I just have to add a few things:
-What about co-operation in mediterranean level.
-The main problem in Greece that works against any serious extension in ports are the strikes that make our hubs unreliable. Recent example was the strike in Thessaloniki which cost us a massive contract with the Chinese.
-Although Big is Good. Our little Mare Nostrum is a very fragile thing and we need to extend but with environmental planning in mind.

Regarding the amazing growth of port-cities like Shenzhen, I heard this program from BBC Radio 4 a couple of months ago:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/business/2009/04/090406_globalbusiness_160209.shtml

“MR CHINA

Liam Casey’s company PCH International is based a long way from Cork where he grew up; it’s in the incredible Chinese city of Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong.
Incredible because 30 years ago it was just a fishing town of fewer than 80,000 people; it’s now got a population of 12- or 15- million people, half of them migrant workers in the thousands of factories sprung up in the Pearl River Delta as part of the great Chinese industrial revolution.
Liam does not speak Chinese, but he has the contacts to find you the factories that will make whatever you might want.
Take an idea to PCH, and his people will help you design the product, simplify it to make it manufacturable, find the Chinese firms to make it for you, and fulfil the orders and get them dispatched.
What role for the rich world business in all this ? Well, Liam Casey will do the donkey work in the middle and your Western company will work at either ends of what he calls the “smiley curve”, providing the big idea at the beginning and the astute marketing at the end.”

With middle men like this, you only need design and marketing…