For a Euro-Arab Alliance
Guillaume Faye develops here a sustained argument for an Arab–European geopolitical bloc against what he calls the “American-Soviet condominium.” This essay is historically relevant for understanding the ‘third worldism’ of the Nouvelle Droite at the time. Readers should note that Faye’s later “archeofuturist” turn would reverse much of this Arab-philia. He would become one of the leading voices of identitarianism and remigration in the latter years of his life.
Originally published in Éléments no. 53, Spring 1985
Translated by Alexander Raynor
Divided, the Arab world is the prey of the covetousness of the superpowers. United (as here, symbolically, for the anniversary of Muhammad), it can stand up to Soviet and American imperialisms. Europe occupies a symmetrical position in this regard: its real interests are, in the final analysis, the same as theirs. Is a great Euro-Arab policy possible? Doubtless, if Europe has the will to recover its independence and its unity. And if it once and for all sets aside the historical disputes that continue to poison its relations with the Arab countries. Left: Algerian President Chadli in Paris. From reconciliation to alliance.
The two great civilizations that today border the Mediterranean — Europe and the Arab world — have known, for reasons at once religious, ethnic, and political, exceptionally conflictual relations throughout the whole of history. The Arab and the European have been enemies more often than friends. Decolonization, the quarrels over the Palestinian question, and the disputes born of labor migration are the most recent examples of Euro-Arab opposition.
And yet, the global political balance of forces and the geostrategic configuration of the planet, dominated by the Moscow–Washington axis as much as by the North–South cleavage produced by “unequal development,” ought to lead Europeans and Arabs to ask themselves whether they would not have a strong interest, by drawing a line under the past, in establishing between them a great historical alliance.
It was Michel Jobert who, first of all, in 1973, launched the idea of a “Euro-Arab dialogue.” In his view, it was the oil crisis that should have brought to consciousness the necessity of such an undertaking. That crisis, badly interpreted as an Arab “aggression” against Western Europe, was in reality the consequence of the disunion and the impotence of Europeans and Arabs in the face of the activism of the two Greats. “Treated as a non-person,” wrote Jobert, “humiliated in its existence, Europe, in its energy dependence, is no less the object of the second battle of this Middle Eastern war. A forgotten victim of the conflict (…), it has noted that it was a stake even more than an instrument or an adjunct in the arbitration of the Greats. It can — it must — draw an essential lesson from this. Many peoples are awaiting not its rebound, but its birth” (Journal officiel, Débats, Assemblée nationale, 12 November 1973).
The Arabs are in the front rank of those awaiting this birth of Europe. As Mustapha Benchenane writes: “The Arab world will not manage to extricate itself from this tragedy that it has been undergoing for centuries unless it unites. And Europe is stalked by decadence if it does not build itself. For the great powers, these two regions are nothing but stakes in the struggle they are waging for control of the planet. For Moscow as for Washington, Europe and the Arab world must remain objects of history, and must not in any case strengthen themselves, dialogue, or come to an understanding — for as soon as they did, the balance of forces on the world scale would be overturned” (Cahiers du Forum pour l’indépendance et la paix, no. 3, May 1984).
Michel Jobert convinced Georges Pompidou of the necessity of opening a great Euro-Arab policy. President Bourguiba endorsed the idea in July 1973. On 6 November, the European Community’s declaration on the Middle East and the resolution of the Palestinian problem — the key to all the difficulties of the Arab world — sketched out this great policy. In December of the same year, the nine countries of the EEC, gathered in Copenhagen, laid the foundations of a Euro-Arab petroleum negotiation and of a common economic strategy, while at the Sixth Arab Summit at Algiers (28 November 1973) one read in the final declaration: “Europe is bound to the Arab world across the Mediterranean by deep affinities of civilization and by vital interests that can develop only within the framework of a confident and mutually advantageous cooperation.”
