I remember a radio debate drifting through my Paris apartment one grey afternoon. A seasoned diplomat, voice full of polished certainty, announced that France simply had to restore stability in the Middle East. The phrase landed like a wet towel. As if Beirut, Baghdad, and Riyadh were just arrondissements in some enormous overseas commune. I’m Nadia Bassam. I grew up in Marseille. My father came from a coastal town just south of Oran, and my mother’s family left Damascus when the French mandate still felt like an open wound. That double lens—Mediterranean, Arabic-speaking, stubbornly French—has never let me see the Middle East as one block. Our foreign policy shouldn’t either.
Paris has been talking about la politique arabe de la France for decades, presenting it as a tidy doctrine, a sweeping romantic gesture inherited straight from de Gaulle. The label itself is half the headache. It lumps together societies that happen to share a language but whose political economies, colonial scars, and internal fractures veer off in wildly different directions—more than most people inside the Quai d’Orsay want to acknowledge. When the Middle East becomes a single policy bucket, you iron out exactly the textures that fuel its fires. And you miss the rare openings where French weight could actually count.
A Gaullist Inheritance That Hardened Into Habit
After the humiliation of Algeria, de Gaulle deliberately put distance between Paris and Washington’s bear hug of Israel, hunting for a fresh credibility in Arab capitals. His 1967 press conference—that line about un peuple sûr de lui-même et dominateur—was brutal, even antisemitic in tone, but it marked a structural turn. Paris would talk to the Arab world as a bloc. Contracts followed, doors opened, the sense of independent grandeur swelled. It also froze a mental map solid.
That map still hangs in the Élysée’s briefing rooms. Officials mention l’Orient compliqué with a shrug that’s half fondness, half fatigue. Here’s the catch: the complication is not a single knot. It’s a dozen separate tangles, each with its own French thread running through. Lebanon is not Iraq. Iraq is not the Gulf monarchies. The Gulf monarchies are not post-Qadhafi Libya, which isn’t even the Levant. Talk of a unified Arab policy pretends France can be a universal mediator. In practice, you end up a clumsy friend to all and a reliable partner to precisely nobody.
The Lebanese Exception That Proves the Rule
Lebanon shows better than any other file why the bucket cracks under pressure. France’s tie to Beirut is intimate, strange, tangled up in mandate-era memory that still echoes through Achrafieh’s stone staircases and the syllabi of Saint-Joseph University. When the port blew apart in August 2020, President Macron flew in within days, walking rubble-strewn streets, promising aid wouldn’t vanish into the hands of a corrupt class. For a flicker, it felt like a genuine Lebanon policy—one that saw a multiconfessional state collapsing under its own elite’s weight.
Within months, the Lebanese file slid back into broader regional calculations. Paris hesitated to sanction Lebanese politicians because it feared losing influence on the Syria track. It muted criticism of Hezbollah’s domestic grip, anxious not to ruffle Iran, with whom France nurses a delicate back channel. Lebanon turned back into a sub-file, a bargaining chip in a bigger game it never asked to join. The specific horror of Beirut’s crisis—banking collapse, hunger creeping toward famine levels, frantic remittances from a scattered diaspora—was dissolved into a regional arithmetic that treats the Mediterranean as just another square on a Middle Eastern chessboard.
When I talk to Lebanese friends, whether they’re still in Hamra or scattered abroad, nobody asks for a French Arab policy. They ask for a French Lebanon policy. They want Paris to see that the architecture of Taif, the memory of the civil war, the weight of the patriarchate—these aren’t interchangeable with the dynamics of Baghdad or Cairo. Failing to pull Lebanon out of the big bucket isn’t a harmless intellectual slip. It costs lives, feeds paralysis, and deepens a cynicism that eats away whatever scraps of French credibility remain in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Gulf: Where the Bucket Becomes a Balance Sheet
Slide the lens to the Arabian Peninsula, and the absurdity sharpens. France’s relationships with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are transactional at the core—defence contracts, energy deals, cultural shopfronts like the Louvre Abu Dhabi. This isn’t la politique arabe. It’s a classic realist playbook, miles away from the postcolonial sentimentality that still colours French involvement in the Levant.
When Paris bundles these ties under the same diplomatic heading, it muddles its own priorities. The same Quai d’Orsay desk officer might juggle human-rights concerns in Qatar one morning and post-conflict reconstruction in Mosul the next, as if the moral and strategic questions sat on the same shelf. They don’t. Gulf states are sovereign players with their own regional appetites—their own military adventures, media empires, patronage webs. Treating them as merely the rich wing of a monolithic Arab world pretends the tensions between Abu Dhabi and Doha, or Riyadh and Muscat, don’t exist. France winds up murmuring platitudes about dialogue and de-escalation while the Gulf powers chase rivalries that demand a much sharper French reading.
