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Middle East & North Africa
Can the Turkish regime absorb the opposition to Israel’s war?
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Middle East & North Africa
An Italian Connection? Racism and Populism in Kais Saied’s Tunisia
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Middle East & North Africa
The Social Life of Phosphate on the Two Shores of the Mediterranean: Ecology, Work and Migration
In early January 2024, Turkey witnessed some of the most crowded mass demonstrations against Israel in the entire world. Government-friendly business associations were among the main organizers of these demonstrations. In the weeks that followed, Turkey would also step up to become one of the few countries that backed South Africa’s legal case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). As all this was happening, however, Turkey was simultaneously fueling the Israeli war machine through steel, chemical, and energy exports. Parsing Turkey’s precise contribution to Israeli war capacity is, of course, a difficult endeavor. That said, there are grounds in thinking the contribution significant. After all, close to 70% of Israel’s steel, a critical component in virtually every armament, comes from Turkey.
In view of Turkey’s material complicity in the Israeli war on Gaza, how to explain the state’s engagement with the mass protests and actions at the ICJ? Is this outright hypocrisy, as the government’s critics claim? Or is it instead part of a master-plan through which Turkey will ultimately gain the strength to stop Israel’s excesses, as pro-Erdoğan accounts hold?
The answer is not straightforward. Just as the posture of the governing party AKP is affected by Turkey’s entrenched and contradictory location within world imperialism and regional balances, it is also affected, and rendered more complex, by the AKP’s Islamist roots and complex relations with popular mobilization. As such, the current Turkish regime cannot be seen merely as a bulwark of NATO domination in the region: Insofar as it is transformed by and accountable to Islamist movements, it is also an unpredictable partner for the West and Israel. If Erdoğan’s Turkey helps perpetuate Israel’s occupation, then, the double character of his regime—and the internal tensions it creates—means the possibility of countervailing interventions cannot be ruled out.
Twin bastions of Cold War imperialism
The necessary point of departure for discussing Turkey’s relations with Israel are the Cold War and the character of the country’s integration into world capitalism.
Kemal Atatürk’s premature Third Worldism could not be sustained for long and quickly mutated into subservience. This transition started with the rule of Kemalists themselves in the 1940s before accelerating in the 1950s by way of the center-right’s reaction to Kemalism. Ensconced thereafter in a subordinate position within the global economy while motivated to jury-rig higher levels of welfare, Turkey would famously experience periodic financial crisis over the decades that followed. Its political leadership, meanwhile, would accept the need of staying on-side with the United States-led free world, to whom it could turn for lines of credit.
Turkey recognized Israel in early 1949 and bilateral relations were strong across the 1950s: More than facilitating trade, military and intelligence cooperation were established in these years. At a number of critical junctures in the 1950s, moreover, Turkey also took the bold step of standing with Israel in the full light of day. In 1951, Turkey backed Israel after Egypt prevented Israeli ships from using the Suez Canal and in 1954, Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes called for region-wide recognition of Israel. Henceforth, some frictions emerged, it should be said. On the whole, however, Turkey remained friendly with Israel, if less publicly than in the past. Turkey might have ceased issuing pro-Israel statements following the Suez Crisis of 1956 and made efforts toward rhetorically aligning itself with the Arab states; nevertheless, as it was doing so, its Prime Minister was meeting with Ben Gurion and the Iranian Shah behind closed doors to secretly work out the terms of a “Peripheral Alliance” for constructing a non-Arabic bloc in the Middle East. Note that the USA, seeking to combat the rise of anti-imperialism in the region—a force which had concentrated mostly among the Arab states of the time—supported this prospective alliance.[1]
As the years turned to the 1960s and 1970s, Ankara would largely continue the same two-step. Turkey supported the Arab states in the disastrous 1967 war, and commerce with Arab countries grew considerably stronger in and around the same time (especially after the oil crisis of 1973). Turkey even lent its vote to a UN resolution equating Zionism with racism during the period in question. Throughout, however, bilateral trade with Israel was maintained and even when relations between the two states appeared to reach a nadir—as was the case during left-populist Bülent Ecevit’s short reign in the 1970s—trade and military cooperation persisted. Furthermore, there is speculation (and some evidence to warrant it) that intelligence sharing-cum-collaboration proceeded without interruption: Turkey and Israel may have cooperated during the Cyprus crisis[2] and once Turkish[3] and Kurdish[4] anti-imperialist militants began receiving training in Palestinian camps in the 1960s, there is evidence to suggest that the two countries’ intelligence services worked together to put an end to these arrangements. Upon the close of the Cold War, a fleeting opportunity for restructuring bilateral relations with Israel was presented to Turkey. It was not taken, though, and as the 1990s moved on, Turkey actually pivoted in the opposite direction: A “golden decade” of relations with Israel ensued.[5]
Absorbing the opposition to Israel: the AKP’s ledger
Erdoğan visited Israel in 2005, fostering hopes among parties on both sides that this golden decade might extend despite the Islamic roots of Turkey’s new governing party AKP. As it played out, such hopes wound up dashed, initially as result of the destruction wrought through Israel’s 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. At the World Economic Forum in 2009, Erdoğan publicly rebuked Israel’s president Shimon Peres’ framing of Cast Lead by interrupting his speech with the interjection “one minute,” a phrase which thereafter came to symbolize anti-Western feelings in the region at large. Diplomatic relations between Turkey and Israel quickly deteriorated in the aftermath. With tensions already intensifying, the Israeli military’s violent confrontation with Turkish activists a few months later then took things to a whole new level.
Regarding the particulars of the confrontation, it came about when IHH (“Humanitarian Relief Foundation”), an Islamist aid organization attempted to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza through delivering aid by sea. What is known beyond a shadow of a doubt is that Israeli forces stormed and attacked the ship leading the aid flotilla (the Mavi Marmara) and ultimately killed nine activists onboard. Speculation regarding the potential involvement of the Turkish government in organizing IHH’s anti-blockade action abound through the present day. Be that as it may, it is clear that the IHH was and is a deeply rooted movement organization with at least partially autonomous leaders and activists and a very large donor and member base. And it was the murder of their activists, rather than any hard feelings left over from Davos, which made restoring a healthier diplomatic relation exceedingly tricky. After the bloody incident, the rulers of the two countries couldn’t simply swallow their words and pride and move on. For Erdoğan, the Mavi Marmara incident became a useful device for sustaining AKP hegemony at home: Keeping it in the discourse and seeking recognition if not legal satisfaction in international fora therefore had its utility. Cynics or not, Erdoğan and his party also had to be responsive to the IHH leaders, who leveraged both informal lobbying and public criticism to force the AKP to stick to an anti-Israel line.
