From the Editor The Mediterranean in an Interconnected World

The first three months of 2013 represented an unusually significant period of political, economic, and social change around the Mediterranean, even by the region’s standards. The world anxiously watched the ongoing civil war that has continued to tear apart Syria and divide the international community, and it was then surprised by the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI—the first pope to resign since Pope Gregory XII in 1415. Meanwhile, Cyprus was forced to accept a European Union bailout, which damaged its reputation as an offshore banking and financial tax haven for wealthy, mostly Russian, businessmen. These three key events—and certainly all of the essays presented in this issue of the Mediterranean Quarterly—demonstrate how interconnected the world is, especially with respect to issues that evolved from the Mediterranean region.

The civil war in Syria appears intractable as ever in 2013, with relatively low interest in Washington in supporting the Syrian rebel forces—rebels who may or may not align themselves with the Western democracies on issues besides the overthrow of the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Complicating the issue are the political, economic, religious, sectarian, and tribal fault lines within Syria itself. Writing in the early 1970s, Michael van Dusen captured the complexities of Syrian society well when he wrote, “The many truncations of Syria since the turn of the [twentieth] century have stifled the development of any cohesive or definable loyalty to a Syrian nation-state.”¹ Little has changed since then, and this of course presents an evolving political conundrum on all sides as the death toll continues to rise, estimated at seventy thousand in February 2013 according to United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay. UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres has estimated that the number of Syrian refugees being displaced by the fighting had already reached 1 million people.²

Moreover, the UN confirmed reports coming out of the Syrian province of Aleppo, a rebel stronghold, that there was a chemical weapons attack in Khan al-Assal on 19 March 2013, raising the geopolitical stakes significantly and marking the next phase of the conflict. Washington has been pushed closer to intervening on the side of the Syrian rebels with the delivery of small arms and military equipment and, as of July 2013 was considering perhaps even direct air support, on the same basis that the United States intervened militarily in support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization no-fly zone during the 2011 Libyan uprising.

While tensions and uncertainty may be growing steadily in Syria, the Holy See experienced what many have considered to be one of the smoothest and least controversial transitions of leadership the Roman Catholic Church has seen in its long history. On 11 February 2013, Pope Benedict announced his resignation effective at the end of the month. The burdens on Pope Benedict of overseeing the world’s largest Christian church were certainly not lost on Vatican watchers. Nevertheless, the secretive process by the College of Cardinals in the selection of Benedict’s successor did not necessarily reflect any significant reconsideration of Catholic Church doctrine but rather a new tone of humility embodied by the new pope, Francis I from Argentina—known as someone who throughout his religious career eschewed the ceremony and formal trappings of high office. It remains to be seen whether the election of Pope Francis, the first member from the Jesuit order to ascend to the papacy and the first to have been born in the New World, means a different outlook for the world’s 1.2 billion Catholic faithful.

As white smoke billowed from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel announcing that the papal conclave had elected a new Bishop of Rome, dark clouds gathered over Cyprus. As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote:

Most people who think at all about the island of Cyprus will rely on two well-imprinted ideas of it. The first is that of an insular paradise; the birthplace of Aphrodite; the perfect beaches and mountains; the olive groves; the gentle people; and the wine-dark sea...