Fiscal extraction by sovereignty: Calculative bordering and differential entanglement in the Eurozone crisis

Abstract

The article analyses the relationship between sovereignty and capitalist extraction using assemblage theory. It discusses dialectical variants of assemblage theory as tools to think about the entangled relations that make economic actors. The article proposes two concepts, calculative bordering and differential entanglement, to make sense of processes that responsibilised the Greek government for the 2010s Eurozone crisis and invoked its sovereignty as a tool for extraction value for financial markets. The article contributes to anthropological theorisations of sovereignty by showing how, as a political concept, sovereignty can serve to responsibilize governments to secure accumulation and ensure capitalist extraction. The article thus aims for a refined understanding of the changing relation between extraction and sovereignty and processes of fiscal responsibilization as a performance of sovereignty.

Introduction

‘If you want the milk, you have to feed the cow’, Giannis said as we prepared cartons of produce for a solidarity distribution in Volos, Greece, in early 2015. This comment did not come out of nowhere. I had just been listening to the political debate about the Greek economy on the radio, how ‘it’ had performed based on indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP), and the negotiations between the Greek government and the Troika of lenders (the European Commission, International Monetary Funds, European Central Bank). The sentence stayed with me: its analogy between dairy farming and the Eurozone crisis and the responsibility it suggested if ‘milk’ was what a farmer wanted. Giannis laughed, and we stacked the cartons before calling it a day.

Such everyday comments and their witty, ironic, and joking twists were common during these times in Greece (Knight, 2015). Often, they hinted at the relationality between the highly indebted Greek government and those European governments and lenders that had stepped in – with strings attached – to secure the continuing functioning of the financialised European Single Market and its various players. The crux often hinged on the very possibility of fulfilling legal responsibilities. Could the Greek government fulfil its agreed-upon debt repayments? At which pace should austerity be introduced, and with which effect? At which pace should repayments be made? Such questions were central to discussions during my fieldwork in Volos between 2014 and 2017. They prompted me to attempt to contribute to political and economic anthropology's discussions of extraction, economic relationality and sovereignty.

The article starts with a puzzle concerning how to conceive of political efficacy in an economically entangled world. To arrive at an answer, I will employ recent formulations of assemblage theory in anthropology. These dialectical ways of thinking allow us to think of sovereignty as conducive to capitalist extraction through processes of fiscal responsibilisation. To analytically describe these processes and contribute to our theorisation of sovereignty, I introduce two concepts: calculative bordering and differential entanglement. As concepts, they are intended to illustrate processes during the Eurozone crisis but also help elucidate how sovereignty as a political concept can undergird fiscal extraction beyond the immediate case (see also Makori, this special issue).

Entities, relations, entanglement: Dialectical assemblage theory and understanding configurations of extraction

Recent anthropological theorising has moved from a de jure to a de facto conception of sovereignty (Stepputat, 2015: 130). With it, scholars decentred sovereignty from the traditional understanding of state power in the Westphalian system. They provided scholars with theoretical instruments to investigate the varieties of power exercised in political formations. Instead of reifying political authority as a feature of states, sovereignty became a relational and praxeological theoretical tool that foregrounds the distributiveness of political power across configurations. This shift allows us to understand better how, as a political idea, sovereignty might lead projects of political self-determination by invoking the possibility of independence. However, the efficacy of such projects is far from independent from the constellations of political-economic power. The Eurozone crisis provides ample grounds to analyse this ambivalence between the idea and the reality of sovereignty, yet not as leading autonomous projects but as binding governments even closer to financial capitalism.

In the Eurozone, the political idea of sovereignty re-emerged as a tool for assigning responsibility to actors for securing accumulation at the brink of the 2010s, at the escalation of a realisation crisis in financial markets. How this came about and what legal and economic processes it built on are instructive for the anthropological theorisation of the articulation between political power and capital accumulation. Turning to the ‘dark side’ of sovereignty – its less emancipatory modes – helps to elucidate the pitfalls of claims to independence in an interdependent world. It also helps to connect recent political-economic processes to the role of debt and Central Banks in other historical conjunctures, most notably the economic dependency of formal post-colonial states (Hickel, 2021; Rakopoulos, 2018).

