Nomos basileus: the reign of law in a 'world of violence'

This essay is a response to John Howard’s declaration that Greeks in Australia are desirable ethnics, due to their being “fully integrated”. With this colonial act disguised as benevolence as the backdrop, I also respond to the work of Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos whose important argument about Southern Europeans being positioned as “perpetual-foreigners-within” the Australian state, is vividly brought to life by Howard’s latest celebration of racial integration. But then I move through Nicolacopoulos’s and Vassilacopoulos’s further arguments in order to contest their claim that Southern Europeans can be understood as being “fully complicit” in the ongoing colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples and their lands. While I accept that all non- Indigenous peoples living in Australia benefit from the ongoing effects of Indigenous dispossession I do not see this as “full complicity” since the very coordinates of this complicity are aporetic and violent in structure: it is complicity with colonial and therefore legal criminality but it is also a complicity that is produced in and by law. From this position I ask, what does it mean to be complicit with that which is demanded and enforced by law? Or put differently, what does it mean to be complicit with law from the position of being inescapably before the law?