The United States has, for a long time, built a “relevant” and coherent space to strengthen its sovereignty. In addition to America itself (332 million inhabitants), it includes Canada (38 million) and Mexico (130 million).
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This group of 500 million souls is sufficiently vast and rich in energy sources, in young manpower, in raw materials, vegetable or mineral. The Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) which, signed in 2018, succeeded two years later to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994, promotes the American vision of the world in 2040 as described by the CIA: “We live in separate silos: the world is fragmented into several economic and security blocs of varying size and strength, centered on the United States, China, the European Union European Union (EU), Russia and some regional powers; these blocks focus on self-sufficiency, resilience and defense. Information flows through separate cyber-sovereign enclaves. Supply chains are reoriented, and international trade is disrupted. »
Community preference
China has also created a vertical region, from the North Pole to the South Pole, integrating Japan, them countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Australia, New Zealand. This large region brings together 3 billion people and contributes 30% to global GDP. The result of long preparatory work, entrusted to a foundation, the ERIA, which mobilized the best experts and business leaders, this Asian bloc has been governed, since January 1, 2022, by the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). .
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Europe, as early as 1957 (Treaty of Rome) and 1962 with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), was the first to create a large regional market, combined with Community preference. Having set an example, it cannot therefore be offended that the United States and China are also resorting to a regionalization of trade. But the EU has not yet reached the optimum geographical dimension. It lacks partners in the South, particularly for renewable energies, raw materials and young workers.
Ambitious goals
Therefore, to count once morest the United States and China, Europe has no choice but to find partners in the South to gradually create, too, a vertical axis. During a first stage, the EU should shape with the Maghreb countries (Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt) a relevant North-South regional space, with 666 million inhabitants.
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This economic integration should set ambitious goals: a common market with a common preference for borders; food security in the South and energy security in the North; a Mediterranean Energy Community (MEC); the normalization of relations between Algeria and Morocco; a Euro-Mediterranean world champion for renewable energies; the depollution of the Mediterranean and the rationalization of its use by taxing, for example, the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar, which is a global public good; co-managed Euro-Mediterranean vocational training centers for jobs “in tension”; a vast program of reindustrialization and North-South co-production, including sharing of added value, technology transfers and compliance with the requirements of economic, social and environmental responsibility (RESE); promoting organic farming and a common agri-food market.
Warning: if China establishes itself permanently and produces on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, it will be the end of reindustrialization of l’Europe.
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In a second step, the EU will have to create a large vertical region from Northern Europe to Southern Africa, which in 2050 will have 3.2 billion inhabitants (2.7 billion ‘Africans and 0.5 billion Europeans), exceptional human and natural wealth, populations inserted in only four time zones and culturally close.
Regional integration and multilateralism
To succeed in this linking of the two continents linked by the Mediterranean, it is necessary to follow, here once more, the example of the Americans and the Asians and to set up: a foundation which mobilizes the university experts and the business circles likely to formulate proposals realistic integration; an intercontinental bank to facilitate capital mobility and investment security, as well as to settle disputes; a treaty of co-production, exchange and training for a new resilient green economy; a political structure for consultation.
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This work of institutional organization of regionalization, with possible recourse to regional protectionism, must be considered as a necessary stage, but not as an end in itself. In this sense, the EU is a unique and exemplary experience.
Indeed, highly integrated regionally, Europe also deploys multilateral actions in terms of the climate, renewable energies, the search for a new economic model that is socially and environmentally demanding, or the fight once morest tax havens. It is Europe that sets the example of what should be a new globalization that reconciles regional integration and multilateralism.
If, on the contrary, the regionalization of globalization were conceived as a strategy of economic isolation and political confrontation (as the confrontation between the “American region” and the “Chinese region” might lead one to believe), then it would be misguided. and should be fought.
In short, the three major vertical regions – the American, the Chinese and the Euro-African – should not be conceived as definitively closed blocks, but as new constructions, capable of giving rise to rich multilateral relations. Regionalization, as exemplified in Europe, is not opposed to globalisation. It should be the source of a new “re-globalization”, according to the expression of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO). France and Europe must not leave it to dictators and populists to invent the new order world.
