Comparative social research often produces categorizations and classifications that highlight differences or similarities based on the analysis of statistical data. An important part of comparison is labeling, which can be understood as a tool to communicate and describe the outcomes of comparisons. Although comparisons are central to both research and European policy-making, has the debate on labeling and categorization and the associated power of comparisons been scarce. This article aims at stimulating discussion about the role and nature of comparisons and categorizations in constituting reality. Categorizations do not only reflect the diversity of European reality but constitute the current and future Europe in which we live. The empirical focus of our article is on how Southern Europe and Portugal, in particular, has been described and labeled in the social scientific research literature, in the realm of the EU policy and in Finnish media and how these labels have been taken in Portugal. Our data consists of comparative welfare state research published over the past three decades, reports and publications on the EU cohesion policy, Portugal's government programmes and articles published in the biggest Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in 2011. We apply a genealogical reading to the data and ask how certain ways of thinking become predominant and taken for granted during the given time period. Our analysis that focus particularly on the identification of repeated discourses throughout the data reveals that Southern Europe appears as primitive, poor, immature and backward and Portugal is pictured as a deeply indebted and weak crisis country depending on the benevolence of other countries. In our data labelling has been carried out and promoted by means of repetition and dichotomizations and by using classifications and numerical indicators. Furthermore the texts have appealed to the authority of science and evidence-based politics and to influential opinion leaders. We would like to encourage the researchers to break from the current trend of Scandocentrism (Alestalo et al. 2009) and to question deeply rooted presumptions related to this regional bias in European comparative research. As politics relies more and more heavily on knowledge or evidence, and researchers are called upon to lend their expertise and legitimize politics and its arguments, we feel it is necessary to give more careful thought to the question of how to describe and label different ways of living and resolving social issues. Firstly, even though it is possible in research to make comments and specify conditional factors, they tend to disappear and categorizations and labels continue on their own life in the spheres of politics and public debate. Secondly, it is possible that in the end, the objects of politics begin to behave as they are expected to behave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]