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Abstract
Taking the port city of Alicante the author outlines how numerous crossroads connect the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. Along the arc of Euro‐Mediterranean trading centres lies the European continent as a whole, extending eastwards to the republics emerging from the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, and in the south to Francophone and Muslim Africa. This arc of trading towns includes Istanbul, Dubai, Naples, Antwerp, Hamburg, Marseilles and Alicante. The author traces the movements of individuals pursuing “suitcase trade” performed by means of face‐to‐face links, word of mouth, and verbal agreements. The author then traces this vast “choreographed movement” that originates from Europe’s borders, and suggests that although reasons other than trade influence mobility and movement, only commerce and the necessity of anchoring trade to globalizing flows determines the spatial form of these movements: a framework of land, maritime, and aerial routes that connect constellations of market centres. This territorial framework possesses constellation points, but does not organise a consistent, articulated territory. These nomadic routes are articulated on a double sequential and irregular geography of migrant diasporas on the one hand, and of trading places on the other. It is therefore a stateless space liberated from all political intermediaries. He contrasts this human mobility with the increasing solidification of Europe’s external borders.
Notes
[1] I hereby apply to this Spanish town one of those utterances of Dali as he arrived at Perpignan station, words which are nowadays applied on coffee cups, t‐shirts, and views of the town with Dali’s logo. Witnesses claim that on a particularly hot day the artist had said in two separate phrases: “The Station of Perpignan is the centre of the world … for flies”. This leads one to try to explore the possibility of thinking effectively about the centre of the world by applying it, even to the most improbable station. The title of this paper is also a tribute, not to Dali who has nothing to do with this account, but to another user of Perpignan station who will recognize himself.
[2] On the 5 February 2000, at El Ejido, an Andalusian farming town, a deranged Moroccan stabbed a young woman in the street. After this incident, this small town experienced three feverish days and nights during which armed crowds plundered the stores of Moroccans, burnt their houses and harassed all those they suspected of being “Arab”. During this period, tens of thousands of workers, primarily Moroccans, lived in precarious conditions in this Andalusian region where they were employed as agricultural labourers.
[3] In Algerian Arabic this is a familiar term for the “old”, pensioners who have lived for most, or part, of their professional lives in France.
[4] In 1987 France had distributed about six million visas of all types, two million in the year 2000. The figure remained stable after that year. Spain and Italy have more variable policies, the number of visas distributed every year wavering between 500,000 and a million.
[5] For example, Eurolines is an enterprise with Spanish capital, registered in Brussels. Linebus has Portuguese capital.
[6] Responding to those who reproached him for not giving his works a clear political perspective, Goffman (Citation1974) replied that “anyone who wants to fight against alienation and wake people to their real interests would have a hard time because of deep sleep. My intention here is not to sing them a lullaby, but only to enter on tip‐toes and observe how they snore”. Let us therefore say in the same vein that it may seem more useful, even from a political perspective, to describe what happens and circulates and realizes itself in circulation.
[7] Mercatone, lit. “big market”, means in Naples those commercial zones that have been opened up on the town’s outskirts, regrouping wholesalers, mainly in the shoes and clothes trade.
[8] The term can be translated generally as “transvestites”, as it deals with men‐women making a living through prostitution. This type of prostitution is an age‐old institution in Naples, as transvestites were well integrated in Neapolitan society, figuring in popular tragedy, in songs and in literature. Tradition attributes the femenielle as the “descendents” of the castrati who sang in the opera when this was forbidden to women.
[9] Although never completely verified, hearsay and fieldwork in the Maghreb support the strong suspicion that a veritable market in European visas exists. These are sold for between [euro]1000 and [euro]1500, depending on the country. According to the published account of a journalist who attempted the passage (Courrier International no. 522, November 2000), in that year it cost about [euro]4000 to obtain a Spanish visa at Tangier. The transit in patera cost about half the price (between [euro]1500 and [euro]2000).
[10] Taken from the narrative of the author in Les Ronces: a Moroccan Voyage in the Boats of Death, published in Morocco. I warmly thank Abdel‐majid Arrif for having translated certain passages.
[11] Note of the translator (AB): the word “mieterranes” is made up of two words: mie, the inner part of a loaf, and terranes which means land. Hence in this text it is used to signify “the interior part of a piece of land”, an “inland”.
[12] Out of 752 European offshore companies from the clothing industry located in Tunisia, 47% have located there in the last 5 years, joining with other pioneer companies that have reaped considerable fiscal benefits since 1972. In addition, over the last years Tunisia has become one of the 10 major world textile exporters (fabric, clothes, shoes). Textiles have become the major industry of the country, employing in 1996, 240,000 jobs among companies having more than 10 employees. This constitutes 47% of the industrial jobs in the country. They were later joined by the big US jean manufacturers (Levi’s and Lee Cooper), then the major sportswear brands in the tax‐free zones of Monastir, Sousse and Bizerte, where one also notes the re‐siting of small company shoe manufacturers that had been said to have been “organically” established in the disadvantaged districts of old Naples. A preliminary research that we have conducted in Tunisia (Peraldi Citation2005b) has allowed us to establish that these relocated companies over these past 10 years come from Coletois, Nord‐Pas de Calais in France, and from Venice, Emilia Romagna and Tuscany in Italy, in short those regions that had recently been considered as shining examples of productive districts and “economic miracles”.
[13] “The space of flux is composed of personal micro‐networks that project their interests in the functional macro‐networks through global ensemble of interactions in the space of flux” (Castells Citation1998: 468). To understand Castells in a more practical way, the space of flux consists in some manner of shared time and of collective interests, as on the shop‐floor, but in a space extended by networks. Always according to Castells, it is the compressed and interdependent work‐time in extended space.
[14] A European company that relocates elsewhere is not merely doing so to maximize its profits, as simplistic interpretations would have it. It is exiting national territory, from the “sacred domain” of politics to expose itself to the pleasures of personalized interaction and negotiation. Indeed one could consider that these tax‐free zones constitute “niches” in which the companies have negotiated a right of non‐interference from local and national institutional bureaucracies over their productive and organizational processes. This is of course in the best managed and controlled organizations in tax‐free zones. It appears in effect that in certain countries, especially in Eastern Europe, there is not even an institutional framework equivalent to tax‐free zones, but an imbroglio of more or less secret negotiations and arrangements guaranteeing the integrity of these foreign companies. As attractive as this may seem to entrepreneurs, this situation, characterized by the concrete absence of state institutional counterparts to management, does not permit them the possibility of “reigning in” their (sometimes renegade) personnel without greasing their palms, often at an increasing rate. Or at least, if they wish to manage their companies as authoritative and abusive tyrants—which some do—they must prepare the groundwork with the civil societies in which they have to operate. Put differently, the absence of the state does not mean the absence of negotiation, and the absence of institutional counterparts does not imply even more forcefully the absence of intermediaries. On the contrary, if one refers to the descriptions of certain situations that we have collected from Tunisia (Peraldi Citation2005b), entrepreneurs are enmeshed in a permanent series of complex negotiations, even in endless discussions, not just with their actual personnel but with the multiple agents of power and regulation down to the local level. To put it even more concretely, when the hiring of an exclusively female personnel is not negotiated through the contractual procedures guaranteed by the state, it is negotiated, person‐by‐person, with the fathers, the brothers, or the husbands. The same applies to wage rises and ranking, leave, dismissals, competition, etc.
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