Great Powers in the Mediterranean
Victoria de Grazia, Director of the European Institute, is leading this project, which includes the following participants:
Conferences For more information, including programs and proceedings, please see the Conferences page. Cold War in the Mediterranean: Connecting the Fronts Led by Victoria de Grazia vd19@columbia.edu 14-15 November 2008 The Cold War was especially disruptive in the vast, diverse region encircling the Mediterranean Sea. The one-time European colonial powers withdrew or were expelled from the eastern and southern coasts, reorganizing themselves in the European Community with a North-Western and Trans-Atlantic orientation. American analysts remapped the area in terms of “security regions,” and Soviet experts, in terms of the USSR’s quest for strategic partners. The newly emancipated countries stretching across North African and eastern Mediterranean coasts were essentially prevented from forming cross-Mediterranean solidarities by Superpower interference and by local national, religious, and development conflicts aggravated by appealing to outside powers. To understand the Cold War’s impact in the region, we need a substantial effort to bridge areas of study—Southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East—that have come to be analyzed separately. Our Workshop’s main purpose was to explore the imprint left on the region as the two Superpowers stepped into European imperial shoes in the course of World War II and struggled to mark out their areas of hegemony thereafter, playing on local national, religious, and political conflicts, mainly in the period from the Greek Civil War and Italian elections of 1948 to the 1970s proxy wars in the Middle East.
The Non-Aligned Movement in the Mediterranean Led by Rinna E. Kullaa, rk331@columbia.edu 13 February 2009
The Non-Aligned Movement was established to coordinate cooperation outside of the Cold War blocs. Born in the Mediterranean in the late 1950s, the movement sought to challenge superpower influence. Its inaugural conference was at Belgrade, and the leading figures, aside from Nehru, were Tito and Nasser. Here its development was shaped by the radicalization of politics in the Cold War Mediterranean, the superpower confrontation, decolonization, and the struggles in the Arab world set off by the founding of the State of Israel. Through the perspective of this area, we take a new look at the meaning of non-alignment, its protagonists, notably Yugoslavia, and its ramifications for a “third way” between the blocs. Our workshop’s main purpose is to bring together scholars with different disciplinary perspectives and expertise with respect to the Non-Aligned Movement in the region.
The Great Powers in the Holy Land: From Napoleon to the Balfour Declaration Led by Elena Astafieva, ea2394@columbia.edu 3-4 April 2009 This workshop brought together American and non-American researchers working on the Great Powers' presence in the Holy Land and the Levant in the 19th century. On the macro-level, we examined the Western perception of this space and the ideology of expansion, as well as the conflicts between the Great Powers in this area. On the micro-level, we examined the special cases of the relationships between the local – Arab and Jewish – population and the missionaries. We focused particularly on the study of pilgrimages to the Holy Land not only as a phenomenon of the interaction between different religious traditions (notably Christian and Muslim), but also as a political tool of the Great Powers, such as France and the Russian Empire.
Films
Propaganda Cinema: The Marshall Plan Films and America’s Cold War Image in the Mediterranean
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