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Small Territories/Big Borders: Gibraltar, Lampedusa, and Melilla

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Small Territories/Big Borders: Gibraltar, Lampedusa, and Melilla canessa 6 13/07/2018 15:33 Page 22 Chapter One Small Territories/Big Borders: Gibraltar, Lampedusa, and Melilla Giacomo Orsini, Andrew Canessa and Luís Martínez ‘We are not worried by ‘them’. They are not even ‘them’: they are some of us . People here know Tunisians better than Italians. We are all the same people!’1 International borders today are often perceived as a natural and universal constituent of the global social, political and cultural spaces we inhabit. As such, borders are frequently imagined as fixed, with pre-existing lines marking the separation of nation-states’ territories. Nevertheless, inter- national borders established over previously unseparated territories have a history – sometimes a very recent history; despite their relatively fixed spatiality, the working of borders has transformed dramatically through time (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). Given this ambivalent nature – fixed and yet constantly changing – borders generate ‘otherness’ by demarcating ‘the parameters within which identities are conceived, perceived, perpetuated and reshaped’ (Newman, 2003: 15). Ethnic and sociocultural boundaries are thus closely related to the functioning of international borders. Created to organize the geographical and political space inhabited by people, inter- national borders have ended up shaping our perceptions of the sociocultural space we inhabit. Consequently, the constant evolution of the functioning of border controls and checks directly transforms social life and does so even more profoundly in local cross-border communities. To explore the geograph- ical fixity of borders together with their management, which we suggest generates social differentiation, this article concentrates on three signif- icant and contested Mediterranean borderlands. They are all small canessa 6 13/07/2018 15:33 Page 23 Small Territories/Big Borders 23 communities living some distance away from their corresponding ‘motherlands’. Yet, they are also communities whose neighbours are, according to contemporary discourse, profoundly ‘other’ but were not so in the relatively recent past. They thus provide a heuristic tool to examine how international borders influence social life (Warwick, 2008). The aim is to illustrate a) how both the tightening and opening of borders play a role in changing the perceived identities and geogra- phies of cross-border communities and, b), how social proximity can be transformed into radical difference in a short space of time. Located on the southern periphery of Europe, the cases of the Italian island of Lampedusa, the Spanish exclave of Melilla, and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar are here examined. Whilst Gibraltar is connected to a Spanish hinterland and Melilla to Morocco, Lampedusa is an island in the Mediterranean. Given their small size and their depen- dency on imports for supplies and resources, the dynamics informing cross-border interdependence are extremely visible in these examples. The absence of a national hinterland means that locals are compelled to engage with their nearest neighbours even if these are from another country. At the same time, social ties are often more intense and iden- tities more sharply drawn when small communities exist alongside a much larger ‘foreign’ country. However, as we shall see, the very foreign- ness of that country is attenuated when borders are easily traversed. There is thus a profound paradox whereby difference can simultaneously be sharply drawn and blurred; borders are, after all, bridges as well as barriers. As such, our article both confirms and confounds Barth’s (1969) central thesis about border identities – as being more ‘intense’ than those experienced, perceived and imagined by individuals and communities living at the ‘centre’ of a specific sociocultural and geographical unit. We focus on the relations between locals and their immediate geograph- ical neighbours in Tunisia, Morocco and Spain, to unpack how the major transformations in border management during the last century led to the transformations of local cross-border sociocultural and ethnic fabrics. With the European integration of Spain and Italy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the previously porous national borders dividing Lampedusa from Tunisia and Melilla from Morocco were tightened as both the island and the exclave became points of the external border of the Schengen2 space of free movement of people. Similarly, the func- tioning of the land border dividing Gibraltar from Spain was drastically transformed over the second half of the last century: historically largely canessa 6 13/07/2018 15:33 Page 24 24 BARRIER AND BRIDGE a permeable