In 2013, Israel apologized and promised to compensate the families of the activists killed on the Mavi Marmara. With the IHH still alluding to the AKP’s softness on Israel through 2014, though, this apology could not yet bring about an immediate diplomatic thaw.[6] Alas, conditions shifted in the months that followed, probably due to backdoor dealings between the governing party, Israel, and IHH. With the IHH agreeing to stay quiet, ambassadors would be reinstated in November 2016. A monkey wrench was thrown into the mix by the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital in 2017. Regardless, by 2018, Turkish and Israeli ambassadors were back at their respective posts in Ankara and Tel Aviv once again and while full diplomatic relations were not quite restored, embassies were functioning as usual.
Building on these foundations, a proper upswing in Turkish-Israeli relations commenced in 2021. Not only did high level official visits resume, but intelligence cooperation was publicly recognized: the Israeli foreign minister even took the bold step of thanking the Turkish services for preventing an Iranian action against Israelis.[7] Come 2022’s end, diplomatic relations were fully restored (after a ten-year break) and the Israeli President Isaac Herzog was making a state visit to Ankara. In September 2023, Erdoğan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even met in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations’ General Assembly. This all transpired, mind you, despite Israel’s increasingly violent and repressive approach to Palestinians, be they in the West Bank, Gaza, or inside Israel’s 1948 territory. And this all transpired despite the most extreme rightwing government in the history of Israel coming to power, its ambitions for settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing hardly disguised.
Turkish-Israeli trade under the AKP
While inter-state relations clearly witnessed their ups and downs during the long reign of the AKP, commercially, Erdoğan and his team oversaw a steady and historic expansion to Turkish-Israeli trade. When the AKP took power, Turkish exports to Israel were valued at $805 million. By 2014—at a moment when major diplomatic channels were still severed—this figure had already grown to $2.95 billion. After the diplomatic thaw of 2021, trade skyrocketed even further. Where total bilateral trade was $6.126 billion in 2014, in 2021, it hit $8.4 billion, and in 2022, $9.49 billion.[8]
Trade after October 7th
After the horrors of Israel’s response to October 7th quickly came into view, Erdoğan—recent history notwithstanding—predictably sought to position himself as the guardian of Gaza. As he was doing so, however, journalists, politicians, and social media began disclosing and circulating information regarding ongoing trade links between Turkey and Israel. In the aggregate, the liberal-Islamic opposition daily Karar and a handful of other sources have reported that trade with Israel actually increased after October 7th.[9] (The government denies these claims.[10]). In the minutiae of trade exchanges, more politically compromising information has come out, too. At the forefront of this was social media reporter Metin Cihan. Throughout the fall, Cihan documented trade deals allegedly involving Erdoğan’s family and others involving companies run by prominent Islamist businessmen. Such revelations were considered extremely sensitive by the government and prompted the expected response: Though already in exile due to judicial authorities targeting him with previous probes, Cihan is currently under investigation for claims made against Erdoğan’s son, specifically, that the latter has maintained trade relations with an Israeli counterpart after October 7th.[11] Then in December 2023, media investigations turned the spotlight onto Turkey’s export of weaponry to Israel. In its “refutation” of these accusations the next month, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) actually partially confirmed their veracity: According to TÜİK, Turkey had, up and through the last month for which data was available (November 2023), been providing weapons and weaponry parts to Israel, but only items intended for personal (non-combat) use. Insofar as armed Israeli settlers regularly use their personal weapons to target Palestinian civilians, the qualifier noted by TÜİK was hardly the coup government officials may have thought.[12] Indeed, anti-war organizations in Turkey are still demanding an end to these exports.
The AKP’s Line on trade with Israel
As a general matter, the line put forth by Turkey’s rulers when it comes to trade and investment relations with Israel is that this is outside the realm of politics: These are issues of the market, where Turkish parties are free to act as they see in their best interest.[13] Of course, any such demarcation between politics and markets has long since disappeared in Turkey. The durability of the ruling party itself has largely depended on the shift away from neoliberalism towards dirigisme and even state capitalism. Mouth liberal mantras on the “free market” from time to time as the AKP might, its interventions in the economy are varied and massive in impact.[14]
The business association MÜSİAD is at the core of the ongoing controversy over trade, unsurprising, perhaps, given its links both to the AKP and to Israel. Though one of the main organizers of the mass demonstrations against the war on Gaza, MÜSİAD’s association members rank amongst the leaders of Turkish trade with Israel. Since the trade controversy erupted, the association has attempted to muddy the water by claiming that the final destination of member exports are the occupied Palestinian territories, rather than Israel. As they present it, the relevant exports are only classified as trade with Israel because all trade to Palestine must first run through Israeli customs authorities.
MÜSİAD’s assertions strain credulity for any number of reasons. To begin, over the last decade, the AKP and its allies have blocked a number of efforts from parliamentarians and civil society organizations aimed at obligating that companies and government disclose more details regarding bilateral trade with Israel. The regime extended its de facto embargo on Israel-related trade information in the aftermath of October 7th, too.[15] As is such, by the hand of MÜSİAD’s own political sponsor, there is no way of confirming the association’s claims. A strange coincidence, to say the least. Furthermore, before October 7th, the Erdoğan government and many of the Islamic companies which rally under MÜSİAD’s banner were none too shy in boasting about increased trade with Israel. In late 2022, for example, the (conservative-led) association of steel exporters proudly announced that not only did they provide 65% of Israel’s steel, but intended to soon increase their market share.[16] In early 2023, meanwhile, the Turkish state’s official news agency covered an enthusiastic meeting in Tel Aviv which involved 20 Turkish and 100 Israeli firms. Organized by an association on whose board the prominent conservative businessman Murat Kolbaşı sits, the participants at the conference discussed ways to increase Turkey’s $400 million annual export of glassware to Israel.[17] On these occasions and others when state or MÜSİAD-aligned business took to bragging pre-October 7th, moreover, rarely (and weakly) did anyone add a comment on the final destination of exports being occupied Palestine: Such a specificity was added only after the government and Islamic businesses came under criticism following Israel’s late 2023 assault on Gaza.
Also eating into MÜSİAD’s claim is the praise that Israel showers on many-a-Turkish company.[18] Israel’s regular feting of İÇDAŞ—a steel exporter, member of MÜSİAD, and the largest Turkish exporter to Israel—is a case and point in these regards: It beggars belief that the Israeli state would celebrate the firm if its products were being used to develop Palestinian infrastructure or improve Palestinian welfare. The composition of Turkish exports to Israel (primarily steel, other metals, chemicals, automotive, and electronics) is not suggestive of a secret trade relation with Palestine, either. Due to Israeli restrictions on imported materials, Palestinian industry—the only sector that would have use for most of Turkey’s exports—has been dedeveloped considerably. It could never absorb the amounts of steel and chemicals in question.
Mass mobilization after October 7th
As the Mavi Marmara incident demonstrated long ago, Turkey’s sustenance of the Israeli economy under the AKP can proceed in the face of mass mobilization against the Turkey-Israel bilateral relation. More than that, one could argue that AKP-managed commercial relations with Israel might even require such a mass mobilization, provided that the party is able to keep things from boiling over while credibly positioning itself amongst the anti-Israel camp.
