The Mediterranean Reset: Geopolitics in a New Age

MEDRESET Global Policy (2017)

The Mediterranean waterway has acted as both a bridge and a barrier between continents for millennia. History is riddled with examples of empires and emerging powers seeking to project their power in and around the Mediterranean, and all have made use of it as a communications and transmission route. The Mediterranean has facilitated access to different continents, and those entities with the means and the will have used it to project power and to secure a comparative advantage against their adversaries. One must also be mindful of the reality that much of the political landscape of the Mediterranean – its geopolitical reality – was shaped by European interventions, and in this the “local external” is in fact a dialectical relationship. Indeed, without taking into account the colonial period, one might overlook the fact that historically the Mediterranean has also been imagined as a bridge allowing the projection of European power into Africa and West Asia.