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E. Dupuy: Address to World Summit 2020
Written by Dr. Emmanuel Dupuy, President, l’Institut Prospective et Securite en Europe, France
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
Address to World Summit 2020, Seoul, Korea, February 3-8, 2020
When it comes to discussing the reasons why the future of the 511 million Europeans is inexorably linked to that of the one billion Africans on the other side of the Mediterranean, the question of the integrated economic area is often forgotten.
What is needed, however, is not the opposition of strategies on either side of the mare nostrum, or the highlighting of positive and negative features of each shore, which, let us remember, are only 14 kilometers apart.
What is needed is to see the enduring appeal of the tremendous prospects offered by the fluidity and regularity of trans-Mediterranean trade.
It is nothing other than taking into account the need to work towards a mutual "strategic depth."
The stakes are high: that is, of building a region integrated on a global scale, linking Africa, the Mediterranean and Europe—brought together under the acronym AME—in which each part finds its centrality and singularity while not forgetting the importance of the collective sense.
The world economy and globalization also show that only integrated regions, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Mercosur trading bloc on the American continent or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Asia, can claim balanced development and sustainable growth based on the solidarity among its members.
This new reality takes on full meaning, moreover, at the geo-political, geo-economic and geo-cultural levels. As a result, it is necessary to think about a EurAfrica with the Mediterranean as a bridge and not as a barrier between the European, Asian and African continents.
Its full realization will thus be the guarantee of an area of shared prosperity, stability and security, capable of curbing the ills that prevent its full development (such as the resilient threat of terrorism and narco-crime, uncontrolled migration, economic asymmetry, poor state governance, etc.).
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