The Mediterranean as Potential Community.Cross Cultural Sicily-Poland Research

The 1995 Euro-Mediterranean conference in Barcelona started a partnership pol-icy to establish a Mediterranean area of free exchange that would encourage peace, sta-bility and mutual recognition of cultural differences; it could be described as a basis for the construction of a Mediterranean community as a whole, which could be of great economical and political importance but that for now is still in a ‘potential’ state. According to Gaertner (2007), the construction of a Common Ingroup Identity means the re-categorization of group belonging and appears to be feasible in terms of a Dual Identity (that is by no means automatic), that enables the new sense of belonging to co-exist with the original one. The research on the hypothesis of ‘contact’, as formulated by Allport (1954), in-dicates that this in itself is not sufficient to reduce prejudicial thought; research on “re-luctant racism” shows that the simple ideological option is no guarantee of discrimina-tory tendencies when the ‘potential’ contact becomes ‘real’. The data for this research seem to show that the social representation of the Mediterranean in terms of ‘Potential community’ and Dual Identity characterizes the group of Polish students moderately well (“potential contact”) but not the Catania group (“real contact”).