Chapter 10

Economic Crime and Neoliberal

Modes of Government
The Example of the Mediterranean

O
Béatrice Hibou

Everyone has heard about the problem of rubbish in Naples and Campania
since, in December 2008, Silvio Berlusconi declared a state of emergency
in the region and handed the problem over to the army. As is well known,
the Camorra organizes the traffic of toxic wastes on open-air sites, organizes
their transportation from the whole of Italy or indeed Europe, and man-
ages the quarries and the dumping operations, while household waste in the
region simply remains untreated. But can we be satisfied with this version
of the story, which depicts a wicked mafia and a powerless state? Certainly
not. For the 2008 crisis was merely one episode in a much more complicated
“vicious circle,” which began in 1994 (at the latest) with the first declaration
of a state of emergency in the region and the setting up of a commission
dedicated to the question.1 At the origin of the disaster there lay, on the one
hand, an enterprise that does not belong to the Camorra but is linked to the
very “clean” and legitimate company Fiat. It took quick and easy advantage
of the emergency policies to offer extremely dubious benefits and real indus-
trial negligence. It proposed a quite unviable technical project, deceiving the
state as to its services; it selected obsolete equipment, which made it neces-
sary to resort to dumping; it was forever behind schedule in setting up waste
disposal factories; it resorted to unscrupulous subcontracting. On the other
hand, local managers and administrators who managed the extraordinary
commission reinforced their powers and extended their networks of friends

237
238 Béatrice Hibou

and clients. As a result of the state of emergency, they accepted various

exemptions such as the use of subcontracting or the choice, in the course of
the invitation to tender, of the enterprise that no doubt offered the lowest
level of services, but in a shorter time frame, and they used their extraordi-
nary powers to evade the traditional circuits and mechanisms of public man-
agement. The Camorra was in no way behind this situation: it neither set
up the operation nor oversaw it. By means of subcontracting and invitations
to tender for waste transportation and the management of dumping, the
Camorra was simply responding to a demand, taking advantage of an extra
opportunity to do business, and making the most of the historical inability
of public institutions to control the situation.
This is an excellent example of the thesis I wish to develop here. Start-
ing with an illusory representation of reality (an omnipotent Camorra at the
root of the evil), it shows that the condemnation of organized crime allows
new state interventions (such as the use of state emergency powers and the
development of public-private partnerships) and obscures mechanisms and
practices (such as subcontracting and badly managed invitations to ten-
der) that are much more problematic, albeit difficult to condemn precisely
because they are part and parcel of the neoliberal order. My aim, more spe-
cifically, is to show that the denunciation of economic crime is part of this
new order insofar as such a denunciation helps the state to redeploy its inter-
ventions and enables simultaneous—but not necessarily compatible—config-
urations of neoliberalism to coexist, if we understand the latter not just as an
economic order (a phase of capitalism), but also as a political order.
Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has been characterized by the end of the
welfare state in European countries, the establishment of structural adjust-
ment programs in developing countries, and the transition to a market econ-
omy in the former socialist countries. There has also been a challenge to
the economic sovereignty of states that seem reduced to impotence in the
globalised economic scene. But beyond common appearances and received
ideas on the supremacy of markets, the rise of transnational actors, the sup-
posed inefficiency of states in regulating capitalism, and the domination
of economic and financial considerations, one can see the development
of other forms and qualities of the state and its regulatory capacities and
changes in the relationship between economic and political arenas, between
public and private, licit and illicit.
In this new order, far from becoming impotent, the state redeploys
itself in a new direction, starting with a critique of direct interventionism
and operating instead by “delegation,” or “government at a distance.” In
other words, states resort to partnerships with private bodies, renewing
bureaucratization in the guise of the “new public management” based on
 Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government 239

norms, discipline imposed by rules, quantified evaluation, self-supervision,

and so on. But this redeployment also takes the form of a completely direct
interventionism when it comes to whatever is problematized in terms
of security, thanks to the development of mechanisms of surveillance in
spaces both public and private. These discipline people by continuous
monitoring of their movements, evaluate their activities closely and in the
greatest detail, and get subjects to supervise themselves in accordance with
the norms and regulations of the moment. Resorting to the criminalization
and reification of the figures of “evil” (the terrorist, the smuggler, the mafia
member, organized crime) becomes an opportunity to organize the field of
possible state interventions, the condition of new state actions, an opportu-
nity, thus, to strengthen political domination through intermediaries and
private actors.

