ABSTRACT
Harshly exploited migrants’ care work plays a fundamental role in the political economy of the reproductive social regime in Europe. Different scholars described the instance behind its colonial mechanism of care drain from the Global South to the North, drawing on Hochschild’s term ‘care chains’. Nevertheless, a theoretical reflection on a similar mechanism within Europe remains scarce. Postcolonial sociology suggests that we should not see Europe as a monolith. Eastern Europe and the Balkans need to be re-mapped in the context of a hierarchical model of multiple Europes as the “epigonal Europe” revealing its different and sometimes contradictory contribution to European colonial culture, imperialism, slavery, and servitude. Following this perspective, we will describe one of the internal European “care fixes” with which capitalism responds to the depletion of social reproduction. In particular, the one based on gendered labour migration of postsocialist workers to Spain to be employed as domestic workers, easing the sharpened by austerity programs care crisis in this country, and we will scrutinize accompanying orientalism. Focusing on domestic work, we will show that the extraction process and forms of servitude take place within contemporary Europe despite the lack of a colonial history between its regions in a strict sense. Subsequently, we will argue that postsocialist countries should stop chasing the modernist, colonial project of Western Europe, based on economically competing nation-states, exploitation, and inequalities, including its neoliberal version driven by described here care fix, among other mechanisms.