A key instrument adapted to understanding agency in interdependency is the concept of assemblage. Assemblage as a theoretical formulation of distributed agency stems from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2007). It relates to a broader discussion about ontologies of agency and social complexity (DeLanda, 2016). As Jon Bialecki reminds us, the English term ‘assemblage’ does not quite capture the original French term ‘agencement’ (Bialecki, 2018: 10), which more clearly refers to the co-production of a particular effect by an arrangement of elements. As a concept, assemblage features strongly in recent scholarship on the dispersion of political power. Aihwa Ong uses the concept to add a materialist reading to post-colonial theories (Ong, 2006: 217), using assemblage theory to theorise the constant flux of elements coming together and falling apart as emerging processes in the organisation of capitalism. Her take on assemblage theory connects a view on capital accumulation with the ‘at once global and distinctive dimensions of emerging assemblages’ (Ong, 2012: 33). Other authors, such as Tania Li, use assemblage ontologies to show the contingency of governance in capitalism (Li, 2007). Scholars working on sovereignty from an assemblage theory perspective are often interested in contexts in which sovereignty did not play out as envisioned: where the state did not manage to exert violence, where authority remained incomplete or where possibilities for political change are nested between layers of political power (Stepputat, 2015: 139). Such formulations of assemblage to theorise political and economic constellations help to understand power as fragmented, leaving open possibilities for rule to be unsuccessful or for contestations to exploit or manipulate assemblages strategically.

Asking about the possibilities of sovereignty in capitalist assemblages is instructive for a critical understanding of extraction. The underlying ontological puzzle is how to understand claims to sovereignty in relations in which actors are highly dependent on one another. This is the problem I address in this article. As a basis for my conceptual development, I use Stephen Campbell's recent (2021) proposal of a dialectical assemblage theory. Campbell argues that assemblage theory allows an anthropological understanding of capitalist processes as they unfold (also Ong and Collier, 2005), but risks underestimating how entities and their relations co-produce one another through their being related. The specific problem is technical. It concerns the formation of ‘entities’ or ‘elements’ in assemblages and whether they are separate entities ‘externally’ related to one another (Deleuze, 2004[1994]: 42) or are entangled, existing as always already connected, and through these connections, being part of one another (Campbell, 2021: 232). Translated onto concepts such as sovereignty, assemblage theory risks reifying elements of processes as being separate from one another and misunderstanding their modalities of entanglement. Taking Greece during the Eurozone crisis as grounds for theorising, I propose an analysis of the responsibilization of the Greek government as sovereign to show how legal processes that mark entities such as governments as formally separate from others create illusions of sovereignty.

Recent anthropological work on sovereignty has challenged the idea of discrete units of governance imbued with the power to act as sovereign (in principle capable of exercising authority in autonomy). Yarimar Bonilla summarises the recent turn to sovereignty as a departure from thinking with stable entities and towards ‘uneven and fragmented performances’ (Bonilla, 2017: 333). Aihwa Ong set the scene for these theoretical developments by analysing how globalising capitalism articulated political power (Ong, 2012: 27). European economic integration brought another complex re-articulation of sovereignty: its simultaneous fragmentation and entrenchment in financialised capitalism. Also in this situation, value creation requires government action. This entanglement brings a theory focused only on external relations to its limits. If such theory understands elements of an assemblage (which, if used for economic analysis, may include firms or tax offices, governments or an unemployed person) as separate entities, it misunderstands how they are the results of co-constitutive relations. To apply Campbell’s reading of Adorno, the idea of a ‘national economy’ must be understood through its non-identity. It is already abstracted but is also the basis for action. For the analysis of the ‘Greek’ crisis, the non-identity argument aligns with processual approaches in anthropology that understand concepts such as ‘national economy’ as consequential constructions (Appel, 2017; Carrier, 1997). In summary, if actors appear as separate entities in financialised capitalism, focusing on entanglement allows to understand how they are part of one another and how and why they are constructed as separate.

