ABSTRACT
Having applied a discursive constructivist theoretical framework to EU discourses on the Mediterranean, this chapter will focus on the regular markers across discursive practices in Greece, Malta and Morocco on the Mediterranean and on Europe. It aims to do this by presenting historical background sections on each case study as the doxic backdrop to ongoing debates in these case study countries on the Mediterranean and on Europe: in effect, presenting the past as part of the present discourses. By doing so, this chapter will excavate some overarching generalisations on how the respective nation-building processes involved inform contemporary national discourses on the Mediterranean and on Europe. Hence, it will map out prominent themes, dissonances, incoherencies or coherences in these discourses. These case studies were selected on the basis that, at the time of writing, they are at different stages in their relations with the EU and can therefore offer some varied insights. The question then becomes one of to what extent a particular collective (such as the three cases here) is ready to tear itself away from ‘the Mediterranean’ and into ‘Europe’. The chapter will therefore be divided as follows: the first section will look into the social-historical background of Malta, Greece and Morocco in order to construct the parameters/context of interpretation and understanding responses (prepared from textual analysis and analysed in light of fieldwork carried out in the three countries), and the overall attitudes reflected in them. Then, by adopting a hermeneutic standpoint this chapter will attempt a comparative analysis of elite discourses on issues including the Mediterranean and Europe (the EU and the EMP). This analysis will then be linked to the historical background presented in the first part of the chapter and to the political situation (context) in the cases at the time of writing. This will reveal the historical (past) or cultural background on which some of these discourses are based and which may also be tied up with more contemporary discursive practices (present). Discourses often carry with them embedded cultures or they may reflect the current political situation in the particular context or they may even contain specific conjunctions (discourses that connect other discourses). Culture is here taken to refer to the ‘social heritage’ of a community: the total body of material artefacts (tools, weapons, houses, places of work, worship, government, recreation, works of art, etc.), of collective mental and spiritual ‘artefacts’ (systems of symbols, ideas, beliefs, aesthetic perceptions, values,
etc.), and of distinctive forms of behaviour (institutions, groupings, rituals, modes of organisation, etc.), created by a people (sometimes deliberately, sometimes through unforeseen interconnections and consequences) in their ongoing activities within their particular life-conditions, and (through undergoing various kinds and degrees of change) transmitted from generation to generation.1 It is the purpose of this chapter to uncover some workings of elite discourses on the Mediterranean and Europe in Greece, Malta and Morocco. The aim of this chapter is not to neglect any fundamental and fairly obvious differences that exist between the societies under consideration by fitting them into a procrustean bed of structural similarities. The objective is rather to show that those features they have in common provide a basis for a systematic comparison and explanation of their differences. In any case, the present chapter does not claim to offer any definite or final solutions to the empirical and theoretical issues it raises: it merely presents a number of tentative ideas which may stimulate further empirical research and advance the more abstract debates on some basic themes and concepts on the Mediterranean.
