Abstract
This chapter examines the public representations of this region in the time, analyses how contemporary discourse has painted regional developments since 2011 onwards, associating terrorism, instability and turmoil to the Mediterranean imaginary, and sketches an alternative narrative. It describes how information and culture related trans-Mediterranean networks can help demystifying dividing representations and thinking in terms of a shared space of social, cultural and political interactions, and analyses the messages used by some revolutionary groups as vectors for building consensus, beyond national or cultural identities, in a context of oppression.
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Notes
- 1.
Anna Lindh Foundation, Euromed Intercultural Trends 2010, Alexandria 2010 (Lindh 2010). The survey was conducted in summer 2009.
- 2.
Robert Manchin, “Muslim Attitudes After Arab Spring: Thinking About Peaceful Change—A Gallup Poll”, The Arab Spring Nonviolent Protests Conference, Brussels, April 2012 (Manchin 2012).
- 3.
These were the results of the following Gallup-Anna Lindh Foundation poll on Intercultural trends carried out in autumn 2012. As for civic engagement, behind individual action (27 % in Egypt and 25 % in Italy), social movements and political parties are side by side in Egypt (7 % and 8 % respectively), but distanced in Italy (13 % and 6 % respectively). The full report Euromed Intercultural Trends 2014 (Lindh 2014) is available on www.annalindhfoundation.org/report
- 4.
Ibidem. 10 % did not expect any consequences in this regard and 15 % could not tell what could be expected.
- 5.
Most respondents, with the exception of those in Spain and Germany, believe their respective countries already have too many immigrants and cannot cope with welcoming more! Survey carried out by IFOP in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and UK in September 2014 and published October 2015 (source: www.ifop.com). At the question “Which measures the EU should give priority to in handling the refugee crisis”, providing development aid and supporting stability in the Mediterranean region was, however, the most mentioned top measure (IFOP 2015).
- 6.
Literary translator Roberta Verde and the European spokesperson for the 6th of April Movement Ibrahim Heggi submitted the last complaint at mid-January 2016. The editorial “Bastardi islamici” was signed by M. Maurizio Belpietro, the director of Libero, and published on the first page on 14 November 2015 (Belpietro 2015).
- 7.
Marco Parma, the dean of the high school Garofani, under enormous pressure, submitted his resignation, despite the support received by the parents of many school’s pupils. A few days later, the Ministry of Education inspectors assessed that the dean did not commit any irregularity; on the contrary, he had previously consulted with the school’s representative bodies, La Repubblica, 3 December 2015 (De Giorgio, Tiziana 2015).
- 8.
See Cornelis Hulsman, Middle Eastern Christian survival strategies after the Arab Revolutions in 2011 with a focus on Egypt, presented at the International Conference on Middle East Strategic Landscape 100 Years after the First World War, Cairo, September 2015 (Hulsman 2015).
- 9.
Perpetrated on 18 March 2015. The museum is located nearby the Tunisian parliament. The talk show was conducted by journalist Paola Saluzzi.
- 10.
See Merone’s lectures on Islam and politics accessible on YouTube (in Italian). Looking back at the recent history of Tunisia, the scholar notes that if the Islamism of the ‘70s represented the frustration of low and middle class social layers, who were excluded from the State-building process following independence, contemporary radical Islamism becomes the ideological apparatus of expression of social rage for many of the excluded of the latest generation, who do not recognize themselves either in the moderation process of Islamic party an-Nahda, or in the ongoing institutionalization of the revolutionary phase (please refer to Merone’s “Islamismo e processi sociali: la Tunisia post-rivoluzionaria” [Islamism and Social Processes: Post-Revolution Tunisia], in Laura Guazzone (ed.), Storia ed evoluzione dell’islamismo arabo: i Fratelli Musulmani e gli altri, Mondadori Education, 2015 (Merone 2015): 243–270.
- 11.
Talking about Tunisia, Merone himself advocates a political solution, which includes the political recognition and institutionalization of a significant part of the Salafist movement, which has not taken the military path. See: “Explaining the Jihadi Threat in Tunisia”, open Democracy, 21 March 2015 (Merone 2015).
- 12.
- 13.
Law 53 of 24 December 2013 established this forum as an instance of the State, independent, with legal personality and financial and administrative autonomy. It aims to dismantle the authoritarian system and facilitate the transition to the rule of law by revealing the truth about abuses committed between 1955 and 2013, determining the State responsibility in these violations, making those responsible for such violations accountable, and restoring victims in their rights and dignity.
- 14.
The bill on economic reconciliation has been praised as a panacea for the economic crisis the country is experiencing. Officially, therefore, it has never been presented as a replacement of the transitional justice process, but it might in fact contradict it, and is considered unconstitutional by many. The bill, submitted in July 2015, would allow some files on corruption and money laundering to evade the Instance Vérité et Dignité, and rehabilitate around 7,000 cadres responsible for economic crimes.
- 15.
Sources: dropegyptsdebt.org, 2013; Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM), 2016. Most of this debt is considered odious.
- 16.
