ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the problem of government through rights using the Foucauldian (broadly, ‘postmodern’) lens of ‘governmentality’. It observes rights as technologies of governmentality and explores the possibility of resistance to government through rights. It thus queries the possibility of a new relational right that is performed through an ethical relation of friendship. Using the critical skills of interrogation and application I interrogate the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the EU in the case Elisabeta Dano v Jobcenter Leipzig, concerning economically inactive nationals of a Member State residing in the territory of another Member State. I apply a governmentality lens to magnify the wider implications of ‘economically inactive migrants’ being conceived of as an ‘unreasonable burden’; namely, that the EU is able to govern through rights/community and to highlight the dangers associated with basing citizenship on a work/workless dichotomy which devalues and even demonises the workless subject. Can we, I then ask, re-read the decision and reverse this categorisation; can we see relational rights and ‘do friendship’ with migrants?
