Routledge Handbook of Mediterranean Politics

Richard Gillespie, Frédéric Volpi, Richard Gillespie, Frédéric Volpi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138903982
• eBook ISBN: 9781317446330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Mediterranean space, defined by a major sea, a large number of littoral countries and to some extent their hinterlands, is at the same time an interface between Europe, Africa and Asia. This brings complex challenges in terms of achieving peace and stability. Recently it has received intense international attention through the internal destructiveness and spill-over from conflicts, primarily those waged in Libya, Syria and, more remotely, Iraq.

This Handbook provides an overview of the political processes that shape the Mediterranean region in the contemporary context. It explores the issues of crucial importance to Mediterranean dynamics through a series of analytical sections that guide the reader towards a comprehensive understanding of the main regional interactions and trends.

The Handbook explores:

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• the complex historical formation of the contemporary Mediterranean
• geopolitical perspectives
• issues around peace and conflict
• the political economy of the region
• the role of non-state actors and social movements
• societal and cultural trends.

The wide range of contributions from many of the leading academic experts on the region offers not only insights into the debates and processes that structure each theme, but also key pointers for a more general understanding of how distinct political, economic, social and cultural dynamics interact across the region. It will therefore be a key resource for policy-makers and students and scholars of Mediterranean politics and international relations.

1
INTRODUCTION

The growing international relevance of Mediterranean politics

Richard Gillespie and Frédéric Volpi

Since 2010 the map of the Mediterranean has returned to international news coverage as a result of the Arab uprisings and their aftermath, initially providing a series of epic events involving direct regime–opposition power struggles yet since then mostly featuring the frustration of those movements that have aimed to bring change and the ouster of authoritarian rulers. This Mediterranean space, defined by a major sea, a large number of littoral countries and even to some extent their hinterlands, is at the same time an interface between Europe, Africa and Asia, posing complex challenges in terms of achieving peace and stability. Only recently re-established as a focus of compelling international interest, for decades it had been regarded as something of a backwater of global and international politics, with the great exception of the enduring conflict in the Middle East. As occurred periodically in earlier phases of history, it has become a focus of international attention once more through the internal destructiveness and spill-over from conflicts, primarily those waged in Libya, Syria and (more remotely) Iraq. Syria has been the cause of the largest, most desperate migration of asylum-seekers to reach European shores since the creation of the European Union, and indeed since long beforehand, while refuge from its conflict has also been provided by several eastern Mediterranean countries, notwithstanding their weaker economic status. Although conflicts often have a tendency to place prime emphasis on the actions of states and international organizations, the refugee crisis has brought the people of the area more into the picture, through the most appalling human tragedy.

Thus the recent succession of events within this space has generated both a number of specific flashpoints as well as more unremitting human dramas. Amplified by the revolution in digital information technologies, both phenomena have contributed to rising international public interest and awareness, while further south from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea an equally daunting set of growing security challenges remain far less visible in the Sahel and in sub-Saharan Africa, but also cast doubt on the durability of the old order. Adding to the sense of a pan-Mediterranean dimension has been the divisive north–south dimension of the Eurozone crisis, giving rise to the somewhat simplistic notion of problematic southern member states within the EU. As in the 1980s, when some observers in the western world conceptualized this space as ‘Mediterranean Europe’ and not merely as ‘southern Europe’ (Pridham, 1984; Payne, 1986; Judt, 1989), the northern shores of the Mediterranean are attracting wider interest among social scientists.

Yet even at this time of uncommonly high interest in the countries around the Mediterranean and in the Sea itself, now the scene of human tragedy as it frequently devours the bodies of those desperate to migrate to safer or richer countries, it is still not the entire Mediterranean as region that tends to draw attention, so much as the flashpoints, together with the networks, communication channels, transit routes and economic exchanges that connect the space with the outside world. Its own regional integration, at least at the economic level, remains critically weak, accounting for only 1 per cent of its trade (EU Neighbourhood Info Centre, 2016). None the less, connectivity at the human level has grown, owing to local initiatives, to some extent, while also being promoted by external agency, with the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, for all its shortcomings, giving rise to a plethora of links below state level (Youngs, Chapter 7, this volume). Transnational networks have also been boosted hugely by the impact of new communications technologies and, in parts of the region, by the decline of territorial sovereignty (Huber, Chapter 11, this volume).

Research on Mediterranean politics has tended to reflect the fragmentation of the space and the tendency of the parts to sometimes eclipse the whole. The monumental works on the Mediterranean writ large have been historical works, from Fernand Braudel (1972) to Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell (2000).¹ To interpret present day events, it requires the combined and sometimes concerted endeavours of academic journals, collaborative research projects, think tanks and advocacy networks to bring coalitions of researchers, analysts and commentators together, ideally with practitioners, to make sense of the wider complex picture at a time of such great flux and movement, posing far greater challenges than existed during the Cold War when state structures and institutions were relatively stable and maps seemed permanent and authoritative enough to become familiar.

The task of making sense of developments across the Mediterranean space is impeded by its complexity and by fragmentation. While a number of quite ambitious efforts have been made to promote or build academic networks,² of late there has been a sense that the structures and dynamics have been evolving faster than our ability to interpret them, and that in some respects fragmentation has increased (Jones, 2014). Yet complexity does not invariably push in the direction of fragmentation: for example, as shown by Murphy (Chapter 29, this volume), global tendencies have also done much to unify the experience of youth across the Mediterranean, thus showing the continued and indeed enhanced relevance of this shared space ‘in terms of the exclusionary political, economic and social experiences which are propelling them into new formats for political action’, both in southern Europe and North Africa. Such a depiction is entirely compatible with tracing specific trajectories of youth movement activism distinguishable in southern Europe and in eastern as well as southern Mediterranean countries.

Definition of the ‘area’ of study of Mediterranean politics is a messy and inconclusive business and we have not attempted here to impose a particular geographical framework on our contributors, preferring to regard this issue as an, often implicit, ongoing debate among scholars. In any case, an excellent discussion of the validity and shortcomings of a vast range of different historical notions of the Mediterranean is already available in the impressive work of Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea (2000: 9–49). The relevant scope of analysis for Mediterranean political issues is by no means uniform, but rather tends to shift over time and differs from one policy domain to another, regardless of state frontiers, while also extending into hinterlands or even more globally. Thus the scholar of Mediterranean politics stands to benefit from a wider familiarity with the discipline or sub-disciplines of international relations and international political economy and will do well to extend their purview to the literatures pertaining to ‘adjacent’ area-focused studies, on European, Middle Eastern and North African politics. Equally, for the purposes of this collection, they will benefit from dipping into the specialized thematic literatures, such as those on civil society, regime transition, etc.

The literature specifically on Mediterranean politics has grown impressively since the 1990s, with interest rekindled by developments such as the (short-lived) promise of an end to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the launch of the Barcelona process, as well as the accession of southern European countries into the EU, with specific foreign policy priorities in the Mediterranean (Stavridis et al., 1999; Gillespie, 2000). Judging by the special issues of Mediterranean Politics published over the last 20 years, the main focuses of research have been the experience of Euro-Mediterranean regional initiatives and the politics of change or continuity in the Arab world. While many collections of this journal have contained contributions from scholars from diverse Mediterranean countries, language remains a barrier to inclusive debates. Multilingual journals such as Afkar/Ideas, published by the European Institute for the Mediterranean (IEMed) in Barcelona and occasional contemporary issues of the more historically focused Cahiers de la Méditerranée published by the Centre de la Méditerranée Moderne et Contemporaine (CMMC) at the University of Nice have been welcome initiatives, but difficult to sustain in an era of austerity. Thus, although it is fair to depict some degree of regionalization of the Mediterranean research agenda, one must always be aware that not all debates taking place in this area and not all research is reflected in publications that have a largely global distribution.

Global themes in Mediterranean politics

In the contemporary context, perhaps the most symbolic, if not the most instrumentally effective, embodiment of a regional Mediterranean synergy remains the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership officially launched by the EU in 1995, in Barcelona. Underpinning this ‘Barcelona process’ of regional collaboration is an ideal of political, socio-economic, and cultural rapprochement in the region (Adler et al., 2006). This vision of, and for, the Mediterranean reflects both a regionalization of crucial global political, cultural and economic transformations of the last few decades and longer processes that are grounded in the Mediterranean context. The promotion of a liberal democratic peace in the region illustrated both the post-Cold War rebirth of a global discourse on democracy and much older views of a politically unified Mediterranean world. The institutionalization of trade agreements across the Mediterranean, and between EU and non-EU European states, also reflected the global dominance of a neoliberal economic order and long-standing mercantilist networks between the countries of the region. Culturally, the self-image of the EU as a normative civilian power, facilitated once again in this historical context the promotion of rights and values which were deemed to have universal appeal, even though here, as in the other EMP policies, elite views tended to frame the debate in a very specific light.