To translate this theoretical challenge into concepts that help analyse how actors are co-constituted in their relations and to take this analysis to understand how sovereignty featured as a tool of extraction during the Eurozone crisis, I now turn to Greece during the Eurozone crisis and analyse (a) how ‘Greece’ was responsibilized as separate from other European ‘economies’, which I call calculative bordering, and (b) the specific interdependence of European economic processes, which I call differential entanglement.

The ‘Greek’ crisis: Internally and externally related actors

During the Eurozone crisis, ‘sovereignty’ became a tool for fiscal extraction to serve the interests of creditors. Political-economic governance centred around a re-stabilisation of financial markets that finance government debt. The central pivot of this strategy was to reduce losses for investors who had extended loans to the Greek government. Unable to default, as the Eurozone does not allow such a possibility, and heavily pressured by other European governments, the Greek government was responsibilised for extracting value to serve creditors. Key to a relational understanding of the political constellation around this process is Verónica Gago’s and Sandro Mezzadra's expanded notion of extraction. Processes of extraction, they argue, differ from other forms of capitalist capture, such as exploitation. Extraction is done by ‘capitalist actors who do not organise directly the social cooperation that they exploit’ (Gago and Mezzadra, 2017: 579).

This indirect mode of extraction raises questions about the kinds of actors involved, how they are separable from one another, and their relationality. In the case of Greece during the Eurozone crisis, the political-economic actors involved include governments, banks and investors, as well as various hybrid actors such as stability funds, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. The European Union’s model of financialised capitalism and its complex institutions combine ideas of sovereignty and entanglement.

Economic policy in the European Union in recent decades can be understood as ‘integration’ in the sense of the dispersion of the political efficacy of national governments into supranational institutions. Importantly, this does not mean national governments lost the ability to create laws (see also Pistor, 2019). Governments did retain considerable rights to create laws and manoeuvre fiscal policies. Treaties such as the Maastricht Treaty organised sets of rules to balance centralised monetary policy and decentralised budgeting in the member countries (Lützeler, 1994). Such rules included how much a government can be indebted, which was to become crucial when Greek government debt spiralled out of control. The concrete formulations of law are interesting in themselves, as there were no formal sanctions coupled with such rules, and only certain countries at particular times met the criteria laid out in them (Spyridakis, 2018: 5). These webs of rules regulated the increasing entanglement of ‘national’ economies, while they remained formulated as separate by law. In the organisation of capitalism, such connecting and separating is a routine mode of establishing social forms (discursively or through law) (Eckert and Knöpfel, 2020). Notions such as the ‘Single Market’, ‘Monetary Union’, etc. further stress the connectedness of entities that remained separated by law, and underpinned by the consequential creation of knowledge about them. Statistics and the calculation of economic activity by the European Commission and various agencies that create economic knowledge for the Eurozone play a significant role in this process (Raudon and Shore, 2018: 71). Statistics concerning unemployment, growth, gross national product and debt rates were and are still calculated according to territorial ideas about states.

Addressing the Greek government as sovereign served as a means of extracting value to service financial debt and stabilising ‘financial markets’ in a capitalist realisation crisis. The political imagination of countries as separate entities that enter into external relations with one another fails to grasp the mechanisms of Eurozone capitalism. This needs further understanding of the processes by which their relations are entangled but were bordered as separate in reactions to the Eurozone crisis. ‘Greece’ could be made responsible for implementing structural reforms, with their success evaluated by metrics such as GDP and growth rates, among others. ‘Greece’ was specified as the culprit, and its government an entity that would be held responsible –by the Troika (the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank) through several consecutive memoranda – for the repayment of loans borrowed from financial markets. The control mechanisms greatly narrowed the possibilities for how Greek governments could act, but agreeing to them gave access to the financial lifelines by the Troika of lenders. The agreements bound governments to austerity and attempt to spur growth to create revenues to be used for realising financial actors’ profits. Sovereignty, in other words, became a tool for extraction.

