In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, and: Contested State Identities and Regional Security in the Euro-Mediterranean Area
  • Robert J. Pranger (bio)
Bat Ye’or: Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. 384 pages. ISBN 0-8386-4077-X. $23.95.
Raffaella A. Del Sarto: Contested State Identities and Regional Security in the Euro-Mediterranean Area. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 281 pages. ISBN 1-4039-7063-7. $69.95.

Michel Jobert, close assistant and foreign minister to French president Georges Pompidou, wrote in his "Thoughts on Mediterranean Strategy: From Surprise to Stubbornness" in the spring 1991 issue of this journal that the clash over American leadership in Europe is also a disagreement over whether the zone from the Atlantic to the China Sea of some 1 billion Muslims with 200 million Arabs at its center is to be controlled by foreign powers or left to the inhabitants to do with as they please. In its postcolonial phase after Indochina and Algeria, France has generally leaned toward nonintervention in the Arab world, if not in Afghanistan and the Balkans, whereas the United States has now entered a hyperinterventionist period that, to date, seems nowhere near an end despite setbacks in Iraq.

In his strong critique of American policy in Gulf War II (the first Persian Gulf war was between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, with a third Gulf War under way during this [End Page 141] decade in Iraq), published in various essays between August 1990 and August 1991 and appearing together in his 1991 Journal du Golfe (reviewed by me in the spring 1992 issue of this journal), Jobert expressed profound doubts about US military ventures into the Arab world, with Saddam Hussein only symptomatic then (and no doubt now) of a central issue for world politics in the twenty-first century: "The continuous frustration and humiliation of the great Islamic zone by outsiders who are now led by the United States" (words from my review).

Writing in 1990 and 1991, Jobert prophetically saw the Islamic and Arab zones after the first Gulf War coming under a US strategy that was interested less in control of territory than a recourse based on "brutal and total military confrontation" instead of diplomacy. He would no doubt find it ironic that a key author of America's Gulf War I strategy under George Bush 41, James Baker, would now be a foremost critic of such militarism under George Bush 43 in his 2006 publication of the Iraq Study Group Report (with Congressman Lee Hamilton).

The Arab world we find pictured in new books by Bat Ye'or, a researcher on dhimmitude, and Raffaella A. Del Sarto, of the Robert Shuman Centre for Advanced Studies in the European Programme at the European University Institute, is a domain of "continuous frustration and humiliation," where national identities have been skewed away from passivity to forms of outrage that ominously threaten the security and even stability of the various "outsiders led by the United States." This has often been categorized as a "clash of civilizations," when in reality it resembles more the phenomenon of "Eurabia" in Ye'or's passionate reading of the evolution of so-called Euro-Arab culture from the 1960s onward. She inveighs against such a reality and holds accountable, among others, Charles de Gaulle and, no doubt, Pompidou and those close to him like Jobert.

While written from the standpoints of ostensibly polar opposite methodologies—Ye'or intensely ideological for a wider readership and Del Sarto highly technical for an academic audience—the two books focus on the same topic, the European Union's Euro-Arab Dialogue structure. More specifically, both authors deal with the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) launched at the Barcelona Conference in November 1995 and subsequently known as the Barcelona Dialogue. It initially involved fifteen EU member states and twelve partners from the Mediterranean, including in the latter group Egypt, Israel, and Morocco. For Del Sarto, the EMP is her centerpiece or "case study" in the thorny field of international relations theory, while for Ye'or it is but one example of "Europe's evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilization , with important...

pdf

Share