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”Distribution of roles”, ”Hierarchy of actors, ‘’Intelligence in execution”, ”Inspiration in timing”, are so many expressions that distinguish state and non-state actors in terms of their perception of their roles on the diplomatic and strategic chessboards. If we add actors used as palliatives, if not as substitutions, words become at will.
With all due respect to the proponents of the “sovereignty paradigm” and “total independence” in the implementation of strategic options pertaining to foreign policy and international politics, the room for free maneuver left to the discretion of state actors is limited. There is certainly a space in which relative freedom is conceded to various stakeholders, but it depends on the hierarchy of the actors involved, the issue at stake, the context, and the timing. In this multifaceted process, preferences are confronted with the imperatives of compromise in order to avoid getting into military confrontation, which is synonymous with total stalemate.
However, the intelligibility of this type of process depends above all on the perception of the notion of “role” by the actors involved. What role is assigned to them in situations of acute tension that are difficult to contain? And how can this role fit with their political preferences and cultures?
What kind of role is it? Mediation? Execution of a political, military, diplomatic, or security tactical plan? Troublemakers? Compromise or resignation while waiting for the storm to end? Collateral damage management?
Strategic Dependency and ‘Dynamic Suzerainty’
International politics is conceived in a way that makes processes and sequences the backdrop to all diplomatic behavior. The actors to whom roles are assigned are divided into those who keep pace with an assigned mission and those who, having the wind in their sails, occasionally go beyond this mission. The first category often manages to do well. The second category cannot help but break its teeth.
In international political chessboard, state actors are co-opted to play the role of intermittent or strategic belts. With a few exceptions, some of them have achieved half-fig and half-grape results—not to say they have failed. The history of the second half of the twentieth century offers a good illustration of such a failure.
During the 1970s and 1980s, countries such as Iran and Iraq were offered the role of scarecrows to force certain strategic dependencies, such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt, to conform to the scripts written by the superpowers in the context of the East-West confrontation. The leaders of these countries have misread the balance of power and overrated their countries’ place in the hierarchy of power. They have been swept away by uprisings provoked from within and supported and maintained steadily by foreign interests.
The regimes that were put in place to replace the existing regimes were given the same assignment. Yet, presently, they are making the same mistakes that will ultimately lead to their collapse in the same way the regimes they took over did.
During the 1990s, countries were called in to furnish the décor of the USSR post-collapse era. They have been assigned the mission of sticking to the role of “strategic dependency” by acting as spoilers. They were co-opted because an important major player, namely the United States, was keen, on the one hand, to tame Russia, which survived total collapse, and, on the other hand, to rethink its conception of the Cold War and possibly create a new one.
The idea was to contain Russia, but without allowing Western Europe to feel freed from its commitments to Washington. These commitments date back to the post-First and Second World War era. The entire architecture of the European Union, of German reunification, and of the war in the Balkans was built on the basis of achieving ‘the end of history’—to use Francis Fukuyama’s thesis—by creating a single planetary power controlling the rest of the world. This control was to be carried out on the basis not of the notion of classical strategic dependency but of “dynamic suzerainty”.
Sticking with its classic pattern of controlling interstate conflicts from a distance, the United States resorted to the same diplomatic ritual. It consists of making proposals that save time without moving towards a definitive solution to endemic conflicts. The Americans’ policymakers argue that it is up to the parties to the conflict to work out solutions, as mediation cannot succeed if the latter do not have the political will to do so.
By implementing this perception of conflict management, the United States delegated the role of organizing security and establishing viable balances of power in sub-regions known for chronic instability to state actors it deemed capable of carrying out this task.
Thus, Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria, Libya, France, and Germany, to name but a few, had some leeway to relatively control the strategic chessboards to which they belonged.
The idea was to allow decision-makers at the global systemic level to review their strategic roadmap for the coming decades. They have been interested in the distinction between major and minor state actors in the hastily drawn geopolitical configurations made up by zealous political and military planners. Freedom of maneuver has been left to state actors, who are labeled as intermediate powers.
Let’s see how things went. Countries such as Turkey and Qatar have been tasked with promoting Islamic movements that are believed to be more committed to religious thoughts but less maximalist. This move was conceived without allowing them to come into direct conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran or with the guardians of Sunni orthodoxy in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia.
