My dissertation focuses on elites’ usage of regions and regional identities to alter public opinion in order to achieve their political preferences. Hence, my delight to discover Rethinking the Mediterranean in the Fulbright Library here in Morocco. It is a book that details how elites and scholars have thought (or more accurately—not thought) about the Mediterranean as a region and a concept over time.

It is a useful case study inasmuch as the Mediterranean is certainly a very fixed region in popular conceptions of the world today. And yet, one of the focuses of the book is that no such region existed in the minds of the ancient inhabitants of what we know now as the Mediterranean. There is not even a word for Mediterranean in Latin or Greek (as a region that is, the Romans called the Mediterranean sea Mare Nostrum). Eric Calderwood’s book Colonial Al-Andalus is useful from this perspective too as he points out that only recently has the Mediterranean been a source of identity.

How did it come to be regarded as such a definitive region then? The book only partially explores this question, but offers up the regime of Louis XV as a major driving factor. The authors discuss how the French statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert sought to both conceptualize the Mediterranean as a region as well as to direct French academics and government institutions to study it. His goal was to identify (or indeed create) a region where France could dominate as the preeminent commercial and military power away from a meddling Great Britain. As the authors put it “claims that [a given region] exists are performative…they do not so much enunciate facts as create them…[and] under the right ‘felicity conditions’, actually create the realities that people perceive.” The Mediterranean as a region certainly falls under that category.

Of course, other countries in the region we now call the Mediterranean have also found it a useful designation. In one of the chapters, the authors discuss how elites opposed to Nasser’s pan-Arabism tried to frame Egypt as belonging to the Mediterranean. This was meant to suggest that the “Arab world was not the natural source of Egyptian identity” as well as promoting so-called Western or Mediterranean values.

The book also offers a similar explanation to what I offer in my thesis in terms of why ordinary people choose to identify with regions. That is, that people’s identification with regions is motivated by self-regulation, or the desire to maintain positive self-valence. In the authors’ estimation of Mediterranean identification, there are three distinct flavours.

First, identifying with a region represents exercising cultural choice, and the ability to make such a choice gives a feeling of efficacy. Second, it is a way of affirming the virtues one thinks are important. For example, they suggest that Greeks like to identify with the Mediterranean because the stereotype of Mediterranean people as passionate and spontaneous are virtues that many Greeks hold dear. Third, it can serve as a cover for national or personal failures. Using Greece again as an example, the authors suggest that identifying with Mediterranean “characteristics” such as spontaneity and passion (instead of order and logic) can help a person feel more at peace with why Greece isn’t richer, or why they themselves are not as wealthy. If wealth is created by order, consistency, and so on, then those are less likely to happen if the values in the region one inhabitants aren’t those values. Or so one can tell oneself; whether or not it is true, it is a useful face-saving exercise.