Etienne Balibar: Algeria, Althusser, and Altereuropéenisation

Etienne Balibar joined the French Communist Party in 1961, during the Algerian War of Independence, and was expelled two decades later for his public denunciation of the party’s inability, evident since the time he had joined the party, to forge unity between the French and peoples of non-European origin with whom they lived. A student of Louis Althusser, Balibar has achieved international recognition as an innovative scholar of Marx and Spinoza. This essay examines another important thread in Balibar’s thought, his identification and contestation of the neo-racism at work in the democratic capitalist nation states of contemporary Europe. These states now cling to their role as nurturers of a “fictive [national] ethnicity,” a project with roots in their development as nation-states, at the very time that capitalist globalization is diminishing their powers. Balibar condemns the promotion of forms of “fictive ethnicity” in a new Europe and instead envisions Europe as an opportunity to address the marginalization and exclusion of populations descended from immigrants of non-European origin who live in contemporary Europe. Balibar proposes a new Europe, which could challenge American hegemony not in military terms, but by developing social institutions and cultures whose strength and appeal outside the West is not measured in firepower.