Around the year 1800, management of the city of Venice and its aquatic environs was wrenched from the hands of the local people who had maintained it for so long. Control passed to a succession of outsiders without local knowledge who over the years proved incapable of preserving either; subtle features of land and water that had been fine-tuned in the past slowly fell out of harmony. After the Second World War, Venice was invaded by unprecedented numbers of incomers, both transient and permanent; the local population shrank dramatically, and environmental deterioration accelerated its pace and vaulted to world attention. The past sixty years in Venice have been more destructive than any previous period in its history, and both the city and the lagoon are now in severe peril. There is no good reason to anticipate that either will survive even in the debased state that characterizes them today.
Two essential characteristics of the Venetian crisis are true of the Mediterranean region as a whole. The dramatic changes that the eighteenth century ushered in affected the region, as they affected Venice, at a relatively slow pace at first. After World War II, these forces accelerated dramatically. And as with Venice, the cause of the regionwide changes—changes that strongly impacted the environment—is, broadly speaking, a shift from local control to outside management. The regional transformation has a long history. The colonization of the southern and eastern Mediterranean that began with Napoléon’s attack on Egypt is the plainest example of external takeover. The transformation of the Côte d’Azur from farmland and fishing villages to a tourist mecca is a more subtle version of the same process.
The most immediately devastating changes came with World War II. For five long years, the Mediterranean was an epicenter of intense, prolonged, and exhausting conflict. Victors and defeated alike emerged from this brutal experience in a state of near exhaustion. Millions were without adequate food, clean water, or shelter. Social services were minimal. The massive work of rebuilding was repeatedly hamstrung by shortages of all kinds. Decimated by death and disease and trying to cope with dislocation, the laboring population was too weak for the task at hand. Infrastructure had been destroyed, especially in nations occupied by Axis troops, among them France, what is now Ukraine, the Balkan states, Italy, and Greece. Nature, evidently offended by the monstrous conduct of war, took revenge in the immediate postwar years. Weather between 1945 and 1947 was capricious and severe. Hot, rainless summers alternated with winters of record-setting cold. Farms were already suffering from war damage, and farmers were overwhelmed. Famine threatened regionwide.
Colonial regimes in their various manifestations rapidly disappeared after the Second World War only to be replaced by a more centralized global political system revolving awkwardly around the twin poles of US and Soviet influence. An exhausted Europe became, like the majority of nations everywhere, contested terrain on which the two foes of the Cold War scrambled for political advantage. US foreign policy in the Mediterranean and in Europe at first had humanitarian aims, but it refocused around the grand strategy of containing Russian expansion. Both the United States and the Soviet Union took a hand in restoring regional agriculture as part of their foreign-policy initiatives. The United States was first and most successful with the Marshall Plan. Even after the famine eased, both nations used food aid and agricultural expertise to garner influence. But interest in the Mediterranean was never primarily agricultural for either country. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Soviet Union made determined forays beyond its borders to secure at least a foothold in Turkey, Greece, and Libya. Determined to counter these thrusts, the United States increased its military presence in the region. For both world powers, the main draw of the Mediterranean came from its oil reserves.
Casualties during the war had been staggering. After the war the population rebounded slowly, then exploded. As the world recovered from the war and prosperity spread, population pressure in the most vulnerable parts of the region was intensified by a vastly expanded leisure market. When second homes in Mediterranean countries, especially in Spain, Italy, and southern France, became affordable for people with modest incomes, expatriate populations soared. The replacement of old towns and farms by sprawling resorts was accelerated.
The Mediterranean was transformed piecemeal from a landscape shaped by agriculture to one reshaped for a variety of purposes that were all too frequently alien and ill-conceived. Regional autonomy and regional concerns have been submerged within the incompatible agendas of a mixture of powers and international players. Environmental degradation is now endemic. The region is drowning under a tide of incomers with little or no ability to correctly assess and address the disaster around them. Let us look more closely at the acceleration of change after the war.
The complex and devastating chain of events began in the aftermath of the Second World War. In late February 1946, less than six months after the final victory over Germany, the United Nations General Assembly took the measure of the devastation.
