What Is ‘European’ about White-Collar Crime in Europe? Perspectives from the Global South

This essay offers a complementary view from South and Central America's perspective about European white-collar and corporate crime, based on some contributions of postcolonial and decolonial studies and particularly southern criminology that analyze the problems of subordination of knowledge and horizontal collaboration and intellectual motivation beyond national limits. It states that explicitly or implicitly in a large majority of the European works emerge that the white-collar in Europe is constantly defining itself from a single referent with which they gravitate. European studies share a very extensive common history and the problems of capitalist, democratic, and industrialized societies, but they continue to be thought based on their similarities or differences or proximity to the USA. However, this "identity by the opposition", which reflects the difficulty of a definition in the - certainly - great European heterogeneity, leaves unexplored some of the most distinctive qualities of the European tradition and the diversity among its countries that would be much more productive for a European definition of white-collar crime.