Islands and the offshoring possibilities and strategies of contemporary states: insights on/for the migration phenomenon on Europe’s southern flank

Abstract

Islands have transitioned from being conceived as prototypes of idealised polities to being deliberately engineered as offshore enclaves where the rules of the parent state need not fully apply. With their manageable size, separation and distance from the mainland, small islands are rendered as convenient laboratories for entrepreneurial political engineering, and equally handy sites for research on the same. Island migration policies manifest this contemporary flexibility and creative governance of states. As we approach the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), this paper explores these ideas in relation to the migration phenomenon on Europe’s southern flank. Using an island studies approach, it discusses the problematique of island spaces caught in this dynamic but which cannot be ‘offshore’ because, as unitary island states (Cyprus and Malta) and unlike larger states with small outlying and peripheral island components (Italy and Australia), they must somehow be ‘both inside and outside’. The paper goes on to critique such facile binarisms, arguing for a more nuanced appreciation of islands as well as a recognition that what may be, at face value, an expression of a state’s authority is as much a manifestation of its limitations.