Mediterranean Migration and the Labour Markets

Policies for Growth and Social Development in the Mediterranean Area

Salvatore Capasso, Eugenia Ferragina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351365956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

This book focuses on issues that are relevant for the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. The depth and the extension of the current political crisis in the area have changed the perspectives of conventional Euro-Mediterranean integration policies. The book provides the grounds for new patterns of analysis and addresses policy guidelines which are able to respond to the dramatic challenges that Mediterranean regions are facing.

By implementing a multidisciplinary approach, the volume uncovers the structural determinants of migrations in the area: territorial and social imbalances, climate change, unemployment, weak institutions, poor governance, lack of efficient redistributive policies. Each chapter proposes innovative and rich analyses of the socio-economic conditions of all Mediterranean countries. The prevailing evidence suggests that while the North-South imbalances still persist inside the basin, the recent world economic and financial crises have deepened social, intergenerational and gender inequalities. These inequalities cross all territories both nationally and internationally and affect the living conditions of large segments of population in Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries. To bridge these gaps it is necessary to strengthen territorial cohesion, reduce income differentials, and improve the access of marginal areas to basic infrastructure. These long term goals can be achieved through an inclusive development model for which young people and women can enjoy the same opportunities of education and work.

Offering innovative and practical guidelines for future programs and policies, this book is essential reading for policy makers, researchers at policy think tanks as well as academics and post graduate students of Mediterranean studies and Economic Policy. The general policy recipes, provided to govern migration flows, make useful reading for national and international research centres and major governmental agencies interested in migration issues.

Chapter 1

Migrating in the global vacuum

How globalization has securitized regional market migration flows

Paolo Quercia

Introduction: avoiding ‘how we lost the Mediterranean?’ as a future scenario

There is a tendency among international and geopolitical scholars to cyclically underestimate the challenges and structural transformations occurring under their eyes and to explain these cognitive failures by recurring to nostalgic narratives of ‘why we lost’ something. We have seen such an approach several times in recent decades where the ‘lost’ object, from time to time, was represented by the Balkans, or Turkey, or Russia, or China and so on. This tendency of being geopolitically short-sighted and then geopolitically regretful is clearly an aspect of the present times, in which the West has visibly lost the leadership of world affairs, or governance as it is mostly called nowadays.

It will come as no surprise if, in a few years’ time, we will see books and conferences dedicated to weeping over the topic of ‘how we lost the Mediterranean’ constructing a regretful narrative on why Mediterranean political and economic integration has been abandoned and the sea and its shores have been sealed to insulate the States from the negative outcomes of a regional system lurched out of control. Almost a decade has passed since the Mediterranean geopolitical region experienced an unprecedented level of disruption and destabilization, both within and beyond the borders of the coastal states. The vulnerabilities of many Mediterranean societies and economies have been exacerbated by the profound changes in the international system and in international relations, whose character, praxis and grammar has been departing more than substantially from the old post-war system.

The transformation of international relations is a worldwide phenomenon, but in a unique region like the Mediterranean, this has resulted in the rise of an exceptional multilevel set of challenges, absorbing instability and insecurity from many sub-regions of its 2.5 million square kilometres. Historically, one of the functions of the Mediterranean has been to absorb the geopolitical shocks from its sub-regions, retarding and attenuating its effects on the whole system. In the last 20 years, and especially in the last decade, the shocks have intensified in number, severity and frequency especially since many statehoods weakened or failed in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. No other world space, no other intercontinental sea is facing so many interconnected challenges and confronting such a variety of instability and threats. Threats that are concentrating and incubating in this fragile ‘Sea between lands’, posing a new set of challenges and asymmetric risks to the coastal states.

