“The southern flank of Europe is moving considerably,” says Pascal Ausseur, director of the FMES

The Mediterranean is a strategic place that is close to our hearts in Europe. Pascal Ausseur, director of the Mediterranean Foundation for Strategic Studies, FMES, is the guest of European microphone.

franceinfo: Pascal Ausseur, you have created an atlas, the Strategic Atlas of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Particularity, your atlas, we can have it in paper, but it is especially on the Internet and in addition, it is free, open to all?

Pascal Ausseur: Absolutely, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, is extremely important for us French people, for us Europeans. What might be called the southern flank of Europe is moving. He moves considerably, he tenses. It’s a broth of culture in strategic terms, in terms of tensions. And our future is there.

And it seemed to us with Pierre Razoux, with Pascal Orcier, who is a very good cartographer, that it was important for the citizen, even those who are not experts, to understand as clearly as possible what is happening in this region. We thought it was essential that as many people as possible take ownership of the security issues in this area, which is vital for France and for Europe.

Area that has always been vital in the history of the world?

Which has always been vital. But it’s true that with globalization, one could believe that things were happening elsewhere. Actually not at all. These two shores of the Mediterranean, instead of converging as we thought they would, thirty years ago, on the contrary, diverge on all points of view: cultural, demographic, political, economic, development , etc. So, we have a real need to understand what is happening, to understand these tensions. And in addition, we have external tensions which come to invite themselves on this theater.

Several parts: the major challenges of the Mediterranean basin, a Middle East at the crossroads of global rivalries, security challenges in the Mediterranean basin and in the Middle East, geopolitical reconfigurations in the Mediterranean basin, andt you always say in the Middle East, and thirdly, these are the balance sheets and balance of power in the North Africa and Middle East zone.

So you actually go much further than the Mediterranean?

Absolutely, because in fact it’s a continuum. What happens in the Mediterranean and what happens in the Middle East is increasingly interconnected. We are also witnessing a form of, so to speak, “Middle Easternization” of the Mediterranean. Actors from the Middle East, Qatar, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, are increasingly active in the Mediterranean, whether on the southern shore, but also here in France, on the northern shore .

The lobbies are there, and the conflicts between them are also settled here. So we wanted both to give keys to global reading, we start from the situation of the world, then regional, and then after country by country, we try to analyze, by fairly simple country sheets, with a lot of rigor and at the same time, understandable by all.

For each country, we explain what the strategic issues are, what the country’s policy is and what its military capabilities are, with not only a quantitative approach, but also (Ukraine shows us that this is important) a qualitative opinion on the reality of the effectiveness and capability of these weapons.

And we try to see for each country, what are its strengths and weaknesses, what are its ambitions. And then, we also took the risk of studying conflict scenarios in the Mediterranean. So we have identified three: Morocco and Algeria; Iran, Israel and Hezbollah; Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. Three types of Mediterranean scenarios which, unfortunately, are credible.

With a pivot in the Mediterranean, is it Turkey?

Absolutely. It is a power that we would probably not have considered, as such, 10 or 15 years ago, which today is unavoidable in the Mediterranean. It is a regional power, but which asserts itself as a power with all that that implies as a long-term political vision, as a desire to influence events and those around it, as a strategy that is both cultural and political , economic, military of course, industrial, to develop this will to power. And so today, Turkey is a must in the Mediterranean.

Once again, the goal is for everyone to be able to appropriate these subjects, because these are not expert subjects. It is not reserved for a small elite of people who are interested in geopolitics. I think that any citizen who realizes that what is happening outside has a strong impact on his daily life, whether it is economic, employment problems, energy cost problems, which are sometimes , too, of survival. Because sometimes war invites itself, where we least expect it.

And you haven’t forgotten the environment in this atlas…

Of course, we have maps on the environmental impact and environmental degradation on strategic issues. Obviously, all this adds tension to the pre-existing tension.