Soggetti altri nell'area mediterranea

The “voluntary simplicity” approach is the main strategy put forward by degrowth supporters. Obeying to this path, an elite, most “aware” of the necessity of degrowth, will give the good example, staging degrowth practices, here and now, without waiting to “take the power”, in the hope that their practical virtues will stand out so obviously and infect the rest of the citizens, those “poor ones” who are still unaware. But if degrowth is presented as something very urgent, why choosing a so slow elitist strategy? Degrowth supporters and theorists do not care so much to embody and relate their arguments to actual, existent social and historical processes, i.e. to match them with the will, the values and the attitudes of the existing social actors. Any political strategy that aims at grand social change has to deal with this sociological reality. On the contrary, degrowth is premised upon the paradigm of “reflexive modernization”, it is rooted in an old modern pattern of subjectivity; it even requires its duplication. A model that has disappeared from the social scene. Degrowth proposal must walk on the shoulders of other subjects. It is necessary to uproot the voluntarist hegemony inside the degrowth movement and then to rebuild degrowth as a “political” alternative. The Mediterranean may represent today an important place for experimentation of this option. The Arab uprisings and the general crisis of the South European countries suggest that the region becomes more and more peripheral and that it is not able to hold on the growth run. Mediterranean countries do not hold competitive advantages in the international arena. But the subjects of change are not the young people who protested in the streets of Arab towns. They are the people who voted for moderate Islamic forces. Beyond the religious frame, they express the will for protection, they refuse market anomic competition and they claim to restore the social control over economic ties. Those who care about creating an alternative degrowth future need to assume a leading role, and put in the political arena a model of protection that places the preservation of the natural balance (and hence degrowth) at its centre, as well as the self-institution of society, that is the return of collective sovereignty.