The political efficacy of these claims to sovereignty rests on two processes through which ‘the Greek economy’ was imagined and singled out from the highly distributed and processual value creation in European capitalism: calculative bordering and differential entanglement. Via discussing the specific processes of the Eurozone crisis, I develop these concepts to study similar processes beyond the immediate context. The concepts are attempts to map the conditions for sovereignty that may help to distinguish between claims to sovereignty and the actual conditions to realise it.

A dialectical version of assemblage theory directs attention to similar questions, as Campbell writes: ‘assemblage is taken to be a heterogeneous ensemble whose constituent elements also relate to each other internally – that is, co-constitutively’ (2021: 229). Campbell addresses the question of co-constitution alongside a discussion of Adorno's understanding of dialectical critique as an approach to expose the ‘contradictions of conceptual non-identity’, meaning that concepts are ‘always already abstracted – conceptually severed from its constitutive relations’ (Campbell, 2021: 233). We can use this conception to understand how a government's sovereignty could be formulated in the complex assemblage of Eurozone capitalism. As a concept, it sets an actor apart from others, while the actor's relationality is constitutive of the very possibility of the actor. Translated into a question, the puzzle becomes: how do we understand the constitutive entanglement of economic activity together with the bordering processes by which political power is formed, assigned, and made responsible?

In the following sections, I aim for a conceptual answer derived from observations during the Eurozone crisis, which proposes to understand separation and connection in assemblages by introducing the concepts of calculative bordering and differential entanglement. These concepts are used to grasp how the Greek government became responsibilized for acting as a ‘sovereign’ to extract value and to add to anthropological theorisations of sovereignty and agency in interdependent political-economic relations.

Calculative bordering

The first step is understanding how a concept such as the ‘Greek economy’ is formulated as something separate from other ‘economies’. Appel writes in a recent article that the ‘economy’ is ‘perhaps the privileged object’ (2017: 294) in official discourse. It is a staple of economic anthropology that any definition of a national economy is a practical accomplishment of law and statistics (Carrier, 1997). The idea of relatively autonomous countries existing side-by-side fits well with the development of the idea of gross national product (GNP) after WWII and its replacement by GDP in the 1990s (Lepenies, 2016: 11). Introducing political arithmetics (Lepenies, 2016: 12) to estimate production and to facilitate trade was also imagined as a means of easing economic and political relations among those countries whose rivalry had led to two world wars. In the following decades, GNP became a key indicator and measurement of economic success.

Additionally, the statistical representation of economic activity legitimised the reconfiguration of capitalism in the post-colonial order. ‘Development’, measured by economic indicators, quickly became an instrument for political authority and a precedent for what I analyse as differential entanglement (see below). The newly ‘independent’ countries became subject to the national modus of calculation of economic activity. Crucially, their ‘economies’ were geared towards a detrimental dependence on the empires they were part of, but they were now represented as independent nations with ‘their’ own economy. Recent publications stress the similarities between contemporary austerity and the debt crisis in Africa and South America in the 1970s (Rakopoulos, 2018), the fiscal crisis in Argentina (Abelin, 2012) and how statistics play an important role in these events.

Statistics also played a significant role in unfolding the ‘Greek crisis’. In 2009, the newly elected Prime Minister Giorgos Papandreou announced higher rates of indebtedness incurred by the Greek government than formerly calculated. The global financial crisis of 2007/2008 thus became a sovereign debt crisis. Quickly, interest rates for refinancing government debt shot up as investors feared losses or betted on them. It became more expensive to borrow, and soon, the Greek government considered defaulting as it was caught in a debt spiral with ever-higher interest rates, but there was no precedent of a Eurozone country defaulting. Other governments feared that worsening the economic situation would also lead to higher interest rates for their debt refinancing or to the collapse of the financial system or the Eurozone itself.

To stabilise interest rates and to avert a default, the ‘Economic Adjustment Programme for Greece’ was crafted, with a memorandum of understanding signed in May 2010 (European Commission, 2010). Although it cautions against the numbers it contains, the programme relies on statistical data to discuss the state of the Greek economy and the measures proposed to affect the processes represented by these numbers. It describes a range of statistical objects, including ‘real GDP’ (which declined by 2% in 2009), ‘fiscal position’ (a deficit of 5.1% of GDP in 2007) and ‘external deficit’ (over 11% of GDP in 2009) (European Commission, 2010: 44). These numbers ‘border’ in that they seek to partition multi-scalar political-economic relations into neat units (Carrier, 1997: 3). Calculative bordering hence became crucial for assigning responsibility for worsening national economic indicators to the governing institutions said to be responsible for the quasi-entity, the Greek economy.

