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ABSTRACT
The word “Mediterranean” tends to elicit opposite views, acting as an indicator of assumptions about politics and normative considerations. This article explores two perspectives, and suggests a third. First, it looks at conceptions of the Mediterranean as a unitary actor. The Mediterranean as the “cradle of civilizations”, first described by Braudel, has been recently revived by Horden and Purcell, as well as by the Italian geo-hilosophers. A second perspective emphasizes instead the Mediterranean as an area of conflict, characterized by fundamental fault lines. The position of Huntington, captured by his expression “clash of civilizations”, is mirrored by the post-colonial view of an area fractured by permanent tensions. The article concludes by suggesting a third option and noting that the word “Mediterranean” is fading from political vocabularies, an indication of the shrinking role in politics for concepts indicating “in-between-ness”.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Federica Bicchi is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations, LSE.
Notes
1. The book was conceived in the 1920s, published in 1949, revised in 1966 and eventually translated into English in 1972.
2. On which, see Guarracino (Citation2007) and Izzo and Fabre (Citation2000).
3. An interesting example of a single shared set of values (in this case, gender segregation) would seem to apply to the picture of the 5 + 5 dialogue, including 10 all males ministers of Foreign Affairs for Algeria, Spain, France, Italy, Libya, Malta, Mauritania, Morocco, Portugal and Tunisia, at their meeting in Algiers, 21 January 2018. See: http://ufmsecretariat.org/foreign-ministers-5-5-dialogue-welcome-leading-role-union-mediterranean-region/.
4. Interestingly, Huntington quotes Braudel’s view of history to support his thesis (e.g. pp. 39, 43–44 Citation1996), highlighting that the French historian had identified a number of civilizations as key to world history. This is however a personal interpretation of Braudel’s work. While Braudel did consider civilizations more important and stable than other factors such as e.g. political systems, he also stressed how civilizations emerged from the environment in which they were based, in a broader hierarchy of causal factors. Moreover, in Braudel’s view civilizations do not automatically clash. Rather, they can co-exist layered across space and time.
5. Needless to say, social constructivism could be used to the opposite end, as shown by Adler, Bicchi, Crawford, and Del Sarto (Citation2006) in a collection analysing the “construction of the Mediterranean region.”
6. Literary references to the Mediterranean abound, especially in French literature during the period 1930–1960s. See for instance Paul Valery and Albert Camus.
7. For a similar analysis of EU-funded projects in the Mediterranean, see Bialasiewicz, Giaccaria, Jones, and Minca (Citation2013).
8. If the political connection seems isolated, it might be relevant to consider the remarkable degree of correlation between Roman road density and current day economic activity, corrected for the abandonment of wheel transport in the Middle East and North Africa. In this interpretation, where Roman roads were maintained, economic development continued to exist across more than 2,000 years (Dalgaard, Kaarsen, Olsson, & Selaya, Citation2018).