Paradoxically, this process of de-structuring of the Mediterranean geopolitical space was clearly evident a decade ago, in the very same year when the Euro-Mediterranean Union was launched, on 13 July, 2018. Since its inception in Paris ten years ago, many things have changed for the worse in the Mediterranean, to the point that the Declaration of Barcelona – another diplomatic document signed 20 years ago and full of promises of stability, security, peace and prosperity for the whole of the Euro-Mediterranean space – appears a very distant dream of a geopolitical age long past.

Political involution, the rise of insecurity over stability and the decline of many ideals of social and economic progress not only has been a feature of the southern shore of the Mediterranean but also has affected the more affluent, better-off northern shores. The same European Union, once proud and superior in its material and moral achievements, has started to shake under internal and external pressures, exacerbated by its incapacity to respond to the collapse of the security environment in its proximity and for the difficulties of its economic model. The economic and social collapse of Greece, probably the most Mediterranean country of the Union, is a clear case in point. The EU can hardly today be called ‘prosperous, secure and free’, as was proudly announced in 2003 in Solana’s European Security Strategy and a huge number of internal and external crises are placing at risk the very social and political fabric of the Union.

The transformation of Mediterranean geopolitical space: the key question of collapsing statehoods and the mutating nature of migration flows

The long-term effects of globalization on weak and fragile statehoods, the reduction of State Development Aid and the retreat of the great powers – who had supported and sustained for decades dozens of inefficient and ineffective governments and leadership – have transformed the Euro-Mediterranean space into a new de-structured environment. The imbalances in statehood, democracy and economic development have become today a problem of systemic stability and sustainability. Dramatic gaps in primary economic and social needs have increased the likelihood of internal conflict or external intervention in many countries of the enlarged Mediterranean. In the last decade, no region of the Southern or South-Eastern Mediterranean has been spared by turmoil, revolts, conflicts and unrest: from the Maghreb (Libya and Tunisia) to the Mashreq (Egypt and Syria), to the Black Sea (Ukraine and Georgia), up to the countries of the enlarged Mediterranean, like Somalia and Yemen. Those countries that were spared the most acute turbulence were unable to avoid the collateral spillovers, like refugee flows and many other negative effects. The Mediterranean space has been capsuled by a great Mediterranean region of crisis whose borderless territories are generating and amplifying an extremely wide-ranging set of security threats and challenges, most of which are of a non-military but asymmetric nature.

In this context, the geopolitical environment of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean has dramatically deteriorated, to the point that several traditional transnational regional problems (e.g. smuggling and trafficking, radical pan-Islamism, weakening of statecraft and sovereignty, inadequate border control and rule of law) have transformed their local nature, growing in magnitude, deteriorating in quality and intensifying in their geographic outreach.

At the heart of this process of deterioration of the geopolitical environment around the Mediterranean and the rise in asymmetric and hybrid actors (and threats), there is the process of the progressive de-structuring of a growing number of states of the Northern Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa (Mühlberger 2015) and the rise of private criminal cartels built on tribal loyalty and sometimes on radical religious identities (a process that has been called jihadi-gangsterism, see among others Aall and Crocker 2017). The magnitude and consequences of this process of deconstructing the State in Africa and reconstructing the spoiled sovereignty on a non-state basis has been clearly underestimated and their negative effects have been miscalculated by European and Western governments, analysts and scholars. Very often, the weakening of the old authoritarian post-colonial regimes and of the old state structures in Northern and sub-Saharan Africa has been welcomed and actively promoted as a stage of a process of modernization and development and as a sign of the inevitable route of regime and social change towards more democratic, liberal-minded and inclusive models. This has been mostly the case, for example, of the various movements that have shaken the political map of the Southern Mediterranean countries during and after 2011 and that have been popularly referred to as the Arab Spring.

The migration crisis is often overestimated as regards its impact on internal security and social cohesion of the receiving countries, but at the same time, it is underestimated for the long-term effect on international security and regional stability.

