Saint-Martin/Sint-Maarten, une petite île divisée pour de grands enjeux

• Published in: Cahiers d'Outre-Mer
• Main Author: Redon, Marie
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: French
• Published: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux 2006
• Subjects: border; Caribean; identity; island; migrations; Saint-Martin; Sint-Maarten; tourism; trafficking; américanisation; Antilles; frontière; identité; île; tourisme; trafics; droit; hist; Martin Island
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.4000/com.73; http://journals.openedition.org/com/73

Saint-Martin/Sint-Maarten : A Small Island for Big Issues. The article is focused on Saint-Martin Island (“petites Antilles” archipelago) being an insular area divided into two distinctive political entities – French and Dutch – makes it a surprising judicial and economical tangle, accentuated by a fast-growing, culturally heterogeneous population (more than a hundred nationalities) on a rather limited area (90 km2). The thrust of the article is to question the coexistence of these two communities on such a small area, facing common issues, especially demographic, though maintaining a strict partition, which might be a sine qua non of development. How is it possible to cope with the new demands of mass immigration and growing tourism when different degrees of autonomy from the home countries generate major problems in local governance (infrastructures, education, health, etc.) ? If history has definitely intertwined their destinies in the past, Saint-Martin and Sint-Maarten also tend to become more integrated into a culturally influenced zone in which ways of life are deeply Americanized. In the meantime, the existence of the border and the two cultural entities is still a blessing to attract tourism (“two for the price of one”), a major source of activities. The bipartition has also pernicious effects : counterfeiting, illegal workers, drugs trafficking, criminal networks are widely established on the island individually, many people take advantage of the border, seizing any opportunity to benefit alternatively from both fiscal systems (taxes, employers’ contributions, etc.). There is a paradox : to clear up the economic network would inevitably interfere with Saint-Martin’s major asset, namely a relative freedom induced by the dead angles of the legal systems. These are the questions addressed through an article which aims at understanding this little divided island as a prism to look at the specific issues of the contemporary Caribbean area. L’article traite de l’île de Saint-Martin (archipel des ...