This might seem a difficult trick to pull in the current moment, though it would be unwise to underestimate the AKP after all these years in power. Up to this point, the key for the AKP has been its handling of the autonomous though hitherto controllable civic constituents of its far right bloc. While the autonomy of these actors has created occasional problems for the AKP (see: the Mavi Marmara activists’ pressure on the Israel relationship), this same feature can be equally beneficial for the party. When the riding of popular energies becomes useful for advancing the party’s future, for instance, the autonomy of far right civil society allows it—and with one step’s removal, the AKP—to more ably mobilize the passions of the street. The civil society’s controllability has its obvious uses as well. On the one hand, it allows the AKP to pursue its own prerogatives in conducting state affairs. On the other, it ensures the party can prevent the emergence of a revolutionary Islamism from below. Though time will tell, the flexibility the AKP gains through its relation with a semi-autonomous far right civil society could afford it an advantage over classical fascist regimes. Though the latter had more organized, ideologically committed, and violence-prone masses at its beck and call, the room to maneuver of those regimes was more limited, and their need to feed the base more constant, than is the case for the AKP.
That the AKP remains subject to degrees of pressure from its civic constituencies means that the course of the future cannot be easily plotted. Some of this pressure led the Turkish government to delist Israel as a primary export target at the end of January 2024. One implication of the decision is that the state is no longer committed to protecting involved businesses if “complications” arise.[19] Pro-government columnists have published pieces calling for trials against companies trading with Israel in recent times as well.[20] Such pieces talk loosely of “global companies,” a label meant to implicate the mostly Istanbul-based fraction of capital that has historically opposed Erdoğan rather than his allies in MÜSİAD. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to imagine a heightening of popular pressure leading to the widening of the net, and some AKP cronies getting swept up in the process. IHH president Bülent Yıldırım seemed to have expressed an interest in just that during a speech at a mass rally in early February. Critics of IHH have pointed out Yıldırım’s penchant for big words and little follow through. Nevertheless, the articulation of a harder line on Israel by an influential member of pro-AKP civil society points to the dangers of Erdoğan’s strategy on mass mobilization.[21]
Independent popular challenges to the Turkish-Israeli relation
In addition to the mobilizations of historically pro-AKP forces, there are independent protests currently being organized by opposition Islamists and leftists. These protests are often skillful in drawing attention to the hypocrisy of the AKP. That said, they do not as yet present a comprehensive vision for what Turkey’s role in the region—and vis-à-vis Israel—ought to be. Do they want the AKP and Turkish state to go all the way and join, for example, the Axis of Resistance led by Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas? Do they simply want the AKP to be neutral? Do they desire to see a new pole of resistance, less beholden to Iran and other conservative forces? Or is there no strategic goal beyond making businesses divest from Israel? Without answers to these questions, it is difficult to imagine these popular forces constituting a counter-bloc that can actually pose a threat to the AKP.
Conclusion
If playing with dynamite, the AKP’s harnessing of mass mobilization has undoubtedly paid domestic dividends to date. With local elections coming up, the use of this tactic for billowing the party’s sails should be expected to continue.
Looking abroad, does the party have the capacity to transpose its national formula—talking harsh and mobilizing mass actions against Israel while sustaining the latter’s wars through commerce—to the wider Middle East? To wit, will the AKP be able to absorb anti-war energy for a capital and commerce-friendly reconstruction of international relations throughout the region? The intensity of the anger out there suggests any regionalization of the Turkish formula is extremely unlikely. Indeed, the most likely outcome for Turkey when it comes to Palestine may well be irrelevance: The combination of anti-Israel rhetoric with enduring exports to the country look to have alienated all parties. The West has unambiguously sidelined Turkey within its shuttle diplomacy, as was made most plain during Blinken’s 2024 visit to the Middle East. In the final instance, though, should that be the extent of the cost suffered by Erdoğan for engaging in his traditional two-step with Israel, one can trust irrelevance is a price he will be happy enough to pay.
[1] Jacob Abadi, 1995, “Israel and Turkey: From Covert to Overt Relations.” Journal of Conflict Studies 15/2: 104-128.
[2] Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, 1987, The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why, Pantheon.
[3] Umut Uzer, 2021, “The Fascination of the Turkish Left with Palestine: “The Dream of Palestine”,” The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 12/2: 181-202.
[4] Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya, 2015, “The “Palestinian Dream” in the Kurdish context,” Kurdish Studies 3/1: 47-63.
[5] Jonathan Ghariani, 2024, “Turkish-Israeli relations: ‘the golden years’, 1991–2000,” Israel Affairs 30/1: 5-24.
[6] For more details regarding this back-and-forth between the AKP and IHH, and the history and structure of the relations between these two entities, see Tuğal, Caring for the Poor, 2017, Routledge, pp. 195-209.
[7] Associated Press, “Israeli FM thanks Turkey for foiling attacks on Israelis,” June 23, 2022.
[8] Fatma Sarıaslan, 2023, “Turkish Israeli economic relations in the new normalisation environment,”Israel Affairs.
[9] Turkish Minute, “Turkish exports to Israel rose by 34.8 pct from November to December,” 4 January 2024.
[10] Seda Tolmaç, “Ticaret Bakanlığı, İsrail\’e ihracatın arttığına ilişkin iddiaların doğru olmadığını bildirdi,” aa.com.tr, 4 January 2024.
[11] Hikmet Adal, “Journalist in exile: \’Turkey makes statements against Israel but imposes no sanctions\’” bianet.org, 30 November 2023.
[12] Sol, “Türkiye Barış Komitesi: Türkiye’den İsrail’e silah ihracatı derhal durdurulmalıdır,” 14 February 2024.
[13] Artı Gerçek,“Ticaret Bakanı\’ndan İsrail açıklaması: Ticareti devlet değil özel şirketler yapıyor,” 15 December 2023.
[14] Cihan Tuğal, 2023, “Politicized Megaprojects and Public Sector Interventions: Mass Consent Under Neoliberal Statism.” Critical Sociology 49/3: 457-473.
[15] BirGün, “”Bilal Erdoğan’ın gemileri” sorusu, Meclis Başkanı’na takıldı,” 5 January 2024.
[16] Mehmet Fatih Erdoğdu, Mücahit Aydemir, “İsrail\’in çelik tercihi Türkiye oldu,” aa.com.tr, 19 September 2022.
[17] Uğur Aslanhan, “İsrail züccaciyede Türkiye\’yi tercih etti,” aa.com.tr, 2 March 2023.
[18] Israeli Foreign Trade Administration, “İsrail – Türkiye Ticaret Ödülleri Sahiplerini Buldu,” May 2017.
[19] Toi Staff, “Turkey delists Israel as favored export target amid tension over Hamas war,” Times of Israel, 22 January 2024.
