Debating the South in Unified Italy

The history of modern Italy is an illustrative example of the different social and spatial layers of the North–South divide. Since unification in 1861, Italy has struggled to overcome regional imbalances, mainly although not exclusively along a North–South axis. With an emphasis on the period following unification, when North-South was placed at the centre of national politics, this chapter surveys the lingering debates on Italy’s so-called Southern question and the dynamics of nation-state formation in which it is embedded. The contested history of this process includes debates over economic and moral debts caused by the uneven distribution of gains and sacrifices between North and South as a result of unification. Socio-economically, two North–South divides developed in parallel after unification; the more significant one between Italy and transalpine Europe, and the initially minor but eventually growing divergence between the northern and southern regions within Italy. The ideas of development, catching-up and “Europeanization” were recurring themes in the intellectual and political debates discussed in the chapter. The contested issue was whether the North was developing the South, or vice versa.

The Two Faces of Debt

This introductory chapter surveys the notoriously ambivalent concept of debt. It connects different approaches to debt in social theory and anthropology to the book’s focus on how past debts are mobilised in political debates in the present, and how the ‘North’ has been portrayed as indebted to the ‘South’ for its development, and vice versa. Both questions are framed by the way in which understandings of debt tend to gravitate towards reciprocity or domination. In view of its fundamental ambiguity, debt thus underpins both social cohesion and fragmentation. While it has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. A tension between debt as the glue of social bonds and debt as hierarchy consequently runs through the social history of the concept. Applied to regional and global North-South relations, discussions on debt have often centred on the question of retribution, involving difficult disputes over possible ways of settling debts in the present for injustices incurred in the past.

Europe’s Debt to Refugees

Focusing on Germany and Greece, this chapter examines the mobilization of the historical past in connection with the refugee issue. Based on an empirical analysis of news and digital media, we found that in Greece, the issue of refugees is understood through the prism of debt to humanity in general, to past generations of Greek refugees, and to Syrian people. The past debt can never be repaid but must be rolled over to future generations. The temporal horizon within which it unfolds enables social reproduction in the form of the maintenance of social bonds, among generations of Greeks and between Greeks and present-day refugees. In Germany, the debt to the past is never clearly articulated and the public/media discourse is denying that there is a debt. Germany’s concern is to liberate itself from its past and establish a relationship with refugees on a different basis. However, this ends up transferring the refugee issue from the realm of social relationships to the realm of management and logistics. In cutting off present-day refugees from those in the past, any relationship needs to be created anew, without the benefit of historical continuity. While for Germany this may have a liberating effect, for refugees the only role available is that of an eternal debtor.

The ‘South’ as a Moving Target: Europe’s Debt to the Former Colonies

Ireland is not normally conceived as being located south of the neighbouring Great Britain, nor of Europe, but this chapter suggests that it could be. Towards that end, the dispute over the withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union is briefly discussed in light of the difficulties of separating political entities in our time of high global interconnectedness. Subsequently, the UK-EU dispute is compared to the separation of Algeria from France and the exit of South Africa from the British Commonwealth, opening the path towards pluralizing the notion of the “South”. Such pluralization allows the investigation of historically formed asymmetric relations between societies beyond the formal concept of colonialism. Against this background, the transformation of the relation between EU countries and their former colonies from the 1970s onwards is analyzed in terms of attempts to re-regulate the relation between Europe and its South after decolonization. These attempts aim at drawing clear lines of separation, but they keep failing because the South reveals itself as a moving target, impossible to confine to a restricted space. Thus, in conclusion, current Northward migration and climate change are discussed in terms of global social and ecological injustice the significance of which Europe cannot deny.

Debt, Democracy and the Pharmacology of Money

Few observers of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe have noted that the power relations it laid bare between debtor countries and their creditors stemmed from the very nature of money itself. This chapter considers money’s status as a social institution from the point of view of the democratic values of liberty and equality. Building on Karl Marx’s and Georg Simmel’s critiques of money’s alleged neutrality as a simple appendage of market exchange, the chapter establishes that money constitutes a fundamentally ambivalent phenomenon. Money’s myth of origin in barter, and its actual relation to debt, warrant a comparison with the gift, this primitive form of exchange whose potential toxicity was pointedly noted by Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida. Following the latter’s analysis of the “pharmakon,” the chapter concludes by sketching out how monetary reform could foster collective autonomy.

