ABSTRACT
The sea changes related to the end of the Cold War, the advance of globalization and all that it entails, and the expansion of supra-national regional political and economic entities, such as the European Union, have inaugurated discussion and debate about reconceptualizing the world by deploying frames of analysis other than the nation-state. In the context of this intellectual ferment, scholars, such as those represented in this volume, are interrogating some of the central ideological props of the modern era, like the division of the world into regions on the basis of abstractions like East and West and Oriental and Occidental. A crucial element of this re-imagining of the world is a reassessment of the relationship between Europe and the Mediterranean and how the Euro-Mediterranean fits into the wider world of the twenty-first century.