[20] Yaşar Süngü, “Şirketler de yargılanacak,” Yeni Şafak, 27 January 2024.
[21] See “Replies” to the post: https://twitter.com/TurkishIndy/status/1753896271234896144.
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘Can the Turkish regime absorb the opposition to Israel’s war?’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘can-the-turkish-regime-absorb-the-opposition-to-israels-war’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2024-03-18 13:19:01’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2024-03-18 12:19:01’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=470’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )Migration has long bound Italy and Tunisia. Depending on the moment in time, the twinned countries have alternated as sites of sanctuary and exodus. Just as Tunisians and those transiting through the country are today heading to Lampedusa to seek asylum or a better life, the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw political refugees and economic migrants from Italy’s impoverished south take to the sea for Tunisian shores.
What marks the present off from the past, certainly, is the reception that migrants receive as they traverse the borders of the paired nations. Those Italians who came to Tunisia in search of work, land, and escape from persecution many years ago were unobstructed by the local governing authorities. Settling permanently in many instances, they became fixtures of Tunisian life during the late colonial era. Contrarily, when economic migrants began pushing from Tunisia to the Mediterranean’s northern reaches starting in the 1980s, the human right to free movement had long since been disowned by the prevailing powers that be. Those searching for a better life at this juncture encountered a legal and security apparatus designed to stop them. In this manner, where the Mediterranean once held the promise of delivering an Italian peasant to a grander future, over the last ten years especially, it became a mass grave.
Marking the present off from the past as well are the political and ideological sinews presently connecting the halls of power in Rome and Tunis. Differences notwithstanding, the Italy of Giorgia Meloni and Tunisia of Kais Saïed are animated by a populist appeal grounded in the same foundations: racism and xenophobia. This has brought the countries into a strange and unique kind of alignment.
A Brief History of the Present
On June 6, 2023, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni made an official visit to Tunisia. The purpose of her trip was to discuss irregular immigration, an issue she had rode to power the previous fall and one that remained front and center for her government and party, the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy). In the preceding months, arrivals at Lampedusa had jumped considerably, and there were growing fears in Italy that Tunisia’s economic crisis and the impasse that had been reached in discussions with the IMF might soon prompt even larger movements of people. While in country, Meloni met with Tunisian president Kaïs Saïed at the presidential Palace of Carthage and his then Prime Minister Najla Bouden at the seat of government in the Kasbah of Tunis.
Put on the back foot by Meloni’s boldness, the European Union ended up falling in line with the Italian agenda for Tunisia. Over the course of the next two months, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte accompanied Meloni on two journeys to Tunis, where the mission was to negotiate “enhanced cooperation on migration management.” In practice, this required convincing Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed—publicly resistant to the notion of Tunisia being deputized as a border guard of Europe—to stem sea crossings.
Carthage saw Europe’s sudden attentiveness as an opportunity. Indeed, aware of Brussels’ need for a deal, Saïed thought it possible to trade cooperation on migration for the lifting of the conditionalities that the IMF and the EU’s official lenders typically attached to financial assistance packages.[1] During his meetings with Meloni, Saïed made this objective plain, warning that creditor demands for austerity threatened to ignite an “explosive” situation and strain Tunisia’s social peace. The subtext was hard to miss: Impose pain on Tunisia and the numbers arriving on Lampedusa would spike. For Meloni, the terms Saïed was laying out were hardly a deal-breaker. Animated by the immigration question first and foremost, she was unbothered by the Tunisian President’s interest in bucking fiscal orthodoxies: Insofar as Tunisia had leaped Libya as the top departure point for irregular migrants and asylum seekers disembarking for Europe a year prior, the priority was to shut the Mediterranean gate by whatever means required.
To the surprise of some, the Italian and Tunisian leaders would evince a clear personal rapport as the negotiations process played out. This was despite Meloni’s penchant for dog whistles and barely hidden racism back home. Brushing that aside, Saïed, usually intransigent and combative in dealing with Europeans, displayed obvious warmth toward the Italian President. Appreciative of her “outspokenness”, he told her with a smile in front of a pack of journalists that “You are a woman that says out loud what others think about in silence.”[2]
Fellow Travelers in Ideology
As events before and after the press conference displayed, Saïed actually agrees with a great deal of what Meloni says aloud. Due to distinctions in context, the specific others he targets may be different from those Meloni takes aim at. Nevertheless, the same ideological impulses guide the two. As Meloni’s immigration policies are, Saïed’s repressive dealings with black African migrants—be they residents or those transiting through—is guided by racism, xenophobia, and conspiratorialism. And just as Meloni has injected this racism into her populist appeal, so too has Saied.
Interestingly, the two Presidents took advantage of a similar historical conjuncture in rising to power as well. Though themselves from different sociological backgrounds—Meloni of working class stock, Saïed decidedly not[3]—both proved deft in appealing to marginalized and downwardly mobile constituencies. This appeal was especially apparent for Saïed: Where Meloni actually campaigned on cutting state benefits to many of society’s most vulnerable, Saïed skillfully won a base by speaking to the struggling people of Tunisia’s hinterlands, those in the country’s north, central, and southwest especially. For each, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic also served as a catalyst par excellence. In Italy as in Tunisia, management of the virus had been disastrous: Tunisia lost 30,000 lives, the second highest total in Africa; Italy tallied one of the worst ledgers in the global north. Despite being President, Saïed deftly leveraged public frustrations over the government’s handling of the pandemic in conducting his self-coup in July 2021. Meloni, likewise, struck an appeal based on the Italian citizenry’s anger at lockdowns and intensifying economic stagnation to win the 2022 elections. Thereafter, both leaders would also display talent in attributing the causes of social suffering onto external (and occasionally internal) forces. Though the food shortages which emerged in Tunisia after Ukraine’s invasion of Russia stemmed from fiscal mismanagement, Saïed pinned them on sinister actors working to undermine his rule. Meloni, meanwhile, has routinely targeted Brussels as the source of Italy’s penury.
When it comes specifically to questions of migration, Meloni and Saïed read from the same rhetorical hymnal again. This is most apparent in their (aforementioned) conspiratorialism. In the case of Meloni, conspiratorialism is observed in her references to post-2016 schemes for altering Italy’s ethnic composition.[4] Conjuring a wedge issue from these fictions, she has proved capable of holding together a right-wing coalition and positioning herself as a guardian of “Italianness.” In the case of Saïed, conspiratorialism is present in a vernacularizing of the European far-right’s Great Replacement Theory: As Saïed has publicly proclaimed on more than one occasion, an Afrocentric plot organized by criminal enterprises and modeled on the Zionist project of the late 19th century was put into motion in the early 2000s with the goal of changing the demographic (read: Arab) makeup of Tunisia.[5] Such a tale was originally spun by the Tunisian Nationalist Party (TNP), an outfit that has been calling for the expulsion of black African migrants from Tunis and Sfax since 2018 and that connected with the President’s office in late 2022.
