Racism at the heart of it all — An ethnographic analysis of social (welfare) regimes in Europe's urban centers

A commentary on Bernd Kasparek

Abstract

This paper proposes to consider the counselling café of an initiative of unemployed an precarized people in Berlin as a paradigmatic site for the ethnographic analysis of border and migration regimes in Europe. On this basis, it argues that current attempts at governance of and in the European Union integrate dynamics of disintegration and renationalisation of Europe. They combine these dynamics with activating reforms of Europeanised social policy and racial banishment to form a relatively stable political structure. The conflicts over these social and migration policy attempts at governance are also conflicts over working and living conditions in Europe's urban centres.