ECONOMIC CRIME AS A MAJOR PERIL

Since the 1990s, economic crime has been the subject of a worldwide alarm-
ist discourse: the spread of criminal activities, it is claimed, imperils democ-
racy, development, and citizens’ participation, and constitutes the main
danger facing contemporary globalization.2 Like big business, crime seems
to reinforce its power by its capacity to seal transnational alliances, and per-
mits the existence of ever larger unregulated spaces that are partly tolerated
by individual states and by the international system.3 It contributes, or so
it is said, to transforming the state into an ordinary actor.4 In Europe, this
discourse emphasizes organized crime in trafficking and money laundering
and dubiously melds together migration, terrorism, and economic crime.
Gradually, a rhetoric of the danger threatening Europe has evolved into a
kind of siege mentality, an obsession by a Union that defines itself as virtu-
ous and has set itself up as a fortress.5 Danger is seen as coming both from
the East—from the former socialist countries that have become destabilized
since the fall of the Berlin Wall and are now the prey of mafia groups—
and from the South—in a skewed reformulation of the European myth of
the Mediterranean that highlights whatever is Other (i.e., the Muslim) and
rejected (drugs, illegal migrants, terrorism). European intellectuals have
named this “the pirate obsession,”6 in which drugs, organized crime, dirty
money, terrorism, environmental crime, and human trafficking all “pirate”
the serene order of a puritanical Europe.
This discourse arouses unease. In order to construct an image of
economic crime as “the plague of the twenty-first century,” various ele-
ments have been fused together, relations invented or exaggerated, figures
240 Béatrice Hibou

extrapolated, relations from cause to effect posited, all without any proof
and without hypotheses or doubts being clearly stated. Mafias and other
criminals, even economic criminals, are reified, and a strict division/separa-
tion between legal, licit, and legitimate actors and illegal, illicit, and illegiti-
mate actors is defined. However, the data on money laundering, fakes, drug
trafficking, and contraband are by nature estimates, few and far between,
constructed largely by the security services whose raison d’être consists
precisely in drawing attention to this phenomenon.7 And as Eiko Siniawer
reminds us in her article, we cannot simplify the relations between state
and criminal organizations: neither the first nor the second are monolithic
entities; other actors enter also the game, such as businessmen, bankers,
politicians, legal and accounting experts, and so on. Finally, the nature of
their relations is extremely complex and ambiguous, going from protection
to opposition, from alliance to conflict, from tolerance to intolerance, from
delegation to containment in very fluid and unstable situations. We need to
investigate how this happens, and why state actors, independent observers,
and even academic researchers fall into this trap and construct external dan-
gers threatening states and society.
Three types of research have influenced me as I defined this thesis and
attempted to support its claims. The first source is the literature showing
that criminal activities formed an integral part of the official economy and
of contemporary neoliberalism.8 A second corpus comes from research
suggesting that there is an apparent paradox in neoliberalism: an unprece-
dented moralization of economic and political life, a reification of the rule
of law and of the legitimate state, and yet, simultaneously, the denunciation
of the “persistence” of illegalities at the very heart of states, and of the sig-
nificant and increasing economic crimes that pose a danger for society as
a whole.9 My third source of inspiration is the classical work of historical
sociology, such as the pioneering work of Charles Tilly on Europe,10 and
that on current situations throughout the world. They show that law and
crime are part of the same history of state formation and that crime is not
the opposite of state legitimacy.11 Through the notions of risk, of pervasive
danger, and of security, the problematic of economic crime plays a funda-
mental role in this redeployment in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is
implemented through the moral construction of what is criminal, illegal or
illicit, and what is not.12 On the other hand, the definition of what is crimi-
nal, illegal, and illicit stems from tensions, struggles, conflicts, and compro-
mises—in other words, from the exercise of power and domination.13 The
stigmatization of certain actors and activities is part of the political meaning
of neoliberalism, and the label “organized crime” plays a fundamental role
in this exercise.14 My essay suggests, as does Eiko Siniawer’s in a different
 Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government 241

context, that the nature of relations between state and criminality, or rather
the way state apprehends economic criminality, allows us better to grasp and
understand current modes of government. I posit that such construction of
economic criminality conceals a basic reality of the current transformation
of European states. Far from being weakened by outside threats of orga-
nized crime, states are redeploying their powers via new modes of regulation
and new relationships between public and private, between licit and illicit.15
The construction of economic crime and the stigmatization of alleged per-
petrators stems from underlying power conflicts, implicit negotiations, and
compromises of a developing neoliberalism that is a political as well as an
economic order. An analysis of illegal migrations, money laundering, fakes,
and trafficking shows that the struggle against “organized crime” ultimately
legitimizes renewed state intervention on a broad political scale. By promot-
ing neoliberal principles of deregulation, economic flexibility, competition,
profitability, and competitiveness at any price, and yet criminalizing some
economic actors operating in this environment, states are assuming ever-
greater political power over their populations.

THE CRIMINALIZATION OF ILLEGAL MIGRATIONS IN

THE MEDITERRANEAN, OR THE REHABILITATION OF AN
OUTDATED CONCEPTION OF SOVEREIGNTY IN THE NAME
OF A NEW VISION OF THE STATE

These days, the illegal character of migration in the Mediterranean is often

seen as the result of contradictory European policies of on the one hand,
liberalization, globalization, and the disappearance of borders, and, on
the other hand, the controlling and closing of borders to the movements
of persons. The closing of borders to persons was decided on in Europe
between the mid-1970s and the end of the 1980s, at the very time when the
opening of economic borders was becoming a worldwide credo. It is com-
monly explained as a response to a sense of insecurity: insecurity felt by a
population demanding protection, but also insecurity among states fearing
a loss of influence over economic flows and activities. In this view, European
legislation and directives express the public will and effective control by
state actors. This is a superficial explanation, but its persistence is intrigu-
ing considering that migrants continue to arrive without being systemati-
cally prosecuted and expelled. Another element must be factored into the
equation: employers who use this workforce are not criminalized or even
harassed, and they thus foster a form of immigration whose very illegality
serves the neoliberal agenda.
242 Béatrice Hibou

Both shores of the Mediterranean are historically characterized by

large, informal economies. However, the sheer extent of illegal migration
cannot be understood without an analysis of a complementary evolution
in the European productive sector, namely, the drive to increase profitabil-
ity by outsourcing labor.16 This takes three main forms. The first and best
known is the chain of subcontracting, in which several levels of businesses
hide behind the official subcontractor. The second, more important form is
the use of temporary employment agencies, allowing subcontracting busi-
nesses to offer an absolutely flexible workforce in the quickest, most rough-
and-ready way. Such companies typically trim bonuses, deduct fees from the
payslip, make fraudulent contributions to national health and insurance,
and, above all, leave contracts unsigned. This last procedure is essential
because it makes it easier to dismiss the worker at any time and to legalize
his or her situation a posteriori by making him or her sign a contract for the
actual duration of the job. Thus temporary work encourages outsourcing
and with it, the outsourcing of illegalities.17 Temporary assignments carried
out by companies providing transnational manpower are the most recent
form of outsourcing.18 Since the 1990s, “fake” companies from countries
with low wages and little social protection (Portugal first, and now the coun-
tries of Eastern Europe) send their employees to other European countries.
Having only workers for export, the façade of such an apparently transna-
tional company conceals the illegality of its contracts.19
While immigrants holding a false identification or none at all are obvi-
ously the most vulnerable workers, subject to deportation at any time, legal
immigrants are also affected because the border between legal and illegal is
often fuzzy. For example, in France, one-year permits do not ensure renewal,
and in Italy the status of unemployed immigrants is tolerated for only two
years, after which many of them become illegal.20 In almost all European
countries, discretionary legalization can create permanent illegal immi-
grants by redefining the status of the legal ones.21
There are at least four channels through which European legislation has
contributed to the profitable precariousness of migrant labor. Labor legisla-
tion constitutes the first of these. Everywhere in Europe since the mid-1970s,
various laws have authorized the use of very short-term contracts. This pro-
motes an alternation between declared and undeclared work and facilitates
the use of an intermediate subcontracted and temporary labor force. Second,
states accept inconsistencies in the application of legal rules. Thus, illegal
immigrants who work in factories or on legal construction sites may pay
taxes and even contribute to Social Security.22 Third, in spite of the principles
of free movement within the EU, Europeanization has resulted in increased
monitoring of non-European workers.23 States construct illegal immigrants
 Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government 243

by not allowing commuting even though it is economically functional, thus

creating a situation in which entire populations live under the threat of
expulsion.24 Finally, in collusion with employers, judiciaries indirectly pro-
mote illegal immigration through their quasi-official acceptance of employer
practices. The directors of temporary employment agencies as well as the
businesses that use them know that they employ illegal immigrants, but can
play the victim in case of an investigation.25 At most they pay a fine, but often
courts simply discharge the case. In sum, states’ practices of impunity show
that far from “losing control,”26 they collude in creating illegal workers.
The discourse of criminalization has constructed a “danger” of illegal
migration that renders an important work force invisible.27 They are statis-
tically and socially invisible, as are their working conditions. Yet they are
criminalized by a political emphasis on the role of organized crime and a
purported link with terrorism.28 Such criminalization obscures the fact that
it is a state-created discrepancy between the demand for labor and closed
borders that creates opportunities to be exploited by some actors who are
then named criminal. The discrepancy makes possible “reconciliation of
the irreconcilable,”29 reconciling on the one hand flexibility, competition,
and competitiveness based in part on cheap, disciplined, and illegal labor,
and on the other hand, the management of security, based on monitoring
and disciplining the population. The criminalization of illegal immigrants
legitimizes coercive measures and allows the sovereignty of the state to
be exercised in a quite different way. It justifies the surveillance of public
and private spaces and repression by detention, expulsion, and raids even
in places that are symbols of protection, asylum, and immunity, such as
churches and schools. Criminalization legitimizes discretionary interven-
tions such as judicial decisions, evictions, and arbitrary and selective legal-
ization.30 Powers of control and exclusion are reinvented by delegation to
private bodies like airlines, rail and maritime companies, private security
firms, employers, and third countries.31 This extends surveillance but in so
doing transforms the nature of what is being pursued and what is not. Crim-
inalization has resulted in a public/private exercise of domination, perfectly
reflecting the neoliberal world order by its power to redefine the boundaries
between the permissible, the tolerable, and the reprehensible.

