The French president wants to put a buffer between Europe and the Islamic world by patronising an arc of preferred Middle Eastern states, writes Emad Fawzi Shueibi* French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his people have had an idea and they want to make it a reality. They want to create a Middle Eastern bloc parallel to the European Union, a "Europe without Europeans" as some have called it, in order to solve the problem of Turkey's application to enter the EU. According to the plan, Turkey will become part of the "non-European Europe". Behind this project lies the desire to facilitate the adoption of policies targeting Muslim immigrants, that ubiquitous demographic/cultural time bomb that is fuelling mounting xenophobia in Europe and that in France voiced itself in a law prohibiting the wearing of the veil in schools. The Sarkozy plan calls for a division of the Islamic world along lines that are presumed non- provocative, in contrast to Washington's crusader/clash of civilisations approach that pits the enlightened democratic West against Muslim extremist evil. Sarkozy's planned division is founded on the notion of geographic proximity. According to Zvi Barel, in Haaretz, the Middle Eastern bloc will consist of 15 countries: seven of them Islamic (Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco); and eight non- Arab, among which is Israel. Significantly dubbed the "Islamic sieve" by the Israeli commentator, the project is clearly designed to sort the Islamic chafe from the Islamic wheat, or "correct Islam" as Europeans define it as opposed to what one supposes must be the deviant Islam of the Gulf, and especially of Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia. In effect, it aims to create the type of strategic pocket that Samuel Huntington calls for in his Clash of Civilisations -- a pocket of Oriental culture made in the West. Barel asks the obvious question: Is there a "Mediterranean Islam" that is different from Islam that is non-Mediterranean? Why have Turkey, Morocco and even Egypt -- never mind non-Muslim Lebanon and secular Tunisia -- produced a "different" Islam while countries that are beyond the Mediterranean basin present to the West an Islam that is deemed threatening? The answer, he writes, "is apparently not inherent in Islam as a religion per se, but rather in the states and the regimes that determine the place of religion -- not faith -- in a country". As usual, of course, the question of the Arab-Israeli conflict is deftly overlooked. As with that plethora of studies conducted by American neo-conservatives in an attempt to unearth what possible reasons "they" could have to "hate us [the Americans]", what is probably the major source of extremism in this region is, officially at least, discarded in the analysis. In this analysis, Turkey is cited as the model of the Islamic country Europe is looking for. As Barel writes, "now, instead of celebrating the victory of religion over the state, in Turkey, too, political Islam prefers to keep its head down and allow itself to be coloured by secular definitions: democracy, human rights, a free economy, entry into the European community, and diminished military power. True, the president's wife does wear a head covering, but she has announced that she will not participate in public appearances and in that way she will not break the law. In Turkey, too, Christian Democrats serve as a role model, and secularism is not subject to criticism; it is only required to adopt a conservative scale of values, like modesty, not drinking alcohol in public, or getting rid of street advertisements that show girls in bikinis." The Israeli writer continues, "if in Western eyes Turkey symbolises a non-Arab Mediterranean country whose language is written in the Latin alphabet but is still sufficiently Muslim to upset Europe's white Christian serenity, then for Europe in general, and France in particular, Morocco, Lebanon, Algeria and Tunisia are francophone countries. Their official language is Arabic, their citizens' religion is that same Islam, but the French that reverberates in the streets, in the clubs, on street signs and even in some of the local literature is perceived as a factor that brings those countries closer to Europe. Brings them closer, but does not bring them in, and certainly does not threaten the desire to belong, to which Turkey aspires." Clearly the Sarkozy concept of a Middle Eastern bloc is intended to regulate, if not prevent, Muslim immigration into Europe. Sarkozy seems to have subscribed to the type of formulas that the Israelis believe are essential to their survival. The French president wants a defensive wall, an intermediate zone, something that is not entirely Arab, but that is not European. Its unifying factor is not so much geography but rather that cultural distance that separates its nominated members from "Arabism" -- that bugbear of the neo- conservatives for whom the term has become almost synonymous with "extremist Islam" that is required to recede into the background in order to give room for the "sieve" that allows only "correct" Islam and "proper" Arabic culture to pass through to areas near Europe's borders. If this is indeed Sarkozy's intention, the Israeli commentator asks, how will he apply it to countries like Egypt or Libya, "the first of which sees itself still as the chief arbiter of Arab discourse, and the second of which skips back and forth between Arabism and Africanism? And more importantly, how will francophone countries like Lebanon and Morocco be able to get along among themselves in the Mediterranean when they are circumscribed by the bonds of their Arabism, and some of them diminish the power of Islam within them to the point that it is reduced to folklore?" The only conclusion one can draw is that there is another attempt afoot to engineer a regional role for Israel in its capacity as a European foothold in the area. Barel does not say this exactly, but he does observe, "it would seem that the broad brush strokes that were aimed at defining regions or uniting cultures in a way that is convenient for someone who used to be a colonialist and is today defined as a neo-colonialist, are not being drawn exactly according to the Middle East's own preference." The French concept of a Middle Eastern bloc is a weaker version of "Middle Easternism" which, in turn, differs little in its inherent attitude from "the Third World". True, the Israeli commentator may feel it more correct to say that Sarkozy's "Mediterraneanism" is the "French-European version of US President Bush's 'new Middle East' -- i.e. a term used for countries that have to be tamed in accordance with Western criteria". However, this is not quite precise. The "broader Middle East" is not something to be tamed so much as it is something to be splintered and fragmented into disparate sects, tribes, ethnic groupings and religious denominations by shattering dominate centralised states and annexing the shards to the US, according to the whims of the likes of Fouad Ajami, Bernard Lewis, Zalmay Khalilzad and Richard Perle. As Barel points out, the difference is in approach to the same design wherein the West, either Europe or America, is trying to dictate the conditions if not the nature of the countries that are supposed to adopt the dictate. Have we been transported to the turn of the last century, to become but a formless substance to be divvied up within the framework of grand or not so grand theories? Apparently we have. It appears that the breaking of rational political will at home has reduced us to fodder for the policies of others. * The writer is a professor of political science at Damascus University and director of the Centre for Strategic Data and Studies.
