Unsuccessful Efforts to Stabilize the Mediterranean: The Western Powers and the Mediterranean Pact (1948–58)

Abstract

In the post-war era regional agreements were seen as the tool best suited to counter the spread of Soviet influence in the non-Communist world. A Mediterranean pact was never born, yet the idea recurred throughout the first decade of the cold war. It became a sort of ‘phoenix’, to be revived from time to time in connection with developments in the European situation and American foreign policy, mirroring the uncertainty of the Mediterranean as a geopolitical concept. This chapter will focus on French, British and American approaches to Mediterranean regional security. Unlike Latin America or Western Europe, where regional agreements were born in 1948–9, the Mediterranean area was a disparate entity, whose main historical feature was to be a zone of influence: in the late 1940s the traditional hegemonic powers, France and Britain, retained territorial, political, economic and military roles while a new power, the United States, was entering the picture and still defining the range of its interests. Mediterranean pact proposals could equally well serve as an instrument for stabilizing the East-West conflict as a powerful instrument of power politics.