Myths and Making of the ‘Mediterranean World’

Looking back from where we stand, we can see how the creation of a new political idea of Europe during the early modern period began to gradually prepare the transformation of the Mediterranean from a sea into a ‘world’. This transformation was accomplished in word and deed between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, both through Napoleon's conquest of Egypt and other colonial enterprises and the geophilosophical writings of Hegel, Humboldt and others. In the context of a trans-Mediterranean colonial French mindset, the ‘Mediterranean World’ was further popularized in the twentieth century by Braudel. Was this a process of scientific discovery of the region’s true, innermost geohistorical characteristics? Or was it the collective creation of a new space metaphor based on power politics and the European mythologeme of universal history? By concluding the volume on ‘Mediterranean Europe(s)’, this chapter sums up the French-European construction of Mediterranean unity and the Other, and looks at space metaphors in colonial relationships and the importance of Mediterranean references for the construction of ‘national Selfs’ in European countries. Finally, it discusses the attempts by Camus, Cassano, Chambers and others to delineate a ‘better’, non-colonial and non-Eurocentric, ‘Mediterreanean World’.