Europe, Islam and the Roma: Liberalism and the manufacture of cultural difference

In this article, we direct our critical enquiry at public intellectuals’ musings about cultural difference in the wake of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ (starting in 2015) and the coincidental eruption of ‘ethnic tensions’ between Roma and non-Roma citizens in Bulgaria. We show how (1) some intellectuals mobilize their position as holders of legitimate knowledge about culture to construct rigid collective identities, despite their professed liberal political beliefs about the ontological primacy of the individual and (2) how they politicize the constructs of culture to arrive at exclusionary, racist ‘solutions’ to the security problems that Roma and refugees allegedly pose, thereby fuelling and in many ways legitimizing far-right mobilizations. We examine the discourses of a range of experts commenting on clashes between ethnic Bulgarians and Roma, on one hand, and on the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, on the other. Juxtaposing the scholarly discourses about two different types of ‘surplus populations’ helps us tease out the malleability of the ‘enemy’ and the ensuing complex hierarchical organization of these populations according to the logic of economic utility and preconceptions of the distance between a coveted ‘Europe’ and a threatening ‘Islam’.