THE FIGHT AGAINST MONEY LAUNDERING, OR THE

EXERCISE OF INDIRECT PRIVATE GOVERNMENT

Money laundering is always the result of other crimes—tax evasion, fraud,

trafficking. Therefore, understanding the mechanisms by which laundering
244 Béatrice Hibou

has been constructed as the great danger of contemporary globalization

helps us to understand the fight against money laundering in political terms.
According to official discourse, financial globalization and the decline in reg-
ulation have enabled the amount of dirty money in circulation to increase
since the 1970s. The control mechanisms of the financial system that were
designed to cope with this “evil” did not call into question the very principle
of free movement of capital; in any case, they were largely purely decorative,
a mere façade, until the early 2000s. Only recently has the denunciation of
laundering taken organizational form. September 11 has played a crucial
role in constructing a link between money laundering and terrorism, the
financing of criminal networks, and attacks on state security. The pretext of
terrorism has been critical in giving antilaundering a political dimension. .
For years, laundering has been tolerated because it was partly con-
structed by the dominant actors in the system: states, financial actors, and
big businesses. The offshore sector was simultaneously the product of, and
an integral part of, state systems. Tax and finance havens were to be found
less on islands, even though these were stigmatized, than in the major finan-
cial centers, legal spaces created to attract financial flows and to optimize
investments from the tax point of view.32 The goal of large merchant banks
has always been tax optimization, or, in less polite terms, the more or less
legal organization of tax evasion. In the Mediterranean as elsewhere, states
have played a major role in the construction of offshore centers and havens
following the familiar pattern of the couple vice/virtue: Madeira and the
Azores/Portugal and Great Britain; Cyprus/Greece; Malta/the Mediterra-
nean zone; Gibraltar/Spain; Andorra/France and Spain; Monaco/ France
and Italy; Nador/Morocco; Benguardanne/Tunisia and Libya. States have
turned a blind eye to the creation of fictitious companies; they have pro-
moted offshore companies first in the name of development of ultraperiph-
eral areas (1970s–1980s) and later of the core country’s financial health
(1990s–2000s). States have amnestied banks behaving suspiciously (despite
categorical inspection reports), and have even encouraged the practice of
laundering by allowing stocks and bonds to make anonymous investments
that are nondeclarable and nontaxable.33
But September 11 transformed the fight against laundering into a veri-
table machine of bureaucratic interventionism.34 From that date on, a new
emphasis on traceability of capital flows has led to a public/private partner-
ship that empowers bankers, insurers, notaries, lawyers, estate agents, trust
managers, casino managers, and traders to oversee the ethics of their profes-
sion. Thus, banks have actually transformed previous limitations of the fight
against money laundering into commercial and industrial opportunities.35
They have interpreted these rules in terms of the social responsibility of
 Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government 245

enterprise and offered customers the best products for their needs. They
have interpreted laundering in terms of managing penal risks and risks to
reputation.36 They have integrated antilaundering mechanisms into a larger
system for the continual surveillance of operations. The security objective
has been interpreted in terms of “auditability,” that is, formal proofs of com-
pliance with legal obligations.37 It has thus been primarily a matter, for the
banks, of reducing the uncertainties arising from “operational risks.”38 In
this context, “traceability” is fundamental; it makes it possible to follow the
flows, to retrace the sequence of transactions, and to identify not crimes
themselves but suspicious signs that might track the individual criminal,
terrorist, or mafia member.39
One result has been the commodification and marketing of fear and
security, through the dissemination of IT tools and norms set by commer-
cial companies (mainly American) and implemented by specialized firms
that promote kits and software packages and by sellers of “lists”: lists of
people (terrorists, “politically exposed persons,” persons involved in the pro-
liferation of weapons of mass destruction), lists of types of behavior, lists of
relations to scrutinize. Thus, the fight against money laundering is undergo-
ing a process in which ethics is commercialized: ethics has become a trade,
a market, a technique, and a profession, of which the compliance officer is
the emblematic figure.40 Thus, antilaundering policy is not measured by a
reduction in the circulation of dirty money or in the number of detections
of illegal flows or of sentences handed down, but by the existence within
financial institutions of mechanisms and procedures for monitoring. The
objective is self-protection from professional and penal sanctions, and from
any damage to reputations.
The practices involved in the fight against laundering clearly show the
limits, not of the legal and illegal, but of the licit and the tolerable. Tax
havens and offshore centers are not harassed once they have adopted the
antilaundering kit. In other words, what is legal is what is visible in terms
of procedures, compliance with formal rules, and the politics of blame
avoidance.41 The transformation of antilaundering into the “management
of illegalisms”42 is made possible by the leeway offered to bankers and busi-
ness firms to select their targets for scrutiny. This role of private actors in
the concrete definition of crime not only creates business opportunities;
it also suggests their hegemonic ability to decide which are the legitimate
targets of state-imposed penalties.43 This is an international domination, of
course, but above all, it is a matter of internal domination: the ultimate tar-
gets are petty criminals and the most vulnerable populations.44 In Europe,
since September 11 informal funds transfers, migrants who use cash, and
Islamic charitable foundations are carefully scrutinized.45 By and large,
246 Béatrice Hibou

