The neoliberal culturalist nation: voices from Italy

Abstract

The impact of neoliberal globalisation on the nation-state has been extensively studied in terms of politicoeconomic restructuring and forms of governmentality and securitisation. While the former speaks of a process of de-nationalisation, the latter brings about a re-nationalisation process. In both cases, though, the focus has only been on one component of the nation-state, that is, the state. The nation has either been treated as a given backdrop or merely ignored. This paper aims to bring the nation back as a way to better contextualise practices of socio-spatial exclusion associated with one particular aspect of neoliberal globalisation, namely international migration. By analysing parliamentary debates in Italy between 1986 and 2014, the paper explores the intersections between neoliberalism and cultural essentialism as they conflate in what I call the 'neoliberal culturalist nation'. This construct sheds light on the roles that a national culturalist imaginary plays in prompting and justifying governmental practices of securitisation, which in turn are implicated in the production of a vulnerable and expendable labour force. Moreover, it reveals how a neoliberal workfarist and individualised logic is functional to the 'normalisation' of the foreign immigrant, and the reproduction of the national titular group. My argument is that a national culturalist imaginary exists in a mutually reinforcing relation with, rather than in opposition to, neoliberalism. Far from keeping nation and state as ontologically distinct or theorising their decoupling, the paper points to a renewed spatial isomorphism between nation and state, which comes to epitomise the very process of current re-nationalisation.

Natives and aliens: Who and what belongs in nature and in the nation?

“…Again, this strikingly resembles the hierarchy of ethno-cultural belonging that also informs the nation (Hage, 2000). Like for humans (Antonsich, 2016), also for natural species the belonging of aliens is conditional to their "behaviour," i.e., whether or not they harm their place of settlement (Davis et al, 2011;Martin & Trigger, 2015;Warren, 2007). Moreover, like national belonging (Hage, 2000) also natural belonging is written in moral terms, with natives regarded as paragons and aliens as villains (Hill & Hadly, 2018, n.p.).…”

Re-interpretation of the Nationalism-Economy Nexus: Nation-State Building via Neoliberal Reforms During Post-Socialist Transformations in the Baltic States

“…Decline of the welfare state, globalisation, and collapse of Communist regimes paved the way for the rise of neoliberalism and today some authors speak about the neoliberal form of governmentality (Ferguson, Gupta 2000;Rose 1996). James Ferguson (2010: 172) noted that unlike liberalism, which has always sought to maintain a right balance between spheres it understood as distinct, for example, between the state and the market or between the public and the private, neoliberalism 2 'puts governmental mechanisms developed in the private sphere to work within the state itself, so that even core functions of the state are either subcontracted out to private providers, or run (as the saying has it) "like a business"' . In other words, the private becomes the public and the state is governed as an enterprise.…”

Focalizing new-Fascism: Right politics and integralisms in contemporary Italy

“…The perilous flirtations of the Lega with what can be considered decidedly "fascist cultural habits" (to borrow Eco's expression once more) have been documented by numerous commentators, both in the lead-up to these most recent elections as well as over the preceding years (Renzi, 2015;Rosati, 2018;Ruzza and Fella, 2009). Writing about the increasingly pronounced "culturalization" of recent Italian politics, Antonsich (2016) has highlighted how the Lega has long engaged the very same geographical imaginaries of a disintegrating Italy embattled by the forces of unfettered globalization and unregulated migration associated with the new-Fascist right. What is especially striking are the territorialized and racialized moral geographies of rights that the Lega was propounding already quite some time ago: imagined geographies that come straight out of the CasaPound playbook.…”