The damage caused by war and the dislocation of agricultural production resulting from the shortage and dislocation of labour, the removal of draught animals, the shortage of fertilizers and other circumstances connected with the war have caused a serious fall in world production of wheat. In addition, a large number of countries, including some of those which are normally the largest producers of grain, have suffered serious droughts and have therefore reaped abnormally small crops. The supply of rice is also so short as to threaten a famine in certain areas.1
The threat that survivors faced in the early months of 1946 hinged on the ravages of war and the meager output of a poor growing season in 1945. Food shortages, already severe, grew markedly worse during the following winter, which was one of the harshest that the European continent had ever experienced.2 In France intense cold destroyed the winter wheat crop. Wartime grain rationing, which had been suspended during the armistice, was reimposed in 1946; the daily bread ration dropped still further in the spring of 1947. Controlled sales of bread and sugar continued in France until 1949.3 During the winter of 1946–47, heavy snows blocked roads and ports in Italy, preventing the distribution of food to cities and towns, and severe storms caused coastal damage.4
This unusually bitter winter was followed by a summer so hot and dry that one meteorologist wondered whether Europe was experiencing a climate change.5 French wheat production in 1947 fell to less than half its prewar level. This shortfall required the nation, a net exporter of grain before the war, to import wheat and other cereals to feed its people, expending a “significant part” of its scanty cash reserves.6
On June 5, 1947, US Secretary of State George Marshall delivered a momentous speech in which he summed up the disasters threatening Europe.
The town and city industries are not producing adequate goods to exchange with the food-producing farmer. Raw materials and fuel are in short supply. Machinery is lacking or worn out. The farmer or the peasant cannot find the goods for sale which he desires to purchase. So the sale of his farm produce for money which he cannot use seems to him an unprofitable transaction. He, therefore, has withdrawn many fields from crop cultivation and is using them for grazing. He feeds more grain to stock and finds for himself and his family an ample supply of food, however short he may be on clothing and the other ordinary gadgets of civilization. Meanwhile people in the cities are short of food and fuel. So the governments are forced to use their foreign money and credits to procure these necessities abroad. This process exhausts funds which are urgently needed for reconstruction. Thus a very serious situation is rapidly developing which bodes no good for the world. The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down.7
The foreseeable consequence of failing to address Europe’s crises was disaster. Without American aid, Marshall predicted, Europe would face “economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character.”8 The Marshall Plan, which grew out of this speech, has typically been portrayed as a program for economic recovery, but that phrase captures only one part of the multipronged US initiative. The plan addressed all the interconnected problems Marshall had identified: food production, intrastate commerce, industrial recovery, commercial and government finance.
Like all the European combatants, Britain was severely beaten down by war’s end, and one of the most immediate effects of its weakened condition was rebellion throughout its colonial empire. Exhausted and losing its hold on its colonies, Britain simultaneously lost the rationale for Mediterranean involvement and the means to pursue it. In an unusually abrupt political volte-face, the British government abandoned Mediterranean involvement altogether and passed the torch to the United States.9 Both the massive initiatives of the Marshall Plan and the British withdrawal from a centuries-long role as arbiter of Mediterranean affairs meant that the conduct of geopolitics in the postwar era would weigh heavily on the United States.
Many had seen in the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the democratic West the promise of a new era of international cooperation. At war’s end, a world governed by the two most powerful nations acting in consort was a dream that appeared to be within reach. The Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, put an abrupt stop to the dream in a grim speech in early 1946 predicting inevitable hostility and war.10 Reaction, especially in the US government, was strong and immediate. George F. Kennan, then chargé d’affaires in the Moscow embassy, sent back what has come to be known as the “long telegram,” in which he critiqued Stalin’s speech and explained its implications: that the Soviet Union was “more dangerous and insidious than ever before.”11 Kennan later outlined a US foreign policy designed to meet and counter Soviet initiatives worldwide. His doctrine of containment served as the recipe for US foreign policy through most of the latter half of the twentieth century. It transformed the Marshall Plan from a humanitarian campaign to one arm of a political strategy that aimed to counter the appeal of communism in poor and hungry countries.
The doctrine that Kennan spelled out influenced every Mediterranean state during the forty years that the Soviet Union continued in existence. Individual rulers callously and self-consciously took advantage of the international rivalry to extort military aid and financial support from one or the other superpower. Egypt and Syria were especially adept in courting the Soviets. Israel and Saudi Arabia were the most consistent regional friends of the United States. Along with the need to contain the USSR, oil made the eastern Mediterranean “an economic and strategic area of vital importance” to the United States.12 For decades after the war, the Mediterranean was invisible from a geopolitical perspective unless thrown into the spotlight by either of two dominant issues, oil or communism.
