Reflecting on the art of war, the real motor of politics as defined in The Prince, Machiavelli noted that a landscape looks different when seen from the mountain, as opposed to the plain.footnote¹ The same goes for relations between territorial political and economic configurations: the vantage point one adopts can offer a new perspective. That of one national formation in particular, Greece, may offer advantages for trying to grasp some of the larger tendencies bearing on the world we live in. Greece is certainly a small country; but, in virtue of its geopolitical, cultural and economic position, it is an outpost of Europe and thus also its border. To see it in this way is to understand it as a permanent point of delimitation and contact between ‘Europe’—but also, and the distinction is significant, the European Union—and its outside: the Other against which Europe defines and constructs itself.

Greece stands at the intersection of at least three regions of broader significance: the Balkans, Southern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. All three share a common status of ‘in-betweenness’, sometimes considered as an advantage—as suggested by the metaphor of ‘the bridge’ or ‘the crossroads’—but more often as a predicament.footnote² European, but not quite Western; Christian, but neither Catholic nor Protestant; the alleged original site of European culture, but also, for many centuries, part of an Islamic multi-ethnic empire; peripheral and ‘backward’, but economically inextricable from the Western core of the continent; dependent and dominated, but never part of the modern colonized world—Greece appears as a true embodiment of those tensions. Exploding after decades of seemingly successful European integration, the recent double ‘crisis’ of which it has been the epicentre—the debt crisis and the migrant crisis—confirmed its identity as Europe’s ‘Other within’.footnote³ Both marginal and central, its singularity thus revealed the cracks multiplying through the European edifice, as well as the latter’s role in the increasing instability and disruption affecting the broader region.

It was thus not by chance that the ‘refugee crisis’ exploded with spectacular violence in Greece, bringing it to the centre of public attention throughout Europe. I put the term in inverted commas to emphasize that there is nothing neutral about its adoption. Why was it that the arrival of around a million ‘refugees’ or ‘migrants’—again, the choice is significant—in a polity of 510 million, should have been, in and of itself, a ‘crisis’? In reality, its representation as such, above all by the eu authorities and member states, powerfully seconded by media commentary, was fully a part of the problem. The spectacle of humanitarian disaster—images from the summer of 2015 of a child’s body washed up on the beach, the mass arrivals on the Greek islands, the crowds at Budapest Station—briefly brought into the light of day a long-repressed reality. Its matrix lay in the lethal character of the liberal-capital ‘Fortress Europe’ regime which the eu has been building for decades, and its relation to the neighbouring zones of North Africa and the Middle East, where the eu powers have been major protagonists in the wave of wars and civil disruption that drove such numbers to flee.

But Greece also marks an internal border within the eu, a front line in the class struggle under way there, fought with special ferocity since the explosion of the financial crisis. For eight years now, Greece has served as the laboratory for particularly brutal austerity policies, whose application has been accompanied by an exceptional form of government through which the country is administered by its creditors—the eu and, in a second tier, the International Monetary Fund. Exceptional as such a regime may appear by the standards of a sovereign liberal-democratic state, it will be perfectly familiar to those who have experienced the structural-adjustment programmes imposed under imf auspices in the post-Comecon countries or the global South. In Greece, these policies gave rise to a cycle of political and social resistance that extended over half a decade, ending with the capitulation of the Tsipras government, which naturalized the new model. At the same time, its experience has demonstrated that these eu borders, external and internal, are indissociable and may even, in certain conjunctures, act as one. Its position confers upon Greece a particular subaltern perspective, from which the European space appears riven by hierarchies and polarizations, by relations of domination that give rise to antagonisms which in turn require perpetual, unsustainable ‘solutions’ across many fronts. The vantage point of Greece may thus offer some insights into the contradictions between these fronts and the role that the national, European and international levels play within them.

European integration since the 1980s has led to the construction and expansion of a specific institutional entity, the eu, which confiscates the name of ‘Europe’ to conceal at the symbolic level the operation of exclusion that lies at its core. The extent to which this hybrid construct, partly inter-governmental, partly supra-national, is based upon sheer coercion is, for the most part, barely visible to the populations living ‘inside’ it. Relaxation of national border controls between core member states—initially just France, Germany and the Benelux countries—was agreed at Schengen, in Luxembourg, in 1985 and expanded to include a larger ‘Schengen Area’ in 1990. The customs posts between these historic antagonists now stood empty. Yet 1989 had also seen the arrival of a mass of refugees from Eastern Europe, as the Hungarian government dismantled its border fence with Austria and the Berlin Wall was toppled. The power to accept or reject external arrivals—immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers—remained with the nation states. Gathering at Dublin in June 1990, European Community leaders agreed to French and British proposals that responsibility for processing asylum applications should rest with the state through which the refugee had first entered the ‘European space’, rather than the country where he or she hoped to live. The Dublin Convention, later toughened with surveillance and finger-printing systems, thus surrounded the free-travel Schengen Area with a vigilant ring of ‘entry states’. The system was beefed up from the early 2000s by a rapid-reaction force of anti-immigration coastal patrols, operating under a new eu border-force agency, Frontex, its name a slangy abbreviation of the French frontières extérieures.

The upshot is far from the ideal of a smooth and homogeneous space, dedicated to the free movement of people—defined, by the 1957 Treaty of Rome, as one of the ‘four freedoms’ (of capital, goods, services and persons) integral to the very essence of ‘European integration’. Even in the relatively uncontentious sense of legal and treaty agreements, we can distinguish at least four sub-spaces in geographic Europe. First there is the Schengen Area, which includes 22 of the eu’s current 28 members; this is where the Treaty of Rome principle of ‘free movement of persons’ is most nearly realized, with a corresponding weakening of internal borders. Nevertheless, free-movement law only applies to eu nationals, not to migrant workers who are legal residents in one or other of the member states. It reinforces therefore the status differences between these two categories, since the latter (who constitute a significant fraction of the European working class) are excluded from a further set of rights enjoyed by eu nationals, those derived from the transferability of employment and residency rights.

Even among eu nationals, free-movement rules do not uniformly apply. Citizens of the Eastern European countries that joined the eu from 2004 onwards were subjected to derogatory rules, lasting up to seven years. The deportation from France of thousands of Roma people from Bulgaria and Romania under Sarkozy and Hollande revealed that this is still the case, even if the legal basis for it is shaky.footnote⁴ Moreover, the Schengen rules allow for the temporary re-establishment of internal border controls, a procedure than has been officially used by member states 92 times since 2006 for ‘security reasons’, most commonly in response to announcements of social protest.footnote⁵