border, it was closed between 1969 and 1982, and even after the border opened there have been long periods where crossing has been difficult. Gibraltar, although an EU member, is nevertheless (with the UK) outside the Schengen area. Consequently, these somewhat contained border territories and communities represent unique case studies to examine the geographical relative fixity of international borders. It must be noted that this sense of fixity is de facto counteracted by a constantly transforming manage- ment of border crossing which produces permanent transitions in the modes of sociocultural interaction. It is from this perspective that this article develops a twentieth-century genealogy of border management in these locations together with an analysis of how sociocultural and interethnic relations across the border became subject to change. With this aim, this chapter is divided into two sections. The first of which deals with the period when local borders were relatively – if not completely – open. The second part concentrates on the recent past when border controls and checks started to be tightened. We draw on empirical data collected from three studies conducted between 2008 and 2016: the Melilla data are drawn from four-months’ fieldwork in 2008 on the management of Europe’s external border conducted in the enclave and in Morocco; the Lampedusa, data were collected in a six months’ field study between 2012 and 2013 focusing principally on local fisheries; and the Gibraltar data are drawn from over 300 oral history interviews collected on the Rock and in the bordering Spanish town of La Línea de la Concepción between 2013 and 2017.3 Life ‘Before’ – and Across – the Border As is the case with most international borders, those analysed here were not established in a sociocultural vacuum. When borders were left rela- tively open and easily crossable, social life flourished across them, leading to the intertwining of individual and community biographies with those of the immediate neighbours. Starting from the historical and geographical location of these three borderlands, what follows here is a detailed analysis of how local border management changed across the last century up until Europe’s external border was established around Lampedusa and Melilla in the early 1990s, and the border dividing Gibraltar from Spain was closed in the late 1969. canessa 6 13/07/2018 15:33 Page 25 Small Territories/Big Borders 25 Lampedusa: A Mediterranean Fishing Island Geologically part of the African continent, Lampedusa is much closer to the coasts of Tunisia than it is to Sicily, the closest point to the Italian territory. The Sicilian port town of Porto Empedocle is 205 kilometres north of Lampedusa, while the Tunisian port of Ras Kaboudja is only 167 kilometres to the south. This island of almost 26 square kilometres part of the archipelago of the Pelagic Islands, has just over 6,000 inhabitants and is today mostly known as one of the most symbolic places of the EU’s fight against undocumented migra- tion (Cuttitta, 2014). Situated at the centre of the Mediterranean, Lampedusa has served as a natural safe port for seamen over the centuries. Historically, islanders experienced the maritime geography they inhabited, as many Lampedusans lived off the sea and frequently sailed to the Tunisian mainland. Lampedusa’s location makes the island a natural safe port, as well as a strategic outpost in the middle of the Mediterranean (Radi, 1972). The Pelagic archipelago, whose major island is Lampedusa, also became a site of conflict and a land for corsairs interested in disrupting and making profits out of the trade between North Africa and Sicily. The most important religious site on the island is the sanctuary of Our Lady of Porto Salvo, the Preserver of All the People of the Sea. Already in use in the 14th century, the sanctuary worked as an interreligious space shared by both Muslims and Christians (Formentini, 1999). After centuries of diverse occupations, the Bourbons took full con- trol of Lampedusa in 1843 and began attracting settlers with the intention of transforming it into an agricultural colony. Soon people started to arrive from Sicily – 90 men and 30 women, mostly peasants and artisans – with the promise of plots of land (Mancini, 1978). However, when Italy was unified in 1860 and the Bourbons lost their dominions in Italy, the Italian government almost immediately revoked the property rights that the islanders has previously enjoyed. Nevertheless, most islanders remained there (Taranto, 2012). When, in 1887, a fisherman from the Sicilian fishing town of Trapani discov- ered a school of sponges just off the shores of the island, dozens of Greek, Turkish, Tunisian and Sicilian surface-supplied divers and fish- ing vessels moved to Lampedusa (Taranto, 2012). However, the lack of a telegraphic cable connecting the archipelago to mainland
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