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A General Introduction to the Special Issue: Mediterranean Political Processes in Comparative Historical Perspective
Charles H. Tilly American Behavioral Scientist 2008 51: 1467 DOI: 10.1177/0002764208316355 The online version of this article can be found at: http://abs.sagepub.com/content/51/10/1467

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A General Introduction to the Special Issue

Mediterranean Political Processes in Comparative Historical Perspective
Charles H. Tilly
Columbia University, New York

American Behavioral Scientist Volume 51 Number 10 June 2008 1467-1471 2008 Sage Publications 10.1177/0002764208316355 http://abs.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

For millennia, the Mediterranean Sea has connected Eurasias western fifthEuropewith Asia and Africa. These articles on Mediterranean political processes from 1400 to 2006 unfold against the background of regional distinctness. The Mediterranean gains special properties from its service as an intercontinental bridge, the diversity of its populations, the age-old but never successful competition for control of its perimeter, and the intensity of trading connections within its limits. All of these features have long shaped Mediterranean political processes and continue to do so today. The articles in these two special issues stand out not only for the light they shed on the region but also for their adoption of a relational perspective on Mediterranean political processes. Keywords: Mediterranean, network, contentious politics, economic struggle

In the vivid preface to his early masterwork, The Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel (1966) declares his love for that meandering sea, a love sustained by the seas very complexity:
The Mediterranean is not just one sea, but a complex of seas, of seas filled with islands, cut by peninsulas, surrounded by articulated coasts. Its life blends with the land, its poetry is more than half rustic, its sailors are sometimes peasants; it is the sea of olive trees and vines as much as of its narrow galleys or the round-bottomed boats of its merchants. We cannot separate its history from the terrestrial world that wraps it any more than we can remove the clay from the hands of the sculptor who is modeling it. (I, p. 13)

That vision of connectedness between land and sea has inspired many a later scholar. For example, Chaudhuri (1991) painted a very Braudelian portrait of the Indian Ocean, including the land around it, as a coherent, distinctive entity between the rise of Islam and the 18th century. Long connected by the diverse inhabitants of the Middle East, the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean began to interact much more intensely during the 15th and
Authors Note: Please note that this issue features three guest editors: Roberto Franzosi (Emory University), Maria Kousis (University of Crete), and myself. 1467

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16th centuries, as predatory Europeans began venturing out into the Atlantic, down the African coast, around the African continent, and into the waters of Asia. From that point on, the two seas distinctness resulted not from their isolation but from their interaction. Europeans recognized that interaction by calling the Mediterraneans eastern rim the Middle East. In their latter-day Mediterranean, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell (2000) pay tribute to Braudel by asking whether before the 16th century that the French master so brilliantly illuminated the sea displayed the same unity and connectedness. They conclude that it did: The great seas dynamics inevitably shaped all its parts. But Horden and Purcell also soon find themselves making a non-Braudelian distinction between history of the region and history in the region (Horden & Purcell, 2000, pp. 1-2). Contributions in the present symposium clearly fall into the second category. They spend little effort treating the whole region as such. Ranging from the 14th century to the present, our authors instead take up political processes within and across the Mediterranean from historical, comparative, and relational perspectives. In this issue of the American Behavioral Scientist and in its companion issue, our authors examine Mediterranean political processes over six centuries, from 1400 to the present. In this issues articles by Demetriou, Kksal, Gavrilis, and Smith, we see the impact of two fundamental and related processes: the rise and fall of a mighty Ottoman Empire occupying most of the eastern Mediterranean and the unsteadily but inexorably increasing involvement of the Mediterranean as a whole in the trade, politics, and culture of Asia. In the second issue, Laleh Khalili, Maritsa Poros, Maria Kousis, Donatella della Porta, Manuel Jimenez, Yagil Levy, and Mona El-Ghobashy analyze different outcomes of those two processes in the present and the recent past. The two processes themselves interacted. The Ottomans, already a significant military force further east by the 14th century, made major advances into Europe and Africa between 1350 and 1500. During the 19th century, European powers began picking that empire apart, until its remnants collapsed during World War I. Whether under Ottoman control or not, the Eastern Mediterranean continued to connect Europe with Asian culture, trade, and political power over the entire period from 1400 onward. Demetrious study of Cyprus between 1400 and 1700 shows us the twin processes most directly; Cyprus domestic economy and polity shifted dramatically as the Mediterranean island moved from Lusignanian to Venetian to Ottoman domination. The other three articles also record the impact of the Ottomans and of Asian connections. Yonca Kksal examines changing systems of political control within the threatened empire during the 19th century; George Gavrilis analyzes relations between the empire and its former Greek colonies at roughly the same time; and Tammy Smith shows us the residues of the two big processes after World War II, when an Italy that had long interacted closely with the Ottomans and a Yugoslavia created in part from former Ottoman territories negotiated a border and a definition

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of national differences. As compared with politics in the rest of Europe, most of Africa, and the Americas, Mediterranean politics has long gained special properties from the interplay among four features of its regional setting:
1. The Mediterraneans service as a pointor rather a clusterof intercontinental contacts; 2. The extreme diversity of populations on its islands and around its shores, including the shifting distribution of attachments to three great religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; 3. Age-old but always unsuccessful competition for political and economic control of its perimeter, in which successive Muslim empires made the most sustained and far-reaching efforts but still failed; 4. Intense commercial connections over more than two millennia, always connecting mainland Europe and northern Africa with vast Asian systems of trade.

