Le bassin méditerranéen. La mobilité humaine pour la réalisation d’une macrorégion

The definitions of the Mediterranean region and the Mediterranean basin are numerous. The most obvious definition is that which makes reference to the countries that overlook the Mediterranean. When the economic, social or cultural characteristics of the area are analysed it becomes clear that the national dimension is no longer adequate and that it is necessary to carve out exclusively the areas and regions that have a direct relation with the sea. These areas vary in relation to the themes concerned, whether they are relevant to productive activities such as agriculture or tourism, or the use of the land, such as, for example, rural or urban areas. It is then necessary to define whether it is still possible to talk of the existence of a Mediterranean area as an expression of unity or alternatively whether there are more and more "Mediterraneans", and if it only seems so in so far as an ambiguous regions. With regard to the necessity to deal with a concrete theme - human mobility - the most consistent reference is that of the Euro-Mediterranean Region, the result of an agreement, or rather a tentative agreement, which should define a new map of the Mediterranean from the year 2010. In 2010, a convention should be implemented in the countries of the European Union and the Mediterranean which should enable the free movement of merchandise and people. Human mobility is one of the phenomena that in the last decades have been of particular interest to the geographical discipline. Mobility, however, has changed substantially in the last few years, both in terms of flow – such as quantity and quality – and in terms of how the social disciplines have studied and evaluated the phenomenon. The push and pull phenomena are no longer the conditioning elements of human mobility. Post-modern society tends to consider mobility as a general phenomenon. Mobility no longer just includes economic migrations but also all the other phenomena that are the response of a post-modern society to the phenomena of global change and globalisation. In the Euro-Mediterranean area, the phenomenon of the last quarter of a century has also experienced a subsequent change in the sense that the countries of Mediterranean Europe, once exporters of manpower, have become countries of immigration. On the other hand, in the other countries of the European Union a new migratory flow, with specific qualitative and quantitative characteristics, has overlapped the large migratory flows of the decades following the Second World War. In short, the paper analyses the most macroscopic phenomena of human mobility in the last 25 years, economic migrations and tourist flows.