La questione migratoria e il principio di libera circolazione nell’Unione europea: una difficile armonizzazione

This essay investigates the political and spatial upheavals that took place across the Mediterranean, centering on the practices of migration and their reverberations in the European external policy. Migrations and political instability should be considered as practices of freedom that broke the spatial and geopolitical stability of the Mediterranean. Any migration movement need to be grasped in the light of the political, geographical and social context in which it takes place, exploring to what extent it exceeds or disrupts existing economies of mobility and techniques of border management. The proliferation of mobility partnerships, economic agreement and neighborhood policies between the European Union and the countries of the Maghreb region marks the restructuring of migration governmentality in the face of those spatial upheavals. It implies the multilayered set of technologies, discourse and policies concerning the production of borders and their differential functioning, and at the same time the regulation of people’s movements. All this entails a twofold historicizing gesture: both the objects and the political categories through which objects are framed need to be questioned in their historical function and emergence.