Unfortunately, since then, France has recentered itself in the Atlanticist camp. And, in its wake, all of Europe. Claude Cheysson, during his last journey to Israel, indicated that the 1980 Venice Declaration (by which the European Community had given itself a common doctrine on the Palestinian question and affirmed the necessity of a Euro-Arab dialogue) “was no longer current.” For once, this was not a gaffe. François Mitterrand has confirmed on several occasions this halt of a great pro-Arab policy. One must see in this the result of American pressure.
From 1975 onward, indeed, alarmed by the Euro-Arab policy then under way, Richard Nixon declared in a speech in Chicago that the EEC’s initiative of drawing closer to the Arabs was a “conspiracy against the interests of the United States.” At the time, the Jobert–Pompidou tandem held its ground against Nixon and Kissinger. This is no longer the case with today’s France. The Arabs, too, have been effectively dissuaded from relaunching the Euro-Arab dialogue, in spite of the cultural and economic cooperation projects elaborated between 1973 and 1980: Egypt and Saudi Arabia, essential pieces of the Arab world, have fallen completely under the influence of Washington on the military and economic planes.
Just as the Soviet policy of penetration in the Mediterranean continues that of old Russia, so American influence in this region is the heir of the British strategy of domination of the Mediterranean area. The two superpowers have a vital need to “hold” this pivot-space, all the more important in that it lies on the southern flank of that Europe placed, since 1945, under high surveillance. If, until the mid-1970s, the Soviets had scored points, it is the American presence that today is the strongest. It is the culmination of long historical work of geostrategic and economic installation in the Mediterranean.
American infiltration into the Mediterranean and the Arab regions dates from the very day after the independence of the United States. The first treaties with the powers of the Maghreb date from 1783 and had as their object a commercial penetration. For about fifty years, France and England strenuously attempted to oppose this. For them, the Mediterranean space belonged to the Europeans. In 1796, the young government of the Republic, enjoining the French Consul at Algiers, Vallières, to oppose by every means the American presence, described the Americans, in the official message sent for that purpose, as “grasping negotiators whose designs must be thwarted.” Despite this, Washington installed its first Consulate for Arab Africa at Tangier in 1791, and in 1794 the first American warship made its appearance in the Mediterranean. Prefiguring the present economic relations between the West and the Maghreb, the United States, in order to respond to the commercial war waged against them by France, signed with the Bey of Tunis a commercial treaty that is the first of its kind: against the opening of the Tunisian market to the United States and the protection of their nationals, the Americans would supply free of charge weapons and munitions to the troops of the Bey. Morocco, Libya, and Algeria signed similar agreements. The Arab resistances were broken: in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli declared war on the United States, and the latter began a military blockade of Tripoli. The Libyans had to bow under the pressure of the Tunisians, skillfully turned against their neighbors thanks to the supply of a fully equipped warship, the Franklin.
As soon as systematic European colonization of North Africa began, from the start of the nineteenth century onward, the position of the Americans was solidly established: consulates, commercial counters, and a war fleet. But the United States did not react to the colonial seizure of the Arab nations by Europe. It was the era of the Monroe Doctrine and isolationist withdrawal: drive the Europeans out of the American continent, where the Americans were already engaged in neo-colonialism, but leave Africa and Asia to the European colonizers. It was after the First World War, with Wilson’s doctrine of the “right of peoples to self-determination,” that the United States elaborated a strategy that would prove extremely profitable: to set the subjugated peoples against the European colonizer — without too greatly antagonizing the latter, who remained an ally within the framework of Western solidarity — while preparing a “post-colonialism” that would reconcile the formal independence of the Arabs with the economic and strategic hegemony of the United States.
