Borders are not real
We all have an idea of how our planet is. Since childhood in science books we were presented with Earth’s images photographed from space and often from there was born one of our biggest dreams, the dream of becoming an astronaut, to be able to float one day in space to see our planet with our eyes. If this dream became reality and we left the atmosphere to observe the Earth, we would see an enormous and colored sphere of blue, green, yellow and other shades. We would be able to see the sea and the mountains, the rivers and the lakes, the deserts and the forests but we wouldn’t see any border separating one country from another. And yet, even if we see no line, we would be able to identify Italy, France, the United States, China, Japan and many other nations.
We know where the borders that separate countries form each other are because we trace them with our imagination, because one of the first images we are given is the geographical map, which is found in every kindergarten, elementary school, middle school and high school, from where we saw clear lines around the various countries and now this idea of the border has conditioned us all, it has penetrated our minds becoming a dogma. A truth from which people are willing to kill or die, in fact there have been many border wars by populations that have not accepted the division of territories and the establishment of borders dictated by others (for example the border war between United States and Mexico between 1910 and 1919 or the Kosovo war in 1998).
But let’s try to define better what a border is. It is not just an imaginary line that separates one country from another, it is a much broader concept. A border is a very large space that has many characteristics, it has a size, a history and inhabitants. It separates different spaces, it is set up to distinguish, to divide “us” from “others”. But who are we? And who are the others? Therefore a question of inclusion and exclusion is born, a group is included and another one is excluded.
The term frontier instead, often used as a synonym, is born from the idea of a closeness: we are in front of something, we see each other, we are close. It doesn’t represent a fixed line, but something mobile. The frontier is facing someone, it’s against someone, it’s something that must protect a nation established against other territories, other populations, other nationalities. A frontier is advancing, colonizing. It is the result of clashes based on power relations. Establishing a frontier is a bellicose act which tells the neighboring state that a particular line cannot be crossed. Hence also the concept of nation. The nation is an institution, something built socially and politically.
Therefore it is clear that neither borders nor frontiers are something “natural”, they have nothing to do with the naturalness of the geographical space and since they are social constructions they take on different meanings according to the historical periods, places, populations and between these meanings we find the concept of self-assertion and denial of the other. All this involves confrontation, conflict and eventually the alliance.
A frontier can be materialized in a wooden barrier, in a concrete or brick wall but sometimes it can also be natural. The rivers, the mountains, which before people looked and crossed, become limits, barriers, they can represent a border that cannot be crossed. But even a place can become a frontier, as in the case of Lampedusa, a small island located in the Sicilian Channel that separates the European continent from the African one, the point where Europe begins or ends.
But what makes Lampedusa a border? Obviously its geographical position plays an important role, but it is not enough to explain its characteristic of “confining”, since like Lampedusa, there are other islands in the Mediterranean, such as Linosa or Pantelleria that don’t have the same peculiarity.
“Lampedusa must be seen not only as a stage — like the stage of the” spectacle of the border “- but also as a great theatrical backdrop, behind which to search, among the hidden folds of the global migration regime, new theaters, new shows, new ideas for reflection and research” (Cuttitta, 2012: 111)
When building a border it is therefore necessary to make it spectacular, otherwise it is irrelevant. Lampedusa reincarnates the idea of the border because it is linked to the images of landings and illegal immigrants that are the subjects targeted by the media and political actors. Whenever we hear the name of this island mentioned, we associate it with images of immigrants in distress, barges and, alas, even people who died at sea. Moving scenarios that excite public opinion. All these images have been imprinted in our minds by the media, by television, by newspapers and this is precisely what turns a border into a theatrical limelight.
The island becomes a theater and the immigrants, those who try to cross this border, are the actors, the protagonists of this show that are often seen as a source of threat, as criminals, as a national problem, when in reality in most of the cases they are only people who escape from poor living conditions or from conflicts in search of a better life. The spectators of this show are instead Italian citizens and voters, since the main goal of the drama is to present necessary and fair policies and practices in the eyes of Italian voters. Politics, therefore, plays a fundamental role because the images listed above are used to make propaganda, to alarm the citizens, to create panic and often the reality of the facts is distorted. The politics-theater equation emerges in a very evident way in this case, it is characterized by a high spectacularization of political communication.
“This is why maritime borders lend themselves particularly well to being spectacularized. That of the Sicilian Channel, which separates Europe from Africa and the Middle East, can easily be presented as a frontier not only between Christian “civilization” and Muslim “civilization”, but also between the dream of security in the Old Continent and the nightmare of international Islamic terrorism. (…) Focusing attention on irregular immigration by sea can be a strategy more or less consciously and markedly dictated by the expectation of a significant electoral income rather than the actual need to counteract real threats from the phenomenon and more that from the effectiveness of the measures undertaken” (Cuttitta, 2012: 92).
From these words of Cuttitta we can deduce that politics is a show and the border acts as a stage. Lampedusa has been transformed into a spotlight for the spectacle of control policies. The island becomes a stage for racist and anti-immigration campaigns, the greater the instrumentalization of bodies and migrants that come to Italy, the greater the repulsion towards them can become.
We know that the events of recent years have brought the island to the center of the global debate on arrivals by sea. Illegal immigration is one of the biggest concerns of Italians and Europeans, it is a hot topic that inflames the public debate. It is believed that there are many more immigrants than they are in reality and we succumb to catastrophic visions about the invasion. The concept of invasion is often recurrent in the headlines of the main national newspapers and also in the speeches of political actors. In the Senate, not a few times, we heard about the “invaded country” referring to the landings of immigrants in Lampedusa. It is often said that the number of migrants has reached record figures, never seen before. This is an important fact that doesn’t justify any alarmism. The hundreds of millions of migrants that are counted in the world are many in absolute terms but relatively few in terms of percentages since they represent about 3.5% of the world population. Furthermore, we must also take into account the fact that the people who land in Lampedusa are mostly willing to continue their journey to other European countries.
