The scheme resembles that of the subaltern integration of the Italian South in the national state created by the Risorgimento, whose structural bases Gramsci elucidated: the fruit of a compromise between the landed elites of the South and the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie in the North. It was this compromise, reached at the expense of the peasantry and the agrarian reform that would have allowed its emancipation, which explained why the Mezzogiorno was condemned to ‘underdevelopment’, to the subaltern position that became its own in the new national state. In spite of its limits—for the EU is precisely not a unitary entity on the pattern of a national state, the expression of a ‘European people’ in the sense of a demos, a sovereign subject—this parallel with internal colonialism in the Italian South helps us to understand the resurgence of racist imagery at the time of the Greek crisis. Orientalist, or rather ‘Balkanist’, stereotypes made a remarkable come-back, stigmatizing the lazy, corrupt Southern ‘crickets’ who hoped to exploit the generosity of the virtuous North to keep them in their accustomed lifestyle. But while this racist outbreak reactivated a pre-existing repertoire of pejorative representations, it was neither a survival nor a regression towards a past that had supposedly been surmounted; rather, it was the product of the new contradictions arising from European integration. The very structures of the key EU institutions—typically taking the form of opaque, if not entirely secretive, and highly asymmetrical inter-governmental negotiations—operate to ‘redefine class conflicts as international conflicts’. It is because that process is founded on a permanent disavowal of the polarizing divisions it fosters—and because it refuses, no less vigorously, a critical examination of the tropes that underpin the dominant version of ‘Europeanness’, products of a long history of colonial and imperialist domination—that it feeds the flames of racism today. This racism targets the Europeans of the second internal periphery—the ‘lazy Greek’ now joined by ‘the industrious (and cheap) Pole who has come to steal your job’, in a sort of unity of opposites—as much as it attacks, with far greater violence, the non-European, non-white, ‘Muslim’ Other.