Tag Archives: Europe

Blog, Fascism, Features

Maddalena Gretel Cammelli: Reflections on contemporary fascism

Image 1: Building in Rome occupied by the CasaPound movement in 2003, photo by Barbicone

It was 2009 when, while living in a squatted house in the Montreuil, a leftist banlieue on the East side of Paris, I was asked how it was possible that there were people occupying buildings in Rome, Italy who self-defined as fascists. The activities of the CasaPound movement were coming to be known on the other side of the Alps as well, and French Leftists were asking me for explanations. Indeed, CasaPound activists used to call themselves third millennium fascists: they have de facto been the first movement to self-claim this label and assert a direct legacy with Fascism since 1945. It is important to remember that Italian law and the country’s constitution prohibit the re-formation of the Fascist party, so a claim of this kind has a certain weight.

Since that moment, I began to focus my research on this subject, first with my PhD dissertation on CasaPound (Cammelli 2015, 2017), and later by continuing to reflect on the place and significance the concept of fascism has been gaining in contemporary European landscapes (within the ERC project F-WORD).

In some ways, the fact that the activists I first engaged were using the label “fascist” to self-identify made things easier for me: my own reproduction of this category in the research was not a choice of political labelling, but simply an act of respecting the emic perspective claimed by the activists themselves. Nonetheless, the specific nature of such a categorization required unpacking.

It is important to recall that, at that time almost 15 years ago, very few people were taking this group seriously as a danger. CasaPound activists were not generally considered new exponents of a fascist-like identity. At an analytical level, it was suggested that I use the “integralist” category proposed by Douglas Holmes (2000) so as to indicate continuity with more traditional political forms, but without the demonizing consequences the label of fascism might trigger. Alternatively, they could be referred to as neo-nationalist, as suggested by Gingrich and Banks (2006) and Kalb and Halmai (Kalb and Halmai 2011) or populist as used by Kalb in his work on Poland (2009). I engaged with this literature to analyze the way this presence was affecting Italian political life, and indeed how cultural identities and political identities seemed to be playing a primary role in absorbing the disappointment experienced by people suffering the double devaluation (Kalb 2022) produced by the social crisis of European modernity – a crisis which, far from being exclusively economic, still continues today.

Almost fifteen years later, we may be in the position to add a few new pieces to the CasaPound puzzle, as the evolution of the political situation in Italy and Europe allows us to make some more specific arguments.

It is evident, as tellingly signalled by the 2022 election of the Meloni government, that the state of affairs once known as the cultural hegemony of the (so-called) left wing in Italy has lost its “momentum”. If there is anything like a cultural hegemony today in the sense outlined by Gramsci, it aligns with the consensus established around the Meloni government and reflects many of CasaPound’s own values. These activists are no longer at the margins; they now find themselves at the centre of the political imaginary of contemporary Italian society (as in other European countries). As confirmed by Douglas Holmes (2019), this not only means that the fascists of today are no longer the violent, skinhead-like people we would have imagined in the past; they have assumed a much more common and widespread profile. It also means that the people who twenty or even ten years ago appeared to be marginal groups of stigmatized militants now play a completely different role in the political arena, having become mainstream and widely accepted. This development may trigger important changes in the way new research on the topic is delineated, and we need to contextualise the rise of right-wing claims and populist nationalist drives more generally within the development of neoliberalism and its irrepressible hegemonic consensus in Europe and the Americas.

To return to the question of how the concept and word “fascism” are being used, therefore, we may look at the enormous body of literature produced by sociologists and political scientists about political parties and formations positioned on the “right” of the political spectrum. These formations are variously characterised as far-right, extreme-right, radical right or, more recently, populist radical right (Caiani Padoan 2020, Brubaker 2020, Froio et al. 2020, Mudde 2007, 2019). Italian historian Claudio Vercelli recently wrote that, while clearly the past never repeats itself, it is valid to say that the underlying motivations and behaviours evoking an ideological and subcultural substratum with specifically fascist roots does re-emerge (Vercelli 2021: 27). Shortly before (2019), historian Emilio Gentile pointed out the perils of what he calls writing “a-historiography”, that is, the practice of comparing different historical epochs to identify similarities and continuity with the Fascist past; such scholarship, he warns, risks rendering fascism banal and empty. Nonetheless, in view of current political developments in Europe, the USA and beyond, recent literature on EU and US contexts has focused on fascism and faced the f-word head on (Stanley 2018, Traverso 2017, Zetkin Collective 2020). This is not a matter of comparing different historical epochs or making ‘a-historiography’ (Gentile 2019). On the contrary, it is high time for anthropological research to bring its insights to bear on this topic, improving our understanding of the meanings behind the concept of fascism today, its use in social cultural life, and its multiple forms of reception and incorporation.

My argument is that, by silencing the word fascism (using populism, far-right, extreme-right, etc. instead), we risk overlooking the central place historical Fascism plays today as a “mythological machine” (Jesi 2011) and meaning-producer. Silencing this word runs the risk of mis-viewing the central place that the construction of mythological spectacle played historically in the formation of Fascism itself. As Simonetta Falasca Zamponi argues, such spectacle was pursued by using symbols and myths as tools for Fascism to define itself, thus contributing to forging Fascist identity (Falasca Zamponi [1997] 2003: 181). In other words, civic rituals, monuments, and public holidays offered myths and symbols that were instrumental for the self-representation of the nation (Mosse 1975: 145). Mythologies acted to normalise and naturalise meanings, containing them in an apparently permanent space. Historical Fascism used myths and rituals to form/perform a superior spiritual community capable of delineating a cosmology based on (what was asserted as) the natural order of things. Legitimizing the superiority of the virile Fascist man over any other subject, human or non, and with the tools of violence to impose the myth on history, Fascism manifested in history in a deeply pervasive and destructive way. With its future-oriented aspects developed in opposition to the sense of decay characterising the beginning of the last century, it went beyond a simple conservative movement born in reaction to the Bolshevik revolution. Overall, we need to address how memories, rhetoric, and symbols derived from historical Fascism help to constitute new political subjects today, regardless of whether they are ultimately best described as fascists or not (Levi Rothberg 2018: 357). This process is effectively illustrated and concretised by my ethnographic encounter with CasaPound activists (Cammelli 2015, 2017): I found that music and concerts served as gathering sites forging a community of destiny united by faith in the leader and obedience to his will. The community gathered behind this leader become a homogenized collective self, finding significance and reasons for their activism in symbols and images of Mussolini and the Fascist past.

An objective of anthropological investigation should thus be to explore the mythological machine (Jesi 2011) fascism produces of itself, the manifestations that make of this machine that contradictory yet mutable, violent yet meaningful contemporary presence that calls out to be explored in its multiple and differently situated manifestations. Anthropologists should try to find meaning instead of arguing over definitions, to search out lower-case fascism as a heuristic device (Holmes 2019) and violent human reaction to present-day social crises. Nonetheless, fascism is not monstrous, inhuman, or alien in any way. It is a phenomenon wholly entangled with modernity (Bauman 1989) and the way we use reason to justify multiple forms of supremacy.

To conclude, we should consider fascism as it has variously manifested across 1945 and the turn of the millennium, and in its connection with liberalism and the neoliberal turn. And we may need to look more widely around us as well as inside ourselves, not limiting our gaze to some stigmatised militant but instead paying attention to the more general culture of domination and violence that is feeding our contemporary world.

Maddalena Gretel Cammelli is Associate professor in cultural anthropology at the Department Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin, and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project The world behind a word. An anthropological exploration of fascist practices and meanings among European youth (F-WORD) (https://fword.unito.it/).

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. [1989] 2010. Modernità e Olocausto. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Brubaker, Rogers. 2020. “Populism and nationalism” in Nation and Nationalism, 26 (1), 2020, pp. 44–66.

