Making “Mediterranean Migrants”: Geopolitical Transitions, Migratory Policy, and French Conceptions of the Mediterranean in the 20th Century

Despite the fact that most migrants in mid-20th century France came from the western Mediterranean, the relationship between conceptions of migrants and conceptions of the Mediterranean is poorly understood. This article analyzes both how French policy debates about migrants borrowed from discourses about the Mediterranean and its inhabitants, as well as how these debates reveal changing ideas about the Mediterranean as the frontier of “Europe.” To this end, the article examines four periods of geopolitical reconfigurations when migratory patterns and policies were reworked: as a result of World War I, in the wake of World War II, during the 1950s and 1960s with decolonization and European integration, and in the midst of economic crises and European enlargement since the 1970s. During the course of the 20th century, the concept of the “Mediterranean migrant,” as well as the “Mediterranean” itself, increasingly referred to persons from the southern shore of the Mediterranean, rather than from Southern Europe. This shift, in conjunction with an increasingly united Europe, has several implications for migrants’ inclusion in the nation-state and European Union.