This calculative bordering fulfilled two critical functions for the organisation of extraction. First, it established technical knowledge about economic activity, and second, it compartmentalised this knowledge to assign responsibility. In the theorisation of law in an entangled world, Julia Eckert and Laura Knöpfel call such bordering practices ‘cuts’ created by liberal law (Eckert and Knöpfel, 2020: 3). While these technical numbers suggest a neatness that does not reflect the entangled reality of the phenomena they describe, for years they served as justification for the severe restructuration of the Greek public sector and redistributive system, causing thousands of excess deaths (Blyth, 2013) and impoverishing millions (Doxiadis and Placas, 2018).

During my fieldwork in Greece between 2014 and 2017, I came across several poignant examples of how calculative bordering was used to territorialise economic activity. One day in 2016, while I was relaxing in front of the TV with my host family, a news item came up that essentially stated that the Bulgarian government was doing a better job in attracting companies than the Greek one. Phaedra, the mother of the family I was staying with, grumbled. She told me that her distant cousin had a company in Komotini, farther north near the Bulgarian border. He had closed his enterprise in Greece, partly because of higher taxes he faced and re-opened it just across the border, as the Bulgarian quest for foreign investment guaranteed better conditions in exchange for capital to be emplaced on national territory. I came across several similar cases, and the European Parliament later reported that Greek entrepreneurs had applied for around 60,000 tax numbers in Bulgaria (European Parliament, 2016). Bulgaria reported that it had successfully attracted foreign capital and Greece had to report how many companies were closing down on its territory despite still operating from Bulgarian shell headquarters (Stergiou, 2016). Further examples stem from before the crisis, such as the well-known example of Greek shipping dynasties who territorialise their wealth through headquarters elsewhere (Streinzer, 2021; Theotokas and Harlaftis, 2009) and the wealthy Greek business dynasties residing in Monaco, Luxembourg or Switzerland, where their wealth is mainly calculated to belong to jurisdictions outside Greece.

Wealth or profit territorialised elsewhere are a poignant example of calculative bordering. Economist Costas Lapavitsas discusses in more detail how entangled economies actually are, as over-accumulated capital (through banks operating in France or Germany) sought ways to invest, particularly in Southern European countries. The low interest rates further supported the financialization of domestic demand in Greece. Enterprises, banks and households hence spent money borrowed from international banks on products produced elsewhere, e.g., in Germany (Lapavitsas, 2012: 98). For a time, this was a profitable business for lending banks and exporting countries, but it became a problem for the Greek government due to the calculative bordering which made it appear as if the ‘Greek’ debtors were passive while the profits from their repayments were calculated in other territories. International rating agencies played a vital role in this process, as their evaluations of the state of the ‘Greek economy’ affected interest rates for Greek government refinancing. Economists from the Bank of Greece called this process ‘doom-loops’ (Gibson et al., 2014) as the downgrading of ratings for Greek bonds led to higher refinancing costs, worse national indicators and, again, lower ratings. The austerity prescribed by the debt memoranda made things worse, as the International Monetary Fund admitted on several occasions (Elliott et al., 2013; Evans-Pritchard, 2016).

The idea of a national economy might be deconstructed and problematised, but it remains a consequential fiction underpinning the extraction of debt repayments. Crucial to understanding the importance of sovereignty and the calculative bordering that constitutes and stabilises this fiction in this process is grasping how these ‘Greek’ economic activities are entangled with events elsewhere. To analyse these, I discuss differential entanglement as a necessary conceptual companion to calculative bordering.