The Tunisian Nationalist Party’s (TNP) Dangerous Delusions
The social media pages of the TNP have unfortunately galvanized a great many Tunisians against black African migrants, weaponizing falsehoods to attack those on student visas as much as those who lack legal status. On these social pages, a diversity of (often contradictory) conspiracy theories are available for consumption. Some center on allegations of criminal networks, others on sorcery and human trafficking. Those that have gained the most traction, including with the President, are the ones claiming that black Africans intend to take over Tunisia as part of an Afrocentric colonial project. The TNP has charged late Senegalese anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop and the 20th-century Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey as furnishing the inspiration for this plot.[6]
The Violent Consequence of Racist Populism
By defining the problem of migration in this manner, Meloni and Saïed set themselves up to propose similar fixes: Zero tolerance for what is deemed “illegal” immigration, and vigilance for the ethnic outsiders who have already managed to make a home inside their countries. Directing public anxieties against society’s most vulnerable whenever it is politically expedient, Saïed looks, in the eyes of sociologist Vincent Geisser, to be following in the populist wake of Meloni.[7]
When politically necessary, it is worth noting that the two leaders also indulge in not dissimilar attempts at hiding or selectively softening otherwise racist agendas. Of course, the wider current from which Meloni flows—the Lega Nord and Fratelli d’Italia—expressly associates itself with fascism and the racist legacies of Benito Mussolini, and as a general tendency, the Italian right does not shy away from sullying black people as invaders and rapists while accusing them of attempting to turn Europe black. Softening, in this context, can only go so far. That said, Meloni herself is careful to keep things subtle, lest she invite a frontal attack. In public, the Prime Minister’s racism is therefore often expressed in indirect terms, as when she suggested a black minister, Cécile Kyenge, was a representative of foreigners (The Italian right, for its part, has lifted up a model minority as evidence of its general decency: in 2018, they promoted the candidacy of Toni Iwobi, a naturalized citizen of Nigerian descent). In the same vein, when an overtly racist speech delivered in February 2023 got Kaïs Saïed into hot water at home and abroad, he would also seek self-preservation by muddying the waters. In a March meeting with Guinea-Bissau president Umaro Sissoco Embaló, Saïed pointed to his black African in-laws and African pride as evidence of non-racism. After racist mob violence began targeting black Africans and some black Tunisians, Saïed’s minister of foreign affairs Nabil Ammar proceeded to diminish the events and denigrate the very notion of Carthage articulating anti-black racism.
Sadly, Saïed’s combination of overt speechmaking and denialism seems to have facilitated the normalization of anti-black racism in Tunisia. Regardless of the spurious defenses they put forth, the President and his allies know well that their public warnings of plots to colonize Tunisia have legitimized vigilantism throughout the country: That civilian groups patrolled and harassed neighborhoods in Sfax and Tunis with large black African communities follows directly from Saïed’s words. Indeed, 2023 was the year that the promotion of a racist-populist discourse gave way to state-sanctioned anti-black violence.
Given their acute vulnerability, it should be unsurprising that black refugee women have suffered the worst from this development. For them, sexual assault, rape in particular, has become increasingly prevalent.[8] Human Rights Watch[9], Amnesty International[10], and Sweden’s Kvinna Till Kvinni Foundation have all documented this worrisome trend: The latter, which partners with Beity, a Tunisian organization whose mission is to welcome women victimized by gender-based violence, reported growing numbers of migrant women being “subjected to sexual harassment, sexual and gender-based violence, threats of rape” after Saïed’s February 2023 speech.[11] Last July, only a short while after Meloni’s visit to Tunis, the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women also received information about a possible gang rape of black migrant women during the wave of violent attacks on the migrant communities of Sfax.[12] With the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission having documented but a few years ago how gender-based violence was used by the bygone dictatorial regime of Ben Ali to intimidate political dissidents, the suffering of these women shows just how far the 2011 revolution has been rolled back.
Conclusion
Since winning the Presidency in 2019 and assuming what amounted to unchecked power in 2021, Kaïs Saïed has derived legitimacy from populist appeals of different kinds. As his response to Israel’s war on Gaza brings into the starkest of reliefs, these appeals often lack substance: Publicly denounce the genocide or not, Saïed opted against joining South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice and has otherwise taken no meaningful action in support of Gaza apart from offering a handful of persons medical treatment in Tunis.
Tragically, there is substance to Saïed’s flirtations with racism. Sure, he might perform solidarity with the African continent in proclaiming “Africa belongs to Africans” at the sixth European Union-African Union Summit. When it comes to Tunisia, however, it is clear that belonging does not mean brotherhood, particularly for black Africans. The dropping of 1200 black African at the desert border with Libya—where more than two dozen would die of thirst and hunger—made the truth of this unambiguous. So too have his attempts at appropriating Tunisia’s anti-discrimination law and the horrifying speech of February 2023. Like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni to his north, Kais Saïed traffics in a racism-infused form of populism to buttress his rule. As these two partners may shape the future of migration in the Mediterranean, that should give us all immense pause.
[1] Luca Barana and Asli Selin Okyay, “Shaking hands with Saied’s Tunisia: The paradoxes and trade-offs facing the EU”, Commentary, Istituto Affari Internazionali, August 5, 2023).
[2] Ghaya ben Mbarek, “Italian PM visits Tunisia with hopes trip will help unlock $1.9bn IMF Loan”, The National, June 6, 2023.
[3] Saïed was employed as a constitutional law university professor prior to contesting for office. Though this translated to a modest, middle-class life, he is of a family with lineage in the old Ottoman bureaucracy.
[4] Barbi Latza Nadeau, “Femme Fascista”, World Policy Journal 35:2 (2018).
[5] Monica Marks, “Tunisia’s President gives life to a Zionism conspiracy theory”, New Lines Magazine, March 21, 2023.
[6] Tunisian Nationalist Party (Al Hizb Al qawmi Attounsi), Facebook Page (Accessed January 11, 2024).
[7] Charlotte Lalanne, “Tunisie : derrière la dérive raciste de Saied, l’ombre de Giorgia Meloni”, L’Express, March 6, 2023.
[8] Lilia Blaise, “Racism in Tunisia: If I had known, I never would have come live here”, Le Monde Afrique, March 16, 2023.
[9] Human Rights Watch, “Tunisia: No safe haven for black African migrants, refugees”, Dispatch, July 19, 2023.
[10] Amnesty International, “Tunisia: President’s racist speech incites a wave of violence against Black Africans”, News, March 10, 2023.
[11] Kvinna Till Kvinna Foundation, “Migrant women amongst those vulnerable”, Commentary, May 3, 2023.
[12] Lilia Blaise, “Tunisie : les associations feministes débordées par les demandes de migrantes subsahariennes”, Radio France Internationale, (August 13, 2023).
