Europe Looks for Friends in Sunny Places - by William Underhill
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking immediately after his election in May, declared: "The time has come to build a 'Mediterranean Union' that will be a bridge between Europe and Africa."
If the details of Sarkozy's plan are hazy, the outline is clear enough: a loose economic union of all the countries around the Mediterranean rim, linked to the EU but with its own trading agreements as well as regular meetings of national leaders. That's visionary stuff: nothing less than a single community of nations, rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, striving together for a better future in which post-colonial animosities can be forgotten. Says Jean-Louis Guigou, head of the Economic Forecasting Institute of the Mediterranean World: "This is the great work of the century."There are also energy deals to be done. Algeria is already Europe's third largest supplier of natural gas, after Russia and Norway. Plans are now afoot for a new gas pipeline that would bring supplies 4,300 kilometers across the Sahara from Nigeria to a terminal on the Algerian coast.
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