Question: What does the Mediterranean represent in today’s global panorama? How could it embody an “alternative”, as you have written, to the current geopolitical reality?

Danilo Zolo: The Mediterranean is today the epicentre of a conflict of large, perhaps planetary dimensions. I am thinking of the Palestinian question, which I consider the hub of world conflict. It is doubtless, in fact, that the terrible question of terrorism has seen its birth in the Palestinian area. The first terrorist acts have taken place in Lebanon, perhaps in part also in Iran, and then, of course, in Palestine. The Mediterranean – which could be, and this is the perhaps daring thesis of the book The Mediterranean Alternative, a crossroads of peace – is now the heart of a conflict that opposes the West, and particularly the Far West, that is to say the great American power, to the Islamic world, with extremely serious consequences for the stability of the Mediterranean space and for the international order. It is then doubtless that to speak of a “Mediterranean alternative” is to approach a theme of great ambition, which discusses the capacity of the countries of the two shores of the Mediterranean to succeed in developing a cooperation alternative to the Atlantic dimension.

Q: In this regard, to what extent are we witnessing the failure of that ambitious project of a Euro-Mediterranean partnership going by the name of Barcelona process? What where the intrinsic limitations of this process?

DZ: The Barcelona process has been important in some ways: it was the first time that Europe, after the end of the Second World War, established a relation that was not principally colonial with the other shore of the Mediterranean and in particular with the Maghreb. So as an attempt, as a project, it is certainly something of great value, although today almost everyone considers it unsuccessful. There were three main baskets to the project, concerning politics, economy, and cultural dialogue. For what concerns the political aspects, the failure of Barcelona is due in large part to the failure of solving the Palestinian conflict. Europe has done nothing in this regard, unable or unwilling to put a halt to the American neo-colonial strategies and the oppression of the Palestinian people on the part of Israel. Both Israel and the Palestinian authority were represented in the Barcelona process: it could have been an exceptional opportunity for dialogue between the two sides of the conflict, but nothing has been done in this regard. On the economic side there is an enormous original sin, which is that the whole of Europe united – one of the greatest economic and commercial powers of the world – has established relations of cooperation with individual countries of the Arabic-Islamic shore. It is easy to imagine how this totally asymmetrical relation has created entirely negative results for the Arabic countries, to the advantage, of course, of Europe, to such an extent that from 1995 until today the economic inequality between the two shores has increased instead of diminishing. Lastly, cultural exchange has been extremely modest and always conditioned by the European attempt to tie commercial activities and economic aid to a blind adherence to all the political-juridical categories of the West and in particularly of Europe.

Q: And we can notice how the rhetoric of human rights is nothing more than rhetoric: the last example is the recent European Union – African Union summit, where Gaddafi essentially ran the show dictating his conditions to all participants, both European and African, and was received with all honours in Spain and France. But we know well the political and social conditions of Libya, there are numerous and detailed reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch…

DZ: The situation is very complex. There is an American project of forced democratisation of the Islamic world, which I do not agree with. I obviously recognise that almost all the Arabic-Islamic countries are ruled by strongly authoritarian elites. I however do not believe that the task of Europe is that of imposing democracy according to western categories. Imposing means to work through the use of force, or anyway through the use of coercive judiciary instruments or economical threats. I do not believe we can obtain any meaningful results in this way, while I hope for a dialogue between the two sides, which, on the one hand, would allow for Europe to propose its way towards democracy and popular political participation, and, on the other, would manifest a large amount of “patience” towards the Islamic world. And the Islamic world itself, through important authors and movements such as that of Islamic feminism, is trying to recuperate a number of values very similar to those of democratic Europe without renouncing its tradition or negating its great culture and civilisation, but rather finding them within this very culture. But I repeat that the fundamental question, for me, is that we must not exercise coercion, without of course undervaluing the gravity of the situation. It is doubtless, for example, that Gaddafi has a relation with the phenomenon of migration that is a times totally criminal, but so do we.

Q: Gaddafi’s criminal approach to migration seems to be strictly connected to European policies on this problem. Gaddafi has perhaps had the merit, at the Lisbon summit, to unveil the real instrumentalisation of this phenomenon, often used as a threat or as a bargaining tool. But then, what is the real significance of the migratory phenomenon in the Mediterranean and the regulatory politics of Europe, especially the “sub-contracting” to Arab countries of techniques of control such as administrative detention?

DZ: I am naturally very attentive to the problem of migration, even though I am not a specialist, and I believe this is a fundamental step to finding peace again in the Mediterranean, especially as there is a tendency in numerous European countries to draw an equation between migration and terrorism, which is a very dangerous conception of security. I am a very strong critic of the migratory policies practices by Euro-Mediterranean countries; I think that we will not be able to go towards solving this problem as long as we keep on missing a Mediterranean vision which would include the African countries where the migratory flow originates, engaging them not only in terms of policing, as if this were a proto-terrorist phenomenon, but in terms of political, economic, and cultural cooperation.

Q: In the introductory essay to the collection The Mediterranean Alternative Franco Cassano, co-editor of the volume, has valorised the “knowledge of the border” as a place “always ahead of any centre because it is always forced to look over onto the other”. At a time when the border of the Mediterranean seems to have become a place of death, of violence and fear, how can we return to consider the Mediterranean not only as a “trench”, as Serge Latouche writes in the book you have edited, but as a different understanding of the very notion of border?

DZ: There are no obvious solutions. The fundamental thesis of the book is that there will not be peace in the Mediterranean if there will not be dialogue between the two shores, and this means that we should open ourselves to Islamic culture and recognise that Europe ignores and refuses it, seeing it as a decayed culture: the Islamic world as the world that cannot keep the pace of development and modernity, a world we must bear-with but one that has nothing of interest to tell us. There is a radical negation of the Mediterranean roots of Europe and of the entire Western world, and a negation of the immense contribution that Islamic culture has given to the development of Western culture, science, and medicine. So the first objective is to demolish the wall of ignorance and refusal that separates the European from the Islamic world. This is an achievable objective. The other great theme is that of the capacity of Europe, of a Europe that would rediscover its Mediterranean roots, to give itself a stronger and more energetic identity and profile. Europe today is an enormous economic power, the first commercial power in the world, but its political identity and its international subjectivity is close to zero. There will not be European autonomy, and there will hence not be a European civil society, for so long as Europe will not be able to emancipate itself from its often servile subordination to the Atlantic empire.

Click here for more on our Mediterranean project

BACK TO TOP

Website Design By ChrisWalmsley.co.uk
© 2008

Hosting by e-noise.com