Europe’s Debt Denied: Reflections on 1989 and the Loss of Yugoslav Experience of Direct Democracy

A conscious political erasure of the legacy of socialist revolutions and politics followed the regime changes in Eastern Europe in 1989. The transition moved away from the initial demands for the democratization of socialism, towards capitalism and procedural democracy. In the process, the political experience of the democratic practices of socialism was obscured, as well as the anti-fascist resistance and revolutionary experience of a century-old struggle against authoritarian tendencies and for equality, which was also the driving force of the movement behind the 1989 uprisings.The chapter looks into the case of Yugoslavia and the mechanisms of erasure to argue that a political debt to the socialist past of Europe has been incurred by a deliberate politics of oblivion and discreditation both nationally and supranationally, within the EU institutions. The Yugoslav example is particularly significant given the direct democratic practices it developed despite the bureaucratization of the Communist party in its final decades. The debt thus incurred is however making itself felt in present-day Europe through its political crisis of the so-called democratic deficit and the rising Far Right.

The Tragedy of Recognition: Debt, Guilt and Political Action

In the course of the Greek debt crisis, and in the relationships between Greece and Germany, the tragic dimension has often been evoked, by government representatives by the media, and common sense. The chapter analyses two different philosophical interpretations of tragedy with the fundamental Hegelian reading in the background. The chapter takes into account Heidegger’s thought to show how to turn to tragedy means to reveal the impossibility of action in favour of a manifestation of being. Then the chapter analyses how Castoriadis uses tragedy, on the contrary, to show the artificiality of human norms and therefore highlights the possibility of modifying them. The aim is to highlight that two different ways of understanding the tragedy can lead to two different readings of the debt concept and of the intertwining between political action, democracy and subjectivity.

The Soul of Europe: Two Different Ways of Thinking Germany’s Debt to Greek Culture

This chapter compares two opposing ways of conceiving the idea of the “Soul of Europe”. Both of them trace the origin of the idea to Greek philosophy and especially Plato. On the one hand, it is the Platonism adopted by the so-called 'Nazi philosophical anthropology' that interprets the Germany of the Third Reich, its Idea of Rassenseel, as the moment in which not only the debt of German culture to Greek culture is paid but in which Germany will finally be able to demonstrate that it is the only true heir of ancient Greece and that for this reason it must conquer the whole of Europe. On the other hand, as an example of an opposite vision, it is the work of Jan Patocka who is convinced that German philosophy can 'today' represent the soul of Europe, but for whom both the notion of soul and that of Europe are constitutively open and infinite, connected to the concept of a debt that can never be settled.

The Indebted Subject and Social Transformations: The Possibility of Resistance and Empowerment

Today, individuals, households and states have accumulated enormous amounts of debt. Their indebtedness has significant social and political consequences. The main tendency in critical debate is to see the indebted subject as a dominated and disempowered subject – a view in which there is certainly much truth. At the same time, however, this view accepts a rather narrow, economic-financial understanding of debt and, furthermore, explores only the consequences of this form of indebtedness, not the ways in which it has come about. It neither looks at the broader pre-conditions of a debt relation between subjects nor at the variety of ways in which a debt relation can be understood. This chapter suggests, in contrast to the dominant critical view, that the debt relation contains emancipatory and empowering possibilities for the indebted subject. To identify them, it explores the broader meanings of debt and the ways in which indebtedness constitutes and sustains social relations. In particular, the chapter suggests that it is at the point of breakage – when debt becomes unbearable, often called ‘crisis’ – that one observes the rise of the subject.

Causes, Critique and Blame: A Political Discourse Analysis of the Crisis and Blame Discourse of German and Greek Intellectuals

Discourses of crisis are always intertwined with aspects of causal investigation, critique and moral accusations. The European and Greek crisis has triggered a debate about debt and guilt in many countries. The creditor/debtor relation between the European North and South resulted in strong tensions within the EU. Particularly, in the most and the least affected countries, Greece and Germany, multiple debates have occurred about who is responsible for the debt crisis. Therefore, rich reflections and diagnoses on debates of crisis and guilt emanate from German and Greek intellectuals which range from internal and external subject constructions, guilt accusations, self-blaming and culturalisms, to a critique of capitalism and its power elites. The chapter uses the Essex School approach of political discourse analysis developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and their students to deconstruct crisis and blame discourses of selected intellectual and public figures from both countries like Yanis Varoufakis, Nikos Dimou, Stelios Ramfos and Wolfgang Streeck.