A couple of years ago, an ominous decision of the European Union passed almost unnoticed: the plan to establish an all-European border police force to secure the isolation of Union territory and thus to prevent the influx of immigrants. This is the truth of globalization: the construction of new walls safeguarding prosperous Europe from the immigrant flood. One is tempted to resuscitate the old Marxist ‘humanist’ opposition of ‘relations existing between things’ and ‘relations existing between persons’: in the much-celebrated free circulation opened up by global capitalism, it is ‘things’ (commodities) which freely circulate, while the circulation of ‘persons’ is more and more controlled. We are not dealing now with ‘globalization’ as an unfinished project but with a true ‘dialectics of globalization’: the segregation of the people is the reality of economic globalization. This new racism of the developed is in a way much more brutal than the previous ones: its implicit legitimization is neither naturalist (the ‘natural’ superiority of the developed West) nor any longer culturalist (we in the West also want to preserve our cultural identity), but unabashed economic egotism. The fundamental divide is one between those included in the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it.

Slavoj Zizek Violence