ABSTRACT
The long history of interaction between the East and the West has been characterised by two opposite approaches: one that we may call ‘the crusader approach’, according to which the two must permanently be in opposition, and a violent confrontation between them is always imminent; the other, which we call ‘the Mediterranean option’, maintains that on the contrary, the two are in permanent dialogue, creative synthesis, and that it is in their reciprocal difference that each discovers itself.