However, alarmism is not the result of the recent anti-immigrant campaigns of some politicians today but it is an original defect of the Italian public debate. The alarm and the myth of the invasion are rooted at the time of the discovery of immigration, in the three-year period 1989–1991.
In the nineties, the Italian border par excellence was the Otranto Channel, that is the stretch of sea between Puglia and Albania. In those years, between 1989 and 1991, Italy discovered immigration but above all discovered that it was the promised land for thousands of Albanians. Those years were full of international events, such as the collapse of the Berlin wall and the communist regimes, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the beginning of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Gulf war and the search for new world balances after the long season of the cold war. This wave of international crisis had greatly affected the Balkan peninsula and especially the Albanians.
On 7 March 1991, a door, which has not been closed since then, was opened. The Italians found themselves for the first time in front of a new scenario completely foreign to them: the first landing of immigrants in their coasts, which took place in Monopoli. The country was not prepared to welcome such an exodus and found itself faced with a difficult situation to manage, in front of exhausted, powerless, hungry and thirsty people.
It is difficult to reconstruct the history of that day because there are few testimonies since that was not one of the most significant landings, but I decided to report the story of my father, who was one of the first Albanians to set foot in this country on the 7th March of 1991.
“ It was the afternoon of March 6th 1991, I was only 17 years old. Everywhere there was a rumor that in Vlorë ships would sail to Italy and from there the country fell into chaos. Thousand of people from any part of the country, both from the countryside and from the city, went to the port ready to leave. We found no ship, only a small tugboat and we were about 10,000 people eager to leave for Italy, the free country. Obviously we were too many, we couldn’t enter a boat of that size and the policemen who guarded the docks began to use rifles to prevent people from getting on the tugboat. I was just a poor and hopeful little boy to find a better life beyond the Mediterranean Sea, in that country that was described as welcoming, democratic and free and I wanted to live there, I, who since I was born, had lived only in a Communist dictatorship.
The tug began to fill up with people running and pushing to find a place within it. At a certain point the tugboat left without me realizing it, I had not yet climbed when I saw the boat departing and panicked, I dived into the water to reach it. I was helped by some boys, most likely, given my young age, I aroused a little pain. That journey was a labor, the conditions were terrible, we were all stuck. I found myself a seat in the corner and stood there for the next 20 hours. We managed to climb in 870 but on the Italian coasts we went down much less because during the night many people had been thrown into the sea to make some space. A few hours before arriving in Italy we saw a Greek liner pass by, we began to desperately ask for help and the coast guard was advised to intervene in our favor with helicopters and with the naval service of the finance guard. Our tugboat was towed for a while and finally after about two hours of rescue, we managed to land in the port of Monopoli. As soon as I got out I found myself in front of a crowd of policemen, journalists and citizens clearly curious about who we were, where we came from and what we were looking for.
We were welcomed in a very positive way, the inhabitants of Monopoli were immediately willing to help us and on the same day they made us accomodate in the Hotel Cala Corvino where they gave us food and clothes. I stayed in Monopoli until June, then, together with other minor boys like me, we were distributed in various institutions in the rest of Italy. I was transferred to Berceto in the province of Parma. There they taught me the language and a trade to make myself useful to Italian society and to integrate me into that country where I would spend the rest of my life.
There were not many prejudices against us, initially public opinion was positive, we were not seen as a threat to the country but only as people in need who needed help. Only a few months later, in August, when the ship “Vlora”, carrying around 27,000 Albanians, landed on the coasts of Bari, public opinion changed and the news began to use the word “invasion” more and more.”
So, if we wanted to indicate a day and a place where Italians were finally aware of living in an immigration country, it would be August 8, 1991 at the port of Bari, the day the Vlora ship arrived overloaded with men and women. The mass arrivals of the Albanians hit the imaginary of the Italians and the discovery of immigration was accompanied by the famous myth of the invasion, a recurring myth also given the many landings at Lampedusa.
Obviously the reality of 1991 is not the same as today but we can notice that some alarms that today fill newspapers, television and social media, have already been launched in the past and then turned out to be excessive or completely unjustified, in fact the invasion by Albanian migrants has never happened.
It is interesting to see how the phenomenon of immigration is treated by the media, journalists and politicians. Everything is hyperbolized to be made more interesting, to attract people’s attention, but the media’s spectacularisation of the border, of the landings, of the invasion and of the migrants gives a misleading idea of reality to the citizens who are continually subjected to media falsehoods and distorted versions.
We live in that society that Debord, a French philosopher and sociologist of Marxist formation, 40 years ago defined as “the society of entertainment”. The show is presented as a social relationship between individuals mediated by images. The power groups at the head of the society, politicians, who then make the State, decide the images to propose to us so that we can see a reality where social life is often falsified but which is convenient for them to show us. All this does nothing but influence our opinions and shape our minds to think what they want to support them in their election campaigns.
In conclusion spectacular mediality, as an exercise of imperial power, therefore operates through the commodity that tends to occupy desire, through biopolitics, through communication technologies that convey knowledge capable of merging fictitious subjectivities, feeding needs and consents to the commodity and enterprise: a space in which truth no longer has any attraction.