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘An Italian Connection? Racism and Populism in Kais Saied’s Tunisia’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘an-italian-connection-racism-and-populism-in-kais-saieds-tunisia’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2024-02-04 11:25:43’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2024-02-04 10:25:43’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=393’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )It is no exaggeration to say that phosphate has shaped modernity as much as any other natural and non-renewable resource. Constitutive, alongside nitrogen and potash, of the chemical fertilisers which were behind agriculture’s Green Revolution[1], the mineral is, after all, essential to how most the world has fed itself for the better part of a century.[2] Nor is phosphate’s importance now set to decline: Upon China’s development of a new battery technology known as LFP—which mixes lithium, iron and phosphate—phosphate has been made fundamental not only to the future of food, but to the energy transition.
The largest producers of phosphate in the world in recent years have been China, Morocco and the United States, though that may change soon: Last year, Norway announced the discovery of deposits of at least seventy billion tonnes, a staggering amount that was equivalent to all known reserves at the time.[3] Once mining commences, the resulting increase in global phosphate supply will likely stave off the exhaustion of exploitable deposits and mitigate competition between the food and transport industries. What it will not do, however, is resolve the thorny environmental problems that are linked to what has been called the “devil’s element”[4]: Supply boost or not, the industrialisation of phosphate has already disrupted the phosphorus cycle, overshot the mineral’s “planetary boundary”, and thereby endangered the sustainable reproduction of life on Earth.[5] The causal mechanisms at play in these regards are multiple. Fertiliser leakages into the water cause algae proliferation and eutrophication, resulting in the expansion of “dead zones”: oxygen-poor areas in rivers, lakes, seas and oceans where aquatic life cannot be adequately supported.[6] As it is weakly radioactive, the waste generated by phosphate extraction and processing, known as phosphogypsum, also creates headaches of increasing intensity. How to store ever-growing masses of toxic waste and protect the workers, communities, and ecosystems directly exposed is a challenge not easily resolved.[7]
A literature examining the social and environmental impacts of the American phosphate industry—and its acute effects on Florida—has gracefully come into being in recent years.[8] This marks a contrast with the state of knowledge on the social life of phosphate within the greater Mediterranean, where explorations of present-day dynamics are, despite a handful of notable exceptions, few and far between.[9] To help close the gap in the science, this article focuses in on the extraction, travel, and processing of phosphate, tracing the commodities’ movements from Khouribga in Morocco to Porto Marghera in Italy. For decades, these two sites have been silently connected in what historian Simon Jackson calls the Phosphate Archipelago: a network of extractive and industrial spaces on the two shores of the Mediterranean, spaces once managed by the French empire.[10] In what follows, the nature of their relation—bound, as ever, by phosphate—is subjected to inquiry.
Khouribga: Mining town and migration hub
For at least a century, phosphate has represented Morocco’s most important natural resource. The world’s top exporter of the mineral through the present day, phosphate has long underlain the Kingdom’s social relations, mediated its integration into the global economy, and helped delineate its political geography.
Moroccan phosphate is extracted from two main reserves: Ouald-Abdoun in the northwest province of Khouribga and Gantour in the central-west province of Youssoufia. Both reserves are managed by the Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP), a state-owned enterprise of unsurpassed economic and political influence. OCP’s clout is especially apparent in Khouribga.[11] Established in the 1920s (during the French protectorate) to host OCP’s administrative offices and house its workforce, what were once lands patrolled by the nomadic tribes of the Béni Mellal-Khénifra region quickly grew into a company town par excellence. As mining took off, migratory wave after migratory wave would follow. Khourigba first received a large influx from Morocco’s rural south. After World War II, a significant flow of immigrants from Algeria and the northern shore of the Mediterranean, France predominantly, arrived to animate scaled-up production. Upon the colonial era’s close and the gradual departure of the Europeans in the 1960s, finally, new groups from across Morocco’s vast geography came into the town. Due to the dual nature of the economy that consolidated around mineral extraction, however—an economy which furnished secure jobs for some with positions into the OCP and profound precarity for those without strong footing in the firm—note that it was not as if Khourigba was only on the receiving end of population movements during the years in question. Throughout, the town’s population evinced a high propensity to emigrate, both nationally and internationally.[12]
Path dependencies set in motion over the course of the 20th century are abundantly apparent in present-day Khouribga. Phosphate extraction remains the city’s dominant industry, and shows no sign of slowing down: Home to one of the world’s largest deposits of the mineral, it is with reason that major Chinese multinationals are presently considering setting up battery plants there.[13] The inequalities which were observable as far back as the postwar era endure as well: Despite the dynamism of urbanisation and socio-economic development, poverty dominates in several areas of the Béni Mellal-Khénifra region, particularly the rural peripheries.[14] And the ecological disruption and destruction hinted at by the enormous “gypstacks” (artificial hills made of phosphogypsum) which began accumulating around Khouribga’s “phosphate plateau” many years ago very much persist.
Elements of the socio-spatial reconfigurations set in motion by the phosphate industry in Khouribga have been subjected to inquiry by social scientists. A number of great studies, for instance, interrogate how the city’s wider geography, its agricultural lands in particular, are affected by solid, liquid, and gaseous discharges released as part of extractive process.[15] There is nevertheless a relative absence when it comes to examinations of phosphate extraction’s less proximate impacts: its downstream effects on public health, environment, politics, and the social fabric.
The absence is relative because one recent report published by SWISSAID offers a major appraisal of phosphate fertiliser production’s wider environmental and human rights record.[16] Per the report’s authors, “the production of phosphate fertilisers in Morocco violates the right to health of its workers and that of the local communities, and has a negative impact on the environment. Many workers suffer from respiratory diseases and cancers after lengthy exposure to pollutants and fine dust. Many workers are reported to have died. Local communities also suffer from pollution, contracting respiratory diseases and dental fluorosis”.[17] Concerning the last of these charges, high incidence rates of dental fluorosis among the human population in Khouribga as well as in other phosphate-producing areas is at this stage well-established.[18] What is novel in the SWISSAID report is the documenting of dental fluorosis among livestock, donkeys and sheep, especially. While the disease begins with brown stains on the teeth, with time it results in the animals’ teeth falling out, at which stage they cannot eat and are therefore bound for premature deaths. Through the causal pathway of dental disease, phosphate extraction is thereby implicated in the impoverishment of Moroccan farmers. In an official response, the OCP “categorically rejects” the findings of SWISSAID’s research.[19] Regardless, the balance of evidence shows the firm’s capital accumulation to be tied to the dispossession of others.
In zooming out, then, it becomes apparent that the wealth produced through phosphate mining in Khouribga is tied to the generation of substantial environmental and social costs. These costs, moreover, may only grow in the years ahead: With phosphate extraction moving further south to the Fquih Ben Salah plain, fewer and fewer people in Khouribga will be able to secure gainful employment from the OCP, which has been employing a decreasing share of the town’s population for some time now. Without major investments in economic diversification, the future looks to be one marred by job loss and environmental degradation.
