The Mediterranean Legacy for the Future of Europe

The Mediterranean Legacy The Mediterranean legacy is a complex ensemble of ideas, images, feelings which have been cultivted for centuries and are still cultivated in this "sea (not ocean) in between the earths"; which has been called by the ancient Romans mare nostrum and which could be called again in that way if - as Franco Cassano has argued - we understand nostrum with a totally different meaning: as referred to us, the humans. Evoking and thinking of the Mediterranean legacy means beginning to think alternatives to the actual state of the things of the world and of Europe. Going back to the disasters produced in the XIX century, by giacobinism and colonialism, by the ideologies of science and progress; and, in the XX century the disasters produced by the European civil war (1914-1945) and by the "cold war" (1948-1989), by the ideologies of the "end of history" and the "clash of civilizations". And beginning to think at the "historical existence" of humans in a totally different way. Reinventing new categories in the place of the dominant ones: like the given for granted dualism between open and closed societies, simple and complex societies, or antiques and modern times; or North and South or East and West civilizations. In order to do this kind of work - this new way of thinking the world - we can use the researches and the intellectual work made by prominent scholars which are quoted in my bibliography: like Gino Germani (1991), Jack Goody (2006), Remi Brague (1999; 2005) and Franco Cassano (2007b). They are my starting points.