Samsun(by Simone Perotti)

Years ago, I was in charge as General Manager of a subsidiary of a USA company. I met periodically my colleagues, and all the time we had to face an apparently unsolvign problem, it was the Spanish, or the Greek, or the Libanese, or the Turkish General Manager (or the italian), to find a solution. It was, generally, a solution outside the policy. With us (the Mediterraneans) around the table, it was always a good day for the solutions, but a bad day for the policies…

We are all children of times that has seen the hegemony of Anglosaxon and Northern European thought. All of us, since we were children, were invited to look to the North West, towards Berlin, London, Boston. But doing this, we turned our backs on the sea.

Doing this, the citizens of the Mediterranean, the founders of culture, of law, of the values ​​of all humanity, the guardians of Time and knowledge… they have abdicated the construction of their own existential and life models.

Obviously, there is a lot of good stuff in the North-Western culture, and as the traditional openness, innate curiosity, humility of Mediterranean culture dictates, it’s very good to study it, get to know it, take every discovery, every conquest, and make them your own. So would the Romans, the Greeks, the Minoans, the Ancient Egyptians… and then the Genoese, the Venetians, the Ottomans. Open cultures, which absorbed, enriched their knowledge in contact with the world. But then, they established, as Pericles said, that “We in Athens do this way“. Our grandfathers Mediterraneans always listened everybody, kept all useful things from other people, but they decided for their own lifes in their own way.

Remember that the step from being curious observers to became uncritical followers, is a retreat. In our times, when we work, as when we live, even when we eat, we often try to behave in ways that are not ours, the very organization of work is not ours, the style of negotiation, of life… The sense of time is not ours, nor that of relationships. Some of us even hide his ideas, or how he would approach a certain topic.
If it takes to keep your job, I can understand that. But that’s a shame.

We are women and men of the Mediterranean, epigones of an extraordinary history. And we are finally, by generation, in a position to understand where we come from, weave threads able to unite, unearth an ancient pride that will never be separatist or supremacist, but unionist, supportive, pacifist. We, more than anyone else, today, after millennia of wars, can and must work for peace, integration, dialogue. We, more than others, are expected by history to make a contribution to the challenges of the time.

We observe in these months that the foundations of the world, organized according to the values ​​of money, power, competition end work (which is no longer a noble instrument but an all-encompassing target, which puts in the background affections, families, relationships, even thought, study and creativity)… these foundations… are rapidly collapsing. This model has produced weak, spoiled generations, unable to resist adversity, and now try to recover with all its scientific and technological power to withstand the impact of history. Soon, this system will have to try far more than a vaccine… the consequences of the model, for instance in the climate storm coming up, will be a much bigger challenge than a virus.

Already today, and even more at that moment, dear Mediterranean brothers, there will be a strong need for reconstructors, people who use their intellect to think new patterns of life, inspired by new ideas, capable of creating new living spaces and aggregation, new economies, a new relationship with the private dimension, with oneself and with others.
Perhaps the time when capital run to hire the best to work for itself, to increase turnover and acquire greater market-share, is going to the end. Probably the new times will be the ones where the best, among you, among us, will have to consciously decide which side they want to be on, and if the talents received, the studies done, the experiences acquired, should not be used elsewhere. Those talents come from the Mediterranean, in you, and it wouldn’t be bad if they came back to it.

When I decided to travel around the Mediterranean, I knew I was putting seven years of my life on the table, to sail for 20,000 miles, in more than twenty-two countries… but it was clear in my mind I would have understood the importance of this continent, as it happend, its enormous potential, as I saw with my eyes. I had in front of me, in hundreds of circumstances, the typical italian hospitality made by a turkish, or the sincere eyes of a Greek on the face of a Tunisian, or the wide open mind of a son-of-Israel expressed by the smile of a young Arab guy. I saw the Balcans talking as a Georgian, or as a Spanish, the Romenian be noble and pride as a Cretan. I felt myself at home in all your countries, some of them I know better than my homeland.

When I was sailing back to Genoa, it was the end of the trip… just fifty or seventy miles more… I started remembering all the faces I’ve seen for years, in every corner of our world… all the meaningful words pronounced and listened, and in that moment I had the vision of a flag. A Mediterranean Flag, that we needed. This place of values, wisdom, knowledge, it’s a living paradox: not yet a federal country, but already a homeland. And a homeland needs a flag. But a flag totally different from anyother ever. The first flag in history to be raised only in case of peace, to be lowered in case of war. The first flag that nobody will die for.

So I decided to make a bid, to invite people all over the Mediterranean to design a flag and write few lines of values below the flag. We received quite one thousand proposals. Then the online world became a jury that voted, thousands of votes… and the people decided the winner flag. A wonderful flag. That flag is ours…

Now, with my colleagues, all mariners on board the Mediterranean Project I founded 7 years ago, I’m going to send the flag to all the Presidents of the Mediterranean Countries, from Mr Netanyahu to Mr. Macron, from Mr. Erdogan to Mr. Mattarella, and also to the leaders of Europe, and I’ll write a letter to them, to remember them the great duties they have with all of us: to unify the Mediterranean Continent, that will never be alternative to Europe, just complementary, nor alternative to Africa or to Middle East or to Asia.

A United Mediterranean is not an Utopia. When the very first founders of Europe (Mr. Rossi, Mr. Spinelli, prisoners on a small italian island) started projecting the unified continent and wrote the famous “Chart of Ventotene”, it was the 1943, there where nazists everywere, bombs drop on every town, millions of dead.
That was an utopia! Germans, French, Italians, Greeks, British… in the same country.

But it happened. We did it.

Today, every morning, a horrible machine whose components are millions of employees, managers, companies, men of culture, journalists and politicians, begins its work of disintegration just to keep us all separate, to avoid that we all become aware of our history, and trust our destiny.
But every day, for millennia, that terrible Leviathan arrives in the evening without having succeeded. Using the words of a great writer, Mr. Tahar Ben Jelloun: “Every morning, in the Mediterranean, life prevails and triumphs”.

But if a lot of economical, religious, political interests didn’t succeed, for centuries, in destroying the Mediterranean extraordinary option, the hope in a future when we can live united, in safety and peace, why shouldn’t we dream and reach it tomorrow? Why sould we call it Utopia?

Today, you are building a sample, a metaphora of the Mediterranean United, as we did on board Mediterranea sailing vessel. You, working together, will show everybody, everyday, that Mediterranean United is not an utopia. It will be! And you are going to contribute everyday not only to the company you are working for, not only to the growth of your wallet or your family, but to the growth of our common world.

I do wish, and wish you all, every day, that YOU are the LIFE that Tahar Ben-Jellun wrote about. And that you will work to always help humanity prevail every morning.