ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the aims and results of France’s post-decolonisation policy in the Mediterranean, taking into account the deterioration of its image in Arab countries at the time of the Algerian war of Independence. France presented itself as a balancing force, a major player in Mediterranean dialogue, seeking to move beyond the bipolar world, or even unipolar world in the 1990s. This ‘other West’ initially developed an Arab policy, which broadened into a Euro-Arab dialogue in the 1970s and became Euro-Mediterranean after the end of the Cold War. The gradual end of the Cold War, the rise of the north-south factor in international relations and the rise of Islamism in the Mediterranean explain why discourse of an ‘other West’ in favour of a ‘dialogue of cultures’ between equals was maintained. From the 1990s onwards, and even more so after full reintegration into the NATO command and the Arab revolutions of 2011, the French diplomatic positions nevertheless seem less clear or less operative in the face of the vagaries of American involvement in the Mediterranean.
