engleski

The Nation-State and "Bare Life": The Migrant as By-Product of Capitalist Modernization and its Potential for Post-National Supremacy

In the historical moment in which the "provisional" contours of European nation-states are being outlined by kilometers of razor-wire, simultaneously are being outlined the contours of a not so provisional nature of contemporary European regimes.Only twenty-five years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, we witness the restoration of "the regime of wire", not only in the south-eastern borders of the EU member states, therefore, on the borders of the Schengen zone, but on the seemingly ever-increasing spatial scale. Assuming that the so-called Schengen zone, albeit in a very cramped sense, represented a potential for transcending the symbolic and the real spatial distribution based on the in/ex-clusionary principle of national borders, insofar becomes clearer the neurosis of a modern nation-state due to the troublesome phenomenon of migrant. In the existing socio-historical context, the migrant can be understood both as a by-product of a prolonged historical process of capitalist modernization (perhaps finding its roots in the European colonial project), and as a postmodern (i.e. post-national) social phenomenon. In the latter sense, it is an epiphenomen of a transgressive socio-historical trajectory that finds itself in a rather troublesome collision with the on-going modern project of nation-state(s). Starting from the short socio-historical overview of utilization of the barbed-wire, this paper delves further in order to disclose the apparently universal disposition of the modernist in/ex-clusionary principle, of which wire perhaps is a powerful symbol, but only a functional element. This principle, as it is argued, is the underlying bio/thanato-political principle of two universally modern institutions: the nation-state and the labour market as two leading "sovereigns" over the "bare life", thus reflecting the fundamental biopolitical rupture of contemporary social life.

migrant, nation-state, labour market, biopolitics, modernism

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