Italian Studies

ISSN: 0075-1634 (Print) 1748-6181 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yits20

Reimagining Europe’s Borderlands: The Social and

Cultural Impact of Undocumented Migrants on
Lampedusa

Luciano Baracco

To cite this article: Luciano Baracco (2015) Reimagining Europe’s Borderlands: The Social and
Cultural Impact of Undocumented Migrants on Lampedusa, Italian Studies, 70:4, 444-448, DOI:
10.1080/00751634.2015.1120949

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2015.1120949

Published online: 22 Feb 2016.

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italian studies, Vol. 70 No. 4, November, 2015, 444–48

INTRODUCTION

Reimagining Europe’s Borderlands:

The Social and Cultural Impact of
Undocumented Migrants on
Lampedusa
Luciano Baracco
Over the past twenty years the island of Lampedusa, which forms the southernmost
point of Italian territory, has been transformed from a little known isolated island in
the Mediterranean to become one of the most visible locations of Europe’s new border
regime. As the European Union steps up its efforts to secure and police its external border,
the island has borne witness to the shift away from reactive migration control policies
to proactive migration management involving new regimes of deportation, detention,
and militarized rescue operations. The impact of these regimes on local Lampedusans
and migrants, as well as the issues they raise in relation to wider social and political
questions concerning how Europeans have begun to view the arrival of undocumented
migrants to Europe, form central themes of the articles contained in this special issue of
Italian Studies: Cultural Studies.
The history of Lampedusa has long been one of marginality. Forming the largest of
three islands in the Pelagic archipelago located some 200 kilometres south of Sicily,
Lampedusa has had a chequered history of ownership and occupation. Attempts to colo-
nize the archipelago have been frequent and problematic. Isolation and pirate raids ended
the determined colonizing efforts of the Tomasi family who had been nominated the
‘Princes of Lampedusa’ in 1630, and who subsequently sold it to the Kingdom of Naples.
In 1860 Lampedusa became part of the new Kingdom of Italy which almost immediately
saw its utility as a penal colony for those who continued to resist the unification of Italy;
a use that was resurrected during the fascist era when the island’s isolation made it the
ideal site for the internment of political prisoners.1
By the 1880s Lampedusa had developed a lucrative sponge fishing industry which
attracted boats from across the Mediterranean. Fishing not only transformed the island’s
economy, but had a profound impact on the social character of its population, which
began to exhibit the forms of mutual assistance and self-reliance characteristic of a small

1 
J oseph Pugliese, ‘Crisis Heterotopias and Border Zones of the Dead’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural
Studies, 23.5 (2009), 663–79.

© The Society for Italian Studies 2016 DOI 10.1179/0075163415Z.000000000121

 INTRODUCTION    445

fishing community. The establishment of the island’s fishery was also to have an impact
on its relations with its neighbours. Tunisia’s proximity led to close trading links with the
island, with the Tunisian port of Sfax becoming home to many Lampedusan fishermen
along with thousands of other migrants from Sicily.2 These close relations contrasted
with the disconnection experienced between Lampedusa and the Italian mainland, which
many suggest remains the case even today. The emergence of the lucrative bluefish fishing
and canning industry from the early twentieth century provided expanding employment
opportunities for the island’s population, drawing in both women and children, and
further enmeshing the island in trading networks with its Mediterranean neighbours and
northern Italian merchants. The 1950s marked the beginnings of limited state-sponsored
infrastructural projects with the installation of electricity generation for the first time,
followed by the building of the island’s only school and clinic, and in 1968 the completion
of the island’s airport. The bluefish industry reached its peak in the 1970s. However,
it remained the island’s main employer until the 1990s when locals took the first steps
towards what is today a mass tourism industry which has almost entirely displaced
fishing as the island’s main source of income.
The island’s isolation and obscurity was briefly interrupted in 1986 when, in retaliation
for the US bombing of the Libyan city of Tripoli, Colonel Gaddafi fired scud missiles
at the island intending to hit a US coastguard station on the western edge of the island.
Although the missiles fell short of their target, landing in the sea, the incident led to the
closure of the station.
As many of the articles in this special issue note, the transition to mass tourism was
to have a profound social impact on the island’s 6,000-strong community as a new
market-driven ethic of competition emerged. It was also at this time that the island
encountered another new experience relating to the arrival of undocumented migrants.
While the island had hosted people from across the Mediterranean for a century or more,
few of whom were ‘documented’, the turn to mass tourism was also accompanied by
government and EU measures which gradually began to enforce formal border require-
ments which made former ‘friends’ into strangers. Just as the island was opening up to
increasing tourist arrivals, at the same time governmental institutions were establishing
a presence on the island in an attempt to close it off from the steady flow of migrant
arrivals from North Africa, many of whom were Tunisians. The island’s emerging inter-
national profile as a destination both for tourists and undocumented migrants exposed
an increasingly contradictory situation where the channelling of substantial resources
towards tourism and the newly established border regime was juxtaposed with contin-
uing neglect by the Italian state: Lampedusa was simultaneously brought to the centre
and yet remained at the periphery.
Despite this varied history, today Lampedusa is almost exclusively associated with
the human tragedy of undocumented migration across the Mediterranean, becoming the
site of intense political, cultural, and ideological contestation for Italy, North Africa,
and the wider European region. While the arrival of undocumented migrants has been
an issue in Italian politics and the Italian media for some time, in 2011 the humanitarian
crisis occurring on the island came to the world’s attention with the beginning of the

