The Politics of Mourning

2013: the Pope on Lampedusa. Theatrical gestures, solemn speeches – for humanity, against the dying, against the "la globalizzazione dell'indifferenza" – "the globalization of indifference." A moment the world watched and felt something.

2015: same sea, same deaths, new lament. Except the politics had shifted. In 2013, heads of state mourned. By 2015, they had already made their move.

Across Europe, interior ministers lined up to declare Mare Nostrum not a rescue operation but a pull factor – "a bridge to Europe," in the words of Germany's Thomas de Maizière, a program that created "perverse incentives" and amounted to complicity with human traffickers. They pushed to replace it with Triton: a border surveillance mission with no search-and-rescue mandate.

When 1,200 people drowned in two shipwrecks in April 2015, the emergency summits followed and with them, the stages for political performance. Some declared it "a serious mistake to bring the Mare Nostrum operation to an end." Others cut short their holidays to hold emergency cabinet sessions and appealed to European partners not to leave their country alone. The EU Commission unveiled a "burden-sharing plan."

But it was not governments who filled the gap. It was MSF, Open Arms, Sea-Watch, Iuventa, Sea Eye – civil society in secondhand boats, filling the vacuum that policy had deliberately created.