An interview with Michael Herzfeld: #Cryptocolonialism, the responsibility of the social sciences and Europe | King’s Review – Magazine
►http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2013/12/24/an-interview-with-michael-herzfeld-cryptocolonialism-the-responsibili
KR: To broaden the question of Greece a little bit and contextualise your analysis, I think it would be interesting to talk about Europe or potentially the Euro and its situation at the moment. Where do you think we stand there?
MH: Europe is an idea. The attempts to try to unify Europe culturally are quite artificial. It is simply extending the logic of the nation-state with all its failures to a larger plane. So I am not necessarily all that sympathetic to the project. On the other hand, the move to unification has had some benefits as well, most importantly the absence of warfare among its member countries. This at first sounds very good – but the absence of overt warfare does not necessarily mean that everything is going well. There are many ways of destroying people that don’t actually involve the usage of guns and bombs. The creation of a huge destitute underclass is precisely one of the ways in which an Orwellian nightmare could still come out of this. So I am less concerned about the criticisms of the EU that have to do with the shape of bananas, than I am with the mono-culturalist policies. To say – as the Vatican has said – that Europe is Christian is an insult to any European who is not and similarly viewing Europeans as ‘white’ insults. I think it is important to stop the idea of Europe as an exclusionary base. If Europe aims to become inclusive then it must rethink its attitude towards immigration. The world is going to see an even bigger sweep of refugees fleeing areas of conflict largely created by the ecological messes that in turn have been created by the West. Don’t we have a responsibility, therefore, to open our gates, even if it means we have to eat a little less? There are moral issues here that, as so often has happened in the past, have been recruited by a self-satisfied moralistic rhetoric. What the EU could be has been subverted by what the neoliberals would like it to be for their own very selfish purposes.