Borders and Scales
In maps it appears as a blue stretch at the confluence of Africa, Asia and Europe. The sea between lands, the Mediterranean. Naming this space as an object of scholarly attention presumes its existence as a more or less clearly defined reality. There is, no doubt, the blue space on the map; there is, no doubt, an expanse of water stretching from Algeciras to Istambul; and there is, no doubt, animal life in its depths and human ingenuity along its shores. Yet, whether the ecological, economic, cultural, and political processes unfolding along this sea display a coherence that justifies the epithet Mediterranean is open to debate.
Historically it is difficult to find such coherence, at least as a social reality. Politically the region only acquired unity during the Roman Empire. Since then its integrity has been only partial. For example during the 16th century the Mediterranean was a coherent economic entity yet was fragmented politically and culturally. In the centuries that followed the inner sea has gone through uneven and partial processes of fragmentation and reunification, the rise nation states following the fragmentation of the Ottoman's and Habsburg’s empires figuring amongst the most significant.
At the turn of the new millennium divergent dynamics of fragmentation and unification continue to unfold, this time reflecting and being shaped by the specific conditions of a global age. Reinvigorated nationalisms and processes of regionalisation have led to the creation or revival or sub-national and transnational boundaries. And the northern shores of the Mediterranean have witnessed the expansion of the EU, with all its crisis, contradictions and dilemmas, still a unique experiment in the history of humanity, a future state formation founded in the recognition of the culturally other.
Part of these geoeconomic and cultural processes has been a rediscovery of the concept of Mediterraneity, from the international efforts of creating a Euro-Mediterranean area to the revival of the Mediterranean as a fundamental characteristic of Southern European cities promotional strategies. In each of these initiatives the Mediterranean emerges as a narrative, a vision, a project, or a set of contested narratives, visions or projects. Each of them implying its own delineation of Mediterranean boundaries, setting what and for whom the Mediterranean counts. For instance, to some the border is between Europe (including its Mediterranean shore) and the Orient, the non-western otherness. For others, the Mediterranean (including the northern shore) is the border with the Anglo-Germanic world, where the Mediterranean stands for a sort of "joie de vivre," Latinism or Hellenisms in contrast to the Puritanism of the reformist north. For others it represents the cosmopolitanism of the city port as opposed to the monotheist fundamentalisms arriving from the desert. Yet, the Mediterranean has been always a porous and moving border: between the colonial and post-colonial territories, between (de-)centered lands and decaying peripheries, a cultural border between continents, a border between economic dynamics or religious hegemonies, between intellectual epistemologies, etc. As Braudel already warned us, we cannot set the geographical and conceptual limits of the Mediterranean to one but hundred frontiers … some political, some economic, and some cultural." The Mediterranean must be seen as a contingent multiplicity of borders. Contingent and complex for, if anything, the pervasiveness of globalisation has made the border even more porous and more de-centred. For instance, where we draw the border between the Maghrebian Mediterranean, in Tangiers or in the banlieus of Marseille and Paris?
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