A Zizekian Interpretation of the EU

The European Union has been described by Zizek as a law-giving Superego or “big Other”, giving out conflicting directions to its populace as to their duties as citizens. Zizek makes light of the fact that the traditional Superego often gives deliberately conflicting orders that are impossible to obey, such as in a film-version of an unauthorized tryst that is yet required to complete a romantic plot line. In the example of the EU, there are conflicting demands to be “austere” or responsible for limited government spending on social programs, and yet the citizens of the “Eurozone” are expected to increase their individual consumption habits through cross-border sales as a civic duty to increase economic activity in the EU.

These directives would appear to be key to the fundamental duty of the citizen of the European Union — to both be responsible for individual governmental cutbacks, and yet respond to the conflicting duty to increase individual shopping in order to prop-up the commercial raison d’etre of the Union. Exterior to this, the EU has been beseiged in a medieval sense by millions of African migrants seeking simply to survive and participate in a right to a modest and physically secure consumer existence, against which the EU has attempted to defend as if it were a hostile invasion by a foreign power.

There are individual legal theories that are lurking in the background of this debate. The fundamental concept of the ‘homo sacer’ or outlaw, stripped of all legal existance and dignity appears to be a shadow in this area. The tradition of Roman law and the use of slavery is readily percolating below the surface of this debate. The spirit of the Union appears to be held together with a thin and cynical ideology that is struggling to stay togther simply out of the pragmatism of capitalism and the fear of all exterior enemies and their repression of individual existence.