Introduction: Europe, Crises, Performance

Abstract

‘London-Athens-and-Berlin-we-will-fight-we-will-win’: imagine the slogan reverberating as protesters walk down London’s Fleet Street in May 2012.¹ The chant of struggle and victory connects the streets of a financial centre of the developed world, the ‘new capital of Europe’ (Rachman 2012), and the locus of a potential Eurozone contamination. An invisible thread connects London, Berlin and Athens — three cities with loaded past and complex relations to the formation of the European idea — and their people; this diagonal line, we argue, is instrumental for understanding current articulations of the European idea(l) and its Others, the tension between centre and periphery, Old and New Europe, Europhiles and Eurosceptics.² This book sets out to understand the role of performance in the making of contemporary, in-crisis, European identities by presenting perspectives from the London-Berlin-Athens axis while also engaging with questions of crisis as it ripples beyond the borders of Europe. We propose that the ‘inside/ outside Europe’ conundrum, which marked the tone of the post-2008 Eurozone crisis, reframes Europe, both the idea and the geopolitical formation, as at once exclusive and privileged. The recent uses of this dichotomy point to the discursive value and in-crisis permutations of notions of inside and outside; the May 2012 slogan attests to such shifts insofar as the ‘we’ who will ultimately rise victorious is juxtaposed with an imagined ‘them’. But who is ‘we’?