Longue durée
There is something seductive about movement and circulation. In imagining the new world in the making experts in academia, corporate policy, politics and popular culture often succumb to the charisma of an era of global flows and borderless horizons of endless opportunity. Increased circulation stands indeed as a promising sign of global newness and future making. An interesting feature of these visions of a hyper-mobile world is how its future orientation implicitly renders the past static. Hegemonic globalist dreams confer a sense of disfunctionality to things, people and places that are thought as immobile and too slow: being slow is lagging behind, becoming old, not modern enough.
Yet this simple dualism new-mobile and old-static neglects both the significance of mobility in modern and pre-modern times and the complexity of temporal frames, scales and orientations underlying current patterns of circulation. Rather than pure indeterminacy in the emergence of new futures, what characterises the landscape of global mobilities are assamblages of fluidities and stabilities, discontinuities and continuities, complex becomings and multiple determinations. This sensitivity to temporality in the emergence of new landscapes of mobility directs attention the longue durée. Fernand Braudel coined this term to refer to 'history's slowest processes', the ‘almost imperceptible, almost motionless framework' in which the theatre of history plays itself. Sensitivity to the longue durée directs attention to ‘ever recurring cycles, processes which span the centuries and can only be grasped if the chronological field of study is extended as far as possible.' The longue durée speaks about almost constant, almost stable features and recurrent patterns.
Some of the mobilities, or aspects of mobilities, and associated landscapes and institutions that are highlighted today as paradigmatic of a new world order are indeed projections of old patterns. For example, the new landscapes of leisure emerging in the Spanish Mediterranean around real state development have more to do with seeking regular rest away from hustle and bustle of cities, a habit already mentioned by Seneca, than with the package tours that became so popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Today both practices coalesce in complex ways but acknowledging their different origins is still essential to understanding mass tourism in Spain. To name another example, part of the labour force offering hospitality to tourists in these coastal resorts are youngsters from nearby mountain villages. Their move to the coastal plain in search of economic opportunity restages a millennial migration pattern associated with the upland’s structural weakness to retain labour. These short distance flows intersect with transcontinental routes. The demand of labour force to work in the booming building industry has been partly satisfied with migrant labour from outside Europe. As Hein de Haas argues, some of those coming from Africa often make their travel using ancient Tuareg trade routes connecting the Mediterranean with sub-Saharan Africa. While the practices that we call ‘tourism’ are, in a historical perspective, relatively new in the Mediterranean, the mobilities upon which it depends and with which it intermingles might not be so.
One final example: before the spread of tourist hotels, hospitality to travellers across the region was mostly provided by fondas. Olivia Remie Constable has traced the evolution of this basic institution of hospitality in the Mediterranean from the pandocheion in Late Antiquity to the funduq during the expansion of Islam and its conversion into the Latin fondaco following more fluid trade with Europe. Though its meaning and function is now restricted to that of ‘guest house’, for more than two thousand years fondas, funduqs or fondacos were multifunctional places -tavern, market, warehouse, sites of commercial regulation- and catalysts of the cosmopolitanization of Mediterranean ports and cities. The relationship between these institutions of hospitality and the uneven emergence of tourism across the Mediterranean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remains to be examined.
The above examples suggest that certain sets of cultural, economic, geographical and political processes structuring and enabling flows can show great resilience, granting some patterns of circulation a lasting stability. This path dependency of mobilities means that future horizons are not as open and accessible as stated by certain globalist visions. While promising futures might shine in the horizon only some routes to them might be open, others might be mere mirages. The past does matter.
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