Mediterraneanism

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The Pantheon, a surviving architecture of the Roman Empire, and a symbol of its civilization.

Mediterraneanism is an ideology that claims that there are distinctive characteristics that Mediterranean cultures have in common.[1]

Germanic-speaking, and Northern Europe that claimed Mediterranean people were inferior to the supposed Nordic race
.

History

Giuseppe Sergi

The Italian anthropologist

Libyans.[2]: 24–27  Sergi noted that the Roman Empire led to the spread of Mediterranean civilization across Europe and thus contemporary European civilization was bound by ancestry to the Mediterranean race.[2]
: 24–27 

Sergi rejected Nordicism's claims of Nordic peoples being strongly Aryan, saying that Aryans were not Nordic in appearance.[2]: 24–27  Instead he claimed that Nordics were "Aryanized Euroafricans", and that the Nordic race is related to Mediterranean race.[2]: 24–27  Sergi responded to typical Nordicist claims of superiority of Nordics over Mediterraneans, by saying that the reason for the perceived lack of wealth or progress in Romance-speaking countries as compared with countries of Northern Europe was because the Aryans of the North, living in frigid climates had developed close-knit groups that allowed them to survive in that environment, as such they became more disciplined, productive civic-minded than southern Europeans.[2]: 24–27  However Sergi rejected claims that Aryans who were a Euroasian people were responsible for founding Greco-Latin civilization. Sergi described the original Aryans in Europe in a negative manner: "The Aryans were savages when they invaded Europe: they destroyed in part the superior civilization of the Neolithic populations, and could not have created the Greco-Latin civilization".[2]: 24–27  Sergi claimed that the only contribution by the ancient Aryans to European civilization was Indo-European languages.[2]: 24–27 

Sergi claimed the Nordics had made no substantial contribution to pre-modern civilization, noting that "in the epoch of Tacitus, the Germans ... remained barbarians as in prehistoric times".[2]: 24–27  He claimed that the Romans were unable to Romanize the Germans because the Germans were averse to the Romans' civilizing influence.[2]: 24–27  He rejected Germanic scholars' claims that Germans were the saviors of a decadent post-Roman Italy.[2]: 24–27  Instead Sergi claimed that the Germans were responsible for bringing forward the Dark Ages in the Medieval period and that the Germans of the Medieval period were known for "delinquency, vagabondage, and ferocity".[2]: 24–27 

C. G. Seligman supported Mediterraneanist claims, stating "it must, I think, be recognized that the Mediterranean race has actually more achievement to its credit than any other, since it is responsible for by far the greater part of Mediterranean civilization, certainly before 1000 B.C. (and probably much later), and so shaped not only the Aegean cultures, but those of Western as well as the greater part of Eastern Mediterranean lands, while the culture of their near relatives, the Hamitic pre-dynastic Egyptians, formed the basis of that of Egypt."[3]

The French historian Fernand Braudel in the 1920s invoked the conception of the Mediterraneanism including claims of Mediterranean universalism to justify French colonialism in Algeria.[4] Braudel had entered his doctrinal studies in the 1920s at the precise time when the issue of Mediterranean unity was being fiercely debated.[4] Braudel supported the pro-unity argument.[4] The argument for Mediterranean unity justified French colonialism in Algeria and viewed the Berbers in a place of privilege amongst the peoples of Africa, as retainers of the lost Roman legacy in Africa.[4] It was claimed that if the Berbers could be culturally separated from the Arabo-Islamic surrounding culture, that the Berbers would become natural allies of the French through their Mediterranean heritage that would challenge anti-colonial sentiment.[4]

Italian Fascist conception

Benito Mussolini was initially a strong proponent of Mediterraneanism; however, following his increasing allegiance towards Nazi Germany and the subsequent influence of pro-Nordicist Nazism on his policies, he began to promote pro-Nordic Aryanism and suggested that Italians had Nordic-Mediterranean heritage.

