Natalia Ribas-Mateos - The Mediterranean in the Age of Globalization: Migration, Welfare & Borders

Time after time migration studies tend to make use of ancient travel myths to recall the living experiences of contemporary migrants, sometimes to highlight an expression of mourning, while others to insist on a venturesome, enterprising nature of modern mobility. Goytisolo (2004) considers that our civilisation brings with it two main travel myths: that of Ulysses in the Odyssey and Robinson Crusoe on the Isle of Ms a Tierra. The myth is built up around the wanderings of Penelopes husband prior to his return to Ithaca, and those of Daniel Defoes hero, in the light of the challenge they face in struggling to build up their own world in a hostile environment. Whilst the former acted consciously or subconsciously as the seeds for the great travel books, ranging from those by Tangierin Ibn Batuta and Marco Polo to the Pleiades written in recent centuries, for Goytisolo, the Scottish sailor at the centre of Daniel Defoes novel is not really searching for adventure but survival, and is the victim of his own unfortunate fate. It might be some sort of modern truth in all of those icons, so the tale of this shipwrecked sailor echoes that of millions of women, men and children today as for those who do suffer from not being able to return to Ithaca. We will see them, somehow implicitly, through the space of the book, when we define in this introduction: the Mediterranean Scale (Globalization and its borders), when we identify the sides of the same coin (in the North and in the South of Western Mediterranean), then the Caravanserai will take us to the idea of diverse and intensified circulation (where again the myth persists, the word caravanserai finds its etymology from Persian language, Karawn saray, palace of caravans). In fourth place we will detail the itinerary of the book, explaining in how to make a journey by sea calling at a series of ports.

Changes related to globalization and scale cause us to think about new theoretical and methodological questions, and more specifically about the way in which strategic economic and political processes territorialize in the European periphery. Border cities are not in the same hierarchy of power as Sassens global cities (2001) but they are connected to them, and at the same time they play a role in the old North-South division. Through some sort of binomial relationship, the global city-border city set can now be seen in the context of the triadization1 of the global economy.

If we consider the situation of Western Mediterranean cities today in connection with globalization and triadization we see that none of them are command villages in the context of the three powerful world regions, United States, Japan, and Europe. Economic globalization is reshaped by cross-national economic integration of different forms and on different scales, such as those related to the three main axes of the world economies. This process makes us challenge the notion of the globalized world, where North America, Japan, and Europe all have in common the making of fortress regions in the global space. In this geographical clustering, Southern Europe acts as the soft underbelly of Fortress Europe, therefore rescaling the vision of todays Mediterranean world.