Caiani Manuela, Enrico Padoan. 2020. “Setting the scene: filling the gap in Populism studies” In PACO Partecipazione e conflitto 13(1) pp. 1-28.

Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2014. Millenial Fascism. Contribution à une Anthropologie du Fascisme du Troisième Millénaire. PhD diss. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2015. Fascisti del Terzo Millennio. Per un’Antropologia di CasaPound. Verona: OmbreCorte.

Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2017. Fascistes du Troisième Millénaire. Un Phénomène Italien? Milan: Editions Mimésis.

Falasca Zamponi, Simonetta. [1997] 2003. Lo spettacolo del fascismo. Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino.

Froio Caterina, Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Giorgia Bulli, Matteo Albanese. 2020. CasaPound Italia. Contemporary Extreme-right Politics. London, New York: Routledge.

Gentile, Emilio. 2019. Chi è Fascista. Bari-Roma: Laterza.

Gingrich, André, Marcus Banks. 2006. Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond. Perspectives from Social Anthropology. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2000. Integral Europe. Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Oxford, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2019, “Fascism at eye level. The anthropological conundrum”, in Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. 84 pp. 62–90.

Jesi, Furio. 2011. Cultura di destra. Roma: Nottetempo.

Kalb Don, Halmai Gabor (eds). 2011. Headlines of nation, subtexts of class. Working-class populism and the return of the repressed in neoliberal Europe. New York, Oxford: Berghahn.

Kalb, Don. 2009. “Conversations with a Polish Populist: Tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in post-socialism (and beyond)”. American Ethnologist 36(2): 207-223.

Kalb Don. 2022. “Double devaluations: Class, value and the rise of the right in the Global North.” In Journal of Agrarian Change. 23, 1: 204-219.

Levi, Neil, Michael Rothberg. 2018. “Memory studies in a moment of danger: Fascism, post fascism, and the contemporary political imaginary”, in Memory Studies Vol. 11(3) pp. 355–367.

Mosse, George L. 1975. La nazionalizzazione delle masse. Simbolismo politico e movimenti di massa in Germania dalle guerre napoleoniche al Terzo Reich. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, Cas. 2019. The Far-Right today. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Stanley, Jason. 2018. How fascism works. the politics of us and them. New York: Random House.

Traverso, Enzo. 2017. I nuovi volti del fascismo. Verona: OmbreCorte.

Vercelli Claudio. 2021. Neofascismo in grigio. La destra radicale tra l’Italia e l’Europa. Torino: Einaudi.

Zetkin Collective. 2020. Fascisme Fossile. Paris : La Fabrique éditions.

Cite as: Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2024. “Reflections on contemporary fascism” Focaalblog 9 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/02/09/maddalena-gretel-cammelli-reflections-on-contemporary-fascism/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Céline Cantat: The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders

Since the beginning of the Russian offensive on Ukraine on February 24th, over 5 million people have registered for temporary protection programmes and other schemes across Europe. By and large, Ukrainians have been granted access to assistance, and extended legal statuses allowing them to enter and settle in EU Member States. While this unusual generosity on the part of European States should be applauded, it has given rise to a range of questions about the differentiated treatment of Ukrainians as compared to other displaced groups. A result of this configuration, the many issues surrounding the engagement with Ukrainian displacement have been mainly framed in comparative terms: How have Ukrainians been received in comparison to refugees who arrived in 2015? Why have Ukrainians been allowed to settle in Europe when there are thousands stuck at the Belarus-Polish border? Why have non-Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine been treated differently? Consequently, the public debate has been largely dominated by calls for the inclusion of Ukrainians, suddenly considered to be Europe’s own, flanked by denunciations of the EU’s selective indignation as hypocritical and racist.

Image 1: Direction sign for Ukrainians Welcome Center at Paris-Beauvais Airport (France), photo by author

Beyond official responses by states and their institutions, civilian and grassroots reactions have also been polarised across such lines. When, in early March 2022, I visited Budapest’s train stations, where a range of NGOs and networks of residents were gathering to welcome people fleeing Ukraine, the question of the specific qualities and perceived features of people arriving were central to conversations. A volunteer with a Hungarian Church NGO, pointing in the direction of a woman and her three children, stated: “Look, they are tired, they are vulnerable women and children: they are the real refugees”. He went on to explain that he also came out to help people passing through Budapest in the summer 2015 even though, according to him, many at the time were not refugees but, “migrants or Islamic terrorists”. When I highlighted that, to my knowledge, what legally identified a refugee was the conflict or persecution they were fleeing from, rather than undefined notions of worth connected to their perceived gender, age, or religion, he emphasized that some people deserved asylum while others did not. 

Clearly, the discourse reiterated by some of the volunteers in Budapest went beyond their personal feelings: it built on categories produced by the European border and asylum regime over the last three to four decades. A cornerstone of that is the meticulous construction of a separation between (deserving) refugees and (undesirable) migrants. Within the category of refugees there is a further hierarchisation of deservedness, with different types of assistance (e.g., resettlement to the EU versus humanitarian aid abroad) being extended based on racialised profiling of their capacity for integration into the imagined community of Europe. In the volatile context of the “migration crisis” declared in the region in 2015, this discourse has gained centrality in Hungary and other Central and Eastern European countries. Injunctions to distinguish between “bad migrants” and “good refugees” became articulated with local regimes of social valuation and their racialised, gendered, class- and religion-based hierarchies in the context of regional capitalist transitions. This is closely connected to their own paths of ‘Europeanisation’: former Eastern bloc countries were unequally included into its regional divisions of labour, and have themselves been subjected to, and productive of, racializing dynamics. ‘Becoming European’ has involved claims to superiority, modernity, and whiteness, which have led to the renewed marginalisation’s of various groups – both domestic and non-domestic – and has given rise to articulate forms of racism.

In other words, unequal treatment of different displaced groups is not new and does not happen in a vacuum: even if the refugee as a legal construction claims to be a universal figure, it is in reality always embedded in local social relations. Quite the opposite, a longue durée examination of the relation between states and displacement shows that it has always been a story of selective engagement: systematically, the way states engage with certain groups teaches us more about their projects and political architectures than about the displaced individuals themselves. It is therefore important to go beyond moralised assessments of Europe’s current response to Ukrainian displacement, and to reflect on how states interpellate people moving across borders in relation to specific moral and political economies, which are themselves underpinned by broader projects such as nation-building and capital accumulation. From this perspective, the questions raised by the Ukrainian displacement in Europe become: under which circumstances do states welcome or reject displaced people? How is refugee reception shaped by larger historical processes and their legacy, including state-building, capital expansion and related projects such as colonial domination? How do moral hierarchies and constructions of race, gender, class, and religion, in the receiving states and nations, structure responses to displacement? 

Statecraft and the reception spectacle

As I have argued elsewhere (Cantat 2015), the refugee as a category and a figure is shaped and made in ways that are congenial to furthering states’ aims. My point is not that formal frames overdetermine responses to displacement. Yet informal initiatives still respond to dominant discursive and political reception regimes: the space for creative responses remains moulded by their opposition and denunciation of overarching power structures. To further reflect on the parallels and contrasts between current responses to Ukrainian displacement and engagement with previous episodes of forced mobility, I will reflect on specific displacement episodes and assess how the figure of the refugee has been built historically. This historicization will help us understand the differences and similarities in states’ mechanisms of interpellation of different groups, both over time and across categories.

A classic example in recent history of how the category of the refugee has been shaped by states’ circumstances can be found in the Geneva Convention itself. Presented as a text with universal validity in order to protect people fleeing persecution, the definition of the refugee in fact (re)produces a very specific figure: that of a man fleeing the USSR in the context of the Cold War aiming to join the capitalist West. The restrictive criteria outlined in the Convention regarding refugee status constantly prove to be inadequate for providing appropriate protection to people fleeing a range of violent situations. First, of course, those fleeing economic violence and devastation, considered outside the scope of asylum. But also, those fleeing different configurations of political and social persecution that do not abide by the vision of the world underpinning the Convention.

