In reality, “there is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty. In that sense, the border regime is an extension of the history of colonialism and domination that Europe and the West have exercised over the rest of the world, and to which ‘the construction of Europe’ now adds a further chapter in the form of its poisoned fruit, the EU.” —Stathis Kouvelakis, Borderland, NLR March-April 2018