The Mediterranean curse
11/12/11 18:52![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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talkpoliticsIf we were told to bash a country (as is the theme of the month), I guess Greece would look like the easiest target. It has become the synonym of debt and crisis. But it is not only Greece that we should be talking about. Nearly the entire Mediterranean is now in trouble. There must be something wrong going on there... Indeed, the Mediterranean is not just Greece. But Greece symbolises all the other countries in the region, being the most extreme case. And because they share the same tradition, cuisine, mentality, and maybe the way people there look at life and the person's rights and responsibilities to society.
It is a common theme that the Mediterranean is a preferred place to live, because of the great climate, the awesome food and the warm people. It inspires artists, celebrities or just wealthy people to spend as much time there as possible, or even move there permanently. "Those people know how to appreciate life, and how to enjoy it to the full", is a cliche that we hear very often. But meanwhile, the Mediterranean has become a synonym for negligence, incompetence and corruption. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy, and very probably soon France, too, are often accused of betraying the Western values. Their detractors use the argument that these peoples want to have everything, now. And that they have lost their way because of that. They say that the Southern people were reaping the fruits of capitalism without adopting its ascetic approach to money and the material part of life, the cold realism and rationalism, and the disciplined, efficient bureaucracy that we see north of the Alps. Of course we would often hear the evidence that Greece had cheated the EU in order to become a member. And it continued to cheat about its budget deficits for many years (not without some help from outside by the way). We can now often hear screams like "Greece - out!", and not just by drunken Germans in the pub on a Friday night, no. Politicians, too.
But it would be good if we could put this into a broader perspective. We would realize that we all still need the Mediterranean, despite all its flaws. When a friend brought her little daughter to Greece on excursion, it took her girl just two days to come up with the stunning revelation that she wanted to live there rather than in the cold dark North. And that is no surprise. The little one had sensed what everyone else knew already, and what has fascinated travelers and artists, and ordinary people from the North and West. And this is not just about the beauty of Greece's nature, it is more about the people and their approach to life, even if we discount the economic excesses from the last decades.
On the other hand, the anger and confusion of many Northern people directed at the South is understandable. How could the elites of Greece, Italy, Spain, and also the Maghreb and Middle East, bring their people to such a miserable situation? How stupid and irresponsible must someone be to do that? These are the sentiments pervading the North, and they are easy to understand if we put ourselves in their place. Indeed, the Mediterranean is such a strange place from a Northern point of view... It is the place that gave birth to such wonderful things like democracy, Roman law, and several major world philosophic paradigms and religions. And in the meantime it was where multiple genocides happened, and entire countries were turned into private fiefdoms belonging to separate clans and dynasties, or military regimes. It is the place that brought corruption into modern politics for the first time. This dualism in the South is hard to understand by a Northerner.
Many thinkers originating from the South have criticised the cold, sharp, unfriendly form of capitalism of the North. But they also missed to notice that this same Northern capitalism somehow managed to bring a functioning health care and a social system for its people, and it brought the welfare state in its Scandinavian form, and Reformation, and the technological and scientific progress in its modern form (although it, again, originated and was inspired by the South, particularly Italy). And meanwhile, the South has been plagued by misery, corruption, Balkanization, and turmoil, and huge periods of time without any prospect of development. The present situation of the Mediterranean should remind us that the Northern type of capitalism might not be "The" worst possible framework for realising the human striving for happiness. In fact there might be other, far more grotesque forms of it.
But we also shouldn't forget something else. Europe, or the Western world to that matter, would still be impossible to imagine without the enormously rich heritage of Greece, Rome and the Levant. It never hurts to look at the developments in Greece, Italy and Iberia, and remind ourselves that we should be careful about capitalism and its side effects. It shouldn't be brought to extremes, because extremes seldom work, and certainly they are unsustainable in the long term. The debt is debt, fine, but progress at the expense of social and environmental balance, and constant growth for its own sake at the expense of economic sustainability, is never a panacea to the hardships of the day.
No matter what happens, the Mediterranean will always be there. Those societies have been there since the dawn of human civilisation, and they will survive in one way or another. They have gone through innumerable cataclysms and crises, compared to which the current one is just nothing. The Atlantic and Northern world has yet to experience all that, and come up with evidence that it is able to endure in the same way. So, instead of jumping at the Southerners and throwing heavy judgments and verdicts about their laziness and corruption, and their frivolous approach to life and the world around them, perhaps we would like to think about the bigger picture. The Mediterranean is not our antithesis. It is a part of us, and a lesson that we should learn from.