From 1940 (the Murphy–Weygand agreements) onward, the Americans installed themselves in force in the Maghreb with the explicit consent of Vichy. The French State even authorized Washington to send American “controllers” to ensure that American imports were not re-exported to Europe… American technical assistants and vice-consuls installed themselves in Vichy and then Gaullist North Africa. The 1943 landing in North Africa marked an important stage in the American penetration. From that day, an American war fleet and military bases would remain permanently from Gibraltar to Cyprus. Powerfully aided, although discreetly, by Washington, the Arab nationalist movements of decolonization were not slow to perceive American duplicity once independence had occurred. Realizing that the United States was preserving all its alliances with colonial France and intended to replace it in a more “modern” form (neo-colonialism), a number of Maghreb countries, notably Algeria and Egypt, fell into Sovietophilia and socialism. From 1962 to 1970, American influence declined seriously in the Arab world. But the Arabs, very quickly seeing that Soviet neo-colonialism, like the charms of socialism, had narrow limits, and several governments — drawn along by post-Nasserist Egypt — quickly redirected themselves toward a pro-Western and pro-American normalization, with the exception of Algeria and Libya, which attempted, without weakened and decadent Europe assisting them in any way, to follow a narrow neutralist “third way” between American and Soviet influences.
Today, under the combined effect of their policy of support for Israel, of the strategic guarantees they offer to the oil-producing countries — notably Saudi Arabia — and of the game they are playing to divide the Arabs (in particular by offering guarantees of protection against a Qaddafi who plays the welcome role of the harmless devil — or against a possible contagion of Khomeinist integrism), the United States holds in the Arab and Mediterranean space a political, economic, strategic, and cultural influence stronger than ever, and far stronger than that of the USSR, whose fleet has little freedom of action in the Mediterranean.1 European influence holds on as best it can: militarily nil, owing to the weakness of the Italian, Spanish, Greek, and French war fleets2 and the absence of bases on the southern flank, it appears economically stagnant, culturally menaced because of the linguistic war between French and English in a number of Arab countries, and politically unstable. The European countries, incapable of defining a common Arab–Mediterranean policy, offer their Arab partners no alternative to American neo-colonialism or to the Soviet attempts at protectorate.
How then to be astonished, in these conditions, that for ten years the degradation of Euro-Arab ties has gone on accentuating itself, in proportion as Europe abandoned a “Gaullian” vision of its foreign policy and as the Arabs were ever more polarized around the Palestinian question?
Fascinated by the rebound of American imperialism, paralyzed by their fear of the Soviet Union, the Europeans dare not respond favorably to the Arabs’ proposals of alliance. Witness the failure of the Athens Summit of 25 April 1984, where the EEC did not respond to the Arab League’s request to enter into a global dialogue and to define, outside the two blocs, a Euro-Arab political line. When, for example, the entry of Spain and Portugal into the EEC is being considered, at no moment is any attempt made to reflect on a new Mediterranean policy for our continent. Only the price of citrus fruits and grapefruit preoccupies technocrats and politicians.
It is then normal that for ten years the prospects of Arab unity and European unity have been receding. The parallelism is striking between Europeans and Arabs: balkanization, political disunion, absence of real independence on the world scene, vacuity of political projects. The superpowers, guarantors of the planetary status quo, have understood that European unity (independence and union of Western Europe and rapprochement of the two Europes) and Arab unity would together provoke the birth of the Euro-Arab axis — a hypothesis inadmissible to the Greats. Thus it is by skillfully obstructing Arab unity that these superpowers prohibit and ward off the prospect of the Euro-Arab axis.
And yet, the unity of the Maghreb was considered, until the mid-1970s, as the explicit goal of the new “socialist” independent Arab States, as the Charter of Algiers had affirmed in 1964 on the occasion of the first Congress of the FLN. This unity was supposed to oppose itself to “imperialism,” and to be founded on the “need for the liberation of the masses.” A whole Marxist phraseology presided over these doctrines of Arab unity. The aftermath of decolonization made it impossible to envisage it geostrategically, in alliance with Europe, for example.
