Europe and its territories in global human flows

Until the economic crisis of the 1970s, migratory flows could be defined – and, in fact, they have been defined in the international literature – as “push-pull.” The movements of the population were clearly discernible between two poles: one attractive (pull), made of countries in need of new manpower, and one repulsive (push), composed of underdeveloped countries in excess of labour. Those flows were not spontaneous; they were the result of an agreement between countries. In parallel to the migratory flows, which, for simplicity, can be defined as South-North, flows of tourists were moving in the North-South direction. After the 1970s economic crisis until the first decade of this century, production became increasingly affected by the introduction of new ICT tools. In this post-modern society, population flows lost their linear characteristics, and migration started overlapping with tourist flows. That is, migration facilitated tourist flows, and tourism became a facilitator of migration flows. In order to distinguish those processes, scholars defined what was previously called tourism as consumption-led mobility and migration as production-led mobility (Williams and Hall, 2000). The economic crisis characterizing the recent period is encouraging a society that has been defined as liquid modernity. In this new context of globalization, different types of human mobility overlap with other flows (cultural, information and financial flows) and the interactions among them are ever increasing.