criminal charges are diverted from the powerful and dominant actors of
globalization.
Thus, the denunciation of laundering and the claim of an urgent need
to detect it serve state action in a sector that symbolizes neoliberal globaliza-
tion. If direct intervention is no longer appropriate, the use of surveillance
technologies and lists, disciplinary measures, internalization of control, and
enforced collaboration reveal indirect modes of government passing mainly
through private intermediaries but conforming to procedures and concerns
defined largely by states.

THE FIGHT AGAINST FAKES, OR THE JUSTIFICATION

OF THE NEW BUREAUCRATIC CONTROL

Fakes are the third of those “plagues” deemed to pose a threat to the Medi-
terranean economies. The official discourse highlights the dangers that fake
goods represent both for consumer safety and for society as a whole.46 The
recent significant surge in fakes, it seems, is detrimental to European com-
panies, who thus lose market shares and therefore jobs, and suffer deterio-
ration in their image and reputation. Morally speaking, it is claimed that
faking is reprehensible because it is based on the pillaging of property rights
and the national heritage by criminal, even terrorist organizations—a crime
encouraged by the unconscious behavior of consumers.
Any serious analysis of these texts and factual research show the con-
structed character of this discourse, which rests primarily on quantitative
data whose sources and construction are rarely made explicit, and which
circulate as certainties, like the 10 percent of commerce that faking is said
to represent in Europe or 200,000 jobs lost in Europe. However, these data
are partly contradicted when one and the same text claims that fake goods
are increasing in the region while showing a statistical decrease in seizures.47
The dangerous nature of faking is also constructed from a few repeated
examples, like Spain’s adulterated cooking oil in the 1980s, the Peugeot car
bonnets marketed in 1999, a few toys put into circulation in England in the
early 2000s, or various drugs from Africa. More importantly, fakes cannot
be reduced to pillage and theft. The diversity of fakes is actually huge and
involves very different logics. We can distinguish at least five major groups:48
(1) products that appear similar but are deliberately nonidentical with the
goods they simulate such as the perfume Cannel No. 5 or the brand Kalvin
Klain; (2) products that use the same designs, colors, or labels as famous
products in order to create a family resemblance, such as the “bargain”
products of various well-known brands; (3) products that display some sign
 Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government 247

pretending an economic or legal relationship with a prestigious original;

(4) outright imitation without the brand name of an exclusive model; (5)
actual fake, all of whose external aspects mimic those of the copied product,
including name and brand. These multiple logics of the fake are a response
to diverse economic logics: one that seeks to save money by demanding
cheaper and lower-quality goods;49 one of mimicry, apprenticeship, and
late industrialization in a logic of catching-up that does less to undermine
property rights than to protect techniques and markets of more developed
countries;50 a logic of market segmentation and marketing techniques that
allows the duplication and distribution of products through differentiated
networks;51 and a logic of improvisation, with the purchase of lots whose
contents cannot be known with any precision.52 The consequences are obvi-
ously not the same: they depend on the category of “fakes” to which these
goods belong, in terms of illegality and “crime,” either in moral terms, or in
economic and financial terms. .
In all this, the close relationship between fakes and relocation is totally
obscured. The fakes come not only from Asia (China) and Eastern Europe,
but also from the Mediterranean, from its southern shores (Morocco, Tuni-
sia, Turkey) as well as from its northern shores (Italy, Spain, Portugal), both
of which include countries of delocalization on a vast scale. Most impor-
tantly, the companies that produce “fakes” are rarely specialized in falsifica-
tion. Most often, the same companies make “authentic” and “fake” things,
producing goods of different qualities. They sometimes do so intentionally
by voluntarily restricting the market and creating, more or less deliberately,
secondary markets. With the permission of the principals in foreign trade,
they create a given volume of production beyond the quota; or else they
decide to produce different goods of lesser quality for specific market seg-
ments—for example, during sales periods. They often do so in a way not
provided for by the central purchasing department: the latter can refuse, on
the grounds of defective goods or damaged packaging, certain lots that are
then marketed by relocated workshops. Finally, the “fake” may arise from
the very logic of relocation and lower-cost purchases in a race for profitabil-
ity that sometimes fails to check on the origin and quality of producers and
intermediaries.53 So a fake is often less deliberately produced to mislead
customers than to push profitability to its maximum.
Finally, the discourse of the dangers posed by fake goods charges “mafia-
type” organized crime and even terrorist networks with producing and mar-
keting these without proof. One example:

Islamic extremists raised money for the attack on the World Trade Centre in
New York by selling fake T-shirts; one of the leaders of the gang of Vietnamese
248 Béatrice Hibou

origin Born to Kill has acknowledged that it earned more than 13 million dollars
by trading in fake watches; and it is estimated that, in the United Kingdom,
criminal networks handle 600 million pounds through the trade of pirated
DVDs—an activity that generates income for illegal immigrants. These gangs
also operate in other areas of illicit activities like drug trafficking or people
trafficking, pornography, illegal betting, or racketeering!54

While it is true that the Mafia and the Camorra in particular are involved
with fakes in Italy, or even in countries in which they invest and outsource,
such as Tunisia,55 this depends on very particular circumstances. More
importantly, fakes are the province of relocated businesses and small entre-
preneurs who produce them on the margins of legality but who are not
necessarily members of criminal networks, although they may be forced to
pay protection when located in territories dominated by the mafia.56 Insti-
tutions involved in the fight against fakes greatly overstate the role of orga-
nized crime in economic offences by adopting a stereotypical, exaggerated,
and systematic definition of what “organized crime” is.57 In fact, economic
offences are also found in lawful and legitimate business circles. Legality is
problematic given fluid, fuzzy, and porous boundaries; alliances that change
with circumstances; ill-defined careers; and relationships often character-
ized by tolerance, complicity, hybridization, and collusion—whether legal
or not—between business and politics. In faking, as in trafficking, targeting
criminal organizations and perpetrators means finding scapegoats on the
cheap. It hides the true nature of these transgressions by reducing the ques-
tion to mere violations of rules.
The construction of a “plague” and the fight against faking has assumed
forms that are consistent with neoliberal modes of government like public/
private partnerships of enforcement. Norms, controls, authentication, and
sanctions are measures defined together with the “pillaged” companies who
help to set up technical and operational centers established for that purpose.
An antifake “governance” is thus set up, aimed at sharing powers between
the state and all economic actors in the sector including producers, distrib-
utors, and consumers. As with money laundering, it becomes a question
of tracking suspicious flows, patterns, or activities, monitoring and tracing
transactions so as to detect the criminal. Vigilance is handed over to peers
and clients.58 What remains unquestioned and untouched is the economic
imperative of flexibility and competitiveness that sponsors the tendency to
relocation in the search for low costs of production. Also unquestioned are
the implicit policies of protection by norms and quality, at a time when tra-
ditional protectionist policies are being delegitimized. These silences leave
 Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government 249

untouched a nonegalitarian economic order in which the developed and

industrialized countries always enjoy a comparative advantage thanks to
the rules they manage to impose on the international level. Stigmatizing spe-
cific actors like organized crime (for example, the Camorra) creates a myth
of collective danger while removing suspicion from the instigators of relo-
cation and profitability, and enabling a covert form of protection through
indirect interventions in the markets.

THE FIGHT AGAINST SMUGGLING AND TRAFFICKING

OF GOODS, OR THE LOGIC OF SECURE EXCHANGE

Finally, in the case of trafficking and smuggling, the construction of danger

goes well beyond any real loss of revenue alone. In addition, arguments of
security, morality, and legality are marshaled for a public staging of traffick-
ing: “The illegal sales of contraband tobacco, alcohol and beer contribute
to a global underground economy. In the tobacco sector alone, organized
crime has become the ‘fourth producer worldwide.’”59 From this base, it is
asserted, criminal networks establish themselves permanently in the heart
of a country and build bridgeheads from which to organize other illicit
trades, in particular drugs.
The story is much more complex here too: it mostly involves legitimate
and dominant actors in the global economic system—first and foremost,
firms. For example, tobacco companies have a significant interest in increas-
ing the market for cigarettes. Thus, they turn a blind eye to the practice of
overselling, exceeding the estimated consumption by a country. In a market
dominated by a very small number of actors, no criminal organizations have
ever been detected.60 Overall, on both sides of the Mediterranean, legiti-
mate businesses play an important role in smuggling by underestimating
their imports, making false statements, and “forgetting” to declare goods
to customs.61 The majority of goods that illegally enter do so through ports
and actors identified as legal and legitimate. The denunciation of organized
crime ignores the involvement of these enterprises and obscures the fact
that free zones and free points are often less tightly sealed than previously
believed. Furthermore, relocated businesses also engage in smuggling, as in
the case of “fakes,” with or without the consent of the entrepreneur and the
principal.62 Here again, the official discourse of trafficking and smuggling is
based on a false dichotomy of legal and illegal economic actors.
States are also heavily involved in smuggling and trafficking. In this,
enclaves play an important role, as in the case of Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish
250 Béatrice Hibou