“The Arab Maghreb will certainly be built one day or another,” declared Houari Boumedienne, the Algerian President, in 1969, “whether by our generation or by the generation to come.” Expressing the doctrine of all the Arab unitarists, Boumedienne explained that, in a first stage, unification could concern only the “Arab East” (the Mashreq), for the moment grappling with the Palestinian question and foreign interference, but that in the long term, the union of the “Arab fatherland” must constitute a permanent objective. The parallel is therefore striking with the position of the “Europeists”: the building of Western Europe and, in the hypothesis of a liberation from Soviet occupation, the edification of a “Greater Europe”… Arabs and Europeans are indeed confronted with a similar geopolitical problem that ought to incite them to cooperate closely: to overcome their respective balkanizations.
Nevertheless, although in appearance easier to realize — since the inter-Arab dissensions are stronger than the dissensions among European States — European unity does not at present have at its disposal, unlike Arab unity, spiritual and historical supports. Indeed, despite Marxist verbiage — fortunately in decline — despite the introduction, on the occasion of decolonization, of egalitarian, progressive, anti-traditionalist, and individualist doctrines, and despite the excesses of reactions to this progressivism (Muslim integrism), the struggle for Arab unity always appears more or less as the jihâd fi sabil Allah (sacred combat in the way of God), implying the notions of independent neutralism3 and revolution (thawra). Having become atheist, European civilization has not yet succeeded in founding its will to destiny on spiritual bases. While among the Arabs internal economic development is only one means of a politico-spiritual destiny, among the Europeans, unfortunately, the ideal that has presided over the search for unity has always remained that of a common “market”…
One of the lessons to be drawn from the failure of the Arab unity project is the recognition of one of its major defects: it was unfortunately built around a Marxisant, disembodied vision uprooted from political relations. Although many Arabs are now coming back from the illusions of this ideology, understanding that it was a matter of deculturation, and rediscovering the richness of the Arab-Muslim political heritage, the after-effects of “Arab progressivism” — inherited in reality from ideas imported by elites indoctrinated in the West in the 1950s and ’60s — are still heavy to bear.
The National Charter of the United Arab Republic, presented by Gamal Abdel Nasser to the Egyptian National Congress of Popular Forces on 21 May 1962, is a model of scientistic, social-revolutionary doctrine, which would inspire all the nationalists thereafter, while preventing them from having an active geopolitical vision in favor of a “great Arab policy.” The Tripoli Charter (June 1962) of the National Council of the Algerian Revolution and the Algiers Charter of April 1964 fell into the same errings and authorized, for example, the interference of the Soviet Union in Arab affairs. The Marxisant “anti-imperialism” that was the lot of the nationalists into the years 1975–1980 not only did not allow them to oppose effectively American influence and Westernization, but added to their ills the Soviet interference. Likewise today, falling from Charybdis to Scylla (like the Europeans), the Arabs do not manage, despite the displayed pro-Americanism of certain of their most powerful states, to thwart the Soviet maneuvers in the Mediterranean region. One can even say, paradoxically, that it is the naive philo-Sovietism and the statist revolutionarism of the years that followed decolonization that pushed the Arab world, by reaction, into the arms of merchant society and the American party, toward alignment with the Atlanticist bloc.
The lesson is clear: like the Europeans, the Arabs must count only on their own strength. And if they understand that, in this world, the only way to obtain liberty and independence passes through a policy of non-alignment, of neutralism, and of a “third way” between the blocs, their privileged ally can only be Europe. Such a coming-to-consciousness would constitute, evidently, for Europeans as for Arabs, a radical historical novelty, inasmuch as, since the Middle Ages, they have not ceased confronting one another. In certain respects, Europeans and Arabs would have to make, with respect to one another, the same revolution that the Europeans, and notably the French and the Germans, have accomplished among themselves: to become privileged partners after having been traditional adversaries.
Some, indeed, are beginning, in the Arab world more than here, alas, to understand the necessity of a rapprochement with Europe. The ruling classes, in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and elsewhere, are much more lucid geopolitically than the European political classes.
Indeed, the spokesmen of the various Arab “nationalisms” are becoming aware of the danger of alignment with Moscow and Washington, and, as in his time General de Gaulle and today Papandreou, they call tirelessly for a rupture of the status quo and for a world policy of the “third way.” After President Assad of Syria, Yasser Arafat declared, on 13 November 1984 from the rostrum of the United Nations, that the American–Soviet status quo was leading the world “toward economic, human, and natural catastrophes.” Qaddafi, as early as 1973, in a speech to the youth, affirmed: “The East must not consider us close to it because we are against the West.”
Contrary to a very widespread opinion, the immigration of Maghrebi workers is not considered positive by the leaders of their states of origin: for them it is a hemorrhage.
More and more numerous Arab intellectuals, writers, and leaders are calling on the Europeans to unite and to disentangle themselves from the blocs. The Arabs prove themselves much more “Europeist” and concerned about the independence and the power of Europe than the Europeans themselves…
Geopolitically, everything calls Arabs and Europeans to come to an understanding and to cooperate over the long term. They can make the Mediterranean a “lake of peace and co-prosperity” that becomes once again a great pole of civilization and of economic power. But while geography and history establish this Euro-Arab Mediterranean as one of the foremost nodes of world power, what one is witnessing instead is the decline of the Euro-Arab Mediterranean space to the profit of zones — the Atlantic or the North Pacific — that are nevertheless less predisposed by nature to be geopolitical and economic centers.
The model of a coexistence of two imperial ensembles on either side of the Mediterranean — one European, the other Arab-Muslim — is the worst thing that could be envisaged by the upholders of the present world order, as well as by the defenders of a universalist vision of the organization of humanity.
And yet, Europe’s cards are weighty in the Arab world. Faced with the United States, whose civilizational model is more and more contested by the Islamic elites, and with the USSR, whose brand image has collapsed and which has nothing more to propose than Kalashnikovs and SAMs, Europe — and not only its Mediterranean countries, but also Germany and the Nordic countries — could, if it dared, eliminate Soviet and American influences and impose itself as the principal cultural, economic, technological, and military partner of the Arabs, who ask for nothing else but who above all ask that we be equal to the task. It is not with a light heart that the Moroccan government sees its young going off to New York to study marketing; but one must understand: when they were going to Paris, it was not with French culture that they came back, but in their baggage, under their jeans, the works of Althusser or other communist vulgates.
What, then, could be the foundations of a Euro-Arab axis? With the after-effects of colonialism forgotten, and the Marxist temptations receding, it becomes possible to reflect on the conditions of a great Euro-Arab policy.
The first condition would concern a change of attitude on the part of the Arabs themselves, both among themselves and toward the Europeans. Rather than waging exhausting and ridiculous border wars against one another,4 rather than launching themselves into doubtful imperialist enterprises — and in any case doomed to fail — toward black Africa, rather than waging against the European powers political guerrillas that can only discredit them and alienate public opinion, the Arab countries would do better to put into practice the principles they profess in their orientations of foreign policy: non-alignment, third way, and alliance with Europe.
The Arabs are committing the same error as the Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: mistreating their friends, neglecting their real enemies, and weakening themselves through internal wars. Each time an Arab country and a European country come into conflict, each time Algeria and Libya harm the interests of France or vice versa, it is all Arabs and all Europeans who are weakened and who suffer for it, and it is the American–Soviet condominium that is reinforced thereby — all the more so since the superpowers can plead a chronic destabilization of the Euro-Arab area, badly managed by its inhabitants, in order to enforce their “peace” there and to separate the combatants. On the other hand, owing to their technological and military weakness, the Arab countries — once they launch themselves into military adventures against Africa or against their own neighbors — find themselves, as if by chance and every time, dependent on the Soviet Union, which graciously supplies arms, technicians, and command…
The second condition of a historic rapprochement between Europeans and Arabs is the in-depth modification of the way the former look upon the latter.
Many forces in the world push, by conditioning of opinion, to make the Arabs pass for our enemies. France is the privileged locus of such manipulations. Anything serves: primary anti-immigrant racism, the antics of Qaddafi, our dead in Lebanon, etc. Moreover, with a little common sense, one may ask, concerning the attacks that cost the lives of numerous French soldiers in Lebanon: cui bono — to whom does the crime profit? Certainly not to the Arab states and the Arab cause, who in reality had no interest in seeing the French leave and, above all, in alienating our public opinion. What proof, when one knows the methods of the secret services and the imbroglios of terrorism, exists that it was Arabs who armed the terrorists who blew up the Drakkar building in Beirut? In short, in a general way, the Atlanticist and pro-Israeli orientation of the present French government — and even more so, indeed, of the opposition! — does not contribute to improving the image of our Arab neighbors.
Another obstacle to be lifted: Arab labor immigration. The Europeans must know that this uprooting of populations is no more in the interests of the Arab countries than in our own. The idea according to which labor immigration into Europe constituted an obstacle to the development of Euro-Arab ties has been very recently developed by Algerian President Chadli, when, during a recent journey to France, he spoke of a “return to the country” for uprooted Arabs: as early as 1974, Houari Boumedienne, in a speech to the United Nations, presented Arab immigration to Europe as a “hemorrhage” by the industrial North of the elites of the Maghreb countries.
Let us therefore become aware that a psychological war is being waged in Europe with the aim of defeating any idea of rapprochement and of a great Euro-Arab policy. This strategy concords with the one that aims to disunite the Arabs and to scuttle any project of a “European Europe.” To whom does this strategy profit? To the American–Soviet condominium, particularly active in the sensitive Euro-Mediterranean zone of which the two superpowers wish to be the guardians.
Last point of European reticence regarding agreement with the Arabs: the “danger of Islam.”
It is not for us to judge the intrinsic validity of Islam. That it is effectively monotheist, universalist, and philosophically close to the Judeo-Christian project of unifying the Earth — a project from which, as polytheists, we mark every distance — does not prevent the fact that, hic et nunc, in the present state of the strategic and cultural balance of forces in the world, the Arab-Islamic re-emergence constitutes for us an objectively favorable factor, since it casts a serious disturbance into the Atlantic-Communist duopoly and contributes to destabilizing the model of a Western civilization uniform for the human race.
The third condition of a great Euro-Arab alliance would consist in posing in different terms the problem of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
As Nadia Benjelloun-Ollivier emphasizes, the State of Israel suffers as much, if not more, than the Arabs (notably on the economic plane) from the present conflict.5 Israel’s well-understood interest, as Shlomo Shoham6 suggests, is not to make itself the base of American interests in the Arab–Mediterranean region, but to maintain good relations with the Arabs and the Europeans: in this perspective, Israel, like the Arab countries, ought to look favorably upon the establishment of a Euro-Arab pole and the substitution of such an alliance for American and Soviet imperialisms. The Gaullian position on the question must be recalled: the obvious right of the Hebrew people to live in peace would be much better guaranteed if it had to deal with the Arabs and the Europeans rather than with forces — as has been the case since 1949 — that are constantly manipulated by the USA and the USSR, these two powers having at bottom no concern for either the rights of the Palestinians or those of the Israelis. The position of the Israeli Labour Party has often, in this regard, been very positive: no one threatens Israel, except those who push, by provocation, that country into adventures against its neighbors. It is the Soviets and the Americans who have destabilized this region by maintaining permanently, since 1948 — and in this taking over from England — Israeli-Arab and Arab-Arab conflicts.
Why does the Israeli-Arab conflict harm the Israelis and the Arabs first of all and serve the joint interests of the Soviet Union and the United States? For two major geostrategic and geo-economic reasons. First of all, the conflict gives the two superpowers the dreamed-of historical occasion and pretext to install themselves in the Mediterranean–Arab area, to evict the Europeans from it, and to prevent the dreaded constitution of a Euro-Arab military and economic ensemble. As “protectors” and “negotiators,” they can have their fleets cruise and maintain friendly governments. The second reason: the Arabs being important exporters of hydrocarbons, it was necessary at all costs to prevent the constitution of an economic and financial bloc, which would not have failed to occur if the region had remained at peace, and which would have menaced the economic hegemony of the United States, just as the presence of Marxist governments — which always install themselves in the wake of disturbances — would have.