Going back into past displacements, something which, as noted by Philip Marfleet (2007), neither historians nor refugee scholars are particularly good at for different reasons, allows us to assert yet more clearly that histories of exiles are always underpinned by states’ demands for hospitality or hostility to different groups. Besides, neither hospitality nor rejection are homogeneous circumstances, and states may often be ready to accommodate refugees without actually welcoming them, for instance by allowing people to integrate within labour markets while at the same encouraging discourses of exclusion or refusing them legal statuses and protections. Discursive constructions of displaced populations intersect both with the valuation regimes and social hierarchies that structure host states’ bio–political architectures, by which I mean regimes of race/gender/class (etc.) as articulated with the geopolitics and interstate relations of the moment.

An important example of this can be found in the stories of Huguenot displacements in the 16th and 17th centuries. The flight of 200 000 Huguenots to Geneva, Holland, and England, as they feared persecution from the French absolutist Catholic authorities of the time, is often seen as one of the earliest episodes of contemporary refuge, not because Huguenots were the first group to flee a territory due to violence, but because they were chased away by a state project and received by other states defining themselves against that. It is understood that the word “refugee” entered vernacular language for the first time during this episode. The emerging English and Dutch states promoted openness to those refugees, who came from relatively wealthy commercial backgrounds, including the slave trade, and spectacularized their welcoming attitude as a proof of their attachment to liberalism and religious freedom. This self-presentation was central to their opposition to the French absolutist state. In England, while historical sources show widespread popular hostility towards the Huguenots, the state engaged in a mass sympathy campaign, explaining to people that welcoming Huguenots was a matter of national pride and of, indeed, upholding values of tolerance.

The discourse of brotherhood was also framed in terms of religious proximity. But such categories of belonging are not static. They are insufficient for understanding reception attitudes: we need to recognize racialization, legitimization, and differentiation as dynamic and contingent processes that evolve across time and according to political circumstances. In fact, 50 years later, the Palatines, another group of Protestants fleeing Germany, was seeking refuge in England. Coming from a formally allied and Protestant state, they were received with great hostility. Many were placed in what are believed to be the first refugee camps of contemporary England, along the Thames, before being resettled to Ireland and British America. A highly polarised political debate with similar arguments as those that we now hear regarding the merits of migration and the (im)possibility of integration emerged in England at the time. This underlines that there is nothing new or specific about the unequal treatment of different displaced groups. It also shows that selective empathy tells us very little – perhaps nothing – about groups per se, their circumstances, needs or characteristics: it would be misleading to try to identify reasons for this differentiated treatment in specific qualities of individuals. What is at stake, always, in the relation between state authorities and displaced people is various forms of statecraft and state power.

The famous notion of “border spectacle”, which Nicholas de Genova (2013) has usefully mobilised to examine how exclusion is staged at the border to showcase the state as the protector of a national public that is simultaneously coalesced, has already taught us a lot about how the nation/state/citizen triad is produced in relation to displacement, exile, and borders. Similar observations can be drawn from other episodes where welcoming and hospitality become spectacularized by state authorities. Questions we must ask ourselves to understand selective empathy are never about whether people deserve a better treatment or not, but always about how their inclusion or rejection promote specific state projects at any given moment.

Ukrainian displacement and European belonging

In the case of Ukrainian displacement, discourses about Europe, whiteness, and European belonging have secured people access to reasonable reception conditions. In this context, grassroots reception practices have also been numerous, diverse, and consistent. They have been able to assert themselves publicly in ways that have been altogether forbidden and impossible in other displacement episodes, which were often characterised by the criminalisation of informal aid. This, together with the adoption of legal frameworks allowing Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine (but no other groups!) to cross EU national borders and choose where to settle, can be applauded as not only a uniquely welcoming set of policies but in fact the first properly coherent approach that the EU has ever adopted in relation to displacement. This is a welcome shift from the securitizing response usually reserved to those seeking asylum, which is not just chaotic but also, on many occasions, lethal.

There already are, however, serious issues to consider when we look at the way Ukrainians are being received in Europe. First, the activation of temporary protection schemes, has not meant access to regular (and more protective) asylum regimes. Second, across Europe, the bulk of reception work has been delegated to civilian networks and small-scale organisations. This is the result of decades of neoliberal sub-contracting of public responsibilities to private actors. This continued delegation of responsibility has meant the revival of aid networks formed in 2015: the flexibility and responsiveness of these loser structures, easily reactivated via social networks, was crucial for the execution of reception activities in the first weeks of the conflict. However, as everywhere, the capacity of civil society to fill gaps left by withdrawing states has its obvious limits. We are already seeing how the tide is turning, with volunteers becoming less willing to host the displaced in their homes and tiring from daily assistance activities. In the absence of a coordinated state response this can only deteriorate.

As we have seen in Greece for example, there is no more efficient way to turn popular sympathy into hostility than letting a situation worsen without states providing adequate support to both exiles and host communities. Importantly, while grassroots support activities do not always reproduce government categories developed by states and institutions, they always produce and navigate a sense that practising solidarity is a messy business in contexts of limited resources (Cantat 2018, 2020, 2021). Distributive dilemmas always involve representations, typologies, and moral economies, where (consciously or not) people’s deservingness is assessed by those who have to decide whom and how to help in specific contexts.

In fact, there is nothing inherently progressive to grassroots assistance as compared to state support or the formal aid sector: such initiatives follow their own politics and ethics, build specific socialities and respond to different circumstances. Often, when those circumstances are not clarified, e.g., when people are moved to help by unexamined desires to do good, informal support can fuel extremely unbalanced and unequal power relations. Those may be even more difficult to contest as they take place outside a formalised aid relation where roles are clearly defined and distributed: they might come together with powerful discourses that neutralise criticism, be it religious charity, claims to horizontality, or demands for gratitude. Even when relations are clarified, it is hard to escape combination and hybridization in solidarity practices: doing good and progressive politics usually exist together and this can make people who are the object of help very vulnerable.

This vulnerability is made more problematic because citizens of host countries have been moved into assisting Ukrainians in the name of moral imperatives, rather than because it is considered a public service that states ought to provide to people based on their statuses. If Ukrainians are now being supported in the name of some unstable construction of European belonging, then it begs the question: how long will Ukrainians remain so white? Europeanness is not a homogeneous and stable condition: the EU has produced shades of European belonging where Eastern Europe has always been seen as less belonging, less European, and somehow less legitimate – even for those countries who have become member states. The example of the Brexit campaign is just another reminder of how strong intra-European racism remains.

In the current context of the EU’s mobilisation against Russia, Ukrainians’ Europeanness is strongly asserted, but it could just as well be tempered, questioned, or sacrificed when geopolitics evolve. If so, the lack of deployment of proper state support and the overreliance on popular assistance will become highly problematic. We already see processes of differentiated inclusion unfolding with questions around the type of access that Ukrainians get to different social spheres: for instance, in Hungary, work permits are not needed for certain types of jobs where there are shortages – mostly manual, in the agrarian sector and catering, but also in IT. This in fact reiterates previous labour migration patterns whereby racialised Ukrainian labour has been allowed in the country in order to serve specific industries.

The direction in which Ukrainian instrumentality to the EU’s ideological and economic structures will evolve is far from obvious. Above all, the situation demands that we insist on the continuity of solidarity on the ground of a real grassroots internationalism and that we keep demanding public support for all displaced groups.

Céline Cantat is Visiting Lecturer in Migration Studies and Academic Director for the Masters in Environmental Policy and in Energy Transitions at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po.

