Recent mediatic, populist, more or less calamitous events in and affecting France are just the tip of a complex geopolitical iceberg. I refer, first, to the external pulse represented by the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union. Second is the dreadful Turkish rise in the Mediterranean and its regional emancipation—for France, a resentful resurrection as an emerging power in fundamental conflict with the supposed values of the French Republic. The controversial slogan of agitation is secularism—which is not even part of the republican currencies stamped constitutionally in the fourth paragraph of Article 2 of the Constitution of 1958, though it is part of the preceding definition in Article 1 (“La France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale”) which ensures equality based on race, sex, religion, and fraternity. This essay will try to decipher the spurious motives of a geopolitical conflict over Eastern Mediterranean hegemony promoted mainly by Saudi Arabia¹ and France.

France’s Present: Opportunity and Animus

The European Union’s agglutination was built up along two geopolitical edges with an industrial economic tractor (Alnasir, 2020). The first two are France and the United Kingdom which, because of their representation in the UN Security Council, were delegated European nuclear powers. France has always been jealous about its military operational capacity, asserting through its special status in NATO a strategic post-colonial position in Africa and its scattered colonies around the globe. However, and despite this post-imperial greed, Germany understood after the disaster of the Second World War that the age of military operative hegemony had ended, so that its career was focused on economic-industrial prosperity, abandoning its military career to the actors of the old concept. Germany has maintained the power of the European last word due to its industrial talent and might.
 
Now, however, Brexit implies the institutional re-ordering of the Union, not simply the departure of a Member State as it would be in the case of Poland, Greece, or even Spain. Brexit means a French monopoly of nuclear capacity in the European Union. France suddenly elevates itself as an unquestionable regional hegemon, which seriously endangers the order of stability for which the EU has been forged.
 
On the other hand, Turkey’s emergence as a new actor has been long overdue. Since its dismantling by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), the Western powers kept Turkey just as close as they wanted it through its tactical membership in NATO, thereby denying free passage for the Soviet navy into the Mediterranean. Now, as a result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Turkey is demanding compensation for its contribution to the Western powers as the Bosphorus bottleneck of the Mediterranean. The Bosphorus plug is vitally important to Russia; it leaves Russia stuck in the interior of the Black Sea, having no other Atlantic access than the North Sea, and thus renders its entire Mediterranean fleet without effect and frees NATO from that source of pressure.
 
The new situation complicates things. On the one hand, Turkey, in support of Russia, is planning the excavation of an alternative channel to the Bosphorus, over which it would have full sovereignty. This puts the Bosporus bottleneck in check, thus creating alternatives for both Russia and Turkey itself: leaving the obligations of the Treaty of Lausanne without effect and opening the way for confrontation with the West, and strengthening Turkey’s role in the new Euro-Asian rivalry. Now, Turkey would not face the West by itself, but its “revenge” would come from the hand of Russia.²  Furthermore, the maritime readjustment agreed with Libya, by which Turkey significantly gains maritime sovereignty that threatens all the maneuverability of the Mediterranean, puts French interests in check (Butler & Gumrukcu, 2019). 
 
Since Macron’s rise to power, France has been intentionally looking for any reason to irritate Turkey. Besides the unprecedented media campaign of demonization (Coudurier, 2020), consider also the 2019 consecration of Armenian memory (ignoring the Greek genocide of the Turks (St. Clair, 2008, pp. 1–12) and the depths of Turkey’s Armenian problem)—not for love of the Armenians, but to irritate the Turks. In the background, this is all about the French geopolitical problem, hence its interest in locking up European support.

While it postulates itself as a secular state, France has strongly criticized the modification of the administrative status of the Hagia Sofia (Turkey – Hagia Sophia – Statement, 2020), which is ultimately a Turkish internal affair. No one questions Spain about what it is doing with Granada, nor about its decision to remove the bust of Abderraman II from Cadrete (Zaragoza). So why single out Turkey?³  Still, it is not Turkey placing itself in the line of fire with the EU, but rather, it is France pushing the whole of the EU towards the line of fire with Turkey, testing its limits. The provocative conduct of Charlie Hebdo—which in Spain and many other countries might amount to a crime—becomes a State affair in France, and a cross-border geopolitical gambit. These are a few of many more spurious examples of French animus toward Ankara.

Animating much of this tension between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq are conflicts relating to territorial claims going back to the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, whereby Turkey still claims around 30% of Iraqi and Syrian territories allocated to them by Anglo-French power as well as a water quota of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.⁵  Connected to the latter, Turkey has completed construction of the disputed Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River in southeastern Turkey, which renders flow agreements with Iraq and Syria without effect. With Turkey’s 2023 goal clearly the neutralizing of the treaty of Lausanne, it does not acknowledge complaints lodged by the governments of Iraq and Syria, and instead publicly positions them as usurpers of power.⁶  In this way Ankara has generated a de facto situation that gives Turkey control of water from the vital and historic rivers of Iraq and Syria. Mesopotamia is no longer where it was—it is moving to Turkey.⁷

Conclusion

The French instrumentalization of the Turkish case has far more transcendent implications than what the French media claims. On the one hand, France intends to enhance its geopolitical status vis-a-vis the European Union, presenting itself as the only leading military power of European corporate potential. This move instrumentalizes European values in its favor, and agitates for republican principles as justification for closing ranks and inducing Germany to impose sanctions against Turkey (Schnee, 2020). On the other hand, France arms its media artillery defending secularism, while also defending the Christianity of the Hagia Sofia—which is not even a Catholic monument but an Orthodox one, and which the Russians themselves (Orthodox) declare is an internal affair of Turkey.

What is clear is that all the Euro-Mediterranean dynamics hint at the next conflict to bring down Turkey, in which France intends first to forge social support through a media lynching, as well as to close the European ranks, under the pretext of collective solidarity. By finally toppling that rival, it would fully consolidate its strategic leadership in the new post-Brexit Europe.