The difference between those who have and those who do not have rights: togethers against the system of inequality, can we win?

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”: this African proverb, told by the moderator Gabriele Vaccaro, centralised the main theme of the debate around the concept of socialjustice. Speakers from different contexts and stories have participated in this debate. Ramón Espinar Merino, a spokesman of Joventud Sin Futuro, was the first to speak and immediately demonstrated his historical expertise of Spain, his own country. He identifies the crisis which affects Spain as “epic, political, cultural, social and historical”, as well as economical. Answering the question “What is the Mediterranean Citizenship for you and how we can build it?”, Ramón gives a general framework of the situation of Eurozone and explains how the job insecurity, established in 2008, have put in discussion the right of citizenship and the entire social structure. This has interrupted an entire historical process giving birth to a new rebel generation, that of 15-M. Specking about the democratic institutions that “do not work”, Ramón claims a “re-democratisation of democracy”, giving us a contextual map from which a debate can start: having to cope with the institutional vacuum, democracy becomes a synonymous of citizenship, and the objective becomes the building of relations and forms of communication among actors/subjects of civil society of the European “peripheries”, key word for Ramón to identify the South of Europe. Roni Ben Efrat, Israeli activist, member of executive Commission of the Secretary of the Worker Party Da’am, composed from Jews and Arabs’ socialists, speaks about her involvement in the movement of social protest of summer 2011 in Israel, to support the claims of the Arab Spring protesters. She continues describing her militancy against the extensive Israeli military operations in Gaza. With the support of a video made for the election of the 2013, where the position of Da’am Party is explained, Roni starts making an historical excursus of the Israeli context, like Ramón did with Spain. She reports the similarities between Israel situation and that of the south of Europe: generalised insecurity state, where the key word “square” connects its civil society with that of the Mediterranean basin. She presents weaknesses and strengths of the Israeli movement. It wanted to be uniform and to be able to speak with and for everyone, to avoid divisions, without Right or Left, like the Spanish movement 15-M.

But in this way, she tells us, the movement has been guilty of inattention and it neglected the Arab citizens of Israel and the occupied territories. Despite this, the movement has had a very strong impact in the Israeli ideology, bringing awareness and lack of confidence towards the elite. In Roni’s opinion, the turning point must be the investment in the dialogue between citizens, the achievement of conditions of equality, in particular between Israelis and Arabs, and the building of peace with the Palestinians.

With Anna Lodeserto, representative of the network European Alternatives, presenting a contribution focused on the participation of citizens in decisional processes, the attention turns back to the square, to the “recovery of the square”, which she describes as a consistently weaker category, especially in the North of Mediterranean, in contrast to the South, where the a model of ‘agora’ has been the protagonist of the revolutions of 2011. Anna shares the concerns expressed by previous speakers about the crisis and the grim economic climate, and she adds that the economy is “property and claims of each of us” and we should start to take it over by building proposals, like they are doing in Spain, and giving space to a “conglomeration of microscopic voices” too that need to be heard. At the question “how can we build a bottom-up movement, that leads towards the integration in the Mediterranean?”, the three speakers share a common position: aiming to give space to a forum and to meetings that can contribute to increase awareness about the economical and social dynamics around us, and face them in an active and participating way. In their opinion, Mediterranean Citizenship is possible and urgent, but we cannot speak anymore about class and national identities, we need to focus on the affirmation of a wide popular identity, which claims plural and trans-national citizenship rights. Roni comments: “Today we have to rediscover the voices of common people against the reactionary forces that are looking to dominate them”. Gabriele Vaccaro’s conclusion claims that “the community of Mediterranean activists can contribute to create a space of peace and freedom”, through forms of “civil disobedience” and through the consolidation of associative networks, giving special attention, in our historical context, to the realities of Arab countries.