This text was developed as part of the EASA fundraising webinar Humanitarian responses to the 2022 Russian war on Ukraine: anthropological perspectives, 07/06/2022, convened by Ela Drazkiewicz and Mariya Ivancheva, and co-sponsored by SIEF and AAA’s SOYUZ, Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

References

Cantat, Céline (2021) “Refugee Solidarity Along the Balkan Route”, Journal of Refugee Studies, 34 (2), 1348–1369.

Cantat, Céline (2020) “The Rise and Fall of Migration Solidarity in Belgrade”, movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies, 5 (1), http://movements-journal.org/issues/08.balkanroute/05.cantat–the-rise-and-fall-of-migration-solidarity-in-belgrade.html.

Cantat, Céline (2015) “Contesting Europeanism: Discourses and Practices of Pro-Migrant Groups in the European Union”. PhD Thesis, roar.uel.ac.uk/4618/  

Cantat, Céline (2018) “The politics of refugee solidarity in Greece: Bordered identities and political mobilization”, MigSol Working Paper, 2018/1, https://cps.ceu.edu/sites/cps.ceu.edu/files/attachment/publication/2986/cps-working-paper-migsol-d3.1-2018.pdf

De Genova, Nicholas (2013) “Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (7), 1180-1198,

Marfleet, Philip (2007) “Refugees and History: Why We Must Address the Past”, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 26 (3), 136–148.

Cite as: Cantat, Céline. 2022. “The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders.” Focaalblog, 28 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/28/celine-cantat-the-reception-spectacle-on-ukrainian-displacement-and-selective-empathy-at-europes-borders/

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Sandy Smith-Nonini: Energy Crises in the Time of Covid: Precarious Fossil Infrastructures

The spectacle of Russia invading Ukraine has elevated tensions over Europe’s access to natural gas and may herald a sea-change in regional geopolitics of energy. But prior to Putin’s war, energy crises played out across dozens of countries in 2021. Ramped up economic demand in the fourth quarter contributed to many, but there were forewarnings of instability – from rolling blackouts during California wildfires to over 200 bankruptcies of US gas fracking companies since 2015 due to high debt and low prices.

Ironically, Coronavirus lockdowns in early 2020 accomplished in one fell swoop what divestment activists only dreamed of when oil and gas stocks crashed, leading to a write-off of $145 billion in oil/gas assets by year’s end. But outcomes to date do not include greening. The US government rescued the industry with $120 billion in direct and indirect pandemic stimulus funds and benefits. The industry diverted the largess into stock buybacks and dividends, rather than invest in (green or brown) production.

The fragility of gas infrastructure involves more than financial debt. As a surge of Covid-19 cases overwhelmed Texas hospitals in February 2021, a wicked polar vortex and ice storm brought the state to a standstill due to prolonged blackouts caused by frozen gas lines, leaving over 5 million families without heat in the extreme cold, some for up to a week. Temperatures fell to 6° F (-14° C) in Austin, where lows seldom drop below 40° F (4.4° C).  

More crises followed. In June, just weeks after a private consortium took over Puerto Rico’s rickety electric grid, a substation fire and a series of blackouts left a million islanders without power. By fall ongoing grid failures prompted mass protests from a weary public that had only three years earlier gotten the lights back on after an 11-month blackout from Hurricane María.  Prolonged outages also followed Hurricane Ida’s August landfall in New Orleans.

Protesters march down a street, holding signs that say "Luz para Caguas" and "¿Y Caguas pa' cuando? ¡Nuestra gente necesita luz!"
Image 1: Puerto Ricans from dozens of small towns protesting in San Juan for power restoration four months after Hurricane Maria, photo by Marla Perez-Lugo

Then as economic demand rose in the fall, fuel shortages and high coal and gas prices spurred energy crises in Europe (especially the United Kingdom), Pakistan, Singapore, China, India, South Korea and Lebanon, including blackouts and/or steep hikes in electric bills. The high gas prices reflected, in part, low production from collapsed demand in 2020 that left US frackers  dependent on previously drilled wells, while lenders, burned from bankruptcies, were hesitant to extend them credit. Tensions with Russia, source of over a third of EU gas supplies, added to perceived risks. Pandemic economic stresses contributed to energy crises, as did extreme weather and grid fragilities from poor maintenance during decades of utility deregulation.

This essay discusses the social and political costs of energy crisis, with a focus on the Texas and UK cases, based on study of over 150 government, non-profit, academic and media reports, and participation in two panels on the freeze blackout at the University of Texas -Rio Grande Valley.  I draw on other research, including ethnographies on earlier energy crises in Puerto Rico and Greece (Smith-Nonini 2020a, 2020b), to sketch out common patterns and implications for a green transition. 

The Matrix of our Bodies Electric   

The multiple factors behind these crises attest to the complex nature of the grid – simultaneously an aging mechanical infrastructure and cultural artifact, shaped by specific histories and geographies (Bakke 2017) amid a volatile capitalist industrial ecology of fuel flows, climate change, growing inequality and new risks of contagion.

Blackouts often result from the convergence of unusual weather, poor regulation and incentives that reward profit-seeking at the expense of grid maintenance or equitable rates. Prolonged grid breakdowns contribute to energy poverty, or lack of access to energy, which affects 25% of humanity and is both a cause and result of “underdevelopment.”(Sovocool and Dworkin 2014).

But recent energy crises highlight “new energy poverty” in industrialized countries. Most low-income US families qualify as energy poor (i.e., over 10% of incomes spent on utilities) (Mohr 2018), while over 50 million Europeans struggle to pay utility bills – especially in the UK, Eastern Europe, and Mediterranean area (Bouzarovski 2014).

Grid fragility has been exacerbated since the 1990s by pressures to break up and privatize profitable assets of public utilities, a trend associated with rate increases, service cuts, and increased utility debt, especially in indebted countries where privatization is a condition of loan agreements and utility regulation is often weak (Luke 2010, Palast et. al 2003).  

Nearly ubiquitous access to electricity in wealthy countries obscures the magnitude of fossil fuel dependence that underwrites modernity.  Hurricane María’s 2017 destruction of Puerto Rico’s grid plunged residents into the worst blackout in US history. “The country was upside down,” a local activist observed, noting that while power is not considered a basic need like water, “people cannot afford to be in this society — a high energy society — without electricity” (Smith-Nonini 2020a).  

The storm laid bare electricity’s role as routine conduit for basic needs. Around 3000 people died, including many reliant on power for medical therapies. A million lost water service. Residents stood in long lines for food, which grew scarce, and had to survive for weeks with cash on hand for lack of bank machines (Smith-Nonini 2020a).

Inside Pandemic-related Energy Crises

The February 2021 Texas Freeze Blackout 

The Texas freeze caused over 700 deaths and blacked out 4.5 million households. COVID patients could not access care and stores ran out of food. Republican Governor Greg Abbot blamed frozen windmills, but had to walk this back once it was clear that frozen gas lines supplying power plants caused 55% of the outages. The news was a shock to this petro-“state” where fracked gas and oil are credited with restoring US global economic clout since the 2008 financial crisis.  

A failure to weatherize the grid was widely blamed for the debacle. Unlike some islands (e.g., Puerto Rico) that lack options for grid sharing to shore up reliability, Texan politicians voluntarily isolated their grid from other states after an earlier 2011 freeze to evade federal weatherization rules (Busby, et al. 2021). Two cold snaps in early 2022 that reduced gas flow highlighted the fact that weatherization of gas lines remains only partially completed.

During the 2021 freeze, administrators of the largely deregulated grid marked up the wholesale electricity price to $9,000 per MWh (vs. a $22 per MWh average in 2020) in a failed bid to incentivize more gas production. This led to an estimated $50 billion in charges over five days to energy retailers and ratepayers, causing many suppliers to incur large debts and bankrupting three utilities.  Meanwhile, other energy generators and suppliers with “variable contracts” earned billions because they were allowed to pass the astronomical rates to ratepayers, most of them unaware they could be hit with a monthly bill of $10,000 or more due to factors outside their control (Busby, et. al 2021).