Colonial powers had always wanted more or less the same thing from countries in their sphere of influence. They imported raw materials, preponderantly agricultural products, and they coerced their less industrialized colonies to buy goods manufactured in the metropole. They developed infrastructure and increased education in their areas of influence primarily to further these two commercial goals. At first, the discovery of oil fit within this paradigm. Its role in the economic relationship between metropole and colony was more or less the same as that of an agricultural commodity. What first promoted oil from the rank of just another colonial raw material to a prime regional resource was sea power, which, before World War II, was the principle of European international control.
Superior ocean-sailing technology had built European world domination since the Renaissance, and control of the oceans remained the key to colonial empires worldwide. Around the turn of the twentieth century, it became clear to some forward-looking British admirals that oil might offer a way to increase naval power and further secure naval dominance. British warships had already made the switch from sail to steam in the nineteenth century. Coal was one of the few natural resources found in the British Isles in sufficient quantity to power both national industries and the vast fleet of commercial and military vessels that kept the global empire in constant and effective communication.13
Despite a domestic supply of coal and a well-secured infrastructure of refueling stations, there were disadvantages to the use of coal to power military vessels. Coal is immensely heavy. The work of filling a battleship with coal was prolonged, physically demanding, and hazardous. Stokers on board moved the coal from bins to the fireboxes of multiple boilers. Though the job seemingly required nothing more than strength and endurance, skill came into play. It was the stokers rather than the officers or the engineers who controlled the speed of ships and the distance traveled between refuelings. Proficient teams made ships sail farther and created the least volume of visible smoke and the fastest speed. In battle, accelerating, maintaining speed, conserving fuel, and being minimally visible all created strategic advantages.14
Oil was the answer to many of coal’s shortcomings. It was easy to fill the storage tanks of a docked ship with oil by piping it from an onshore reserve. It was just as easy to transfer the oil from onboard tanks to burners. Most importantly, regulating the heat in each firebox was a matter of turning a valve. Pound for pound, oil produced twice as much heat energy as coal, so ships refitted to burn oil had nearly twice their former range. Firing up the boilers and preparing to go to sea was faster on an oil-powered vessel; top speeds were higher, and the telltale plume of black smoke from coal-powered engines working at peak load was replaced by a thin wisp of exhaust. In 1914, at the urging of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, the British navy adopted oil in its biggest and most powerful battleships. The conversion of the rest of the fleet to oil power came quickly after that.
Growing appreciation of the strategic value of oil spurred European interest in the countries of West Asia. In 1901 the Iranian government granted the first concession for oil exploration to a European entrepreneur. In 1908 the first well began producing. By 1912 crude oil was being pumped and piped to a refinery at the head of the Persian Gulf. Access to the region, which, with the exception of Iran, was then part of the Ottoman Empire, assumed increasing importance in European geopolitical thinking.
At the end of World War I, the treaty of San Remo, negotiated in 1920, dismembered the Ottoman Empire.15 During the days of negotiation that led up to ratification, England and France worked out a plan for sharing the region’s oil reserves. Oil discoveries in Iraq came a decade after the end of the war. By 1939, Iraqi oil had reached Mediterranean ports. Small-scale production had begun by then in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Despite the value of oil, returns were modest for the producing nations. Few locals worked in the oil fields, where most employees were foreigners. Royalties from oil production were scarcely sufficient to even out the balance of payment deficits that plagued most nonindustrialized countries. Before World War II, the oil industry duplicated the economic inequalities of colonialism, though the name “colony” was assiduously avoided.
