French President Sarkozy's Mediterranean Union Cause of Libyan War?

The French were one of the first to say there should be a military no-fly zone over Libya. The reasons are threefold. However, I will focus on the Mediterranean Union only.

Unbeknownst to many, in 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy had planned to unite the 44 countries that border the Mediterranean in, what he said, was an effort to boost economic, political, and cultural ties with the EU's southern neighbors, and to reinforce the geopolitical weight of France.  In reality, his motivations, more than likely "lie elsewhere".


John Laughland of the Brussels Journal pointed out:

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. 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.

So, what does this have to do with Libya? Well, it was Colonel Muammar Qadaffi's boycott of the 2008 summit launching the new "Union" in Paris, and his attack on the plan that interfered with the manifestation of Sarkozy's brainchild.  Qaddafi compared Sarkozy's "Union" to the  Roman Empire, and that it will fuel Islamist terrorism and will be regarded as "imperialism" by many in Africa and the Arab world.

"We shall have another Roman empire and imperialist design. There are imperialist maps and designs that we have already rolled up. We should not have them again." -- Col Qadaffi in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, July 9, 2008

Libya is one of only five of Africa’s 54 countries that have not been integrated into U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).

Links:

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