At first, Italian Fascism promoted a variant of Mediterraneanism that, like Sergi's strain of Mediterraneanism, held that Mediterranean people and cultures shared a common historical and cultural bond. Initially, this variant mostly avoided explicit racial connotations; its followers often rejected biological racism and instead stressed the importance of the cultural aspects rather than the racial aspects of the Mediterranean peoples. Implicitly, however, this form of Mediterraneanism posited the

Germanic, and Nordic people. This "defensive" form of Mediterraneanism arose mostly as a response to the then-popular theory of Nordicism, a racial theory popular at the time among Northwestern European and Germanic racial theorists, as well as racial theorists of Northwestern European descent in countries such as the United States, that viewed non-Nordic people, including some Italians and other Mediterranean people, as racially subordinate to the Nordic, Aryan, or Germanic peoples.[5][6]

In a 1921 speech in

Nazis.[2]: 39  Italian Fascism emphasized that race was bound by spiritual and cultural foundations, and identified a racial hierarchy based on spiritual and cultural factors.[2]: 39  Mussolini explicitly rejected notions that biologically "pure" races existed in modern times.[7]

In 1929, Mussolini asserted that Jewish culture was Mediterranean and that Jews were native to Italy, after living there for a long time. He also praised their contributions to Italy despite their minority status.[8][9]

Italian Fascism strongly rejected the

Anglo-Saxon Nordicists who viewed Mediterranean peoples as racially degenerate.[2]: 188  Both Nordicism and biological racism were often considered incompatible with the early Italian fascist philosophy at the time; Nordicism inherently subordinated Italians and other Mediterranean people beneath the Germans and Northwestern Europeans in its proposed racial hierarchy, and early Italian fascists, including Mussolini, often viewed race as a cultural and political invention rather than a biological reality or saw physical race as something that could be overcome through culture.[5] In a speech given in Bari in 1934, Mussolini reiterated his attitude toward Nordicism: "Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil and Augustus".[10]

Nazi German influence and “Nordicist” Mediterraneanism

From the late 1930s through

white supremacism to justify colonialism.[12]

In 1938, mere months before creating the

William Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) suggest that Mussolini enacted the Italian Racial Laws and turned towards Nazi racial theories partially to appease his Nazi German allies, rather than to satisfy a genuine anti-Semitic sentiment among the Italian people.[5]

With the rise in influence of pro-Nordicist

Hamitic peoples.[13]

In 1941, the PNF's Mediterraneanists, through the influence of

Germanic tribes made it inconceivable that Italian culture owed a debt to ancient Germans.[2]
: 146 

See also

References

  1. ISBN 978-0-19-926545-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link
    )
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab Aaron Gillette (2003). Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. Routledge.
  3. ^ The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 54. (Jan. – Jun., 1924), p. 30.
  4. ^ a b c d e Paul A. Silverstein. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation. P. 66.
  5. ^
    ISBN 978-9004212558
    . Retrieved 9 January 2016.
  6. ^ a b Neocleous, Mark. Fascism. Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. p. 36
  7. ^ Glenda Sluga. The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav Border: Difference, Identity, and Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century. SUNY Press, 2001. P. 52.
  8. ISBN 978-9004212558
    . Retrieved 9 January 2016.
  9. ^ Neocleous, Mark. Fascism. Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. p. 35
  10. ISBN 978-1-4325-9942-3
    .
  11. ^ Gerald R. Gems. Sport and the Shaping of Italian American Identity. Syracuse University Press, 2013. P57.
  12. ^ Aristotle A. Kallis. Fascist Ideology: Expansionism in Italy and Germany 1922–1945. London, England, UK; New York, New York, USA: Routledge, 2000. P. 45.
  13. ^ Stanislao G. Pugliese. Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and the Resistance in Italy: 1919 To the Present. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. P. 195.

Further reading

  • Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston: Little, Brown. 1933, p. 202.
  • The Aryan Myth, Leon Poliakov, New York: Basic Books. 1974
  • Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009). Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Univ. of Vermont Press.
    ISBN 978-1-58465-715-6
    .
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