Porto Marghera in the Phosphate Archipelago
The creation of the industrial area of Porto Marghera in the environs of Venice began in 1917. From its foundation, the project would be inextricably bound to, and swayed by, the competition of European powers: Amidst the race for industrial supremacy and scramble for colonies—the latter of which were needed to secure the raw materials without which industrial development was a non-starter—Porto Marghera emerged as a key site within the Italian bid for empire. As history would prove, it also became an irreplaceable link in the chain that ultimately led to fascism. As historian Cesco Chinello has argued, Porto Marghera was “the basis for a new level of class power by big capital, which will result in the instauration of fascism”.[20]
Given the concerns of this paper, it is perhaps unsurprising that one of Porto Marghera’s first factories was Montecatini Fertilizzanti. Built between 1922 and 1924, the Donegani family-owned facility operated in the line of fertilizer production.[21] Through the deployment of its output (namely, fertilizer), Montecatini Fertilizzanti integrated Porto Marghera within the Veneto region’s agricultural circuits of capital accumulation. Upstream, through the sourcing of its inputs, the factory integrated Porto Marghera into the Phosphate Archipelago.
Before Khouribga surged to dominate the supply of raw product in the latter part of the 20th century, the sinews of this archipelago saw to it that phosphate arrived in Porto Marghera from the Tunisian desertic area of Gafsa. This mining basin, active since the late 19th century, was the first large phosphate extraction hub in the Mediterranean area. The miners toiling there were both Arab (Tunisians, but also Moroccans and Algerians) and Italian, the latter generally hailing from Sardinia.[22] In the “red biennium” following World War I (1919-20), the Arab and Italian miners went on strike together in a dispute that marked the dawn of Tunisian trade unionism.[23] The mining basin then became a focal point of the Tunisian armed struggle for national liberation—and a pillar of the country’s labour movement after independence.[24] Nor did its penchant for militancy end there. Decades down the road, neoliberal restructuring of the phosphate industry combined with a generalised marginalisation of the region to provoke the 2008 Gafsa Revolt, an essential prelude to the 2011 Tunisian Revolution.[25] To this day, the region endures a fulcrum of social and political activism. In the 2010s, the port city of Gabes—where a large phosphate-processing chemical complex discharges phosphogypsum directly into the sea—witnessed the emergence of a social movement for health and environmental protection, as is deftly traced in Habib Ayeb’s documentary Gabes Labes.
Turning the clock back to the 1920s, state and capital in Italy regarded dependence on phosphate imports from Gafsa, then under the control of the French imperium, as a point of vulnerability. Indeed, this dependence possibly played a role in the country’s imperial ventures in Libya. Central to these ventures was Giuseppe Volpi, a much-celebrated businessman who just so happened to have coronated his success by founding Porto Marghera. While Governor of Tripolitania between 1921 and 1925, Volpi—critical of the “softy” colonial administrations that preceded him—directed the bloody “pacification” of Libya’s western-most province. In so doing, he completed Italy’s colonisation project and was awarded with the title of Count of Misrata in return.[26]
Much to Volpi’s disappointment, however, unchallenged dominion over Libya did not yield phosphate discoveries. By consequence, the industrialists coalescing around Italy’s fascists turned envious eyes to Tunisia. As the antifascist diaspora journal L’italiano di Tunisi noted in 1938 in an article on the “fascist shark Giulio Donegani[27]”, “Montecatini urgently needs phosphate for its chemical products, and these are to be found precisely in Tunisia! […] A small number of shark families (Mussolini, Ciano, Orlando, Donegani, Volpi, etc.) […], unsatisfied with the slaughter of Italians in Ethiopia and Spain, want to throw the Italian people against France to exploit the Kef and Gafsa mines”. Shortly after the publication of L’Italiono di Tunisi’s piece, of course, World War II broke out.
Fascism’s utility to capitalist exploitation being what it is, working conditions at Porto Marghera’s Montecatini Fertilizzanti proved extremely harsh during the years when Volpi et al were endeavouring to establish greater control over the supply of phosphate. The workforce mostly came from peasant backgrounds and laboured under precarious arrangements. Per Valerio Belotti, recruitment at the factory spiked “at the beginning of the seasonal packaging drives, or when massive phosphate loads arrived by boat from Morocco: in one or two days, over one hundred new labourers entered the place only to be unavoidably dismissed as soon as unloading was over”.[28] Nor was job security these workers’ only trouble: Labour at the factory was also highly noxious. Indeed, Montecatini Fertilizzanti was described as the “nastiest” factory in Porto Marghera due to toxic substance exposure, the heavy physical workload, and the fast pace of work.[29] In the words of a man who toiled there at the time: “I’ve been killed off by those acids. […] We used to work with a neckerchief on the mouth and the jacket collar pulled up, to be protected somewhat. […] If the powder comes in [the clothes], it eats away the flesh and then it’s worse because you can’t work anymore… Many people died that way… paralysed… the acid burns the blood”.[30]
Things only meaningfully improved for the workers at Montecatini Fertilizzanti with the struggles for workplace health and safety during Italy’s Long 1968, a mobilisation spearheaded in north-eastern Italy by the wage labourers of Porto Marghera.[31] Alas, victory was short-lived. This is because, in 1984, environmentalist groups launched a campaign against the phosphogypsum discharge that Porto Marghera’s phosphate industry was releasing into the Adriatic Sea.[32] The campaign would endure for years, and include spectacular episodes such as nocturnal pursuits of phosphogypsum-loaded ships by packs of environmentalists aboard small boats. With time, it took its political toll. Combined with the strains of international competition, the activists’ interventions won the shuttering of Montecatini Fertilizzanti in 1990.
Of course, the story does not really end when the lights went off at the factory. On the one hand, the radioactive phosphogypsum that was not dumped into the Adriatic Sea is still entombed in the surrounding land. On the other, precisely when the Porto Marghera fertiliser factories were closing, restructurings in the Khouribga and Gafsa mines of North Africa were throwing significant shares of the local populations into varying states of under-employment. As those once bustling cities became filled with surplus workers, mining hubs once specialised in the export of minerals would diversify into the export of humans. The legacies of these times are still with us today. In 2022, about 4,600 Moroccans and 800 Tunisians resided in the Venice province. Few of this number likely know that in this exact place there once operated one of the main phosphorus fertiliser plants in Italy—a plant that processed phosphate sourced not so far from where they or their parents once lived. Contrarily, these same persons would be well aware of just how little their elders benefited from the export of phosphate all those years ago.
