For the third year, you are organizing the Strategic Meetings of the Mediterranean (RSMed2024) which allow stakeholders in Europe’s southern neighborhood (industrialists, military, politicians, researchers, students, etc.) to “cross perspectives on the world”. In the light of these exchanges, how would you characterize the state of maritime tensions and conflict in the Mediterranean Sea today?
P. Ausseur: Tensions in the Mediterranean are first and foremost a reflection of tensions in the countries surrounding it, and also a reflection of tensions in the world. The geopolitics of the seas is intrinsically linked to that of the land. Conflict in Ukraine, Israeli-Palestinian conflagration, war in the Sahelo-Sudanese strip, rivalries between regional powers, American elections… International and regional realities intertwine, feed each other and are exported at sea. Today, the Mediterranean is a strategic space under threat, where three dynamics significantly influence the state of tensions in the area: the fragmentation of the world, North/South tensions and finally East/West tensions.
The dynamic of divergence, observed on a global scale, takes on a particular dimension in this region due to the common history, still raw, of this Euro-Mediterranean zone. We are currently experiencing the end of the dream of convergence, including the Union for the Mediterranean (1) was the last avatar; that is to say the end of a rapprochement towards the European model supported by a network of exchange, commerce and cooperation supposed to lead towards “an ever closer union” to use the expression of the Treaty of European Union, whose logic he followed.
Going against this dynamic of happy globalization, which tended by nature to smooth out rough edges, today differences stand out, identities are asserted and alternative models are flourishing.
These centrifugal forces are more complex than a simple de-Westernization, because the reconfigurations are multiple. The first concerns the relationship between the North and the South, that is to say between the countries which benefit from globalization and those which have the feeling of being left behind. The Mediterranean is a narrow border between these two worlds. Economic and social inequalities are increasing. This material gap is now accompanied by an intellectual and spiritual abyss which separates societies in terms of representations, their relationship to religion or societal and political organization.
The Mediterranean is therefore no longer a Our Sea or a political union in the making, but indeed the site of a rupture whose fault continues to widen between the North and the South, all around Europe. The extension of BRICS+ last year to five countries in our southern neighborhood is an illustration of this (2). The Gaza war after October 7, 2023 only reinforced this polarization by bringing with it a growing rise in resentment among populations in the South, in solidarity with the Palestinian cause towards Israel (the paradigmatic representative of the dominant Northern countries).
The same dynamic is at work between East and West, that is to say between the autocratic continental powers led by China and Russia and the democratic maritime powers led by the United States and the Europe. The Ukrainian conflict is a dramatic consequence of this on our continent. It has direct repercussions in the Mediterranean which go beyond the contiguity of the Black Sea. It indeed explains the current power game, in which the cards are reshuffled and from which the Moscow-Tehran-Ankara axis emerges strengthened. Military aid (3)technology transfers, circumvention of sanctions, probable collaborations in matters of intelligence and cybersecurity… The positions of these actors are today more solid in the central and eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Middle East, even if the United States United showed that they still had to be reckoned with.
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