Constructing a Mediterranean Region: A Cultural Approach

Culture and identity lie at the heart of the world’s most intricate security problems. But to what extent are they components of a solution to those problems? How can culture and identity contribute to peace? Increasingly, both analysts and politicians associate regional security with regional integration that encompasses the development of regional identities and a common political culture. To explore the security-enhancing role of culture and identity as an integral part of regional integration, we develop here a framework for the analysis of the process of “region building” in the Mediterranean area. Post "September 11" events, and the nefarious prospects of a "Clash of Civilizations" between the West and Islam, make the exploration of the relation between culture and security, and the fate of the Mediterranean integration, even a more urgent and necessary endeavor. Introduction: The Volume's Main Goals This volume seeks to achieve three related and ambitious goals. First, it purports to suggest a cultural approach to the study of regional security and peace by means of regional pluralistic integration. As such, the volume uses a cultural, "non-conventional," scholarly approach, for the sake of analyzing regional security, which is now being promoted in Europe and other parts of the world, by means of culturally-driven "nonconventional" security practices of "cooperative security" and region-building. Second, the volume aims at taking stock of recent efforts by the European Union (EU) to promote the construction of a Mediterranean regional identity, with the aim of promoting regional security, stability, and peace. We thus tie this volume's theoretical and empirical objectives by asking what was, is, and will be of, the European Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), or "Barcelona Process," born in the city that bears its name in November 1995. We hope that preliminary answers to the above question will shed light on the potential of new security practices to promote a shared sense of security in, and peoples' regional identification with, spaces and socially constructed regions that transcend cultural and civilization borders. Third, we place this volume's theoretical and empirical content in the historical context of post-"9/11" events. These events, only a decade after the international system was shaken by a major transformation due to the end of the Cold War, seem once more to be changing the way we understand security practices, agendas, coalitions and goals. The question, then, is what will happen now to security practices that European institutions, such as the EU and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE)