Vintage

What Is Really Behind the Mediterranean Union?

There are moments in history when the geopolitical balance seems to shift clearly in one direction or the other. Currently within the EU, power seems to have just moved noticeably from France to Germany on a clear issue of substance. It is not the first of such shifts and, while it may not be the last either. But it is substantial and merits comment. I refer to the issue of the Union of the Mediterranean.

The Union of the Mediterranean is a project conceived by Nicolas Sarkozy, the mercurial and hyperactive French president known for his capricious sex life and his loose tongue. Indeed, the former may be an subconscious cause of his proposal to create a political “Club Med”, since all three Madames Sarkozy have been of distinctly Southern European blood, as indeed Sarkozy is himself. The first Madame Sarkozy, Marie-Dominique Culioli, was Corsican; the second, Cecilia Maria Sara Isabel Ciganer-Albeniz, was born of a Jewish-Russian (possible gypsy) father, Andre Ciganer (ne Aron Chouganov) and a Spanish-Belgian mother; while the third Madame Sarkozy, Carla Bruni, is still even now an Italian national while having become the First Lady of France. Sarkozy himself, of course, is the son of a Hungarian emigre and he was in fact brought up by his Greek-Jewish maternal grandfather as his father left the marital home when he was three.

Sarkozy originally came up with the idea of a Mediterranean Union during his campaign in 2007 to become president. He announced his intention to hold the founding summit during the French presidency of the European Union, i.e. in July-December this year, and the latest news reports indicate that he has been successful: there will indeed be a summit of all heads of state and government from all the countries of the Mediterranean in Paris on 13th July, and they will be invited to stay the night and attend the Bastille Day celebrations the following morning.

The geopolitical and political motives behind this proposal seemed fairly obvious at first sight. Politically, Sarkozy’s interest in setting up the Mediterranean Union would be to offer Turkey an alternative to full EU membership. This is certainly how the plan is being peddled in Paris. The second geopolitical motive would be to reinforce France’s weight on the world stage. European enlargement since the end of the Cold War has been directed almost exclusively at countries which are more or less in the German geopolitical orbit – not just the former Communist states integrated in 2004 but also Austria, Sweden and Finland which joined the EU in 1995. The creation of a political “Club Med” is perhaps a typical example of the French love of the politics of the grand gesture, but there seems little doubt that it would institutionalise France’s leadership role in an area where she has huge historical ties and considerable political influence, from North Africa to Lebanon and Syria.

On closer inspection, however, all is not as it seems. First, Sarkozy has effectively abandoned his opposition to Turkish accession. In the summer of 2007, France voted in favour of opening new “chapters” in the accession negotiations with Turkey. Paris has not put the freezing of those negotiations on the agenda for the French presidency later this year, and there will never be a “French” presidency ever again because the Lisbon treaty abandons the principle by which the European Council is chaired by one country every six months. More insidiously, Sarkozy is campaigning to remove Article 88.5 from the French constitution, which requires that a referendum be held in France on all new accessions to the EU. Any referendum in France would almost definitely lead to a No vote.

Moreover, the latest news is that France has capitulated to Germany’s demand that all EU states be included in the new Union. For the last few months, indeed, there has been bad blood between Paris and Berlin as two summit meetings were cancelled at short notice by the French, apparently because of disagreements over Sarkozy’s new Mediterranean Policy. The Germans objected to the plan because the EU already has a forum for Mediterranean Policy, the so-called Barcelona Process, and it says that a new structure would only undermine that part of EU policy, over which Berlin obviously has a say. Austria has concurred: the Austria Foreign Minister has said she does not see the point of Sarkozy’s new initiative. Thanks to a recent deal between President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel, the new Union will indeed be launched on 13th July – but all EU member states will belong to it. Any geopolitical advantage for France is thereby completely neutralised and the new “Union” is nothing but the Barcelona Process jazzed up.

So why did Sarkozy agree? His capitulation is all the more mysterious because Germany herself was one of the prime movers behind the creation of the Council of the Baltic Sea States in 1992. This organisation has 12 members – Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Iceland and the European Commission. Apart from Iceland and the European Commission, these are all Baltic states, as the name of the organisation suggests. On what possible grounds can Germany object to being excluded from France’s Mediterranean Union when France is excluded from Germany’s Baltic Union?

Perhaps the motives behind the Mediterranean Union lie elsewhere, therefore. The plan, indeed, bears some resemblance to the “Greater Middle East” project favoured by the American neo-conservative strategists. Although the membership of the two proposed bodies is different (the Greater Middle East encompasses Arabia, Iran, Central Asian states and even Afghanistan and Pakistan) the ideology is the same: supranational and anti-national. The idea is to neutralise the Arab-Israeli conflict by “integrating” the Middle Eastern countries into a single political unit, rather as the Franco-German conflict was allegedly neutralised by the creation of the European Community. For there is nothing the neo-cons want to neutralise more than Arab nationalism.

Even more striking is the resemblance between Sarkozy’s plan and the existing Mediterranean Dialogue set up by NATO in 1994. The relevant page (in English, French, Hebrew and Arabic) can be seen here. Numerous Maghreb states have already signed partnership agreements with NATO. In other words, the Mediterranean Union would be but a political superstructure over a military organisation which already exists and which is under US leadership. Sarkozy is known to be extremely friendly to the US and Israel (the Israeli president has just been in Paris, the first head of state to be received with full honours since Sarkozy was elected last year) and his plans therefore resemble those which led to the creation of the original EEC which was also set up on the back of an existing US-led military structure (NATO was created in 1949, the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951).

The goal of Sarkozy’s Club Med is therefore not, after all, to reinforce the geopolitical weight of France, but instead to consolidate the power of NATO and the United States over the Middle East. That is why Germany, America’s senior partner in Europe, was determined to be involved – and that is why Sarkozy has agreed to it. I predict that, in due course, he will agree also to another American policy, the accession of Turkey to the EU.