ABSTRACT
Geographically set in the Sahara-Sahel, Mauritania is politically caught in the opposing winds blowing from North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. The political upheavals of its neighbors to the north and south have made this double identity palpable once again. While the repercussions of the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent changes in the international order led to political convulsions in Sub-Saharan Africa, they have barely changed the course of Mauritania’s politics. The country’s 1991 political reforms did what they were designed to do: entrench the regime, which cannily seized the moment to set itself more deeply within the geopolitical sphere of Arab countries through the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA). Later, when Mauritania withdrew from the West African Economic Community (ECOWAS), it clearly showed its determination to adopt a national identity that was not that of a Sub-Saharan African country. Withdrawing from ECOWAS membership and anchoring itself in the UMA allowed Mauritania to take advantage of a context where the slogan, “sacred national union,” would serve as a pretext for a range of policies that tended to gloss over its cultural, political and – less widespread – religious diversity.
