Internationalism today necessarily involves an awareness of the colonial structure of power relations and of symbolic production in contemporary global societies. By colonial we designate both the rhizomatic structures brought about by the historical process of colonial exploitation, as well as the ongoing and ubiquitous reproduction of forms of domination and inequality based on the racial and cultural inscription of the subject. Coloniality does not only chase our present as a ghost from the past. It constantly produces new social realities, which defy attempted definitions of the realm of politics in either exclusive or static terms.

Any critique of the economic or institutional system, and any emancipatory imagination should be thought of as part of a decolonising process. This sheds new light to class-based and feminist politics, since it addresses us all as the result of a relational process of colonial differentiation and subjectification, which exceeds any dualistic logic.

Europe's political frontiers, as well as its ethnic borders, are the result of an enduring colonial process which is actualised in the present. The rise of nationalisms and the spread of xenophobia are symptoms of an inadequate political language articulating our societies. The contemporary condition involves the prise de parole of a new, different subject, a new kind of social governance and a radical transformation of the role of cultural institutions. Decolonising ourselves and our institutional practices thus involves a two-sided position: both resisting the process of reproduction of colonial taxonomies and vindicating radical multiplicity as the basis of any imagination of the social.