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Understanding the family experience of health and illness within the family's social and cultural context helps health professionals understand a family's stories. The purpose of this article is to present salient characteristics of the Western European family to extend understanding about family structure and values in relation to caring and intergenerational solidarity. The goal is to provide nurses and other health professionals with culturally competent knowledge that can inform practice with families. Evidence suggests that a family model, characterized by strong-family type societies consisting of coresidence, solidarity, and intergenerational relationships, stalwartly continues in Mediterranean countries. However, due to the recent economic crisis in Spain and other European countries, there is a trend toward the withdrawal of state responsibility toward the family, and an increasing weight on families' responsibility, particularly for women, toward the care of their old and chronically ill relative. Therefore, there is a need to make health and social systems more effective, sustainable, and focused on family care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Should the Mediterranean be seen as "face-to-face" (i.e. confrontational) or "side-by-side" (i.e. fraternal)? How this question has been answered has had far-reaching effects both in the human sciences and in terms of actual social relations - and the former has had massive implications on the latter through its influencing of policy-makers, politicians, the media, and thus public opinion. This article attempts to look at two interrelated processes: the historiography of looking at the Mediterranean, and actual political discourse and practice, within the overall context of actual social interactions across the region. It begins by examining two paradigms in looking at the Mediterranean: The Paradigm of Discord, and the Paradigm of Utopias of Harmony. The article then examines alternative paradigms - those of Utopias of Harmony tracing their evolution from nineteenth-century Saint-Simonians to Albert Camus. It then attempts to show that both approaches suffer from grievous flaws. The article concludes by seeking inspiration from Raymond Aron's characterization of different types of peace. The peace that is being pursued by the European Union can be seen as a "Hegemonic Peace" and this is problematical. Finally it explores two different hypothetical scenarios for future relations in the Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reconstructs two fifteenth-century lawsuits introduced by merchants attacked by the Genoese pirate Sologrus de Nigro, who was active in the Mediterranean between 1397 and 1401. Both actions sought compensation in civil damages, or restitution, from parties the litigants regarded as responsible for de Nigro's actions, in the first case the commune of Genoa and in the second the Order of Knights Hospitallers. Neither suit appears to have been successful. This article argues that these outcomes derived from distinctions recognized throughout the medieval Mediterranean between unlicensed pirates like de Nigro and corsairs, who interrupted shipping with the sanction of European territorial states. It suggests that restitution represented a source of tension between commercial agents and political authority in fifteenth-century Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]