Teaching Activities
01
The aim of the course is to provide students with an overview of the historical-political evolution of the Mediterranean area from the 18th century until 1945. The course will be structured in three modules. The first two are devoted to the 18th and 19th centuries, the third to the period from the end of the 19th century until after the Second World War. The main ambition of the course is to describe and interpret the historical and political evolution of the area taking into account the interactions between the main countries in the area. Another distinctive feature of the course will be to relate the historical-political dynamics of the Mediterranean area with those external (Atlantic, Asian, African) but closely related to it, and this particularly in the acute phase of imperialism and the first half of the 20th century. Finally, a privileged space will be devoted to the intertwining of the national, imperial and supranational governance dimensions and the political and religious and socio-cultural dimensions.
02
​The course aims at reconstructing the process of European integration, its origins and development up to its contemporary criticalities starting from a continental perspective but giving special importance to the interaction between the two shores of the Mediterranean area. Special attention will be devoted to the intertwining of the integration process and the evolution of the Arab world, with a focus starting from the great crisis of the early 1970s. At the end of the course the student will be able to retrace the main stages of the European integration process, identify its institutional actors and place its evolution within the Cold War and post-colonial evolution scenarios, with a specific focus on the southern shore of the Mediterranean.
03
The aim of this course is to describe and study three main dimensions of the European integration process. First, the institutional and political one, between the end of the Second World War and Brexit. Secondly the Mediterranean aspect considering the original links with Africa, passing through the entering of Spain, Portugal and Greece into the EEC and the energy issues, till the complicated steps of the Barcelona Process and the Union for the Mediterranean. And thirdly the cultural diplomacy dimension, in the attempt to consider in a realistic way difficulties and limits but also opportunities and potentialities of the so-called soft power and, at large, of a European foreign policy in the current multipolar world. By the end of the course, the student knows the main dimensions and events that have characterised the European integration process and is capable of critically assessing how is important to have a correct and multidimensional knowledge of the historical roots of the integration process for understanding today’s turning point of European Union.
04
The aim of this course is to describe the evolution of the political systems of the countries of the Mediterranean area. On one hand, the class is going to study the evolution of the political systems of Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Greece (in these three last cases with a particular attention to the transition to democracy) during the Cold War and after the fall of communism. On the other hand, the class will focus also on the political evolution of the principal political systems of the main countries of the southern side of Mediterranean, in particular Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria after French decolonization but also Egypt and Turkey. At the end of the course the idea is to question if we can consider the Mediterranean area as a compact one and in general if we can find similar evolution lines.
