Love Tops Agenda As Sarkozy Launches Mediterranean Union

President Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday sought to shift Europe's strategic focus towards the Middle East, north Africa and the Balkans, hosting 42 heads of state and government at a summit in Paris to launch a new Mediterranean Union.

Initially concentrated on infrastructure and energy projects such as making north Africa a hub for solar power, Sarkozy's grand initiative is acutely political, claiming a pole position for France in European foreign policy-making after years of drift and seeking to redirect policy from the east of Europe to the south.

A fortnight into his six-month EU presidency, Sarkozy hosted an unprecedented gathering of leaders from Europe and all sides of the Mediterranean amid the splendor of Paris's Grand Palais. He delivered a message of peace to a suspicious audience of leaders more noted for their backstabbing rivalries and conflicts.

"The goal of the summit is to learn how to love each other in the Mediterranean, instead of continuing to hate and wage war," said Sarkozy. "We will build peace in the Mediterranean together."

Sarkozy's big idea is to use imperial Rome's center of the world as a unifying factor linking 44 countries that are home to 800 million people. But the plan has been pilloried by such diverse sources as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Colonel Muammar Gadafy of Libya.

Berlin saw the Sarkozy scheme as a means of splitting the EU while enhancing France's clout at others' expense. Gadafy stayed away, claiming to discern a revival of French colonialism in north Africa that would spark Islamist rebellion.

Yesterday's summit committed participants to "peace, stability and security" in a region beset with conflict, including Israel and the Arab world, Syria and Lebanon, Morocco and Algeria, Turkey and Greece, Cyprus, and much of the Balkans. President Bashar Assad of Syria sat in the same room as Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who, in turn, appeared alongside the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to announce that peace was within grasp.

Sarkozy ended Assad's international pariah status and the Syrian leader announced that Damascus and Beirut would reciprocate with the opening of embassies for the first time in decades.

Despite the fanfare in Paris, Sarkozy's new "Club Med" will be a long haul if it is to amount to much beyond a talking shop and a channel for transferring EU funds to the Maghreb and the Middle East.

The initial decisions were to establish a secretariat jointly run by France and Egypt and to announce initiatives on developing solar power in north Africa, a clean-up-the-Med project, the promotion of ports and transport infrastructure to boost regional trade, and the setting up of a new Mediterranean university in Slovenia.

Brussels is already working with north African and Arab states on the proposals for "sun farms" across the Sahara and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, to meet the need identified by the International Energy Agency for up to 215m additional square meters of solar panels each year to 2050. Gordon Brown said that the region had the potential to become "a global hub for low-carbon solutions".

The line-up at the summit supplied an opportunity for leaders to haggle over multiple international issues from Zimbabwe to the Middle East to Turkey's constitutional crisis to the EU's attempts to reconfigure its modus operandi.

Staged on the eve of Bastille Day, the summit also afforded Sarkozy the chance to parade as a world leader despite his flagging ratings at home. But he has been forced to scale back initial plans for a French-led union of 21 Mediterranean littoral states which would have been funded by the EU but would have excluded northern and eastern Europe. Germany, the EU paymaster, balked at that and also suspected a Sarkozy scheme to divide the EU into zones of influence where Berlin would take charge to its east and Paris would play the main role in the south.