mediterranean modernity? 117
The sea’s seven soulsIn the aftermath of the Great War, the nationalization of the littoral severed—at times
violently—the cross-marine connections its cities maintained: “Alexandria turned
‘Egyptian’, Salonika ‘Greek’, Izmir ‘Turkish’, and Habsburg Trieste ‘Italian’” (Tabak,
2009: 79). Mid-twentieth century decolonization similarly materialized North-
African anticolonial nationalization, thereby significantly reducing European presence
and the strictly-cultural cosmopolitanism it had conditioned. In the battle between
two notions of modernity—pluralistic cultural élitism or nationalism—the latter had
the upper hand. The departing of avatars of European culture from port cities in the
Levant and the Maghreb marked the end of the Mediterranean—the last of its many
deaths—and the identification of modernity with the spread of the European-model
of nationalism.
The discourse on cosmopolitanism combines the historiographical and the anthro-
pological strands of Mediterraneanist studies: on the one hand, it partakes in the
temporal split between modernity and the Mediterranean; on the other hand, it
focuses on a recent phenomenon that becomes both emblematic of the wider
Mediterranean and a contemporaneous opposite of European modernity. Elegies of
cosmopolitanism thus echo histories of the Mediterranean that date the sea’s death to
earlier periods—as early as the turn of the sixteenth century or as late as the beginning
of the nineteenth—not because they agree on the conditions for the sea’s end, but
rather because all accounts construct their respective Mediterraneans in opposition to
the present. At the same time, these elegies turn cosmopolitanism into the spatial
companion to patronage and the honor syndrome because, whatever their view of
port cities c. 1900, they result in portraying a Mediterranean model of action
surrounded, and then defeated, by a modern, that is, national expansion.
Herein lies the productivity of cosmopolitanism as a theme, at least in its narrow
definition: it curiously resembles the supporting examples for the improbability of
both a Mediterranean modernity and a modern Mediterranean. Should we exclude
1900 Trieste or Alexandria from our definition of modernity? Or should we declare
that these moments showed no resemblance with the pre-modern socio-spatial con-
stellations of maritime connectivity among micro-regions? The third option would be
to start from the observation that the political economic and cultural conditions of life
in port cities fit comfortably within both modernity and the Mediterranean. If that is
so, we should be able to reconstruct the Mediterranean not on the basis of a time-
bound definition, but through the many and varied processes of maritime region
formation it has undergone.
We do not need to declare the end of modernity, national or otherwise, in
order to view various processes from the last century as contributing to the emer-
gences of regional constellations. Many of the phenomena that social scientists
term as transnational would make good candidates for such constellations. As an
analysis of narcotics trafficking in the post–World War One Levant shows, “local,
nation-state, transnational, and international processes unfolded simultaneously”
(Schayegh, 2011). In fact, the same simultaneous unfolding took place in various
sub-regions throughout the twentieth century. Agrarian cultivation remained
“parceled and segmented” well into the twentieth century (Tabak, 2009: 82).