Rather than cancel what some would call “odious debt,” Republican state legislators later socialized the debt, offering long-term payment plans to customers and issuing state-backed bonds for $7 billion in low-cost loans to impacted energy companies. Many lawsuits remain pending. One involves Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), a large gas company that earned $2.5 billion during the storm, and later contributed $1 million to Gov.  Abbott’s campaign chest. $300 million of ETP’s profits were billed to San Antonio’s municipal utility, whose residents now face a surcharge to cover the tab. The city has sued ETP.  

Overall, gas companies took home $11 billion; other winners in the Texas “power pool” included speculators—banks and energy trading companies—which placed lucrative bids on prices while Texans burned furniture to stay warm, but had no role in actually supplying energy. 

The 2021 British (and European) Energy Crisis

In October, a five-fold rise in natural gas prices in Europe, along with a drop in wind power and Brexit complications, led to steep price hikes for British wholesale electricity and warnings from National Grid, the system’s corporate operator, of possible winter power cuts. The inflation was linked to shortages of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), in part from ramped up Chinese demand, and speculation over geopolitical tensions, given the EU’s heavy reliance on Russian gas. UK electricity is 40% dependent on gas, roughly double the level for the EU.  

Regulators raised the UK public cap on electric rates by 12%, and it goes up another 54% in April, the largest cost of living increase in a quarter century.  An early 2022 government aid package will offset costs for low-income families, and allow extended payments, but regulators warn the cap may rise further. An astounding 29 utilities (mostly small, poorly vetted retailers) in the UK’s “power pool,” went bankrupt since the cap forced them to absorb extra costs, leaving millions of ratepayers without service. One large utility, Bulb, was bailed out by the government, which failed to take wider action. Meanwhile, North Sea oil and gas firms, long-term heavy donors to Tory politicians, took home windfall profits, leading to calls for new taxes on the sector.

Ironically, after long delays on renewables, in 2019 the UK had expanded wind power to a remarkable 28% share of electric power, but a rare calm weakened the turbines’ output in mid-2021.  Also, a fire in a trans-channel electric cable and new Brexit rules disrupted a promising system of cross-border undersea cables aimed at mitigating supply shortfalls.  

Competition with China over LNG gas helped drive prices up. China had phased down coal due to an economic slump, climate goals and Olympic optics, but encountered an energy shortage as demand ramped up in the fall. To compensate, officials reversed a Trump-era ban on US gas imports and Sinopec signed long term contracts for LNG offering higher prices than EU importers, which diverted many LNG tankers to Asia.  

Prices peaked in Europe at a record 171.40 euros/MWh just before Christmas due to tensions over lower-than-normal Russian gas flow to Europe and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. They moderated, then soared again in late February as Russia invaded Ukraine.

Patterns of Grid Fragility behind Energy Crises

Extreme weather was a factor in many 2021 crises – deadly storms, shifting winds, and Asian floods (which cut coal production). Also, rapid growth in electricity demand year over year (e.g. video streaming, Bitcoin mining) has put pressure on power plants, feeding a narrative from conservatives and business critics that the green transition is the problem, and more gas plants the solution. 

But many crises have deeper roots. Since the 1980s, 18 US states and over 35 countries, (including the UK and much of the EU), have partly or fully deregulated electricity. Neoliberal policies favoring such “unbundling” have resulted in privatization of profitable assets, widespread layoffs of utility workforces and neglect of grid maintenance (often left to state authorities). The reforms enabled renewable energy on the grid, and promised lower rates, but hurt public oversight (Oppenheim 2016), while favoring extraction of profits and speculation through energy trading. California’s 2000 Enron debacle, Puerto Rico’s 2021 grid failure after a hasty privatization, steeply priced electricity in Central and Eastern Europe –where energy poverty is high — (Bouzarovski 2014) and are examples of deregulation’s downsides.

In many places, including the UK and Texas, large corporate players dominated the deregulation process, precluding actual competition and setting the stage for steep consumer fees and rates that outweigh earlier cuts in rates. This corporate control enabled the 2021 price gouging of Texas and UK ratepayers and the string of British utility bankruptcies.

During earlier energy crises in Greece and Puerto Rico, steep price hikes for electricity tied to austerity over public debt, left many consumers unable to pay bills, with some turning to energy theft (an option aided by organized anti-debt advocates in Greece). Loss of revenues fed back on public utilities causing institutional debt and providing a rationale for privatizations that benefitted hedge funds and foreign investors more than ratepayers (Smith-Nonini 2020a, 2020b).   

These energy crises expose the socio-material path dependency embedded in grid infrastructures which creates friction, slowing green transitions, while creating scalar vulnerabilities to disruption that are difficult to predict and have complex repercussions (Boyer 2017).  A key question is whether the 2021 crises are short-term, or evidence of a long-term mismatch between supply and demand rooted in resource limits intertwined with capitalist contradictions.

Notably, growth in conventional global oil/gas production has been tepid since 2005, and unconventional extraction (e.g. fracking and deep-sea drilling) is not profitable without high debt and large state subsidies. Also, volatile energy markets often fail to satisfy both consumer needs for affordability and corporate needs for growth, provoking new crises.

In late 2021 the International Energy Agency reported that growth in renewables won’t supplant fossil fuels in time to keep global heating below 1.5°C, and the gap – as electric grids expand and fossil energy is phased out (or loses profitability) — will feed destructive cycles of volatility in markets for energy and energy-intensive goods, including food. The current spike in natural gas prices has driven up fertilizer costs, which is likely to exacerbate regional food crises.  

An understudied problem is how divestment and pandemic capital destruction will affect the green transition. Can energy crises stimulate degrowth innovations?  Might fledgling movements for community solar (e.g., as exist in Cuba, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico) help solve energy poverty and climate goals at the same time?    

But scaling up, for society to transition we need stable grids. As an environmental advocate once told me, “We need to burn some fossil fuels to get to where we don’t need to.” If electricity is to be the centerpiece of a renewable future, we have much work to do. We should start by demanding accountable public oversight of electric systems.

Sandy Smith-Nonini is a research assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She produced “Dis.em.POWER.ed: Puerto Rico’s Perfect Storm,” a film on the causes of the longest blackout in US history, and is the author of Healing the Body Politic .  

References

Bakke, Gretchen. 2017. The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future. Bloomsbury.

Boyer, Dominic. 2017. “Revolutionary Infrastructures” Infrastructures and Social Complexity, eds: P. Harvey, et. al.  CRESC.

Bouzarovski, Stefan 2014 “Energy poverty in the European Union: landscapes of vulnerability.” WIREs Energy and Environment 2014, 3: 276–289.

Busby, Joshua W. et al. 2021 “Cascading risks: Understanding the 2021 winter blackout in Texas.” Energy Research & Social Science, 77: 102-106.

Luke, Timothy. 2010. Power Loss or Blackout: The Electricity Network Collapse of August 2003 in North America, 55-68, in Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, ed. S. Graham, Routledge.

Mohr, Tanga M. 2018. “Fuel poverty in the US: Evidence using the 2009 Residential Energy Consumption Survey.” Energy Economics 74: 360–369.

Oppenheim, Jerrold 2018. “The United States regulatory compact and energy poverty.” Energy Research & Social Science 18 (2016) 96–108.

Palast, Greg et. al. 2003. Democracy and Regulation: How the Public Can Govern Essential Services. Pluto Press.

Smith-Nonini, Sandy. 2020a. “The Debt/Energy Nexus behind Puerto Rico’s Long Blackout: From Fossil Colonialism to ‘New’ Energy Poverty.” Latin American Perspectives 232: 47(3): 64–86.