presidios on Moroccan soil. Free ports since 1863, their status actually
has been strengthened by emergency legislation and visa exemption for
cross-border commuters from Tetuan and Nador.63 Ceuta receives about
10,000 Moroccans every day without a visa.64 Tangier, an international city
in the 1920s and then a free port after independence, owed its development
to the use of free zones in the 1970s and especially 1980–1990—a policy
intensified today with the construction of Tangier Mediterranean, soon to
be one of the largest trans-shipment and dispersal ports in the western Med-
iterranean. Similarly, Mediterranean ports of Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria
facilitate trafficking often with state collusion.65 Nor are the northern shores
exempt, as in the case of Andorra and Gibraltar, whose membership in the
European Union does not require them to join its customs territory,66 or in
the case of free zones, preferential tax regimes, or places of bank secrecy in
the British Islands, Luxembourg, or Switzerland.
Thus, in trafficking as in the case of fakes, the role of organized crime
is largely overestimated. Targeting and reifying this actor obscures other
actors. Other mechanisms make such trafficking possible: financial arrange-
ments to minimize taxes, passage through companies acting as fronts based
in countries with intensive bank secrecy, and transit through tax havens or
countries deemed to have a low degree of judicial cooperation.67 Similarly,
the fact that some ports happen to be located in territories controlled in part
by criminal organizations (Naples, Gioia Tauro, Istanbul) does not mean
that they organize and control this traffic. Rather, what we see in Campa-
nia, Calabria, and Turkey is an in-between situation whose status is diffi-
cult to determine: the borders between legal and illegal, between official
and “mafia member,” between “clean” and “dirty,” are extremely unclear
and are marked only when judicial action is taken.68 Generally, economic
actors, whoever they are, take advantage of these borders. As Eiko Sini-
awer reminds us for the beginning of the twentieth century, research into
mafias shows that they are restructured according to the globalization and
internationalization of business, though they do not take the place of states
and legitimate actors. This research suggests that there is a subtle interplay
between actors that the stigmatization of “organized crime” or the “mafia
state” tends to conceal.69 In reality, the “grip” of the “mafias” differs greatly
from one country to another, from one history to another, from one moment
to another. Business ties appear much more fluid than a description in terms
of organized crime would suggest, and much weaker and more fleeting too,
committing people to little, and perpetually renegotiated.70
The regulation of shipping provides us with another illustration of
this blinkered outlook. Through the interplay between merchant shipping,
 Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government 251

terminal port operators, and state and regional governments, this mode
of transport has undergone radical transformations over the past thirty
years. Now a small number of trans-shipment hubs concentrate all the
flows of merchandise transported in ever-bigger standardized containers.
In this context, the Mediterranean Sea fulfills an increasingly important
role, representing 30 percent of merchant traffic and 25 percent of oil
traffic.71 Algeciras in Spain, Marsaxlokk in Malta, Gioia Tauro in Italy,
Damietta in Egypt, and soon Tangier Mediterranean in Morocco, are the
main ports. Distance is no longer expensive in a logic of competitiveness,
concentration, and speed-up. What matters are the physical possibilities
and techniques for massing.72 Competitiveness also requires reductions
in costs achieved more or less legally, through flags of convenience and
tax evasion, and through improved techniques of containerization.73 But
this concentration makes it physically impossible to control merchandise.
There is in fact an “illusion of inspection”:74 ports possess sophisticated
machines, scanners, tools for inspection and control capable, in principle,
of inspecting anything and everything. However, it is impossible to moni-
tor all goods systematically and concretely, given the vast size of the flows
and the speed constraints for routing, trans-shipment, and delivery. Smug-
gling is thus facilitated, yet this concentration itself is never questioned—
nor is the extent to which the quality of control can be assessed.
On the other hand, the fight against trafficking focuses on the ever-in-
creasing sophistication of safety standards and techniques. A whole system
of authentication, of secure traceability, of well-protected unit markings,
and of the standardization and harmonization of legal rules is being
implemented to locate perpetrators of crimes. Yet “technology is more
than a tool for authentication. It is a judicial tool capable of providing the
evidence that is indispensable for the fight against new profiles condu-
cive to crimes.”75 As with the “perils” analyzed above, such intervention
is delegated to private actors like companies that market protection sys-
tems and automated monitoring, companies that manage port terminals,
security firms, ship owners, and bankers. Such commodified security is
exercised arbitrarily, alternating tolerance and prohibition. Trafficking is
generally known, accepted, and even tolerated until, at some point, a one-
off intervention creates an example, to show that the state knows what is
happening and is in control, and to put an overambitious actor back in
his place—a place that must remain marginal. The denunciation of crimi-
nals can then enable wrongdoers to be stigmatized without the very archi-
tecture of globalization, its mechanisms, and its practices being called
into question.
252 Béatrice Hibou