Politically, the globalized narrative about democratization that grew in strength in the 1970s and 1980s in the policy-making and scholarly spheres has shaped many approaches to, and expectations of, the Mediterranean region. In his classic article ‘Transitions to Democracy’ (1970), Rustow stressed the importance of an agreement between elites on the relevance of a democratic system as a means to resolve apparently unsurmountable political tensions. Rustow, also a specialist on Turkish politics, emphasized the importance of a process of habituation for the population at large to adopt such an elite consensus about democracy. Successful transitions from authoritarianism in southern European countries in the 1970s (Greece, Portugal, Spain) began to entrench this transitologist view that presented liberal democracy as a natural outcome of the process of modernization. The landmark four volumes of O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (1986) complexified the debate about trajectories of authoritarianism and democratization, but the outlook remained generally positive right into the 1990s. The collapse of the communist bloc in eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and the wave of ‘velvet revolutions’ producing democratic systems in eastern and south-eastern Europe confirmed these expectations. Even on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, some former ‘Arab-socialist’ regimes appeared to be following the same trend, at least initially, as with the Algerian democratic experiment (Volpi, 2003). The relevance of standard democratization models and mechanisms to the Middle East remained, however, a moot point throughout the 1990s. Culturalist views of democratization articulated notably by Huntington’s article ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ (1993), hinted that a mainly Arab and Muslim Middle East could not produce a working liberal democracy. Just as the Barcelona process began to articulate a democratic agenda for the Mediterranean region, scholars and policy makers alike began to think about the possibility of a Middle Eastern exceptionalism (Salamé, 1994). Progressively, the optimism of the 1990s turned into pessimism in the 2000s, and scholars focused increasingly on explaining the resilience of authoritarianism rather than the progression of democratization (Levitsky and Way, 2002; Diamond, 2002; Heydemann, 2007). By the end of the 2000s, a seemingly increasingly unbridgeable political gap had appeared between a democratic northern shore and an autocratic southern shore, as democratization discourses and democracy promotion policies were upstaged by the securitization narratives and policies of the ‘war on terror’ (Schlumberger, 2007). Whilst the 2011 Arab uprisings reintroduced the possibility of democratic changes in polities on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, the post-uprising situations showed the fragility of these political developments (Gunning and Baron, 2014; Volpi, 2017). If the early 2010s have illustrated that the Middle East was not that exceptional, the making of a democratic Mediterranean region has also proved to be more elusive than some had hoped at the end of the Cold War. All the chapters of this Handbook, directly or indirectly addressing the issue of democracy, point to the multiplicity of factors – be they rooted in policies from the north or from the south – that interact and underpin this difficult construction of a domestic and regional political consensus.

The cultural pendant to a democratic political agenda for the Mediterranean is a liberal conception of rights, enshrined in policies designed to promote human rights across the region (and beyond). This normative ambition of the Barcelona process may be linked to older schemes of a civilizing mission that had rhetorically justified some of the actions of the European empires on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Even Tocqueville (1988 [1837]) was at first quite enthusiastic about the impact that France could have in Algeria. In practice, French (and British, and Italian) colonial policies commonly proved to be far less uplifting for the local population, and Spain’s protectorate in Morocco was hardly benevolent (Balfour, 2002: part II). Colonial policies were often taken up by indigenous authoritarian actors, sometimes with eventual consequences for the metropolis, as in the Spanish civil war or the military challenge to de Gaulle during the Algerian war. The colonial period initiated a new period of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in the south; while the post-colonial period was characterized by the same process in the north. In the Middle East and North Africa, earlier forms of multiculturalism were reshaped to accommodate the secularizing dynamics initiated by European powers – a process that outlived colonialism itself (Meijer, 2014; Ruedy, 1996). This difficult process of mutual accommodation, particularly visible in relation to the place of Islam in society, contributed to the evolution of Islamism over the ensuing decades, first in the countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and then in the European countries themselves (Esposito and Burgat, 2003). The cultural transformations initiated by colonial powers in the nineteenth century laid the foundation for the social reconfigurations of the end of the twentieth century, when the implications of migration from the south began to impact states and societies on both shores of the Mediterranean (Brand, 2006). Whilst the discourse of ‘rights’ has undeniably established itself across the region over the years, its significance has tended to vary with its political uses (Slyomovics, 2005). Despite the normative promotion of its ‘acquis communautaire’ in the region, European Union policies de facto prioritized the implementation of security and economic agreements as the basis of a regional ‘community’ of sorts (Kausch and Youngs, 2009).

The socio-economic dimension of community building in the Mediterranean has always been central to the formation of a Mediterranean nexus, be it in classical times, in the period studied by Braudel, or in the contemporary context. In the modern period, colonial policies shaped an extractive relationship in which colonies on the southern shores provided countries on the northern shores with cheap raw material (and then manpower); and Europe sent some manufactured goods in return. This imbalanced relationship continued in the post-colonial period, even as oil-rich countries in the south tried to use their newfound wealth to develop their economies. In practice, reliance on oil and gas entrenched a dependence on natural resources and hindered the domestic economy, not least due to an ill-thought-through spate of state dirigisme (Luciani, 1990). The post-WWII period was marked by an ever-greater eco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: the growing international relevance of Mediterranean politics
• Part I Historical constructions
• Part II Geopolitical perspectives
• Part III Peace and conflict
• Part IV Political economy
• Part V Non-state actors and social movements
• Part VI Societal and cultural trends
• Index