Differential entanglement

A closer examination of the effects of calculative bordering reveals the importance of understanding how entangled the economic activity that calculative bordering formulates as separate actually is. The unfolding economic crisis at the time exposed the consequences of how economic integration had been organised in the Eurozone and the reaction of the political constellation to it. To make one government responsible focused the problem onto a single entity and away from the differential entanglement that had proved highly problematic (Lapavitsas, 2012).

One way to narrate the European economic history of the last century is to describe it as the coming together of European countries. Most monarchies had become republics, and most colonies had become protectorates or formally independent business partners. Economic interdependency, so the idea, would appease the warring rivalry between European governments. Increasing dependence on other economies would eventually lead to more cooperative politics and less potential for another world war. Europe's political integration followed, and the European Union was formed. The aims of the European Monetary Union and the Fiscal Pact in the early 1990s were similar. European Union countries increasingly harmonised their laws, creating the Single Market: an economic space without tariffs or customs, with common laws for products and services, orienting economic and fiscal policy (government debt, etc.).

The neo-functionalist idea of convergence lies at the heart of justifications for this integration process (Leonardi, 1995: 35ff). Through economic integration, peripheral economies would either ‘catch up’ or find their ‘niches’ through functional differentiation (Gonçalves, 2017). However, as neo-Marxian economists and historians such as Gunder Frank and others have shown, this process only works if the costs are absorbed by the core countries which would, in the process of integration, benefit more from the effects of integration than the peripheral ones, making ‘convergence’ an impossible goal by way of the mechanism of integration alone (Leonardi, 1995: 43f).

The Eurozone and a common currency were important in this regard. By coordinating fiscal policy with the Fiscal Pact and the common currency, consumer prices and interest rates for governments and businesses would ‘converge’, so the economic theory. When looking at interest rates for government debt and government bonds, convergence seems to have worked for some time. Interest rates converged, leading to similar borrowing costs for Eurozone countries with widely differing economic policies. Germany, a struggling industrial country since the late 1990s, became increasingly competitive as an export country. Greece imported more and more from Germany as its industries could not compete with the low prices of German products, yet it could buy more due to low interest rates. As an example, this process of entanglement illustrates how economic activities in one country become dependent on those in another, while calculation would border them as net import ratios to measure the flows between the jurisdictions (Lapavitsas, 2012). As long as ‘convergence’ in this situation of differential entanglement worked, as it did for several years when looking at interest rates for government debt, the question of sovereignty waned in importance as the process of entanglement seemed more robust than any national economic policy strategy. However, when interest rates shot up after Papandreou's announcement, fears of ‘breaking apart’, ‘contagion’ and other imagery that foregrounded the need to border problems to a single actor re-emerged. Suddenly, it was again crucial to ‘cut’ economic processes.

In 2010, fears that the Eurozone could break up seemed realistic. The political fears for a project that was thought of as the fulfilment of the European path after WWII overshadowed the much larger problem of the unprecedented dependence of governments on financial markets to borrow to sustain their statehood. Without the financial mechanisms of financing and refinancing governments and their quest to orchestrate capital accumulation on their territories to capture parts of it as revenue, the very function of a contemporary European state was in jeopardy. As high government debt also troubled Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, Eurozone countries agreed to leverage 750 billion Euros as a rescue package. They founded the European Financial Stability Facility (ESFS), which commanded about 1 trillion Euros in 2012.

When the bailout programme ended, the Greek government's outstanding debt was spread over the following creditors: 168 billion Euros owed to the ESFS and ESM (European Stability Mechanism), €53 billion to the Eurozone governments, €34 billion to investors, €15 billion to government bondholders, €13 billion to the European Central Bank and €12 billion to the IMF (Amadeo, 2020). The memoranda the Greek government and its creditors agreed upon foresaw repayment until 2060, with the delayed repayment of interest rates on the debt. The mechanisms of the bailout bound countries and international financial institutions to the capacity of the Greek government to earn enough revenue to pay back the enormous sums it now owed. The contractual obligation between governments and institutions again binds seemingly sovereign governments to one another in a process of differential entanglement, this time to repay profit-oriented financial actors. This process can be described using Gago and Mezzadra's formulation of extraction as a process of exploitation in which the capitalist actors benefit from others organising social cooperation. Notably, it differs from analyses of sovereignty in which corporate actors are said to have sovereignty, whereas states are reduced to the status of arbiters (Diphoorn and Wiegink, 2021; see Makori, this special issue), in that it was other governments that organised extraction for financial markets. The profit-driven financial institutions did profit, but the extraction of non-realised profits was organised by the performance of sovereignty organised by European governments and supranational institutions.

