What is the Mediterranean? It is a thousand things together. It is not only one landscape but countless landscapes. It is not a sea but a succession of seas. It is not a single culture, but many cultures accumulated on one another, wrote Fernand Braudel. The trip across the Mediterranean is the discovery of Roman civilization in Lebanon, the prehistoric times in Sardinia, the Greek cities in Sicily, the Arab presence in Spain, the Turkish Islam in Yugoslavia. It is a dive in the depths of the centuries, to the megalithic temples in Malta or the pyramids of Egypt.
In its natural as well as its human landscape, the Mediterranean crossroads, the diverse Mediterranean, is presented in our memories as a coherent picture, as a system where all is tangled together so that they can be reconstructed into an original group. How can we interpret this apparent unity, this deeper existence of the Mediterranean? We ought to try again and again.
We will try to approach the role of the Mediterranean in the course “European Governance, Globalization and the role of the Mediterranean”.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in November 1989, the pulse of the world has accelerated. A new era began for international policy. The end of the Cold War brought about rapid changes in the geopolitical landscape of Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean with the emergence of new states, the enlargement of NATO, the EU accession process and the remaining political divisions. This course focuses on the post-cold war geopolitical changes in the Mediterranean region, including ethnic conflicts, the process of establishing a State, as well as the policies of the EU and other key international key players such as the EU, UN, OSCE, NATO, the US and Russia.
The issue of governance in Europe and in the world is carefully examined in the course. The course also considers the role of the EU in the Mediterranean region and in particular the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and the Barcelona Declaration and its further development into the Union for the Mediterranean. It should be borne in mind that the overall aim of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership is to maintain peace and security in the Mediterranean, as well to create of a Free Trade Area. So far the Euro-Mediterranean cooperation has been initiated at three levels of action: (a) at the political and security level (human rights, democracy, the rule of law, good-neighbor relations, (b) the economic and financial level and (c) the social and cultural level with special emphasis on the development of a citizen’s society, which is a lever of the implementation of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership.
Are there prospects of enforcing or creating a citizen’s society in the Arab and Muslim countries in the Mediterranean region? This question as well as the key issue regarding democratisation and human rights will be addressed in the discussions of