If these conditions — modification of the attitudes of Europeans and Arabs, and a change of perspective on the Middle East conflict — were fulfilled, what form could the Euro-Arab axis take?
In the cultural domain first of all, the Europeans would have an interest in opening themselves up to Arab culture (the real one, not that of the “beurs”…), which could counterbalance the present American-olatrous monomania. As for the Arabs, gravely menaced by the erosion of their cultural specificity by the invasive Anglo-Saxon style, they should, among other undertakings, favor the maintenance and development of the use of the French language, which constitutes an important factor of resistance to the Americanization of Maghrebi societies. Francophonie can appear as a means, for the Arab countries, of preserving their independence and their originality within the system of international relations. The creation of an “Arab–French pole” would make it possible to preserve what Jean-Claude Delaunay calls7 a “polycentric system of original cultures” around the Mediterranean — French, unlike English, not menacing, by its use, the specificity of local languages and cultures.
The second form to be conferred upon a Euro-Arab axis is that of an economic cooperation that would put an end to the neo-colonial model of “North–South exchanges” and of labor migration. To the extent that Europe would follow the path of a self-centered, semi-autarkic economic space — the only valid response to the world economic crisis — it could, by rethinking its policy of “aid to the Third World,” cooperate with the Arabs so that the latter, too, would constitute themselves into such an economic ensemble. The under-development of today’s Arab world, despite oil revenues and investment income (which create wealth only abroad, in the United States notably…), comes from its integration into the Western and international economic system, from the weakness of inter-Arab exchanges and cooperation, from an industrialization turned toward the West and its interests rather than toward the needs of the internal market — in short, from the existence of a neo-colonial economy directed by financial castes in the service of foreigners. The right solution would consist in working progressively in the direction of a model of which the French socialists have had only the half-hearted intention, without managing to realize it: to institute two great parallel and self-centered economic ensembles, a semi-autarkic European space and a semi-autarkic Arab space that would each develop their own system of production, of technology, and of consumption, and between which cooperation and exchange would take a parity-based form.
Such an economic schema would obviously be very long to put in place. Nevertheless, it would be vain to want to bring about consciousness of its necessity without sketching, here and now, its broad outlines. The existence of two self-centered and cooperating ensembles, on either side of the Mediterranean, would bring considerable upheavals to the present economic order. By breaking the neo-colonial logic of planetary “development” according to the Western profile, it would constitute, for the entire world, an example of a solution provided to the pauperism of the “Third World.” In addition, it would partially settle the problem of immigrants in Europe, since the displaced populations could re-install themselves in their countries, thanks notably to investments from capital-rich Arab countries (Libya and the Gulf countries), which would be wiser to place their cash in employment creation in the Arab space than on the New York exchange. And a self-centered, pan-Arab economy would render these investments profitable…
The third form of the Euro-Arab axis: the formation of a geostrategic pole independent of the blocs around the Mediterranean, with extension into the Persian Gulf and toward black Africa. The locking of the Mediterranean presupposes a close Euro-Arab military cooperation, and, on the part of Europe, a greater place conferred upon its Mediterranean countries — notably Spain, Italy, and Greece — countries whose role and military efficacy are neglected by NATO, wholly obsessed with the “Soviet threat.” Better still: in the hypothesis of a substitution for this NATO entirely dominated by the United States by an independent European defense system, it would be of interest to constitute a Mediterranean Pact that would bring together exclusively the Europeans and the Arabs. Such a pact ought to confer upon the riparians of the Mediterranean an absolute monopoly of the settlement of all questions affecting the region in the broad sense. The United States and the Soviet Union would be totally excluded from it, which, given the worldwide geostrategic importance of the zone, would contribute to weakening them — an eminently positive consequence for us.
