In her emphatic speech on May 2, Isabel Díaz Ayuso attributed to Madrid the last of the capitals that she had yet to proclaim: that of the Mediterranean. No matter how audacious it is: it is hard to imagine the mayoress of Paris claiming her city as the Mediterranean capital to the detriment of Marseille, Nice or Toulon itself, a pirate port and scene of war troubles such as the sinking of the French fleet in 1942, provoked to avoid to fall into the hands of Hitler.
This inland sea, the second largest on the planet after the Caribbean, has seen leadership alternate throughout history. Each civilization has promoted a system of cities to govern the Mediterranean shores. The moment of Barcelona began in the 13th century, when, in the words of the historian José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, King James I began to see the Mediterranean world as a natural projection of the Catalan city.
This concept of natural projection has continued to be used, with more or less foundation, until today, when Barcelona, encouraged by the irruption of a promising blue economy ecosystem and the catalyst that the 2024 Copa del América represents, returns to have – or so it seems – a certain Mediterranean ambition.
Ideas like the competitive advantage that fully exploiting this projection beyond the seas means for Barcelona, in the tradition of a city built on trade.
But it is not as usual –or at least, not as much as it should be– that the responsibility of the city with the regeneration of that sea that has given it so much is emphasized. In this context, a symposium recently held in Barcelona, Troubled Blue, within the framework of the international program A Sea Change , has warned about the urgency of changing our way of relating to the Mediterranean and the rest of the seas. On multiple fronts.
Researcher Marta Puxan-Oliva developed the idea that illegal fishing is not only lethal for the environment or for economic activity itself, but also generates a dynamic of modern slavery that is difficult to detect and combat in waters that belong to everyone but they don't really belong to anyone.
He provided examples of human rights violations that, although they often occur in remote seas, should not be foreign to us as customers of the global fishing industry.
This is one of the topics addressed in the documentary Freightened , by filmmaker De nis Delestrac, who was also present at the symposium –organized by the Barcelona Quo Artis foundation with the collaboration of Europa Creativa–, along with the blue economy entrepreneur Ignasi Ferrer and artists such as Robertina Šebjanič, Maja Smrekar, Daniel G. Andujar or Filippo Minelli.
The symposium reinforces the idea that, on paper, Barcelona has solid arguments to lead or (or co-lead) not only the discourse of economic development in the Mediterranean, but also that of environmental restitution and the promotion of social, political initiatives and even artistic ones that persecute criminal practices in all seas.
The Catalan capital has, in principle, a tool to influence the problems of the Mediterranean from a political perspective: the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM). But it is an instrument of public diplomacy that is only activated episodically and that languishes without the central governments, nor those of the Generalitat, nor the successive municipal governments having much belief in its possibilities.
The America's Cup can be a good ally for the city in terms of innovation in sustainable marine practices, a vocation inherent to this competition, but it is up to the institutions and civil society to take more ambitious steps along the lines that I aimed at the beginning: to give back to the Mediterranean all that it has given to Barcelona.
For example: the city that has managed to become the Mediterranean capital of cruises would have to be the same one that provided imaginative solutions to make this industry compatible with the new environmental standards and the fight against tourist saturation. There are fewer and fewer people who defend such a predatory practice as cruises that do not spend the night in the cities where they call. But little or nothing is still being done about it.