The first Blockupy rally took place in May 2012. Last large Blockupy rally, held in front of the new headquarters of the European Central Bank on March 18, 2015, gathered between 17,000 and 20,000 people.
- 17.
On the struggle for normative legitimacy between capitalism and democracy, see the work of Swiss Kontrapunkt research forum (i.e. P. Mastronardi and others, “Kann die Demokratie den Kapitalismus neu verfassen?” [Can Democracy Reshape Capitalism?], July 2014) (Mastronardi 2014).
- 18.
Italian oil company ENI has signed last 14 March 2015, a framework agreement with Egypt to develop oil resources exploitation and increase ENI’s investments in the country.
- 19.
According to Spanish opposition forces, the Citizenship Security law violates nine articles of the Spanish Constitution. The following actions will certainly be severely penalized: demonstrating in front of the Spanish Parliament; taking pictures or images of police officers; obstructing the execution of administrative orders such as house evictions, displaying Greenpeace-style banners on sensitive buildings or infrastructures, and occupying public spaces through pacific sit-ins.
- 20.
See Umberto Bacchi, Callum Paton, “Migrant Crisis: Are Isis Terrorists Infiltrating Refugee Boats to Europe?”, International Business Times, 16 September 2015 (Bacchi, Paton 2015). “There have been no confirmed cases, zero!” said Giorgio Brandolin, the deputy chairman of a cross-chamber parliamentary committee on immigration and security to the two journalists. “Terror groups spend money on training militants; it makes no sense for them to send them over on death boats, risking them drowning on the way,” he said.
- 21.
Aylan Kurdi was found dead by the Turkish police in Bodrum at the beginning of September 2015. He could not survive a wreck when a group of Syrian refugees were attempting to reach a Greek island with a little boat. His pictures made the tour of the world. Aylan’s family had been previously refused a visa from Canada, where some relatives were already living, and denied even the status of asylum seekers granted by the UN at the refugees camp located on Turkish soil where they were. Regarding the Cologne’s events, the thesis that the aggressions were planned by a wide refugees network has not yet been proved (“Only 3 Out of 58 Detained Suspects in Cologne Sexual Assaults are Refugees—Public Prosecutor”, RT News, 15 February 2016 (RT News 2016); Ben Knight, “Cologne Sexual Assault Case Collapses”, The Guardian, 6 May 2016 (Knight 2016); Chris Tomlinson, “New Year’s Eve Sex Attacks: 2,000 Attackers, Only 120 Suspects”, Breitbart, 12 July 2016 (Tomlinson 2016).
- 22.
For Said (Orientalism, 5th ed., Penguin, London, 2003), Orientalism is a cultural will intended to master, manipulate and operate in a hegemonic manner. Thus, according to him, the Orient is not a fact of nature, but it is rather a hegemonic cultural production of the intelligentsia. “What makes all these fluid and extraordinarily rich actualities difficult to accept” clarifies Said “is that most people resist the underlying notion: that human identity is not only not natural and stable, but constructed, and occasionally even invented outright” (p. 332).
- 23.
See Niall Ferguson, “París, víctima de la complacencia” [Paris, Victim of Complacency], El País, 19 November 2015 (Ferguson 2015).
- 24.
In his last work—with Alexis Jenni, Les mémoires dangéreuses. De l’Algérie coloniale à la France d’aujourd’hui [Dangerous memories. From colonial Algeria to contemporary France], Albin Michel, January 2016—he highlights the inability of a society like the French to stave off the return of the repressed colonial in all its exploded dimensions, from those of a Southist extreme right to those of successive generations of immigrant children, torn between opposing cultural identifications. (Jenny, Stora 2016)
- 25.
Luigi Cazzato, “An Archaeology of the Verticalist Mediterranean: From Bridges to Walls”, Mediterranean Review, 5, no. 2 (2012): 17–31 (Cazzato 2012).
- 26.
Rich is the literature on the relation between marginalization of Muslim youth and Islamist radicalization. See for instance Sarah Lyons-Padilla and others, “Belonging nowhere: Marginalization & radicalization risk among Muslim immigrants”, Behavioral Science and Policy, December 2015 (Lyons-Padilla 2015). Some research centres, such as the conservative European Foundation for Democracy disagree with the view that the poorest, the working class are the most exposed to radicalization.
- 27.
There are civil actions for understanding and empathy towards Muslims taking already place in Europe, like the Allow me—I am Muslim! European action, organized by the powerful Turkish Milli Görüş Islamic association (March 2016).
- 28.
Kalypso Nicolaïdis analyzes the emergence of borders and polarized identities in the Mediterranean, and opposes the politics of memory as basis for conflict resolution, region building and integration (with D. Bechev [ed.], Mediterranean Frontiers: Borders, Conflict and Memory in a Transnational World, Tauris, London 2009) (Nicolaïdis 2009).
- 29.