Certainly, isolation and provincialism have sometimes characterized sections of the Mediterranean region such as the interior Balkans (Tilly, 2004, pp. 229-232). But on the whole, our analysts are watching politics in one of the Western worlds most cosmopolitan territories. So doing, our contributors are also making distinctive choices of analytical strategy. Treating complex political processes, social historians and social scientists have a choice among three possible perspectives on their subject matter: systemic, dispositional, and relational. Systemic accounts posit a coherent, self-sustaining entity such as a sea, a society, a world economy, a community, an organization, a household, or at the limit a person, explaining events inside that entity by their location within the entity as a whole. Dispositional accounts similarly posit coherent entitiesin this case more often individuals than any othersbut explain the actions of those entities by means of their orientations just before the point of action. Competing dispositional accounts feature motives, decision logics, emotions, and cultural templates. Relational accounts take interactions among persons, groups, and other social sites as their starting points, treating both events at those sites and durable characteristics of those sites as outcomes of interactions. Despite a great tradition and grand examples such as Braudels masterpiece, over recent decades, systemic explanations of social processes have lost ground to relational and, especially, dispositional explanations. Dispositional explanations have the great advantage of corresponding to peoples everyday accounts of social action, which regularly take the form X did it because she wanted to accomplish Y. But they have serious logical and methodological disadvantages. Logically, they exclude incremental effects, environmental effects, feedback effects, simultaneous effects, unintended consequences, and processes of aggregation while exaggerating the distinction between agency and structure. Methodologically, they block serious efforts to trace mutual influence among social

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sites. In precisely these regards, relational approaches to social processes show their strengths. The articles in this symposium on Mediterranean political processes display just such strengths. Far from treating the Mediterranean as a huge system that generates political outcomes or as the context for millions of individual dispositions, they devote Braudelian attention to the interplay of persons, groups, and other social sites. The articles make a Braudelian tour of the Mediterranean, from Spain to Lebanon. Faithful to Braudelian inspiration, they take history seriously. They take it seriously in three senses. First, they insist that when and where political processes occur affect how they occur; no timeless, placeless models of disposition-driven rational action in these meaty accounts of political interaction. Second, they analyze political changes over time rather than settling for cross-sectional comparisons at the same point in time. Third, their explanations entail historical causation, in which what happens now shapes what happens next. To be sure, the articles vary enormously in temporal scope, from Demetrious three centuries of Cypriot history to the recent foci of the papers in Part II. But all convey a clear message: history counts. All of our two issues articles deal with political processes rather than static structures, but there the differences begin. With varying emphases, our authors favored processes include the following:
Alterations in center-periphery relations and their political consequences (Demetriou, Kksal, Gavrilis, Kousis, della Porta, and Jimenez, with the last three bringing in the European Union as a center) Identity formation and transformation (Demetriou, Kksal, Smith, Khalili, and Poros) Production and transformation of collective memory (Smith and Khalili) Shifts in citizen-state relations as a result of collective action (Levy, El-Ghobashy), political mobilization, and contention (Gavrilis, Khalili, Poros, Kousis, della Porta, Jimenez, Levy, and El-Ghobashy)

In each regard, our authors construct sophisticated relational accounts of the political processes at hand. Their methods vary from the formal network analyses of Kksal and Smith to the first-hand ethnography of Khalili and El-Ghobashy. But they join in a common effort to clarify how Mediterranean political processes unfold in history. In all these articles, then, the value of relational analyses for political processes in historical context appears clearly. Systemic and dispositional accounts have their places, but to get political processes right, analysts must get past self-maintaining systems and individualized dispositions to the continuous interplay of social sites. To understand the interplay, we must place the sites in their regional histories. The Mediterranean offers a marvelous arena for the investigation of that consequential interplay.

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References
Braudel, F. (1966). La Mditerrane et le Monde Mditerranen lpoque de Philippe II [The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the era of Phillippe II] (Rev. ed.). Paris: Colin. Chaudhuri, K. N. (1991). Asia before Europe: Economy and civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Horden, P., & Purcell, N. (2000). The corrupting sea: A study of Mediterranean history. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (2004). Contention and democracy in Europe, 1650-2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Charles H. Tilly teaches social science at Columbia University. His most recent books include Why? (Princeton University Press, 2006), The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (with Robert Goodin, Oxford University Press, 2006), Regimes and Repertoires (Chicago University Press, 2006), Contentious Politics (with Sidney Tarrow, Paradigm Publishers, 2006), Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Explaining Social Processes (Paradigm Publishers, 2008), Contentious Performances (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Credit and Blame (Princeton University Press, 2008).

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