France vs. Germany: Compromising on a Mediterranean Union

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has midwifed a new alliance, said Frederic Gerschel in Aujourd’hui en France. Last week, Sarkozy realized his goal of creating the Mediterranean Union, an international forum that will cooperate on all matters pertaining to the Mediterranean Sea, including pollution, smuggling, and boat people. The new group combines the 27 E.U. states with countries in the Mediterranean border region: Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as the Palestinian Authority. The most important aspect of Sarkozy’s plan is the structure: The union will be administered by a joint presidency that always includes one country from the northern side and one from the southern. Sarkozy was ebullient when the E.U. endorsed the new group. But he did acknowledge that the alliance did not look exactly the way he had first envisioned it. “It’s hard to build Europe without compromise,” he said, “but I do not think you can say that we have given up the ambition of the project.”

Sure, you can, said Charles Soula in France’s L’Indépendent. This new Mediterranean Union is a “significantly watered-down” version of the one Sarkozy had wanted. His original goal, a logical one, was to create a group of only those states that border the sea. Not all the E.U. countries would have been involved, just the ones with Mediterranean coastlines: France, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Greece, and Portugal. But Germany wouldn’t hear of it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was afraid the new group would take over European foreign policy toward North Africa, leaving other E.U. states with no say in the region. She refused to allow any E.U. funding to go toward the new group unless all European states were involved.

Thank goodness for Merkel’s clear­head­edness, said Thorsten Knuf in Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau. She took the controls from the highflying Sarkozy, “stabilized his altitude, and then landed him gently back on the ground.” The rest of Europe is silently cheering. Sarkozy has been in office for only 10 months, but Europeans are as tired of his grandiose, scene-stealing ways as are his own French people. Merkel made sure to toss Sarkozy a bone: She agreed to let him “host a big party” in July, when the Mediterranean Union holds its inaugural summit in Paris. Maybe now Sarkozy will “begin to understand that he can’t accomplish anything without being calm and rational—and including his allies.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The disagreement reminds us all how important it is for Europe that France and Germany get along, said Pierre Avril in France’s Le Figaro. Sarkozy specifically said he wanted to forge with Merkel the kind of relationship enjoyed by Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer in the ’50s, or François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl in the ’80s. But the two leaders have yet to find common ground. “There are no two more dissimilar personalities than Merkel and Sarkozy,” said one European leader. Merkel, a chemist by training, “is a scientist who loves asking questions. He, by contrast, is the political animal in its purest form.” It won’t be easy for these two “to find their chemistry.”