The Euro-Arab axis is realizable in the medium term. No “sense of history” opposes itself to it. The only obstacle is constituted by the absence of clarity of vision and of will on the part of those concerned, and principally on the part of the Europeans. The ball is in their — in our — court. It is our military weakness, our absence of strategic and political determination as much vis-à-vis the USSR as vis-à-vis the United States, our diplomatic timidity — in short, our absence of a common worldwide political vision — that dissuades the Arabs from putting their trust in us.
Is it known, for example, why the dollar has become the unique currency, which contributes to European economic recession and to American resurgence? Because no country — and most particularly the Arab exporters of oil and hydrocarbons — wants to take the risk of displeasing the United States by choosing, for example, a European currency in payment, or by diversifying currencies, which would nevertheless be in its interest. And why does no one wish to take this risk? Because the United States is militarily powerful (or is considered to be so), and one trusts it more, on the side of Riyadh, to defend against a Soviet aggression or a communist subversion than the Europeans. If the Europeans wished it, it would be possible to constitute, from the shores of the North Atlantic to the Indian Ocean — which laps the Arabian Peninsula — an immense geopolitical zone liberated from the status quo and from the American–Soviet duopoly. Let us dream a little: India, ever tempted by non-alignment, could join in… No, this is not a dream. It is a nightmare that the strategists of the Pentagon and of the banks of the Moskva have every night. They know that the Euro-Arab axis would change the face of the Earth, since, for the first time since 1945, the East–West logic of the American–Soviet condominium and the North–South cleavage of the Western economic order — the two present pillars of the enslavement of the peoples of the world — would be powerfully shaken.
Only one Soviet naval base in the Mediterranean: at Latakia (Syria), as against seven American bases. Moreover, the Soviets do not possess true aircraft carriers and must, in order to access the Mediterranean, force the Dardanelles, held by Turkey, a member power of NATO.
The French fleet is honorable — third in the world in firepower — but has no strategy, particularly no nuclear strategy. Is it known, for example, that France is the only naval power in the world along with the United States to possess long-range surface-launched nuclear weapons, thanks to AN54 atomic bombs embarked on the two French aircraft carriers and dropped by the Super-Étendards? But for lack of a doctrine of employment and of any will to place these nuclear weapons in the diplomatic balance, they serve no purpose…
It was this Arab neutralism, qualified by Foster Dulles as “immorality,” that as early as 1966 Mehdi Ben Barka (in Options révolutionnaires au Maroc, Maspéro) defined as the keystone of a pan-Arab international policy. It is striking to note that Ben Barka’s theses come close to those professed today by the German, Belgian, Dutch, Greek, Scandinavian, or Italian “alternative neutralists.” On this point, see Dieter Lutz, Neutralität — Eine Alternative?, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden, 1985.
In addition to the Iraq–Iran war, which is not really an inter-Arab conflict, mention should be made of the chronic antagonisms between Morocco and Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, Libya and Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, South Yemen and Saudi Arabia — without forgetting the political division on the Palestinian question between adherents of the “Front of Refusal” (Algeria, Libya, Syria, Iraq, South Yemen) and the other states.
Nadia Benjelloun-Ollivier, La Palestine: un enjeu, des stratégies, un destin, Presses de la Fondation nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris, 1984.
Professor of Law and Political Science at Ramat-Aviv University in Tel Aviv. Statement at the 1984 Athens Colloquium on the geopolitical interests of the State of Israel.
Cf. “Les pays arabes et l’usage de la langue française aujourd’hui,” in France-Pays arabes, no. 122, November 1984.
It's nice to be able to day-dream and publish the results ...👍👍👍
Daily reality in the Euro-Arab realm though, is shaped by greed, fraud, deception, treason and total corruption for personal goals of the so-called elites/politicians ONLY ...