english text 182 of Europe itself, i.e., the relation between the cultural, economic and political role of the Mediterranean and the mission that Europe has always attributed to itself. Above all because it would not be going too far to propose that, historically, the self-comprehension of Europe cannot be understood without reference to the different view attributed to the Mediterranean. In this regard, it is impossible to forget the contribution of the Annales School and particularly of the great Fernand Braudel.5 It is true that the global dimension that was acquired by Europe – the European powers – from the late fifteenth century onwards and that extended until the first half of the twentieth century is connected with the decline of the Mediterranean as a vital sea (Spain, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France), in conflict with the Atlantic powers (first Portugal, then the United Kingdom and the Netherlands), which established the centrality of the Atlantic and of the nations of the north,6 which, with the exception of the United Kingdom, very early on present as an aspirant to the hegemony, were primarily those of Mitteleuropa and only later the nations of the north, those of the North Sea and the Scandinavians around the Baltic. There is no need to emphasise that the decline of the Mediterranean as the centre of the lands and the centre of Europe and even of the world has a great deal to do with other myths, such as the one that the Swedish cartographer Olaus Magnus helped to create in the sixteenth century, which established the difference between Mediterranean and Nordic people: the former were soft and degenerate because of the warm climate (but also full of life), while Nordic people were healthy and virtuous because of the rigours of their environment. This characterisation on the basis of geographical circumstances (something that, of course, appears in Montesquieu) received decisive support as a result of the vulgarisation of Weber’s thesis about the Protestant ethic and capitalism, which described the superiority of the ethos of the peoples of the Reformation compared with Mediterranean people (Catholics, or, worse still, Muslims – not Europeans, strictly speaking). That is what underlies the acronym PIGS, with which the jargon of Brussels tries to stigmatise the Mediterranean partners of the EU. Thus the sun, light and salt of the Mediterranean, its landscape, its agriculture and its rhythm of life have become an area of leisure in the worst sense of the term, the mass tourism that is converting the Mediterranean countries and the sea itself into a service area, a holiday destination for the masters of Europe. However, a further turn of the screw was yet to come, a turn of history that, coming on top of the techno-economic process of globalisation imposed by fundamentalist market ideology (as Stiglitz called it) and of the logic of expulsion that, according to Saskia Sassen,7 is the emblem of this phase of global neocapitalism, is an economic model that, like that of the start of capitalism itself, has its consequences, its costs. At the start there was colonialism, imperialism and slavery. Now there is the exponential increase in inequality, the pauperisation of the peoples of the South and the destruction of their natural habitats (and of the world itself), which obliges them to move, to flee, and which is at the origin of the phenomena of forced human mobility that we call migrations or shifts and that characterise the new pariahs, the immigrants and refugees. As Sassen explains, they are socioeconomic dislocations that cannot be explained only in terms of the categories of “poverty” and “injustice”. According to that recipient of the Prince of Asturias award in social science, these dislocations would be understood more accurately if they were conceptualised as a variety of manifestations of what we should consider as expulsions. And so she writes, “The past two decades have seen a sharp growth in the number of people, enterprises, and places expelled from the core economic and social orders of our time.” Expulsions that are not spontaneous but produced with instruments that “range from elementary policies to complex institutions, systems, and techniques that require specialized knowledge and intricate organizational formats”. The analysis of the logic of expulsions reveals a system whose consequences are devastating, even for those who think that they are not vulnerable. From finances to mining, the predatory techniques of expulsion lay hold of all those whom contemporary sociology has led us to understand as disposable, replaceable, the new pariahs whose archetypes are the immigrants and now also the refugees. The ones crossing the Mediterranean, risking their lives for the hope of the other shore, our shore. And that is how the Mediterranean, which was a border area, became a boundary of death, a place of fright. The Mediterranean and the polysemy of a border It is true that the Mediterranean has also, and especially, been a border or boundary between three continents, between different cultural and religious traditions, between empires in conflict, as I recalled earlier. However, we must consider in more detail the notion of the border, which is fraught with ambiguity, even if, as in this case, it seems to correspond to a natural barrier. Because the dominant notion of a border is a reduction that does not do justice to the historical role of this sea. But what is a border nowadays? In what sense is the Mediterranean a border?8 I think that the outstanding American political scientist and feminist Wendy Brown has given a very good explanation of the contradictions that are produced by the process of globalisation, which we ingenuously identified with the progressive deterritorialisation of the world.9 We thought that, sooner or later, the logic of the process would lead to the downfall (the abolition) of borders, at least of borders understood as instruments of affirmation of territorial sovereignty in relation to those who dispute it (i.e., other states or else invading “hordes”). A disappearance of the border understood
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