It is a common theme that the Mediterranean is a preferred place to live, because of the great climate, the awesome food and the warm people. It inspires artists, celebrities or just wealthy people to spend as much time there as possible, or even move there permanently. "Those people know how to appreciate life, and how to enjoy it to the full", is a cliche that we hear very often. But meanwhile, the Mediterranean has become a synonym for negligence, incompetence and corruption. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy, and very probably soon France, too, are often accused of betraying the Western values. Their detractors use the argument that these peoples want to have everything, now. And that they have lost their way because of that. They say that the Southern people were reaping the fruits of capitalism without adopting its ascetic approach to money and the material part of life, the cold realism and rationalism, and the disciplined, efficient bureaucracy that we see north of the Alps. Of course we would often hear the evidence that Greece had cheated the EU in order to become a member. And it continued to cheat about its budget deficits for many years (not without some help from outside by the way). We can now often hear screams like "Greece - out!", and not just by drunken Germans in the pub on a Friday night, no. Politicians, too.
But it would be good if we could put this into a broader perspective. We would realize that we all still need the Mediterranean, despite all its flaws. When a friend brought her little daughter to Greece on excursion, it took her girl just two days to come up with the stunning revelation that she wanted to live there rather than in the cold dark North. And that is no surprise. The little one had sensed what everyone else knew already, and what has fascinated travelers and artists, and ordinary people from the North and West. And this is not just about the beauty of Greece's nature, it is more about the people and their approach to life, even if we discount the economic excesses from the last decades.
On the other hand, the anger and confusion of many Northern people directed at the South is understandable. How could the elites of Greece, Italy, Spain, and also the Maghreb and Middle East, bring their people to such a miserable situation? How stupid and irresponsible must someone be to do that? These are the sentiments pervading the North, and they are easy to understand if we put ourselves in their place. Indeed, the Mediterranean is such a strange place from a Northern point of view... It is the place that gave birth to such wonderful things like democracy, Roman law, and several major world philosophic paradigms and religions. And in the meantime it was where multiple genocides happened, and entire countries were turned into private fiefdoms belonging to separate clans and dynasties, or military regimes. It is the place that brought corruption into modern politics for the first time. This dualism in the South is hard to understand by a Northerner.
Many thinkers originating from the South have criticised the cold, sharp, unfriendly form of capitalism of the North. But they also missed to notice that this same Northern capitalism somehow managed to bring a functioning health care and a social system for its people, and it brought the welfare state in its Scandinavian form, and Reformation, and the technological and scientific progress in its modern form (although it, again, originated and was inspired by the South, particularly Italy). And meanwhile, the South has been plagued by misery, corruption, Balkanization, and turmoil, and huge periods of time without any prospect of development. The present situation of the Mediterranean should remind us that the Northern type of capitalism might not be "The" worst possible framework for realising the human striving for happiness. In fact there might be other, far more grotesque forms of it.
But we also shouldn't forget something else. Europe, or the Western world to that matter, would still be impossible to imagine without the enormously rich heritage of Greece, Rome and the Levant. It never hurts to look at the developments in Greece, Italy and Iberia, and remind ourselves that we should be careful about capitalism and its side effects. It shouldn't be brought to extremes, because extremes seldom work, and certainly they are unsustainable in the long term. The debt is debt, fine, but progress at the expense of social and environmental balance, and constant growth for its own sake at the expense of economic sustainability, is never a panacea to the hardships of the day.
No matter what happens, the Mediterranean will always be there. Those societies have been there since the dawn of human civilisation, and they will survive in one way or another. They have gone through innumerable cataclysms and crises, compared to which the current one is just nothing. The Atlantic and Northern world has yet to experience all that, and come up with evidence that it is able to endure in the same way. So, instead of jumping at the Southerners and throwing heavy judgments and verdicts about their laziness and corruption, and their frivolous approach to life and the world around them, perhaps we would like to think about the bigger picture. The Mediterranean is not our antithesis. It is a part of us, and a lesson that we should learn from.
(no subject)
Date: 11/12/11 18:37 (UTC)I can understand where the accusation against the Southerners about a lack of responsibility is coming from. Of course the issue is much more multi-layered than most people are trying to imagine it to be, but there is some validity to that point.
(no subject)
Date: 11/12/11 19:06 (UTC)souvlakiShopska-salad and drink myouzorakia I go!(no subject)
Date: 11/12/11 19:31 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/12/11 19:39 (UTC)*runs for schnapps*
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Date: 11/12/11 19:41 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/12/11 19:49 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/12/11 02:49 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/12/11 21:39 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/12/11 21:41 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/12/11 21:43 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/12/11 21:44 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/12/11 22:27 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/12/11 11:42 (UTC)The one in the userpic is pretty popular in America, not... oh, I get it.
(no subject)
Date: 12/12/11 12:11 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/12/11 22:40 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/12/11 19:44 (UTC)