Conclusion
Simon Jackson’s concept of the Phosphate Archipelago connects productive processes from different spaces and times, following the thread from the extraction of a mineral to its usage and half-life later down the road. More generally, this analytical method also provides a means for fruitfully exploring linkages between work and ecology, as structured in a hierarchical international division of labour.[33]
Drawing from Jackson, extractivism can be seen as a multi-sited phenomenon that does not impact extractive sites only: Rather, extractivism’s effects reverberate across sites of processing and refinement, the circuits where the commodity is traded and valorised, the places where its waste products are disposed, and across the vast human geography that is delineated through a resource’s production and consumption. To paraphrase Arjun Appadurai, there is a “social life of commodities”[34], one inevitably undergirded by dispossession, exploitation and contamination, one inevitably constitutive of the “commodified life of people”.
As the cases of Khouribga and Porto Marghera show, extractivism often endows an “imperial debris” as well.[35] Accumulating in the old metropoles and colonies alike, this debris is visible in the trajectories of environment, employment and migration, and in the hopes, opportunities and possibilities that are unevenly available to people in different haunts of the world.
Research into these complex interconnections is just at the beginning. In the years to come, new causalities binding humans, non-humans and phosphate will surely come to light, particularly in the context of current ecological transition attempts. For the moment, it is worthwhile to emphasise the continuity, in space and time, of the power and meaning relations originated in the colonisation of lands in the Mediterranean space. Such continuities are reproduced in different forms across places and generations. In each instance, however, they are shaped by the capitalist transformation of landscapes and its ebbs and flows of exploitation and abandonment.
In contributing to this article, Lorenzo Feltrin was supported by Leverhulme Trust (ECF-2020-004).
[1] Marion W. Dixon, “Chemical fertilizer in transformations in world agriculture and the state system, 1870 to interwar period”, Journal of agrarian change, 18, 2018, pp. 768-786.
[2] Jim Elser and Phil Haygarth, Phosphorus: Past and future, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
[3] Gavin D. J. Harper, “Huge phosphate discovery in Norway could fully charge the electric vehicle industry”, The conversation, 2023.
[4] Dan Egan, The devil\’s element: Phosphorus and a world out of balance, New York (NY): W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.
[5] Katherine Richardson, et al., “Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries”, Science advances, 9, 2023, p. 2458.
[6] David L. Kirchman, Dead zones: The loss of oxygen from rivers, lakes, seas, and the ocean, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021
[7] Gary O. Pittman, Phosphate fluorides toxic torts, self-published, 2011.
[8] E.g. Ted Ehmann, Boom & bust in Bone Valley: Florida’s phosphate mining history 1886-2021 and the looming ecological crisis, Columbia (SC): Shotwell, 2021.
[9] E.g. Rebecca Gruskin, “The value within multiform commodities: North African phosphates and global markets in the interwar period”, Journal of Global History, 16(3), 2021, pp. 315-335.
[10] Simon Jackson, “The Phosphate Archipelago: Imperial mining and global agriculture in French North Africa”, Jahrbuch für wirtschaftsgeschichte, 57(1), 2016, 187-214.
[11] Jean-François Troin (ed.), Maroc : Région, pays, territoire, Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2002.
[12] Francesco Vacchiano, Antropologia della dignità: Aspirazioni, moralità e ricerca del benessere nel Marocco contemporaneo, Verona: Ombre Corte, 2022.
[13] Harry Dempsey, “Chinese battery groups invest in Morocco to serve western markets”, Financial times, 2023.
[14] Mustapha Azaitraoui, et al., Les espaces ruraux au Maroc : Dynamiques et mutations, Rabat: Ayoris, 2020.
[15] Abdelaziz Adidi, “Khouribga : La problématique de développement d\’une ville minière marocaine”, 2000; Abdelaziz Adidi, Mécanismes et formes de croissance urbaine des agglomérations phosphatières marocaines, PhD Thesis, Mohamed V University, Rabat, 2006 ; Mohammed Sahsah, Naissance et développement d\’une ville minière marocaine : Khouribga, PhD Thesis, Saint-Étienne University, 1996.
[16] SWISSAID, Engrais dangereux : Négociants suisses et violations de droits humains au Maroc, 2019.
[17] SWISSAID, “Dangerous fertilisers: Swiss traders and human rights violations in Morocco” (English summary), 2019.
[18] Rachid El Jaoudi, et al., “Determination of fluoride in tap water in Morocco using a direct electrochemical method”, Bulletin of environmental contamination and toxicology, 89(2), 2012, pp. 390-394.
[19] OCP, “Texte de réponse du groupe OCP (OCP SA)”, 2019.
[20] Cesco Chinello, Porto Marghera 1902-1926: Alle origini del “problema di Venezia”, Venice: Marsilio, 1979, p. 181.
[21] Mario Perugini, Il farsi di una grande impresa: La Montecatini fra le due guerre mondiali, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2014.
[22] Simon Jackson, “The Phosphate Archipelago”, 2016, p. 195.
[23] Rebecca Gruskin, “The value within multiform commodities”, 2021.
[24] Salah Hamzaoui, Conditions et genèse de la conscience ouvrière en milieu rural : Cas des mineurs du Sud de la Tunisie, PhD Thesis, Paris VI, 1970.
[25] Larbi Chouikha and Vincent Geisser, “Retour sur la révolte du bassin minier : Les cinq leçons politiques d’un conflit social inédit”, L’année du Maghreb, VI, 2010, pp. 415-426.
[26] Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia: Dal fascismo a Gheddafi, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1988.
[27] At the time, Donegani was Montecatini’s president and an MP with the National Fascist Party
[28] Valerio Belotti, “Il complesso chimico Fertilizzanti-Ceneri del gruppo Montecatini (1924-1943)”, in I primi operai di Marghera: Mercato, reclutamento, occupazione, 1917-1940 edited by Francesco Piva and Giuseppe Tattara, Venice: Marsilio, 1883, pp. 230-264, p. 250.
[29] Francesco Piva, Contadini in fabbrica: Il caso Marghera, 1920-1945, Rome: Edizioni Lavoro, 1991.
[30] Ivi, pp. 209-210.
[31] Lorenzo Feltrin and Devi Sacchetto, “The work-technology nexus and working-class environmentalism: Workerism versus capitalist noxiousness in Italy’s Long 1968”, Theory and society, 50(5), 2021, pp. 815-835.
[32] Michele Boato, Eppure soffia: Spifferi e tempeste ecologiche in Veneto, Venice: Ecoistituto del Veneto, 2013, p. 74.
[33] Lorenzo Feltrin and Gabriela Julio Medel, “Noxious deindustrialisation and extractivism: Quintero-Puchuncaví in the international division of labour and noxiousness”, New political economy, 2023..
[34] Arjun Appadurai, The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
[35] Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Imperial debris: On ruins and ruination, Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 2013.
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘The Social Life of Phosphate on the Two Shores of the Mediterranean: Ecology, Work and Migration’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘the-social-life-of-phosphate-on-the-two-shores-of-the-mediterranean-ecology-work-and-migration’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2024-01-30 16:22:09’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2024-01-30 15:22:09’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=389’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )Join the team
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