Smith-Nonini, Sandy. 2020b. “Networked Flows through a ‘Porous’ State: A Scalar Energo-political Analysis of the Greek Debt Crisis”, in The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, eds: D. Nonini and I. Susser, Routledge Press.

Sovocool, Benjamin and M. Dworkin. 2014. Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles, and Practices. Cambridge University Press.

Cite as: Smith-Nonini, Sandy. 2022. “Energy Crises in the Time of Covid: Precarious Fossil Infrastructures.” FocaalBlog, 21 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/21/sandy-smith-nonini-energy-crises-in-the-time-of-covid-precarious-fossil-infrastructures

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Dragan Djunda: Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and blue patterns revived the previously cracked ground. These traditional geometrical shapes are landmarks of ćilim – a centuries-old weaving technique of wool from sheep herds on the Stara Mountain. Few steps inside, and you are surrounded by the large photographs of nature, people, and customs characteristic of this mountain in eastern Serbia. Only a year ago the walls covered by the photographs were molded due to the damaged roof and windows. The building was empty and in decay. It became again the center of the village’s social life after

Image 1: House of Culture Dojkinci. Meeting between the villagers, the architects and the movement Let’s defend the rivers of the Stara Mountain regarding a new revitalization project (photo by the author, 2020)

the villagers together with architecture students and their teachers and the grassroots movement Odbranimo reke Stare planine (Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain) renovated this building in 2019 as an act of resistance to the threat of small hydropower plants (SHPPs). SHPPs consist of several kilometers-long pipelines, which channel water to the turbines where the electricity is produced, threatening to leave the riverbeds dry and local communities without water. The more water the pipe holds, the more electricity the turbine creates and the more profit through subsidies it brings to private investors. Thus, for the local villagers and environmental activists the pipes of SHPPs came to symbolize greed, environmental destruction, and social marginalization.

The SHPP in Dojkinci, together with almost 3000 plants in the Western Balkan countries, arose from the network of national capitalists, European banks, and the national energy sectors responding to the EU accession standards. However, Dojkinci and other villages in the Stara Mountain did not succumb to such a wide front of interests. My contribution examines how this happened. I will firstly explain how SHPPs emerged from the Serbian renewable energy (RES) market, and then describe the social responses triggered by SHPPs. 

Renewables between liberalization and water-grabbing

The Serbian RES market emerged from the pressures for liberalizing the energy market, the government’s resistance, and the inflows of Western European capital. The liberalization of the energy sector in the EU candidate-countries is part of the broad legal, economic and political compliance to EU standards. The EU expects the Serbian energy sector to go through a double transformation. From a state-owned system that is largely dependent on coal, the sector should become competitive, decentralized, at least partly privatized, and promote renewable energy. This ambitious task unifies both liberalization and energy transition, keeping the logic of the free market as their leading principle. In the early 2010s, the Serbian government established the foundations of the RES market, consisting of a certification procedure for green electricity producers and fixed-rate feed-in tariffs (FITs) guaranteeing beneficial prices for 12 years.  FITs are the means of subsidizing renewable energy production. They are paid by all citizens through their electricity bills and transferred to the producers in a form of subsidized electricity prices

If it had followed entirely the prescribed logic of unfettered competition, the Serbian RES market could have had severe social, political, and economic effects. The state’s monopoly could have turned into an oligopoly of European companies, with FITs pushing up the low electricity prices – repeating developments already seen in Spain (Franquesa 2018). To prevent this scenario, the government found a middle way: to establish the RES market but prevent significant changes. It limited access to FITs through technology and capacity caps. These limitations targeted large investors in wind and solar, but also local people interested in installing small numbers of solar panels on private property. Foreign investors quickly filled the quotas for wind power subsidized by FITs. Only one channel for investments remained wide open – around 800 locations for SHPPs in mountainous, often protected regions.

Investors and authorities claimed that hydropower is identical to wind and solar sources. The ideology of untapped hydro potentials, anchored in the socialist technological heritage, is widespread among Serbian engineers and continuously supported by all Serbian governments since the 2000s. The costs for planned SHPPs were lower because expertise in the hydropower construction sector already exists since socialism. Moreover, SHPPs technology is not as capital-intensive and dependent on the economy of scales as larger solar and wind parks. This combination of technological and economic factors meant that the costs were low and that smaller investors could easily access the financial market. Alongside the international banks and a few private investors from Western Europe, people with close affiliation to the Serbian ruling party invested in and owned the new SHPPs, among them, the godfather of the Serbian president. This implies that after repaying credits for the SHPPs, the profits gained through FITs would stay within the circles of national capitalists unlike profits from foreign-owned wind or solar parks. The purpose of SHPPs was not to transform the energy sector, as they only contribute to the national electricity production with 2.5%, but rather to guarantee easy profits through FITs.

Even though SPPSs investors were usually local capitalist, it does not mean that it has not been a lucrative opportunity also for foreign capital in the region. European financial institutions and manufacturers of hydro equipment have followed a well-established path of foreign direct investments that have transformed the political, economic, and social fabrics of the postsocialist countries. SHPPs have been a good opportunity for the Western European producers of hydro equipment to reanimate an industry drowning because of the current rush for wind and solar sources. Hydro lobbies organized conferences that connected national energy authorities, public producers of electricity, manufacturers, and financiers, to consider new fruitful investments. Foreign financial capital played a key role in supporting SHPPs in the region. Most of the credits for SHPPs in Serbia came from commercial banks such as Erste Bank, UniCredit, Banka Intesa, and Société Général. Large financial institutions like European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, together with Norwegian, Austrian, German, and Italian development banks, poured hundreds of millions of euros into greenfield hydro projects in the region (Bankwatch 2019).

In this context, environmental and local community protection mechanisms were hardly implemented and succumbed to the immense pressure of national and international capital and power. The government lowered environmental standards, allowing the RES market to turn into water-grabbing. Researchers from the University of Belgrade identified on all inspected SHPPs malfunctioning or dry paths for fish migration and pipes unlawfully built-in riverbeds. They argued that the rule of “biological minimum”, which was supposed to guarantee the minimum level of water in riverbeds to sustain the river, was conducted by experts close to the investors and without systematic, often costly studies (Ristić et al 2018). This “biological minimum” therefore could not limit the investors’ arithmetic transformations of water into kWh and FITs, leaving behind dry riverbeds especially in protected areas with high biodiversity, such as the Stara Mountain.

Struggles against SHPPs

I first visited the village Topli Do in the Stara Mountain in December 2019, while the residents had been barricading the bridge in the village for three months to stop an investor from trying to build two SHPPs on both rivers flowing through their village. Most of them were retired people and small-scale agricultural producers, fearing that SHPPs would disturb the underground water that they use for drinking, as well as pollute and reduce the water in rivers for livestock and gardens. Numerous springs and waterfalls attract many visitors to the village, and the villagers were afraid that SHPPs would spoil both natural exceptionality and their opportunity for supplementary incomes through room rentals.

Image 2: Panorama of Topli Do (Photo by the author, 2019)

Residents of Topli Do and nearby villages recognized the state and investors as the main perpetrators and directed their anger towards them. But they also conveyed their existential anxieties through narratives of the “approaching global wars for water”, “international corporations stealing water”, and “extinction of their communities for settling migrants” from the Middle East who lived in a refugee camp in the nearby town of Pirot. These anxieties sprouted from the long-term sentiments of the vanishing of Serbian villages where mostly elderly people live. Decaying homes and infrastructure, closed schools, and ambulances are the material witnesses to rural flight. In this context of social degradation, the investors and local authorities promoted SHPPs as opportunities for development. The locals told me that the municipality fabricated the mandatory consultations with them, and portrayed SHPPs as benevolent water mills, and promised benefits for everyone – temporarily employed local workers and landowners near the rivers. “I wanted to bring improvement to this village which has had nothing, I brought my one million euros”, the investor in Topli Do SHPP said in a documentary film about the Topli Do barricade (Marinković 2020).