2 
 iacomo Orsini, 2015. The EU and the changing lives of fishermen. A study of Lampedusan and Fuerteventurian
G
fishing communities. PhD thesis, University of Essex, p. 51.
446   LUCIANO BARACCO

Arab Spring and the popular revolutions in Tunisia and Libya. The images of that year
of heavily laden migrant boats being towed into port by Italian Coast Guard vessels, or
wrecked on the island’s coastline, are continually evoked by more recent disasters at sea
which claim the lives of hundreds of unnamed and undocumented people attempting
to reach the island, with their deaths eliciting very different responses from among EU
member states.
The events of 2011 and the high numbers of drownings off the shores of Lampedusa
occurring in early 2015 have brought into sharp focus the dilemma between the humani-
tarian discourses which have informed Italian and European politics throughout the post-
war era, particularly emanating from the European Union and the Council of Europe,
and the policy choices made by governments in response to these events. The failure to
implement EU, Council of Europe, and UN conventions on human rights and refugees,
together with the increasing practice of involuntary repatriation and reported failures
to assist refugee boats found adrift in the Mediterranean, demonstrate the limits to
such humanitarian discourses as well as new techniques of bordering and exclusion to
circumvent international treaty obligations. While the arrival of refugees and undoc-
umented migrants is not a new experience for the island, Lampedusa has become a
symbol and site of new fears of Otherness that is giving rise to new anti-immigrant
movements across Europe and growing anti-immigrant sentiments within moderate
established political parties of both the left and right. Such fears became condensed in
representations of Lampedusa as an open gateway to the rest of Europe, leading to high
profile visits to the island by the leaders of the far-right French Front National and the
British National Party seeking to use Lampedusa to illustrate their claims that Europe
is facing an unmanageable invasion of migrants to justify their general hostility towards
the European Union as well as their political rhetoric for nation-states to reclaim the
power to enforce and police their own national borders.
Today such representations of Lampedusa are not confined to the extreme right as
they have been gaining ground among Europe’s established parties which have increased
the profile of anti-immigrant rhetoric and border controls in their policies and election
manifestos. The recently elected Conservative government in Britain offers a notable
example, having made significant manifesto commitments to seek greater immigration
controls its subsequent stance on undocumented migrants crossing the Mediterranean
underlines a growing divide among EU member states. It has specifically criticized Italy’s
Mare Nostrum search and rescue operation as creating a pull factor which has encour-
aged migrants to cross the Mediterranean, supporting its replacement by Operation
Triton whose mandate is limited to the policing and enforcement of EU borders. This
emerging division within the EU has come at a critical time, as 2015 has seen an increase
in the flows of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, the majority of which have been
identified as refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria. In this context, the replacement of
Italy’s Mare Nostrum with Operation Triton resulted in major humanitarian disas-
ters at sea; by April 2015 a reported 1600 people were feared drowned attempting the
crossing from North Africa to Italy.3 Responding to this death toll, EU states bolstered
the resources made available to Operation Triton, particularly navel patrol boats. Yet