The economic relations between governments and institutions show how the different and unequal relations in economic processes are strategically bordered and compartmentalised. However, any analysis of this process remains incomplete without zooming out further to see how that differential entanglement binds quasi-entities to one another and with it, to a process of extraction in which debt, bonds, and guarantees are instruments for capturing value for financial markets. Discourses about ‘Greece’ or the ‘Greek economy’ risk overshadowing that a mere 5% of the bailout money went to Greece's fiscal budget. The rest went directly to the creditors as debt repayments and interest payments (Rocholl and Stahmer, 2016: 16). While this figure is also the result of calculative bordering, it shows how the coming-together of ideas about sovereignty and debt binds governments first to one another, and then to the creditors seeking profit from this constellation.

This is where the importance of understanding bordering and entanglement together becomes apparent. As stated in the first part of the article, assemblages are as much about the relation between parts as they are about the production of specific outcomes through these relations. Campbell's proposal of understanding elements of an assemblage as connected externally and internally – as being already part of one another – is illustrated by the complex entanglements of economic activity in the Eurozone. In conclusion, I show the contribution of the concepts I have proposed to further anthropological theory and translate dialectical assemblage theory's abstract features into lenses for ethnographic and reconstructive work.

Conclusion

The shift in theorising sovereignty from a de jure to a de facto conception (Stepputat, 2015: 130) has allowed for conceiving of the complexity of formations of power and the articulation of capitalism through them in a more nuanced way. Notably, it also meant shifting the focus of analysis from entities such as governments to the dispersion of political power across configurations. The analysis of the Eurozone crisis requires both, de jure and de facto conceptions of sovereignty, and a view that relates entification and dispersion. The case I presented here shows how the actual exercise of sovereignty is a delicate balance of legal possibilities, claims to political power, and political-economic interdependency. My aim for theorising this balance is to understand how sovereignty as a political idea and legal possibility is conducive to extracting value for capitalist financial markets.

To analyse extraction via sovereignty, understanding the bordering of entities proves crucial. The recent reformulation of assemblage theory in a dialectical variant by Stephen Campbell helps to think how entities and their agencement, to use the original French word for assemblage, are inseparable. This provides a conceptual approach to understand how the Greek government, formulated as an entity but belonging to a more extensive configuration of extraction, was responsibilized for capturing value to serve creditors’ interests in the Eurozone crisis. I call this political agency entangled, entanglement here meaning that aspects of elements exist in specific relationalities that make them appear at times separate and at times inseparable.

For analysing situations in which political power is said to reside in certain actors in interdependent configurations, two concepts appear as useful: calculative bordering and differential entanglement. Combined, one can reconstruct how statistics, law, and ways to calculate ‘economies’ create consequential illusions of bordered entities, and one can analyse how they still belong to one another in configurations in which they exist on unequal terms. These concepts help to analyse claims to and performances of sovereignty in contemporary capitalisms. They support grasping extractivisms and contextualise claims to sovereignty. Also, I do not regard them as solely focused on analyzing government action. Directed towards corporations, for example, the tools of calculative bordering and differential entanglement might help to understand how corporate operations are split and settled in several jurisdictions to make an interdependent process of value generation seem separate. Using national law to emplace operations strategically is used to maximise against the state via tax avoidance and reduce corporate liability across value chains. Importantly, this dynamic process might change quickly. When Greece's rate of indebtedness spiked, for example, the strategic emplacement of financial corporations in France or Germany made these governments highly aware of the economic dangers posed by a potential collapse of ‘their’ banks.

The conceptual couple of calculative bordering and differential entanglement adds to the theorising of the relational character of financialization and the processes by which extraction is organised via sovereignty, making claims to sovereignty ambiguous at best.