The so-called Arab Spring uprisings, which were sparked in December 2010 by the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, have resulted in mass displacement and migration across the Middle East and North Africa region, as well as the Mediterranean Sea. With the fall of the Ben Ali regime on January 14, 2011, the system of externalisation of border controls performed by the Tunisian authorities to prevent boats from leaving the Tunisian shores collapsed. Around 28,000 Tunisians harragas1 crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Italy in the months following the fall of the regime. Furthermore, 1.5 million people were displaced by the conflict in Libya, mainly to neighbouring countries that were themselves experiencing political unrest such as Tunisia and Egypt. Only around 3% of the people displaced by the Libyan conflict reached the European Union (EU).2
The Arab Uprisings represented an opportunity for the reappearance of the rhetoric of invasion from the South (Marfleet and Cetti 2013). This narrative was employed as soon as the first Tunisian harragas arrived on the island of Lampedusa, Italy. Shortly after the fall of Ben Ali in January 2011, the then Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi referred to a âhuman tsunami.â3 The Italian Minister of the Interior, Roberto Maroni, spoke about a âreal catastropheâ4 and referred to a ârisk of mass exodusâ coming from North Africa to the EU through the Mediterranean.5 The Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Franco Frattini, predicted the arrival of 200,000 or 300,000 people, a âbiblical exodus of clandestine migrants.â6 The mayor of the island of Lampedusa, Bernardino de Rubeis, declared his fear of the âannounced haemorrhage of migrants coming from Libyaâ to the media.7
The narrative illustrated by these statements was not limited to Italian politicians. The then French President Nicolas Sarkozy stated in a televised speech on February 27, 2011, that there was a fear of âincontrollable fluxes and terroristsâ coming to Europe. This image was fueled by Gaddafiâs declarations in March 2011, who referred to an âinvasion of Europe by thousands of migrants coming from Libyaâ that would occur if he was removed from power.8 âThere will be chaos, Bin Laden, armed factions. That is what will happen. You will have immigration, thousands of people will invade Europe from Libya.â Public speeches by politicians constructed a crisis based on concerns over a threat to the security and territorial integrity of Europe. The âcrisisâ labelling thus enabled the translation of the political crisis in North Africa into a migration crisis on the southern shores of the EU (Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins 2015).
The use of the invasion rhetoric was not new in the context of irregular migration in the Mediterranean. Cuttitta (2008) notes that it was already employed in the Italian context in 2004 when the minister of the Interior, Pisanu, talked about an âassault on Italian coasts,â and again in 2008, when vice-minister Palma spoke of an âaggression.â The framing of the arrivals in the language of invasion led, both in 2004 and 2008, to an increase in border controls and the signing of migration agreements with the Tunisian and Libyan governments. Although the invasion narrative does not hold for the Mediterranean Sea as a whole in terms of numbers of migrants apprehended at the borders, boat migration can be perceived as an âinvasionâ in particular localities and regions, such as the small Italian island of Lampedusa (Cuttitta 2012), which in 2011 became a sort of âbarometer of the arrivalsâ (Wihtol de Wenden 2011). Thus, the reference to a threat coming from North Africa becomes more powerful when supported by the experiences of small localities, even if these small-scale events do not reflect a more general trend (Cuttitta 2012). In such cases, government policies can affect migration outcomes.
In the particular case of Lampedusa, for instance, the Italian authorities contributed to the de facto invasion (ibidem) in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution. The number of arrivals from Tunisia increased at the end of January 2011, and, at first, the Italian government refused to re-open the Reception Centre in Lampedusa that had de facto been closed as a consequence of revolts that happened in the centre in 2009 and of the âzero immigrationâ policy of 2009 and 2010. The government also refused to transfer the migrants to Sicily and to mainland Italy until February 13, 2011, when the number of migrants in Lampedusa, which has a population of 6300, reached 5500. During this period, the public was exposed to images of the island facing a humanitarian emergency, an âopen-air campâ with migrants sheltered on what has since been dubbed the âhill of shame.â The construction of the invasion rhetoric in 2011 was driven mainly by domestic and international political concerns: the extreme right Northern League party of Umberto Bossi, part of the Berlusconi government at that time, was pushing for âkeeping the migrants in the south of the country, out of the Italian territory.â9 At the same time, Italy was negotiating with the Tunisian transitional government for the repatriation of the migrants who arrived in Lampedusa. The ad hoc invasion was seen as good leverage for reaching an agreement.
More generally, the European policy response to the uprisings has been characterised by an increase in the intensity of migration controls as well as in their externalisation, as exemplified by the European efforts to strengthen maritime surveillance operations and to re-propose the same agreements to ââfightâ irregular migration to the new governments in North Africa.
The European reaction to migration after the Arab Uprisings was thus a continuation of the previous trends towards more restrictive migration policies vis-Ă -vis âunwantedâ migrants. The increase in the number of arrivals to the EU in 2011 has shown the ineffectiveness of the European system of border controls in the absence of the possibility to rely on non-democratic North African regimes to curb cross-Mediterranean migration (Wihtol de Wenden 2011). In the last 20 years, three strategic aims have characterised the EU approach towards its MENA10 neighbours: the promotion of neoliberal economic policies, the inhibition of Islamist movements, and the control of migration to Europe (Lamloum 2003). This meant for the EU a process of âtrading democracy for stability,â signing agreements, and doing business with authoritarian regimes (Marfleet and Cetti 2013).
The aim of this volume is to investigate the ways in which the EU externalisation policies have changed as a result of the Arab uprisings; more specifically, how those policies were implemented in post-2011 Tunisia after the fall of the Ben Ali regime. It particularly addresses the question of how the frameworks of intervention usually adopted by EU externalisation processes had to adapt to the âdemocratic transitionâ initiated by the Tunisian Revolution, shifting from the state apparatus as a privileged locus of intervention to the âvibrant Tunisian civil societyâ as a new category relevant to migration policies. Our analysis aims to contribute to a set of recent academic production on the role of civil society in the EUâs externalisation policies and migration management in Tunisia.11
The book follows the epistemological path described by Allal in his analysis of the Tunisian revolutionary moment: âHere it is the reconstruction, through a comprehensive approach, of the stages of the revolutionary process underway which is central, and not the search for the initial causes of the âRevolutionâ12 (Allal 2012, p. 823).13 The reader should not be misled by the bookâs architecture, which relies upon both a diachronic perspective and a presentation going from the theoretical to...