On the multitude of borderscapes shared by Europe and Africa in the Mediterranean, see “The Mediterranean Migration Frontier, Plus Miscellaneous Research Papers”, ACME International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13, no 2 (2014: 163–304.) (ACME 2014), a collection of contributions of a group of border specialists from Europe, Africa and the US, who worked with the support of the European Science Foundation. The consensus emerging from this collection is that the Mediterranean as a border(ing) space has gradually left its stable ground of national checkpoints and territorial lines on maps to make part of a more fluid landscape built on overlapping, and often contradictory, histories of mobility and exchange.
- 30.
Anna Lindh Foundation (2014).
- 31.
The interviews of the following section were made online and by phone in February 2016.
- 32.
The founding journalists were all working for Egypt Independent, the English issue of the leading privately owned Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. They were fired in April 2013. One of them, Lina Attalah, explains in a brilliant manner the reasons behind the collective dismissal and the closure of the print edition of Egypt Independent in “The triumph of practice” (www.egyptindependent.com//news/final-issue-triumph-practice; removed from the Internet in summer 2016).
- 33.
E-Joussour currently manages an EU-facility for community radios in the MENA region (Aswātna Fund), in partnership with Community Media Solutions. AMARC is also involved in MedNet, another EU-funded project connecting civil society and independent media in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Palestine, and coordinated by COSPE. One of the project’s outputs has been the creation of the Tunisian Union of Community Media (July 2015), which involves 28 media, most of them being community radios.
- 34.
Tunisian online progressive magazine Nawaat.org, for example, is a collective blog, giving voice to all those who want to carry on and strengthen their civic engagement, and accompanying them in their skill development.
- 35.
This assessment is based on comments I have collected in May 2016 among alternative media practitioners and observers, including Ahlem Bousserwel (Democracy Reporting International), Debora Del Pistoia (MedNet coordinator), Sadok Hammami (Centre Africain de Formation de Journalistes et Communicateurs), and Amirouche Nedjaa (Mena Media Monitoring).
- 36.
Interview held in Barcelona in January 2016.
- 37.
On graffiti, may I mention Konstantinos Avramidis, Live your Greece in Myths: Reading the Crisis on Athens’ Walls, Professional Dreamers, Working document 8, 2012 (Avramidis 2012); and Heba Helmi, Gawāyā Shahīd [Martyr Souls. Street Arts in Egyptian Revolution], Dar al-Ain, Cairo, 2012 (Helmi 2012).
- 38.
On 1 February 2012, a massive riot occurred at Port Said Stadium in Port Said, Egypt, following an Egyptian Premier League football match between local team El-Masry and Cairo team El-Ahly. 74 people were killed and more than 500 were injured after thousands spectators from El-Masry section stormed the stadium stands and the pitch, and violently attacked El-Ahly fans with several kinds of weapons. El-Ahly Ultras have accused the Egyptian security of having orchestrated the terror attack in revenge for the role El-Ahly Ultras played in defence of the 25th of January Revolution. At the trial, most of the police officers were acquitted.
- 39.
Moreover, in the period around the constitutional referendum convened by President Morsi, protest marches of the revolutionary forces against the text multiplied, to which Islamic and pro-government factions responded with parallel calls to mobilization. My table begins with the advent of the warmest period following the election of Morsi, when he published a constitutional decree taking upon himself all the powers and granting immunity to a Constituent Assembly already abandoned by the secular forces.
- 40.
Larbi Sadiki, “Unruliness Through Space and Time”, in L. Sadiki (ed.), Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring, Routledge, New York, 2015 (Sadiki 2015): 1–13.
- 41.
Stéphane Grueso, “Conversación con Pablo Padilla” [Conversation with Pablo Padilla], Madrid.15 M.cc, 22 December 2011 (Grueso 2011).
- 42.
Please refer to the excellent analysis of Aziz Mechouat, Le Mouvement du 20 février au Maroc. Identité, Organisation et discours [The 20th of February Movement in Morocco. Identity, Organisation and Narrative], PAF, Paris, 2012 (Mechouat 2012).
- 43.
In 2012, the number of young Spaniards between 15 and 29 years of age who were living abroad were 302,623, while in 2009 they were 242,154 (Source: Instituto Nacional de Estadística). These data, however, do not include Spanish emigrants who had not registered with the respective consulate, and who represented the majority among the youth. It is estimated that every week a few thousands young people emigrate. The number of Spanish young citizens who live abroad is gradually increasing (405,285 in January 2016, age range 15–29). 91 % of the jobs destroyed during 2009–2012 affected young people under 35 years of age (see INA’s Encuesta de Población Activa [Labour force survey], 2016).
- 44.
Sources: El economista. 2013; “Cambio de tendencia: los españoles emigran a Marruecos huyendo del desempleo” [Trend Change: Spaniards emigrate to Morocco Fleeing Unemployment], elEconomista.es, August 28, 2013.
- 45.
Planet Syria is part of thesyriacampaign.org.
- 46.
Interview held in Tunis in March 2015.
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Solera, G. (2017). Decolonizing the Mediterranean: The Battle of Images and Clichés. In: Citizen Activism and Mediterranean Identity. Mobility & Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45961-5_2
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