Transnational Nationalism in the Mediterranean Sea

Explores how nationalist projects in the modern Mediterranean absorbed, reshaped or erased shared intercultural identities, offering five historical case studies from Italy, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon and Libya

The study of modern Mediterranean history, society and international relations has long featured debates over whether and which of the values, norms and perspectives found in the region are site-specific or cross-cultural. In the past few decades, scholars have offered new understandings of the Mediterranean’s nationalist era in the 19th and 20th centuries by exploring the tension between national and transnational identities. Recent advances by far-right and authoritarian forces in a wide array of Mediterranean states prove that this tension remains of present-day significance and urgency.
Transnational Nationalism in the Mediterranean Sea: Origins and Aftermaths provides a timely, innovative and concise contribution to these ongoing debates. As it is indisputable that numerous Mediterranean sub-regions entered the nationalist era expressing intercultural characteristics, many questions remain to be answered about, first, the repurposing of pre-nationalist shared identities for nation-building causes and, second, attempts by nationalist forces to divide and erase those same shared identities. In the face of these questions, Schumacher argues that methodologies predicated on critiquing crude dyads like East versus West, North versus South, and Europe versus non-Europe are outmoded and present very little utility in policy-minded spaces.
Schumacher proposes that a case-studies approach has better potential to provide both new insights for scholars and actionable information for policymakers. He provides five historical case studies, centred on the national experiences of Italy, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon and Libya. First, he investigates how Italian nation-building was affected by the Italian peninsula’s pre-unification relations with other Mediterranean locales. Second, he explores the nature of Greekness in the Ottoman world after the emergence of an independent Greek state. Third, he offers a view on how the rise of Turkish nationalism affected the Ottoman role in the Mediterranean Sea. Fourth, he looks at how Lebanon’s colonial and post-colonial history reflects the limits of transnational narratives in nation-building and asserting state sovereignty. Fifth, he examines Libyan nationalists’ attempts to reconcile their country’s desert versus maritime and local versus international identities. The book closes by suggesting that the ongoing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean should lead scholars to question the instrumentality of their work.