The Maghreb Blind Spot Inside the Arab Policy
Here I need to speak personally. My father’s Algeria belongs to the Middle East only in the loosest, laziest journalistic sense. Yet it gets swept into the Arab policy bucket all the time, especially when Paris talks about Islam, terrorism, or migration. The distortion runs deep. Algeria’s relationship with France isn’t a subset of some Middle Eastern question; it’s a direct, painful, unresolved bilateral knot that goes back before most modern Arab states were even drawn on a map. The war, the pieds-noirs, the harkis, the memory laws—none of that is regional. It’s Franco-Algerian, and it demands a vocabulary the generic Arab policy can’t supply.
When French presidents land in Algiers and declare a nouveau partenariat avec le monde arabe, they’re missing the point entirely. Algerians aren’t waiting for Paris to mediate between Ramallah and Tel Aviv. They’re waiting for an honest reckoning—with archives, with nuclear-test sites in the Sahara, with visa policies that humiliate the very grandchildren of those who fought for independence. Shoving the Maghreb into the Middle East bucket lets France sidestep precisely the historical accountability that might make its broader Mediterranean posture believable. Morocco and Tunisia tell a similar story, each with its own distinct weave of French linguistic policy, economic penetration, and security cooperation. Calling any of that Arab policy erases the specific gravity of empire.
The Iran Conundrum and the Limits of a ‘Regional’ Frame
If the bucket approach stumbles in the Arab world, it collapses outright when Iran, Turkey, and Israel enter the frame—three non-Arab powers whose moves define the region’s deepest fault lines. France has long tried to act as a bridge to Tehran, a role that needs its own carefully tuned diplomatic channel. But because Iran sits in the same policy committees as Yemen and Syria, its nuclear file gets tangled with the trajectory of Houthi missiles and the price of Iraqi electricity. The result is a permanent fog: Paris wants to push back hard on Iran’s regional proxies while keeping the JCPOA door ajar, but the institutional wiring doesn’t let those two impulses breathe side by side.
Turkey is maybe the most glaring omission from the bucket metaphor. Ankara is a NATO ally, a frozen EU candidate, and a thick-thumbed military actor in Syria, Libya, and the Eastern Mediterranean. France’s run-ins with Turkey—over Nagorno-Karabakh, over maritime boundaries, over the very definition of laïcité—aren’t Middle Eastern scraps in any classic sense. They’re European, Mediterranean, global. Yet they land on the desks of the same overworked diplomats who are supposed to be tracking the Idlib ceasefire. The institutional architecture of the Quai d’Orsay, with its direction d’Afrique du Nord et du Moyen-Orient, wasn’t built for a world where Ankara and Abu Dhabi back opposite corners in Libya while Paris tries to keep a straight face toward both.
The Institutional Roots of the Bucket
Some of this is just how the machinery is bolted together. The French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs still runs a regional division that crams North Africa and the Middle East into a single directorate. That’s not a neutral bureaucratic choice. It shapes how intelligence gets distilled, how policy papers get written, how ambassadors get their marching orders. A young diplomat cycling through the sous-direction du Machrek might cover Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq in a single posting. The expertise that develops is real, but it’s also pushed to generalise, to hunt for patterns where none exist, to churn out memos that can arm a minister with three bullet points before the evening news.
Successive governments have tinkered—appointing a Libya envoy here, spinning up a Syria task force there—but the bedrock assumption stays put: the Arab and Islamic world is one coherent diplomatic theatre. That assumption is a relic of the 1970s oil shock and the pan-Arabism wave, when the Arab League still looked like a serious interlocutor. Today the League is a husk. The real game unfolds in smaller, more fluid clubs: the Abraham Accords, the Astana process, the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum. France is in all those rooms, but it walks in carrying a mental map that keeps trying to fold them back into a faded atlas.
What a Disaggregated Policy Might Look Like
Picture a French foreign policy that spoke of Eastern Mediterranean security as a space of its own—separate from the Gulf, separate from the Maghreb. That would let Paris address the tangled interests of Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey without hauling in the baggage of Yemen or Iraq. It would finally match diplomatic language to the geographic facts on the water: gas fields, migration routes, naval stare-downs don’t respect the old MENA label.
