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Practical Mediterraneanism 63
countries to foist upon them, and to live with the consequences.
This is a spectacular case of visiting the sins of the children
upon the fathers. A critical study of Mediterranean identities is
not necessarily and should not be, an act of ‘Mediterraneanism’.
It can instead be a critical response to such essentializing discourses.
To become that response, however, it must entail full
recognition of the extent to which it is itself enmeshed in political
and ideological processes. There is no value in emphasizing
the excesses of critique if the alternative is to retreat into another,
no less totalizing and politically insensitive discourse.
For better or for worse, the history of even the most distant
Mediterranean pasts is always already politicized—indeed, one
might argue that its distance is precisely what allows politicians
to have their way with the past-in-the-present. And that engagement
is part of what creates both the distinctive peculiarities
of the microregions of the Mediterranean and the
occasionally compelling sense that it does, after all, have quite
a lot in common. Here, too, the discursive community of disciplinary
practitioners, in Lederman’s sense, exemplifies the
trade-offs between conceptual expediency and critical knowledge
that we can none of us entirely sidestep, but toward
which we must always maintain a critically vigilant and politically
sceptical stance. In that sense, we do indeed have a lot to
talk about.