ABSTRACT
The homeless, the feminisation of poverty – a consequence of deteriorating quality of life for single parents; youth poverty and unemployment; the concentration of disadvantaged people in socially and culturally divided residential areas; a permanently out-of-work part of the population, whose income is decreasing at the same rate as unemployment benefits and social welfare: these are but a few aspects of what is known as the ‘new poverty’ and social vulnerability that is spreading over the economically stronger blocs of the world. In recent decades, this has increasingly been named ‘social exclusion’ Simultaneously, this ‘weight of the world’ – as Pierre Bourdieu (1993) put it in his mammoth work about the dark side of globalisation – became a shared political concern within the European Union, from Kiruna in the north to Malaga in the south. It is a vulnerability that has grown in parallel with the expansion of sectors of informal labour that are characterised by low wages and professional restrictions, outside the scope of national labour market regulations and social insurance systems. It is also about the spreading of discrimination, segregation, social unrest and criminalisation in the socially polarised, segregated and ethnically divided cities over the past three decades. One dramatic expression of this development can be seen in the riots among young generations in Europe’s major cities: Paris 2005, Copenhagen 2008, London 2011 and Stockholm 2013. As a result, by reflecting institutional practices and forms of social vulnerability, most of these – and many more – contemporary forms of social vulnerability and ‘new poverty’ have manifested traits of racialisation or ethnification. This particularly affects immigrants and minorities from outside the dominant countries of the global economic order. These are, in other words, expressions of institutional discrimination, which in public discourse is often explained and justified in terms of ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’ or ‘culture’ (see Chapter 6, Racism). This has contributed to a European Union-wide creation and cementing of a new social hierarchy based on an increasingly dense intertwining of traditional social markers such as class, gender, race and ethnicity. It has become one of the most important grounds for social stratification and subordination in our time.
