Od prakticiranja k »tehniciranju« politike

The Mediterranean is a meeting point. On the one hand, meeting points imply communication, activity, openness and interlacement, while on the other, conflict, frequently even war, destruction and extermination. Meetings, therefore, represent both danger and opportunity, threat and occasion, the possibility of annihilation and a model of a new quality, which the Mediterranean clearly mirrors. Its endless tension, the relations between harmony and opposition, its similarities and differences reveal the Mediterranean, in its essence, as a zone of mediation, and mediation itself as the very prerequisite of the existence of something like the Mediterranean. One of the most fundamental mediations, out of which all the others derive, is the relationship between man and man. Once translated into the language of questions, this could be reformulated as the question of the possibility and purpose of human society, i.e. the essence of the political. The Mediterranean is, amongst other things, the source of two, one could say diametrically opposed yet determinative approaches to this issue: one is the so-called traditional approach to politics – the Ancient Greek understanding of politics as a set of actions by free and equal citizens, who fulfil the purposes of a good and virtuous life in a state as a political community, the most outstanding example of which is formulated by Aristotle (philosophia anthropina) – while the other is the so-called modern approach to politics, which is the polar opposite of the Ancient Greek definition of the relationship at hand. With Machiavelli a radical shift takes place, and the analyses of his work disclose his influence on contemporaneity.