In the beginning, the two countries handled their task quite well until, at the outbreak of the Arab Spring, they sought to stand on their own two feet and discredit their sponsors. The consequence was a smooth political transition of power in Doha and an attempted military coup in Ankara. This has resulted in a change of scenery and a shift in priorities for both countries, with nevertheless a Turkish stubbornness that manifests itself from time to time without any significant consequences for the regional geostrategic balance of power.
Egypt, for its part, has made a wrong assessment by being too self-confident in its capacity as a strategic belt and indispensable diplomatic mediator in the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts. Hosni Mubarak had been asked to go further in the fight against terrorism, opening a room for the Ikhwan movement, and facilitating the resolution of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
Change of scenery, change of priorities
The Egyptian president has been aware of the existential danger of these three strategically damaging demands on Egyptian sovereignty. Propelling the Muslim Brotherhood into the framework of the plans concocted by the United States and its European allies, in collaboration with Turkey and Qatar, could have gotten the job done, yet what happened next brought about a different outcome. It is worth reminding that the events that are taking place in the Palestinian territories, particularly in Gaza, are dangling the same pattern for some Western strategists, which Hosni Mubarak rejected.
South Africa, Algeria, and Nigeria have been assigned the role of potential locomotives in their respective areas of influence. South Africa, by playing on its aura as a pioneer country in the armed struggle against apartheid, Nigeria, and Algeria by advocating their assets as producers of hydrocarbons that are so important for the energy security of Europe and the United States.
The alliance between the three countries has allowed them to crack down in their sub-regions with the blessing of the major actors who have delegated to them the power to rationally organize regional security. This tripartite management came up against the ambitions of Libya, whose leader did not accept to be the butt of the joke—he who had been brought to power thanks to the United States, precisely to play the role of troublemaker in Africa and the Middle East.
The tripartite alliance achieved three objectives. South Africa had a dizzying rise thanks to the legacy of Nelson Mandela and the ascendancy of the multinational corporations that control most of the South African economy.
Algeria had the support of the other two countries on the question of its hypothetical leadership in North Africa by using the question of Western Sahara as an alibi. Algeria did so while refraining from interfering in Nigeria’s internal affairs, mainly on the issue of its territorial integrity, still threatened by the secession put from time to time on the back burner of Biafra.
Nigeria had control of the West African space and maintained a reasonable balance of power vis-à-vis South Africa, Algeria, and Libya.
Nevertheless, these countries made a big mistake by underestimating the bargaining and silent power of other African actors. This applies to Morocco and Egypt, not to mention other so-called minor actors who played a balanced role in situations of tight diplomatic and security tensions.
France and Germany present a different pair of sleeves, but this sustains our analysis. The European Union, which both countries boast about, arguing that it was thanks to them that it built itself and resisted American and Soviet pressure, is going through a period of deep crisis. With all due respect to commentators who deem this crisis an unavoidable step toward reshaping European solidarity, we think that their optimism is a little too exaggerated.
The European Union was built to confront the USSR and continue the American work of encirclement begun in the aftermath of the First World War and especially since the Second World War. The fall of the Soviet Empire was not the end of history (in its ideological dimension: capitalism vs. socialism), but the beginning of a process of weakening Russia without going so far as to destroy it.
The Europeans (France and Germany, notably as the driving force of the European Union) have inherited the role of implementing the American vision. In their euphoria, both countries failed to pay attention to the safeguards that the United States has put in place. They believed that they were free to deal with Russia without going through the United States. They invested massively there, forgetting that most of the capital invested is under the control of American financial structures.
The consequence of this miscalculation is the establishment of a climate of suspicion and mistrust in relations between Washington and most European capitals. This climate is also aggravated by the Europeans’ outstretched hand to China and Iran, not to mention important contentious issues such as Taiwan or cooperation with the Asian Tigers.
Geopolitical rebalancing, not uncontrolled disorder
The following conclusions can be drawn from the developments reviewed above: Firstly, the perception of the classical balance of power has changed. Actors who had been co-opted to fill the roles of strategic intermediaries failed in their mission. Only Qatar seems to have learned its lesson and is returning to its classic role. However, Doha is inadvertently trying to perform a new diplomatic-security skill in conflictual spaces far from the Middle East.
Secondly, the principles highlighted during the 1960s to maintain anachronistic situations inherited from colonization are being challenged and undermined by the change in the geopolitical structure of regional subsystems. This is the case with notions of the inviolability of borders inherited from colonization and the feudal structure of international relations.