“The investor even asked us why defending the villages of the Stara Mountain when they would anyway disappear in a few years”, one activist told me. Between 2017 and 2020, the movement Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain resisted heavily SHPPs in Stara planina through protests, legal actions, and physical clashes. Through its actions, the movement connected villagers in Stara planina, academics, environmental NGOs, and international organizations with their pan-European campaigns against SHPPs in the Balkans. Finally, faced with such a broad resistance, the local municipality terminated all SHPPs in the Stara Mountain in September 2020.

Image 3: Protest banners in Topli Do: ‘A lot of money, little energy, zero fish’ and ‘For rivers to death’ (Photo by the author, 2019)

I came again to the Stara Mountain during the pandemic in October 2020, this time in Temska and Dojkinci villages. The mood was post-victorious since villages were not endangered anymore by SHPPs. The activists and locals thought about how to use the momentum and transform the symbolic capital of the river defenders into something more. They looked for financial and institutional support for infrastructure, housing, research centers, and small-scale businesses in the Stara Mountain, and the House of culture in Dojkinci was a result of these efforts. Revitalizations were both immediate reactions to the threatening devastation from SHPPs, and opportunities to demonstrate that revival of the disappearing rural communities was possible and necessary. For the locals, these renovated objects represented debt repayments to ancestors and predecessors and a promise that life in the Stara Mountain would not end, as the leader in one of the villages told me.

Unlike in other Serbian mountains, the SHPPs paradoxically rescued the villages in the Stara Mountain from disappearance and marginalization by reviving the local communities and garnering the support of the Serbian civil society. Attempts to make profits from greenwashing unexpectedly turned into a second chance for some Serbian communities.

Whose market, whose energy transition?

SHPPs were supposed to maintain a status quo in the energy sector – to represent a Godotian energy transition that never arrives and does not go anywhere. However, the wide social resistance turned energy transition from a techno-bureaucratic matter in to an issue decisive for society’s future. This change led to questions about who has access to the RES market, who gets benefits from it, and what role society plays in the energy transition.

These questions are becoming prominent among newly forming energy cooperatives interested in small-scale investments in solar energy. So far, they have been largely excluded from the RES market, not recognized as potential producers, and therefore unable to apply for FITs. Energy cooperatives criticize the closedness of the market to “ordinary people” and aspire to unify activism and business initiative allowing citizens to become active drivers of the energy transition and simultaneously benefit from FITs. Therefore, solar panels are trying to make their way to the roofs of urban dwellings to demonstrate sustainable and market-democratic alternatives open nominally to everyone.

While the aspiring cooperatives are wishing for a more inclusive market, experts and regional media specialized in energy are also calling for more and better markets, i.e. for the usual liberalization that supposedly corrects market distortions with improved market mechanisms. They wish for competition between big investors with access to credit and technology, which would ensure that the public gets measurable and less expensive electricity from renewable sources. This belief in the market as the only vehicle of energy transition follows the EU agenda which emphasizes decentralized, competitive, and interconnected national markets. Public tenders and premiums will most likely be implemented in Serbia’s new energy laws. These laws will launch a new race between large foreign and national investors in wind and solar power.

Such investors wish for a free, unregulated market. A free market which gives space to big and small producers, fosters innovations and initiative. This kind of market is seen as a more fair and sustainable solution than the one favoring SHPPs through FITs. But whose market and energy transition will that be? And the transition to what? The competition between large investors will hardly open substantial space for the development of energy cooperatives. The odds for a more democratic and just energy transition are slim if the promise of the decarbonization of the Western Balkan countries conveys the ultimatum of oligopolies.

Dragan Djunda is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. His doctoral research analyses the investments in renewable energy in Serbia and their social effects.

Bibliography

Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier in Spain. Indiana University Press.

Marinković, Zorica. dir. 2020. Topli Do – donžon Stare planine” [Topli Do – donjon of the Stara Mountain].

Ristić, Ratko, Ivan Malušević, Siniša Polovina, Vukašin Milčanović, Boris Radić. 2018. Male hidroelektrane derivacionog tipa: Beznačajna energetska korist i nemerljiva ekološka šteta. VODOPRIVREDA, Vol. 50 [Derivate small hydropower plants: Insignificant energy contribution and unmeasurable ecological damage].

Bankwatch, 2019. “Western Balkans Hydropower: Who Pays, Who Profits?” Accessed February 23, 2021. https://bankwatch.org/publication/western-balkans-hydropower-who-pays-who-profits.

Cite as: Djunda, Dragan. 2021. “Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/dragan-djunda-transition-to-nowhere-small-hydro-little-electricity-and-large-profits-in-serbia/

Blog

Aliki Angelidou: “It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn

On February 22nd police forces entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating many students, arresting 31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff. Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting against a new bill on “Admission in higher education, protection of academic freedom, and upgrading of the academic environment,” according to which a university police force will be introduced. The police were called by the university’s rector, who did not attempt any dialogue with the students, as was the case in similar situations until then.

The newly introduced Law 4777/2021 seems to represent a turning point in Greek political life indicative of a more general shift towards neoliberal authoritarianism during the pandemic. Τhe Covid-19 crisis found Greece severely weakened by ten years of harsh austerity, political upheavals, hopes and disillusionments, and with a right-wing government in power. The latter saw the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its neoliberal agenda and to break down the social contract established in the country after the end of military rule in 1974. The social contract comprised both the solidification of democratic institutions and of the rule of law, and the promotion of a mixed economy of growth through some redistribution, favoring the expansion of the middle-classes.

Contrary to the general orientation of the EU, which recognized the necessity of state services to face the pandemic and thus abandoned strict budgetary discipline, the government of Nea Democratia (ND) pushed all the neoliberal “reforms” that governments implementing the bailout memoranda had not managed (or did not intend) to pass during the last decade. The ND government refused to increase the budget for the national healthcare and education system, public transport, and other relevant services. It also refused substantial financial support to those affected by the lockdowns (small and medium enterprises and their employees), with the exception of big private corporations. Moreover, with citizens locked in their homes, and with the Parliament working under non-regular conditions, the government has been passing a series of laws that initiate long-term structural reforms that will abolish remaining social and labor rights, remove environmental protection in favor of corporate business, promote privatizations of public assets, and attack the public character of education.

Following some global trends, the government has thus opted for a governance model that promotes growing inequalities, shrinking of democratic processes, rule through repression, and absolute media control. Actually, the only sectors heavily subsidized over the past year have been the mass media and the police. In the Greek context, however, there is one more important factor at play. The electoral success of the radical Left twice in 2015, as a result of huge discontent over the years of financial crisis, was a big shock for the Greek Right, which now seems intent to prevent another SYRIZA victory by treating the major opposition party not only as a political adversary but as an enemy whose electoral prospects must be eliminated.

In the context of the breakdown of the post-1974 consensus and intense political antagonism, universities are being used as a spearhead by the Greek Right. This consensus brought about the massive development and democratization of higher education. Universities increased in number, expanded their departments, and received growing numbers of students. They have also been the loci of critical thinking, contestation, political mobilization and emancipation for many young people, as well as a space where the Left often has an intellectual and moral supremacy. It thus comes as no surprise that they are being attacked first.

The Neoliberalization of Higher Education and Law 4777/2021

The efforts to alter the public, free, and open character of Greek universities go back to the 2000s (Angelidou 2017, Gefou-Madianou 2000), when both conservative and social democratic governments made several attempts to waive the financial responsibilities of the state towards universities in order to create a market of lucrative educational services for private investors. In this way, an attempt was made in 2006 to abolish Article 16 of the Constitution, according to which “Higher Education is provided exclusively by public institutions with full self-administration, which are under the supervision of the State”. Such efforts were successfully resisted by intense mobilizations of students and teaching staff. These struggles have substantially delayed, in comparison to other European countries, the implementation of neoliberal policies in higher education over the past two decades: in Greece there are still no tuition fees (with the exception of most Masters’ degrees), university administration remains in the hands of elected representatives, and there is a limited number of private colleges, which lack the prestige of public universities.

