The EU and the changing lives of fishermen. A study of Lampedusan and Fuerteventurian fishing communities.

Based on 10 months’ qualitative fieldwork and the filming of a documentary conducted on the islands of Lampedusa and Fuerteventura, this thesis examines ground-level Europeanisation, concentrating on two well-established Communitarian policy frames -- the Common Fishery Policy (CFP) and the management of the external border of the Schengen space of free movement of people – and two populations of artisanal fishers who were exposed to them. It analyses how governmental logics operated on the ground through individuals’ engagement with Communitarian policies, and it reconstructs the major transformations that the two islands’ fishing industries underwent in the duree of more than fifty years of European integration. While until less than thirty years ago the economy of the Italian island of Lampedusa was centred on bluefish fishing and canning industries, on the Spanish island of Fuerteventura most islanders lived from agriculture for centuries. Following the European integration of Italy and Spain, both islands turned into major tourist destinations and the centres of frequent European migration crises. By focusing on these two territories, this investigation explores how EU governance contributed to transforming the local sociocultural and economic fabric and the islanders’ everyday life. Following the overview of how both policies were played out on the ground, I analyse the effects that the CFP produced on the two islands, and those that the management of the European external border generated in Lampedusa. Giving centrality to the marine element, I push the study of Europeanisation towards the sea and reveal how European policies had reconfigured the islanders’ relation with the seawaters surrounding them. Concurrently, by exploring the ways in which individuals interacted with EU governmentalities, I also unearth the several unintended consequences of Communitarian governance – as conservation policies aiming at recovering overfished fish stocks actually generated the conditions for increasing and uncontrolled overexploitation, while border policies for the securitisation of the European space de facto de-securitized life in Lampedusa.