Handshake Nostalgics and Starter-uppers: Restructuring Governance and Citizenship in Southern Europe

Abstract

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there is a general process of readjustment of socio-political relations, power geometries and hierarchies within fundamental segments of society. This article tackles precisely such transformations by analyzing emerging practices, legitimacies and struggles around citizenship in south European periphery. Ideologies, representations and deriving practices around models of financial support are deeply engrained within particular production structures, embedded themselves within particular historical social relations, moralities and claims. By looking at two very differently -almost opposed- produced regions, the Industrial District of SMEs in Veneto, and the large electricity production site of Kozani, we ethnographically explore the dialectics between the political meanings attached to “private” and “public”, while inhabiting with our analysis the mutually constitutive relationships between the economic and the political.