ego-litarianism

On the nexus of neoliberalist economical dreams and social reality, we find a disturbing asymmetry. For those elites who intend to gain from the single European market, a frontier-free Europe is an attractive and progress-sounding idea. The social reality nevertheless, for many people comes with a heavy cost. Where on a economical level, policy-makers are stressing the need for more cohesion and concrete measures to tackle the dislocating effects and social exclusion created by the integration process, the logic of the single market contradicts these ideals. The asymmetry between positive perceived cohesion on an economical level and an increasing polarization and dislocation on social level as a result of supra-national egalitarianism, is the contradiction at the heart of modernity that underlies the European Union.

While European integration may symbolize supra-national cohesion, modernity and the transcendence of nationalist attachments, it also breeds insecurity and encourages new identities (ethnic, religious) which are often just as regressive and chauvinistic as the nationalism which the EU claim to be substituting. By undermining the centred nation-states it has encouraged the rise of submerged peripheral nationalisms and protectionist movements. And by shifting the boundaries across and between European states - al in the name of economic rationality, a bigger market or the free movement of capital an labour - it has intensified those processes of social dislocation and anxiety.