‘Battleship at the port of Europe’: Italy's closed-port policy and its legitimizing narratives

From March 2018 to August 2019, during Matteo Salvini’s mandate as Minister of the Interior, Italy implemented the so-called ‘closed-port policy’, the closure of Italy’s ports to migrant-rescue ships. This policy was initially pursued by Salvini’s direct will through circulars before being justified ex-post by a legislative act. This paper analyses the lively parliamentary debates around rescue at sea in order to illustrate the majority’s discursive rationales in support of the closed-port policy and its transformation into law. Theoretically, this work adopts a multidisciplinary perspective which combines the works on critique and justification (Boltanski, Thévenot 2006; Boltanski, 2011) with those on legitimacy (Schulze, 2015) to speak to the political geography debate concerning border and migration regimes. These literatures enable the paper to innovatively approach the crucial role of parliaments as conflictual arenas which require governing majorities to enact specific legitimation strategies. By adopting this perspective, this work sheds light on the disputed rationale of migration policies while exploring how legitimation practices worked within the Italian Parliament. My argument unfolds in three main stages: first, the article examines the genealogy of the closed-port policy; second, it explores the legitimation strategies put in place by the majority in order to justify its policy and law; and last, it looks at how specific geographical imaginaries underpin the main narratives constructed through these different legitimation strategies.