ABSTRACT
The evolving pattern of maritime power, assessed in earlier chapters, indicates that, in terms of seagoing maritime assets and an ability to control routes and trade, historical shifts have created a paradox. Alongside cultural and political divergence between north and south, east and west, the historical contests for intra-Mediterranean hegemony, pursued by Greece, Rome, Phoenicia, the Italian cities, the Ottoman Empire and Habsburg Spain, increasingly gave way from the sixteenth century to an economic and technological dominance by maritime powers that lay beyond the Mediterranean littoral. For these new powers the Mediterranean was only partly significant for trade and territory; it served geopolitical purposes that were generally focused elsewhere, facilitating strategic operations on Jominian ‘external lines’. 1 Peoples whose everyday livelihood and welfare depended directly on access to the Mediterranean were peripheralized by the shift towards dominance by such powers as Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. Since the division and decline of the former Soviet Black Sea Fleet, there is now no significant challenger to the US 6th Fleet, except domestic economic pressures that could lead to what James Miskel in Chapter 6 called ‘doing less with less’. The argument here is that the end of the Cold War has not dramatically disturbed the general historical pattern nor yet enabled the regional powers to reclaim control over security. Certainly, hopes were raised that both security and functional co-operation between maritime powers with interests in the Mediterranean would expand considerably. In a remark to representatives of the Assembly of the Western European Union in late 1996, the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Amre Moussa, observed that Arab participation in peace-support operations could serve as a model for trans-Mediterranean co-operation and pave the way for co-operation in other areas. 2 He clearly regarded peacekeeping, humanitarian activities and other UN-legitimized operations as offering potential spill-over for the breaking down of security barriers in the Mediterranean area. This would mesh with the UN’s encouragement of burden sharing through regional security arrangements, thereby giving substance to the intentions of Chapter VIII of the UN Charter. 3 In so far as there have been several efforts to establish intra-Mediterranean security frameworks, there is also a prima facie case for considering the Mediterranean as an area where there might be both a demand for peace-support operations and a willingness to contemplate contributing to them. Indeed, regional states might draw upon the considerable experience of internationally legitimized peace-support operations (PSO) in the Mediterranean since World War II. 4 Finally, the Mediterranean’s strategic environment is relatively benign in one respect: maritime disputes per se tend to be generally low-key relative to disputes on land, because there is less at stake.