3 
‘Mediterranean migrants: Hundreds feared dead after boat capsize’. BBC World News [online] 19 April 2015.
Available at: <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32371348> [accessed July 1, 2015].
 INTRODUCTION    447

beyond this ad hoc response an EU-wide policy providing a long-term response to the
arrival of undocumented migrants continues to remain elusive. Divisions persist between
those led by the European Commission and Italy favouring a more generous resettlement
policy based around asylum quotas for each member state, and those such as Britain
and Hungary who favour identification and processing of asylum claims at the point
of disembarkation in accordance with the Dublin II Regulation adopted by the EU in
2003, which would leave Italy to shoulder a disproportionate degree of responsibility
for migrants crossing the central Mediterranean. As an extension of the policing and
border enforcement measures under Operation Triton, Britain has recently suggested
even stronger push back policies including military action against sites in Libya. Thus,
at the time of writing, the divide among European states appears to be both growing
and irreconcilable.
Against the backdrop of these divisions, Lampedusa has simultaneously come to
represent a symbol to appeal to humanitarian sentiments across Europe. The island has,
as many of its inhabitants will inform you, become a destination for NGO and social
movement activists campaigning for migrant rights, and has been the site of a number of
humanitarian visits by high profile celebrities. During his 2013 visit to Lampedusa, Pope
Francis made references to the large numbers of migrants dying at sea and the treatment
of those who made it to the island alive in order to draw attention to the diminishing
incidence of humanitarianism and a growing xenophobic undercurrent within European
politics, describing this process as the ‘globalization of indifference’. The articles here
clearly bring out examples of both, and in doing so demonstrate that the significance
of Lampedusa goes well beyond its geographical location and isolation, and indeed the
arrival of undocumented migrants; it has come to represent an ideational site reflecting
a wider divide characterized by a confrontation between humanitarian cosmopolitanism
and new forms of xenophobic populism at the level of both civil society and the state.
The arrival of undocumented migrants to Lampedusa and the political contestation
surrounding such arrivals continues to give rise to a growing body of literature. Early
accounts of migrant arrivals to the island were infrequent and commonly compiled by
social movement activists who drew upon the largely quantitative data collected by the
UN, EU and NGOs, or journalistic reports which often lacked both depth and analy-
sis. More recently, however, the literature on Lampedusa has undergone a qualitative
transformation as it has become the subject of growing interest among academics from
both the humanities and the social sciences. The contributions in this issue of Cultural
Studies are located within this more recent literature and, for all except one, are based
on extensive field work on the island itself that has enabled the authors to articulate a
well-informed, in-depth and original analysis which extends from the micro level of local-
ized events on the island to their larger regional and global significance. This special issue
brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars from Europe and North America
who draw on approaches from cultural studies, political science, sociology and social
anthropology, communication science, and geography. Taken together, they provide a
comprehensive analysis of Lampedusa’s current and ongoing experience of transition
from an isolated fishing island in the middle of the Mediterranean to a symbolic site of
political contestation between exclusionary and inclusionary visions of Europe.
The authors would like to express their thanks to the many reviewers who provided
constructive criticisms and encouragement in the completion of the articles on Lampedusa
448   LUCIANO BARACCO

contained in this issue. We would also like to thank the editors of Italian Studies for
agreeing to our proposal. As will be clear to the readers of this issue, the authors do not
stand outside the political polemics surrounding the arrival of undocumented migrants
to Lampedusa. While maintaining our academic rigour and integrity, we stand firmly in
the camp of humanitarian cosmopolitanism. We hope that the analysis and observations
contained in this special issue will make a contribution, however small, to the ongoing
process for the recognition of migrants’ rights that will assist them in their search for a
new life in Italy and beyond. We also hope that our work brings into view the sponta-
neous humanitarian actions of many Lampedusans in their encounters with migrants
who have arrived on their small island. The ways in which the 6000-strong community
living on Lampedusa have faced the dilemmas brought about by the unpredictable flow
of migrant arrivals have not always been characterized by hospitality and empathy, as the
accounts in this special issue clearly illustrate. They are clearly a community struggling
to cope with the difficulties posed by such arrivals, combined with the need to make a
living from tourism and the Italian state’s failure to invest in public services. And yet
their actions, for the most part at least, suggest a determination to reject that ‘globali-
zation of indifference’ referred to by one of Lampedusa’s more notable recent visitors.

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