Incunabola of Europe. Part I: The International Statute of Tangier (1923-1956)

Abstract

The city of Tangier – Morocco’s diplomatic capital – plays a peculiar role in the history of law and international relations of the 20th century. Out of the coordinates of ‘traditional’ colonialism, through its international statute of 1923 it stands as the first example of a city placed under an international authority. A paradigmatic case study for reading and interpreting the Western presence, and Italy in particular, in countries dominated by European economic power, in a context that has been defined semi-colonial, as Morocco eschews traditional patterns of subjugation. A cosmopolitan city, neither Moroccan nor European, but the result of the encounter between Arab and Western cultures. If the city and its statute have a, albeit meagre, scientific production, the cosmopolitan dimension of Tangier, its alternative vocation to the dominant twentieth-century vocation based on the sovereignty of States, appears to have been overlooked. This Interzone, as one of its most famous residents, William S. Burroughs, called it, does not simply serve as a meeting point between East and West, but as a place of legal hybridity, of intersection, as a non-place of power and law.