ABSTRACT
In Europe the notion of ‘austere’ has since the beginning of the global financial crisis become inextricably linked to the austerity measures demanded by the EU Commission, a number of member states, and the European Central Bank of countries whose short-term financial survival were undermined by the financial market’s attack on their ability to secure new loans. In the financial market media and in the national media of the more affluent parts of Europe, the derogatory acronym PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) or PIIGS (if Ireland was included) came to symbolize an attitude that, although an immediate product of the current crisis, was also a case of the resurfacing of a much deeper-rooted representational history – a re-materialization of domestic European orientalism (Said, 1978/95; Dainotto, 2007; Gramsci, 1926/1978). This domestic orientalism produces Europe’s South as occupying a liminal space in relation to a northern-centred European rational (economic) self and has been fed by a long history of travellers, intellectuals and, more generally, public discourse in Europe’s North (Rota, 2012; Moe, 2002). The South produced by this discourse is characterized by lacks – of responsibility, productivity and rationality. The North, through the verbalizing of the shortcomings of the South, comes to operate as an invisible and hence uncontested model of the perceived ideal characteristics. While Europe’s North has its own history of being produced as marginal, it is here the extreme North that has been subjected to ‘orientalized’ representations (Sami people and Greenlanders as ‘others’, and Faroese and Icelanders as displaced, exoticized or ‘othered’ northern selves). Significantly, these representations are produced in the North itself, as a discourse about an aberrant ‘Northern North’ projected against a normativized European North. Paradoxically, the extreme North has also been depicted in terms of purity, partly influenced by racialized discourses projecting an aspirational pure whiteness as characteristic of the North, with which the metropolitan cultures of the North have identified as part of a northern continuity. Here ‘pure’ North operates in contrast to a ‘tainted’ discourse about the liminal – or questionable – European southerner (and easterner1), which cannot operate as a parallel ideal. As such, the North has worked as an ambiguous space for projections of a displaced and idealized Europeanness in which the European North has had a
determining degree of agency. The European southerner has not been assigned a comparable agency in relation to representations of the South. This imbalance between North and South in terms of representational power has been explained by a number of scholars as resulting from a historic shift from the ‘first modernity’, or the Renaissance, based in the Mediterranean area, to the ‘second modernity’, the Enlightenment, based in northwest Europe (see most notably Dussel, 1998; Mignolo, 2000; and Dainotto, 2007). Some scholars discuss this primarily or exclusively in terms of internal or domestic European power shifts, while others see it as intrinsically linked to Europe’s global history. In this chapter we engage with the intersection between ‘domestic’ and ‘global’ Europe, and we begin with the domestic European context. Thus we seek to place the current crisis in the longue durée of a European modernity (Braudel, 2009) informed by two significant spaces that still inform European self-perceptions and political agendas: the national space and the former colonial space. In the context of the crisis, these two spaces gain a new momentum in the mediation of the common understandings of the ‘us’ (with a growing enclosure of the national space) and of the ‘other’ (reinforcement of conservative views regarding the colonial past and attitudes and policies towards migrants). We will contextualize our arguments through the comparative analysis of two cases, respectively placed (geographically and symbolically) in Europe’s South and North: Portugal and Denmark. While there are many ways in which Portugal and Denmark can be seen to occupy different if not polarized positions, they also have overlapping histories when it comes to their histories as colonial powers and in relation to their self-perception as historically peripheral to the centripetal forces of pan-European history. The Portuguese history as a colonial power can arguably be dated back to the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, but colonialism is not a leitmotif that can be identified from that point onwards. A more obvious starting point is Vasco da Gama because his journey to India led to the establishment of the first Portuguese empire. Yet, in terms of our search for historical continuity from the colonial to the postcolonial, it is the rise, stagnation and collapse of the third2 Portuguese colonial empire in Africa that represents the most interesting phase. Historically, the collapse of empire culminates with the colonial liberation wars in the Portuguese African colonies and the 1974 revolution in Portugal, leading to a reorientation towards Europe with the accession of Portugal to what became the EU. Danish colonial history (discounting the Viking era) dates back to the decision to participate in the lucrative spice trade in the 1600s. The dismantling or demise of the Danish colonial empire, in contrast to the Portuguese, began with the sale of the ‘tropical’ colonies in Africa and Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, culminating with the sale of the Danish Virgin Islands in 1917. What is often forgotten in the Danish context is that the possessions in the North Atlantic (Greenland, Faroe Islands and Iceland) were also colonies, which extends Danish colonial history in the North Atlantic to Iceland’s independence in 1944 and beyond, since Greenland and the Faroe Islands still today remain integral, autonomous parts of a Danish defined realm. Hence, while the Portuguese colonial
history ended with the transfer of Macau to China in 1999, Denmark still wields significant influence over its former colonies in the North Atlantic.
