One feature that stands out from the 2008 White Paper on security and national defence is the strategic priority accorded to the arc of crisis extending from Mauritania to Pakistan. This unstable axis seems today to monopolize our thoughts on security and defence. Large though it may loom in the quest to protect France against the dangers which this arc breeds and however necessary France’s contribution to the European continent’s stability, it must not dominate French thinking to the exclusion of all else. In particular, it must not divert us from the central strategic approach, launched a half-century ago, of the creation of a common European security and prosperity identity. This approach was, of course, a response to the tragedy of the European wars of previous centuries. It was also based on the calculation that a common European interest would outweigh national interests and create a community with a future, along with our neighbours.

We could, however, claim that, with the end of the Cold War, the construction of Europe has deviated from its initial path. That it has in fact given way to a wider transatlantic movement, intended to modernize, secure and control a wide corridor running from Florida to Central Asia, in accordance with the Greater Middle East rhetoric pushed by the George W. Bush administration. Have the successive enlargements of NATO and the European Union of the last decade not been conducted with this more or less implicit motivation? Certainly, they have brought together states which the Cold War had ranged against each other under the same democratic and economic umbrella and which the end of that era liberated from totalitarian political and ideological constraints. But for some, they also meant contributing to an enlarged Western camp, aimed at confronting a new, latent antagonism from an intrusive Asia, with a resurgent and threatening champion in the form of China. And on the route from America to Asia, which passes through the Mediterranean, it was necessary to engage with an Arab/Muslim society discontented with its social and political conditions; a Middle Eastern region containing energy resources vital for the development of the planet; the borders of an Asia which still retained the unstable vestiges of an Ottoman Empire dismantled nearly a century before, and a failing Soviet Empire.

Building a European Strategic Space

The arc of crisis generally considered in France as part of the Western world is the ill-governed weak link which illustrates this analysis; a link which touches on four continents in various stages of development: America, Africa, Europe and Asia; a link which crosses the Mediterranean and the Sahel, the southern shore of that other Mediterranean which is the Sahara.