From a Mediterranean point of view, we should focus on the great connection between the new transcontinental migration flows across the Mediterranean and the collapse of statehood in Africa: two aspects that cannot be separated, and in this hybrid nature of migration lies the new nexus between migrations and security. It is quite evident that the integration of failed and failing states in different continents is a new geopolitical driver that has deeply transformed the very old migration phenomena across the Mediterranean; more than economic poverty, underdevelopment or political repression, it is the collapse of statehood in the Sahel–Maghreb continuum that has changed substantially the legal and security background where the old migrations were taking place. The main consequence of this systemic transformation is that we should emancipate from looking to migratory phenomena only with the old economic-humanitarian approach and we should frame it in a broader political-strategic conceptual vision. For this outlook to be balanced, there is a need to discuss how to include in it the concept of security. We define this new standpoint as the ‘question of international migration security’, to stress the need to upgrade migration studies, to include the relation between the multiple levels of infra- and inter-State security. This is a conceptual shift necessary to understand and govern the new phenomenon of transnational mass migration to Europe: a process that prominent European scholars, like the recently departed Schwarz (2017), have labelled as ‘Die neue Völkerwanderung nach Europa’ to stress the different nature of the present migration crisis vis-à-vis the old migration movements.

It is important to stress that this growing, awkward, relation between security and migration is not a structural one but a contingent one, since it is the result of a unique geopolitical environment characterized by the overlapping of two distinct crises: the global migration crisis and the regional security crisis. Moreover, these external crises have to be confronted with the internal political and economic-financial crisis of the European Union. The convergence of these four crises is shaping a completely new scenario which should be addressed with new conceptual and political instruments: short-sighted management of these four processes and their interconnections will inevitably result in the considerable risk of a fatal blow to the entire European political project.

The ‘new’ relation between migration and security is not a connection of the two concepts per se but it derives from three fundamental attributes of the new migrations occurring in the current Euro-Mediterranean scenario: magnitude, quality and speed. Increasing magnitude, decreasing quality and escalating speed have transformed the grassroots migration phenomena into something different, whose real nature is substantially unknown. Moreover, to add problems to problems, the security nexus is further strengthened by the fact that the migration flows heading towards Europe are intersecting a number of regional and local security crises around the Mediterranean that have contributed to change the rules of the mass movement of people across Africa.

The nature of the many security crises in Africa is increasingly of an intra-state nature (Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research 2017) and their rise in number has been facilitated by the emergence and consolidation of old and new non-state actors. Such actors have taken over ample peripheral spaces with weak or no sovereignty, crafting new and alternative forms of territorial governance (Cerny and Prichard 2017) that are transnational in their nature. We call this ‘transnational networks of sovereignty’ that are cooperating to roll back the territorial control of centralized governments, creating neo-feudal zones of local ownership with global outreach. These networks of non-state actors are disconnected by the government and state-based international system and are interacting disrespectfully of their nature (criminal, religious, ethnic, ideological, terrorist, tribal, business, irredentist/insurgent) in pragmatic cooperation aiming to achieve a simple goal: make profits through the erosion of the residual control of central governments over territory, population and resources. A process that triggers, in a domino effect, further deterioration of the regional security, affecting deeply the geopolitics of the Mediterranean and resulting potentially detrimental for North–South relations.

It is important to understand that even if mass migration towards Europe is occurring in a growing geopolitical vacuum, this vacuum is not neutral but determines the quality and quantity of the migration flows, favouring illegal and criminalized migrations versus the legal ones. The way people migrate has a transformative effect on the character and nature of the phenomena. This means that in today’s Euro-Mediterranean environment, it is mostly inappropriate to resume the 20-year-old debate on possible connections between security and migration. Quite the reverse, today’s issue is to acknowledge that migrations that occur across insecure and lawless areas inevitably have a security nexus and may become, therefore, an international and internal security challenge. The old debate on the security nexus, therefore, should be updated to the new geopolitical framework that has emerged in the last 20 years and which is radically changing the connotations and the fundamentals of migration flows, mass movement of populations and even relations among states.

