Context
„Piracy in the early eighteenth century was, at bottom, a struggle for life against socially organized death.“[^1] This definition of piracy, however, was surely not the one that former Italian minister of interior Matteo Salvini had in mind, when he proclaimed "yet another act of Piracy by an outlaw organization", in June 2019, after the crew of Sea-Watch 3 had rescued 52 people from a rubber boat in distress.[^2] And yet, the struggle that has been going on for five years in the central Mediterranean Sea is just that; a struggle for life against socially organized death. European states have created a zone at their margins, where all their proclaimed values, their human and civil rights are suspended: A state of exception that reduces the sea to a weapon, people to bargaining chips – and the fluid southern frontier of EUrope to the deadliest border in the world.[^3]
The European activists who oppose this state of exception are of course neither pirates in the historical, nor in the legal or ideational sense: If, according to Markus Rediker, historical piracy was a (class) struggle for the pirate's own life, which presupposed sheer defiance of death itself[^4], then civil sea rescue activism is primarily a fight in solidarity, starting off from the privileged position that it is not the activist's own life that is at stake. Nonetheless, the parallels that Matteo Salvini's repeated accusations of piracy unintentionally point to can't be ignored when looking at civil sea rescue as an act of pirate care: "the term pirate has been highly ideological from antiquity forward, functioning more or less as the maritime equivalent of barbarian—that is, anyone who was an enemy of the Romans."[^5]
While the sea rescuers were surely declared public enemy Numero Uno in Rome, at least in the first half of 2019, the question arises; does their intervention represent a modern act of symbolic piracy (in the best sense)? Or, in other words: can humanitarian emergency aid also be an act of political resistance? The state's reaction surely suggests so. While the Atlantic pirates of the golden age – a tellingly short time from 1716 until 1727 – were quickly faced with a campaign of terror by "royal officials, attorneys, merchants, publicists, clergymen, and writers who created, through proclamations, legal briefs, petitions, pamphlets, sermons, and newspaper articles, an image of the pirate that would legitimate his annihilation"[^6a] the modern nation states of the EU undertook their very own campaign to 'cleanse the seas'. But let's start from the beginning:
From Illegal Immigration to Humanitarian Border Management
After heavily relying on low-cost migrant labour in the years after the second world war, due to reconstruction and a lack of 'manpower', the Oil Shock in 1973 turned the tables and brought the economical boom to an abrupt end. One of the reactions of the countries affected was to restrict labour immigration. [^11] The tightening of the visa regime not only laid the foundation for today's European border policy – and thus the so-called "refugee crisis in the Mediterranean" – but also set its constitutive dispositif: illegality. As Philippe Fargues summed it up for the International Organization for Migration (IOM): "It is common sense to state that illegality is a product of how legality is defined and the law enforced, and this applies to migration just as to any other phenomenon."