The Greek case shows that the exceptional regime installed at the time of the debt crisis has created a new line of fracture. The finality with which that internal border asserted itself at a time of crisis—it had been there all along, but concealed by economic growth—has to do with a phenomenon that is more than simply economic. Internal and external borders have come together in a neo-colonial regime charged with administering neoliberal shock therapy to a wayward country, as well as controlling an inflow of migrants that tests the EU’s border regime. The Greek perspective allows us to see with utmost clarity the reality of the ‘security state’ that is emerging inside the EU, insofar as that body is giving neoliberal policies constitutional status by means of a mechanism released from any form of democratic control. The proliferation at every level of bodies exempt from democratic oversight, to which a growing number of state functions are transferred, the mutual interpenetration of the higher bureaucracies of the EU, the national states and the major industrial and financial groups, and the growing reliance on repressive methods: these are prominent features of the ‘authoritarian statism’ whose rise Nicos Poulantzas diagnosed at the end of the 1970s.

The Southerners of Europe’s internal periphery are not only called upon to consent to a regime of dispossession, but also to play the role of fortress gate-keeper, so as to spare the countries of the centre the disagreeable spectacle of needy, persecuted hordes run aground on the shores of Lampedusa or Lesbos. [...]