More than any other single resource, oil was the key to success or failure in World War II. No European combatant had a sufficient domestic supply of oil. Securing fuel for their armies and air forces became a major preoccupation. Both sides wanted to capitalize on eastern Mediterranean suppliers. The Allies alone consumed seven billion barrels of oil during the war. Some historians believe that the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany was a consequence of the differing qualities and quantities of petroleum-based fuels available to either side. Differences in resource bases and resource management may well have determined the outcome of the war.16
Agricultural development played a part in US and Soviet foreign policy after World War II, but it was one factor among many that caused geopolitical head butting. The domestic agricultural policy of the Soviet Union combined collectivization of farm resources, nationalization of land, and state management of production with state-controlled distribution. The US model resisted government management of the economy and relied on market forces to set production priorities. Despite these differences in ideology, both world powers urged similar programs of agricultural development in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. Both had vast internal grasslands under cultivation, and this geographical commonality played an enormous, and largely unacknowledged, role in the agricultural methods that each nation touted for foreign adoption.17 The Great Plains of the United States and the rich soils of Ukraine could be most successfully exploited using mechanization, large-field cultivation, single crops, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and large-scale irrigation.18
When Mediterranean farmers were introduced to methods labeled progressive by either superpower, the result was the destruction or abandonment of traditional local methods of cultivation. Mechanization replaced handwork. Monocultures edged out traditional mixed crops. Land consolidation eliminated the advantages of farming multiple terrains. The use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, obtained at great cost, replaced traditional practices of manuring cropland and allowing fields to lie fallow. Irrigation brought immediate benefits to dry regions, as it had done in the Roman era, but there were important differences. Roman farmers crafted intricate systems to trap and channel rainwater, which was renewed annually. Modern farmers dig deep wells to tap buried aquifers. In a decade or two, they use up water accumulated over generations. The result is increased productivity in the short run with depleted aquifers and subsiding land as the long-term consequence. While short-term upticks in production occur, local infrastructure, created in some cases over millennia, and local knowledge, on which traditional agriculture in the Mediterranean had depended, are destroyed or lost.19
Areas that could not be modified to fit the ideal model of postwar agriculture were abandoned more often than not. Traditional farming could have continued, but it had become either unprofitable or culturally unacceptable. In Greece, farms and farming villages have been emptying out over the past fifty years. Today nearly half the Greek population lives in or near Athens or Thessaloníki. Traditional agricultural lands are untenanted and uncultivated. Terraces fall down; olive trees collapse under their own unpruned weight. Houses and barns rot away as the land around them returns to Mediterranean scrub. As farms and villages disappear, those with knowledge of the soil, the crops, and traditional techniques of cultivation scatter. Few masters of traditional cultivation and the infrastructure that sustained it are left. They have little or no opportunity to use their hard-won skills, and there are almost no young farmers to succeed them.
According to an article in the French magazine France-Soir, one quarter of a billion people were expected to vacation somewhere on the Mediterranean coast in 2010. This transient population would exceed the year-round population by about one hundred million.20 That makes the entire Mediterranean more or less the equivalent of Venice in terms of the ratio between locals with a long-term investment in the health and welfare of the region and casual incomers with little or nothing at stake. Indeed, some visitors seem to have no interest whatsoever in where they happen to be. British tour companies offer young men and women “clubbing” packages to beach resorts where other young men and women are the main attraction. The Spanish island of Ibiza is a longtime destination for this kind of travel. Cyprus, Kos, Zante, Corfu, and Crete are popular; Turkey and Bulgaria have both recently entered the list. Tourism of this kind involves no appreciation of place, no cultural awareness, and certainly no sense of responsibility. Clubbers want a place where egregious behavior will be overlooked. Those who provide for them are looking for a ready source of cash.
Most visitors come to the Mediterranean to savor the beaches, the vineyards and olive groves, the local food, “quaint” villages, and peaceful solitude. They come to experience turquoise water, to lie on manicured sand or rocky beaches. In the evening they expect to dine on fresh fish, to sample local wines, and to eat just-harvested fruit and vegetables.
To meet their needs, the Mediterranean fishing fleet is going out ever farther in search of economically viable catches. In every fish market from Venice to Fez, shoppers note the disappearance of fish once locally caught or cultivated and their replacement by ocean species. As technologically advanced fleets move beyond traditional fishing grounds, they impinge on the grounds of still-local fishers. Traditional fisheries along the west coast of Africa, once exploited by local people using small boats and hand lines or nets, are now fished by mechanized European trawlers. Unable to compete, African fishers load their boats with human cargoes and make for the Azores or the Canaries or the volcanic islands of Italy.21
When a vacationing family gets tired of the seaside, they take a walk in the hills to sit under olive trees or beside vineyards and admire the view. Some find the attractions of the region irresistible: they buy a second home. A Tuscan farmhouse with its own vines and olive trees, with cypresses lining the drive and a view over the fields into the valley below may be far out of their price range. But there are plenty of less picturesque villages and hillsides without sea views that are affordable today and will not be tomorrow, so the second-home culture spreads ever wider, and agricultural land shrinks. Traditional care for the land vanishes along with it.
This scenario was once played out in confined areas of the Mediterranean coast; it is now a regionwide phenomenon. From east to west the landscape is being reshaped to attract vacationers. The United States faces almost exactly the identical dilemma in the management of its public wilderness: what attracts visitors is diminished, then destroyed, as more and more people flock to enjoy it. In the Mediterranean, vestiges of the traditional character of the region are what draw incomers, but satisfying their appetite for land, housing, and infrastructure can only come at the expense of what they have come to see. Like the picturesque villages of Les Baux and Èze in southern France, like the splendid city of Venice, the region as a whole is filling with shops selling imitations of vanishing local specialties to busloads of tourists who are none the wiser.