However, when Nea Dimokratia came to power in 2019, it targeted higher education by abolishing academic asylum. If the latter is one of the bedrocks of any university in the democratic world, in Greece it has an extra symbolic and political significance, due to its brutal violation by police forces seeking to suppress the student protest movement against the military dictatorship. The most prominent violation took place in November 1973, when a military tank entered the Polytechnic School to crush a student uprising, killing at least 24 students (the exact number has never been officially confirmed) and injuring many more, an event that played a seminal role in the fall of the military regime. As a result, once democracy was restored, police were prohibited by law from entering the university campuses – unless a crime was being committed. However, one of the first laws passed by the ND government abolished the asylum, thus permitting the police to enter the universities. Furthermore, after one year without the physical presence of students and teaching staff in the universities, with escalating prohibitions of public gatherings in the name of the pandemic, and without any real dialogue with the academic community, Law 4777/2021 passed on February 11th. Interestingly, this law was not introduced by the Minister of Education and Religions alone, but together with the Minister of Citizen Protection. The collaboration of these two ministries in educational affairs is unprecedented.

To defend Law 4777/2021, which the academic community overwhelmingly rejects, private and public mainstream media, under the control of the Mitsotakis government, orchestrated an extensive propaganda campaign. The propaganda aimed to discredit universities as centers of lawlessness, disorder, and violence, and their staff as “addicted” and trapped in this situation. In this way, university staff have been portrayed as unable to solve such problems internally, thus requiring external state intervention. A few cases of extremely violent acts against academic authorities and staff, mainly at the universities in the center of Athens, were presented as examples of a generalized situation of criminality and public danger. Also, the media disseminated false reports that the deployment of police corps independent of university administration is a common practice across Europe and the US, and that Greece is just “catching up” with the best practices of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.

The new law introduces two major changes that threaten academic freedom and university autonomy, as well as the public character of higher education. First, it creates a special corps of 1,030 policemen that will be installed inside the universities and authorized to patrol, arrest, and interrogate whomever they consider to be “disturbing academic life”, a corps accountable not to university authorities but directly to the Chief of the Greek police. Furthermore, fences and checkpoints will be placed at the entrances of each campus, and “Centers for the control and reception of signals and images” will be established, which will have authorization to collect and store information that might infringe on the data privacy of teachers, administrative employees, and students. Furthermore, the law allows for many disciplinary measures to be taken against students and makes teaching staff serve in a disciplinary capacity to judge students’ acts (from plagiarism to the organization of parties, public events, and takeovers inside the campus) and punish them with fines that can go up to their expulsion from the university.

All of these measures are in direct violation of the principle of university self-government, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and have as ultimate goals the subjugation of students and teachers to strict disciplinary measures, and the banning of unionism and political contestation inside universities. It is also scandalous and ironic that in such a ravaged economy, with universities suffering from chronic underfunding, the yearly cost of this special corps will be as much as 20 million euros out of a total of about 90 million euros of yearly funding for all the universities (while an extra 30 million euros will be spent in the first year on control equipment). Moreover, those universities that will not accept police in their campuses will see substantial reductions of their state funding.

The second major change introduced by the law is the application of a system of admission where a minimum of 23% of candidates will be denied entry to public universities. This measure will transfer the cost of these students’ education from the state to their families, as their exclusion will create a pool of students who will turn to private colleges. In November 2020, the same government recognized diplomas by unregulated private colleges to be equivalent to those of public universities. So those candidates who fail the criteria for public universities will be able to enter without any criteria to private colleges, if they can afford the fees. This will lead to the closure of one in every three university departments in the country, affecting mostly peripheral universities. Law 4777/2021 is to be followed in the months to come by another law that will probably replace elected university administrations with nominated ones. The new law will also likely introduce student fees and loans, and the implementation of 3-years diplomas.

The academic community has expressed strong opposition against these neoliberal and authoritarian measurements. It is not fully united, as some academics have supported, and still support, the neoliberalization of higher education over the past two decades. However, there is unanimous recognition of the need for better protection of university campuses, equipment and people – protection that should be controlled by universities and not the police. Staff unions, university councils, rectors, and other academic groups have made concrete propositions for public funding for that purpose – propositions that, unfortunately, the government has now taken into consideration. But protection is something radically different from policing, and it is the latter that provokes strong objections (NoUniPolice 2021). Despite the lockdown and the ban on rallies, thousands of students and teaching staff have demonstrated in Athens and other Greek cities since January 2021, both before and after voting on the law. Moreover, student takeovers are spreading to universities all over the country at this very moment. The law also finds no consent among the majority of elected rectors and councils of the 24 Greek universities, with few exceptions, such as the authorities of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Also, numerous university teachers and some of their unions are now planning other means to continue their struggle against the law – for example, seeking to argue in the Supreme Court that several parts of the law are unconstitutional, and exploring possibilities for political disobedience to resist the law’s implementation.

Towards a closed and authoritarian university

The measures introduced with Law 4777/2021 aim to create a closed university, both physically and socially. Physically, by installing fences and control technology that will abolish open access to the campuses. Socially, by restricting the number of students who will have access to higher education, and by transforming the university from a place of sociability and open debate into to a sterilized place where students can only pursue their individual academic and professional paths. The law will definitely not solve any of the existing problems of the universities and it will likely open an era of tension and escalating violence. The brutal police attack at the Aristotle University in February can be seen as a “rehearsal” for such a turn.

More generally, over the past four decades, universities in Greece have been major centers of resistance against the neoliberalisation higher education and society, of critical thinking, and of political activism. They have been privileged places for fostering ideas of social justice and equality. Such critical forces are now faced with the risk of self-restraint, self-censorship, and self-disciplining due to surveillance and the police presence inside university campuses. The establishment of the police inside the universities transgresses democratic principles and transcends the limit of the thinkable until now. Similarly unthinkable until now is PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ euphemistic statement in Parliament that, under the new law, “it is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”. If the state succeeds in passing the “law and order” doctrine and transforming universities into places of fear, surveillance, and repression, while breaking the existing social contract by curtailing the right to free public education, then it will become easier to establish a generalized climate of terror and to ignore social claims and opposition to further restrictions of social rights. If this happens, when the lockdown is over, Greece will be a structurally different country, both in terms of economy and democracy.

Aliki Angelidou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, global economic history, anthropology of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, migration, borders and transnationalism. Currently, she carries out research on household and circular economy in post-memoranda Greece.

References

Angelidou, Aliki 2017. “Anthropology in Greece: Dynamics, Difficulties and Challenges”, in Barrera A., Heintz M. & A. Horolets (eds.), Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe: An Intricate Institutional and Intellectual Landscape, New York, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 250-276.

Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra 2000. “Disciples, Discipline and Reflection: Anthropological Encounters and Trajectories”, in M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and Academy. London: Routledge, EASE Series, pp. 256–78.

Initiative of Academics No Police on Campus 2021. “Greek Universities Targeted, Democracy under Threat The New Bill on Higher Education Threatens Academic Freedom and Brings Police Rule on Campuses”, online petition.

Screenshot of a petition header which reads "Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS. Email: NoUniPolice@gmail.com.
Image 1: Online Petition, “Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS” (Screenshot by FocaalBlog editors, this petition has our undivided support, we call on our readers to join us as signatories)

Cite as: Angelidou, Aliki. 2021. “’It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy’: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn.” FocaalBlog, 18 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/18/aliki-angelidou-it-is-not-the-police-that-enters-the-universities-but-democracy-greek-universities-as-spearhead-of-an-authoritarian-turn/

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