ECONOMIC CRIME AS NEOLIBERAL WITCHES’ SABBATH

The fundamental question is thus not one of legality or illegality, or even

of what is permissible and what is not, of the moral and the immoral—even
if the logic of moralization is often mobilized. Many types of behavior are
tolerated while the most consensual moral principles are violated, and many
activities are not prosecuted when laws are violated. The fight against crime
appears more like the province of the imaginaire, where fear reigns and the
search for scapegoats catalyzes this fear. It is also the province of a commit-
ment to state action in a context that actually limits such commitment. The
image of the witches’ Sabbath in sixteenth-century Italy helps us to deepen
this analysis: like criminal organizations, terrorist groups, and mafias today,
the description of the sects of sorcerers then was based less on real events
than on social and moral representations and on an imaginaire.76 The denun-
ciation of the witches’ Sabbath was based on an ideology that highlighted
conspiracies and presumed occult powers willing and able to do evil, thus
transforming the present into a permanent threat. Complex problems were
condemned and exorcised by a single and relatively simple causal relation-
ship.77 The denunciation of an evil constructed in this way allowed the polit-
ical authorities to demonstrate their ability to protect people and respond to
security demands. Economic, political, and social transformations and inse-
curities were thus transferred onto scapegoats; identifying these scapegoats
depended on current power relations.
The stereotypes by which the terrorist, the mafia member, the smug-
gler, or organized crime as a whole are highlighted as primary economic
lawbreakers strangely echo the processes by which witches were identified.
Denunciations and acts of exorcism were not so much determined by dom-
inant values and ideas than they were legitimated by them ex post facto.78
Today as well, reifying figures of evil seems to succeed precisely because it
allows state actors to pursue a diffuse mission for security on a daily basis
with a simplified and more predictable view of the world.79
Eiko Siniawer also shows in her article that the focus on “organized
crime” and the rhetoric of criminalization are classical ways of underesti-
mating and deliberately overlooking illegal practices of legitimate actors.80
The fight against organized crime thus appears to be an aspect of power
and sovereignty enabling the exercise of modes of government compatible
with neoliberal economic globalization. It appears as an interventionism
that is not dictated from on high, by the sole sovereign decision of the
state—which might conflict with the principles of support for markets, com-
petition, and profitability—but that rather advances by “delegation” to the
 Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government 253

highest and lowest levels, through the partnership between private and pub-
lic actors, through consumers, competitors, and company hierarchies, and
finally through the ability to quit the national territory altogether thanks to
consensual norms and morality more than of law itself.81 These interven-
tions, always business friendly, are a mixture of incentives and directives, of
self-supervision and peer pressure, of control by subordinates and control
by clients (as in the well-known case of whistle blowing), of threats to repu-
tation (as in the technique of naming and shaming), of the mobilization of
morality (according to the puritanical imaginaire of globalization), of listing
(which requires much less evidence than would a court sentence), and of
risk prevention (which tends to eliminate the act in favor of an essentializa-
tion of the terrorist, the gang, the mafia member, the criminal state, and
the smuggler).
By obscuring the collusion between crime, business, and politics favored
by the privatization of the state, the process of criminalization is seen to be
the very expression of a “cheap mode of government”82 specific to neolib-
eralism, combining the dream of self-regulation, discretionary bureaucratic
intervention, and moralization. The neoliberal state through its public-pri-
vate redeployment does not surrender its power but reshapes it by defining
new fields and overall new modalities of interventions. As examples of ille-
gal migrations, money laundering, fakes, and trafficking have shown, this
redeployment doesn’t result only from voluntarism by an omnipotent and
omniscient state. It is, in reality, the fruit of a permanent interaction, the
fruit of tensions, conflicts, negotiations, and arrangements between various
actors—public and private actors, economic and political actors. The role
that state and state agents play in it is fundamental: they criticize former
practices, try to make state sovereignty felt, and develop new interventions.
However, these are shaped by economic forces and private actors with which
they interact, so state interventions have to model themselves on the neolib-
eral political economy: I have shown that the fight against economic crim-
inality passes less and less through public administrations such as police
and justice, and more and more by the application of rules, standards, and
procedures that are simultaneously defined by state actors and by private
actors. This neoliberal art of government becomes incarnate in a “frame-
work policy” that opens the way to an “active governmentality” required for
all society to conform to principles of enterprise, competition, and market.83
This redefinition both transforms and is the expression of the ways politi-
cal domination is exercised: through intermediaries, mostly economic ones,
and so through mechanisms that are less direct, less institutional, and less
police oriented.