Thirdly, the obsolescence of these two concepts is accurate in two particularly instructive cases. On the one hand, the erosion of France’s influence in Africa, particularly in the Sahel and West African regions; on the other hand, the reduction of Algeria’s influence in its North African space and in the Sahel.
Algeria, which had thought it had definitively settled the border issue in 1983 by signing agreements with Mali, Niger, Mauritania, and Tunisia, is facing challenges to these agreements. Voices in Libya, which has never accepted the delineation of the borders with Algeria inherited from colonization, and in Mali and Tunisia in particular, are calling for the reparation of this injustice.
The recent conflict with Libya and Mali concerns, among other things, the hydrocarbon reserves in huge parts of their territories that had been illegally attached by France to Algeria.
Now, Algeria is considering installing buffer zones on its borders with the countries with which it has signed border agreements. The project will start at the border with Mali. It will be later extended to Niger and Mauritania. With the latter, the project goes further; it aims at the transfer of the Saharawi populations from Tindouf to the north of that country. Algerian phobia may be highlighted in the signing of an agreement on borders between Algeria and the pseudo-SADR, announced with fanfare after the failure of the project to block El Guerguerat in the southern provinces of Morocco.
Fourthly, France is losing ground in Africa because it has failed to fulfill the mission entrusted to it of astutely managing conflicts in Africa, resulting precisely from the imposition of the notion of the inviolability of borders inherited from colonization.
French political and military planners are paying the bill for a vague (or a myopic) reading of the new geopolitics that emerged from the Cold War. In particular, they underestimated or ignored the revival of nationalism in Russia and Africa.
They have remained faithful to a military ethnology that has had its day. They refuse to declassify the archives of colonization for fear of losing everything in the process. They are losing everything by keeping these records classified.
Fifthly, alliances based on the notion of the classical balance of power are withering away. In Europe, the Franco-German couple is only a shadow of what it had hoped for. In Africa, the makeshift alliance between Algeria, Nigeria, and South Africa is slowly but surely crumbling. Nigeria is emerging from an alliance that is detrimental to its own interests.
Nigeria does so whenever it feels in danger of losing control of its geopolitical space. Suffice it to remind that Abuja has slowed down Morocco’s accession to ECOWAS through the Nigerian Employers’ Confederation. However, Nigeria is embracing the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline project to integrate twelve countries. However, it is not giving up on the trans-Saharan pipeline project between Nigeria and Algeria, although the situation in the Sahel-Saharan strip does not bode well for the implementation of such an ambitious project.
What remains is the alliance between Algeria and South Africa. However, it is worth remembering that this alliance ended in mascaraed on the occasion of the last week’s election for the post of president of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which Morocco won against South Africa despite an unprecedented smear campaign orchestrated by Algiers and Pretoria. The same loss of influence can be witnessed within the African Union and the United Nations Security Council, where both countries play their spoilsport role without getting anything in the way.
It goes without saying that the inevitable end of the stranglehold of the caciques within the decision-making system and the pragmatism of the business community linked to international finance in South Africa will make the alliance between Pretoria and Algiers less visible if not doomed to clinical death.
Sixthly, a renewed geopolitical approach is taking shape in different regional subsystems. It is intended as a wake-up call to the intermediate powers that have not been able to seize the opportunity to be major players in an appropriate way in their chosen space.
Seventhly, a geopolitical area that concerns us is that of the Atlantic, in which countries such as Spain, Morocco, and Portugal have a role to play. This role is combined with that of the United Kingdom. The aim is to show some of the European Union’s members and Arab and African actors that they have to comply with new geopolitical realities. These new realities are not meant to totally neutralize them.
Eighthly, the broad outlines of the new geopolitics impose the duty of compromise, inclusion, and dynamic cooperation in order to meet global challenges. The new geopolitics must reckon with rising intermediate powers entrusted with the same mission of keeping regional geostrategic balances under control without repeating the same zeal of the state actors mentioned in this article.
Ninthly, the new geopolitical equation is eyeing countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East, Morocco and Egypt in Africa, and Spain and Portugal in Europe. Italy could play a certain role as long as it digs itself out of the ambivalence it casts in its Mediterranean policy.
It will be up to these new actors, particularly the Arab and African ones, to make the appropriate use of the “sovereignty paradigm,” “interdependence,” and “reasonable regional integration” through co-development and shared prosperity.