There is, therefore, an evident need for scholars and experts in international relations to update the old narratives and ideological positions pro- or anti-migrations as well as the functionalist approaches to this phenomenon, returning to a more political vision of contemporary international relations and, with it, of migration policies. More specifically, scholars need to increase their efforts to bridge the gaps between two different approaches to migration: the economic-humanitarian approach and the political-strategic one. Only a joint approach that connects human security with state security is useful for a political understanding of the reality and for shaping an effective response to the negative effects of global migrations: a response that must balance solidarity, integration, rule of law and human security as well social and state security of the receiving countries.

A sea sinking in the sand: great migrations in the great vacuum

One of the factors that is progressively transforming the migratory crisis into a crisis of European security is the fact that these human flows pass through a series of ungoverned but interconnected areas extending for more than 2,000 kilometres from the external borders of the European Union. The crossing of this region has become, in our opinion, a hallmark of the post-statual migration flows after 2011, singling them out as different social and historical phenomena in a way that they can hardly be associated with the traditional migration processes (like the intra-European migrations or the migration from Europe to Northern and Southern America or even with the traditional inter-Mediterranean flow of workers and Gastarbeiter).

The vacuum factor is emerging as a game changer of many socio-political phenomena, including migrations. This geopolitical vacuum edging into the Central Mediterranean has created several vulnerabilities in the social and economic exchanges and integration between the two shores of the Mediterranean, and intra-Mediterranean human migration has been absorbed into the more global – and less circular – transcontinental movements of peoples. With the destruction of Libya and the failing of many other States around it, ungoverned territories have merged, with the vertical fusion of three different horizontal geopolitical regions: the Sahel/Sahara strip, the Cyrenaic-Tripolitan Libyan coastal strip (including Libyan territorial waters) and Mediterranean international waters.

This immense politically and geographically diverse portion of the African continent is being integrated by new drivers unleashed in African post-statual globalization, transforming it into a gigantic geopolitical cone that channels the negative externalities produced by failing statehood in Africa into the Central Mediterranean towards the European Union magnet.

This fusion-region is a huge and undefined space, with blurred contours, that starts at the southern borders of Algeria, Libya and Egypt and at the northern ones of Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan. The Central Mediterranean/Horn of Africa corridor, for example, is changing the historical and natural borders of the Mediterranean, challenging most of the old integration strategies and policies.

This expanding African vacuum is becoming similar to maritime spaces: vast areas with no sovereignty and low or no governance, centered on the Sahel Region,¹ whose fragility has been greatly shaken by the collapse of the Libyan state following the civil war, and gravitating towards the international waters of the Central Mediterranean. And the more the statehood is eroded the greater are the similarities between maritime spaces and the Sahel. A sea of sand where global interconnections are transforming traditional anarchy, freedom and tribal sovereignty, often the only form of organized control over territory, into global gangsterism.

In the 2,000 kilometres that separate Agadez in Niger (or Gao in Mali, or Dongala in S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Mediterranean migration between territorial imbalances and structural changes in labour markets
• 1 Migrating in the global vacuum: how globalization has securitized regional market migration flows
• 2 The Euro-Mediterranean regional and sub-regional integration: the role of the EU in the Moroccan path of regional integration
• 3 Demographic transitions and labour supply in Southern Mediterranean countries
• 4 Measuring women’s empowerment in the Southern Mediterranean: an opportunity to address the key development challenges
• 5 Spatial agglomeration, innovation clustering and firm performances in Turkey
• 6 Youth unemployment and labour market policies in the Southern Mediterranean
• 7 Labour market regulations and institutions in the Mediterranean
• 8 Climate change and environmentally induced migration
• 9 International migrations in the northern countries of the Mediterranean: continuity and changes, before and after the crisis
• 10 Migration and trade in the Mediterranean
• 11 Bound to share aims and instruments: the future of Euro-Mediterranean migration policies
• Index