Picture, too, a distinct Franco-Maghrebian framework that centres colonial memory, labour mobility, and language politics instead of shoving all that under the Arab-Israeli conflict. This wouldn’t mean cutting the Maghreb off from its Arab roots. It would mean admitting that the primary French relationship with Algiers, Rabat, and Tunis is bilateral and postcolonial, not regional and geopolitical. It would clear space for the truth-telling that’s been ducked for too long.
The Levant—Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel—would stay a distinct, interlocking theatre where French diplomacy has real historical weight and moral entanglement. But even here, the habit of treating Damascus as the key to Beirut, and Beirut as the key to Jerusalem, has spawned decades of magical thinking. A disaggregated approach would let France chase a Lebanon policy that isn’t held hostage to the Syrian file, and a Syria policy that doesn’t need a peace-process miracle to move forward. Yes, it would be messier. It would demand more diplomats, deeper expertise, more political oxygen. It would also be more honest.
The Danger of Romantic Universalism
Underneath the bucket reflex runs a deeper cultural current. France has long imagined itself as a universal nation, a bearer of rights and reason that rise above local particulars. That self-portrait, born in the Revolution and hardened by empire, makes it hard for Paris to accept that some problems are just local, that some histories are simply not ours to mediate. The Middle East bucket is, in part, a fantasy of French centrality—the old idea that Paris can hold the ring, speak to everyone, that its language of équilibre is always welcome.
On the ground, plenty of players have moved on. Gulf states deal with Beijing and New Delhi as much as with Paris. Israel’s strategic horizon is shaped by Washington and the Abraham Accords, not by démarches from Europe. Even Lebanon, probably the most Francophone pocket of the Arab world, has a younger generation whose gaze turns to Montreal, to London, to the Gulf—not to the Quai d’Orsay. The bucket survives not because it works, but because it’s administratively easy and emotionally warm for a certain French elite that still sees itself as the puissance d’équilibre.
I’ve sat through enough conferences to know the rhythm by heart. A French official opens with the longue tradition d’amitié, pivots to the complexité de la région, then calls for des solutions politiques inclusives. The words are French, but the grammar is pure bucket. It’s a grammar that dodges naming who did what to whom, that smudges the line between occupier and occupied, that treats the Saudi blockade of Qatar and the siege of Gaza as roughly comparable because both fall under the heading of tensions régionales. That isn’t diplomacy. It’s a refusal to think.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does France still use the term “politique arabe” if it is outdated?
The phrase carries heavy historical baggage. It summons de Gaulle’s 1967 turn away from unconditional backing of Israel and his push to carve an independent French voice in a decolonising world. For many French diplomats, the label remains a shorthand for a tradition of dialogue that sets Paris apart from Washington. The trouble is, the tradition has congealed into a reflex rather than a strategy. It sticks around because changing it would demand an honest internal argument about France’s postcolonial responsibilities—the kind of argument successive governments have preferred to dodge.
How does the bucket approach affect France’s relationship with its own Muslim and Arab-origin citizens?
Deeply. When French foreign policy talks about the Arab world as a single, often fraught entity, it fuels domestic stereotypes that mash together Islam, Arabness, and political violence. Citizens of Maghrebi, Levantine, or Gulf background watch their varied identities get pressed into a single mould, one that’s treated as a security file more often than not. A more finely sliced foreign policy would, over time, help pull apart those domestic perceptions and crack open space for a richer public conversation about France’s Mediterranean and Arab connections.
What is the biggest obstacle to reforming the institutional structure at the Quai d’Orsay?
Inertia and tight resources. Splitting the current North Africa and Middle East directorate into, say, a Mediterranean unit, a Gulf unit, and a Maghreb unit would need more staff, more budget, and more political muscle from the Élysée. It would also rattle the career tracks of diplomats who’ve built expertise inside the old system. Above everything, it would take a presidential-level call that the old frame no longer serves French interests. Until the top floor is ready to move, the bureaucratic machine will keep churning out the bucket by default.
Can France remain a credible mediator in the region if it abandons the unified approach?
Credibility doesn’t come from advertising a universal ear. It comes from showing you grasp the local ground. Many of France’s most respected diplomatic moments—Macron’s walk through Beirut after the explosion, Chirac’s stand against the Iraq war, Mitterrand’s 1982 speech in the Knesset—landed precisely because they spoke to specific contexts in specific language. A disaggregated foreign policy would likely sharpen, not weaken, France’s ability to mediate, because it would rest on expertise rather than a fuzzy posture of friendship toward a bloc that exists mostly in the imagination.
The Middle East is not a bucket. It’s a mosaic, some of whose tiles we helped shatter. Until French policy learns to see each shard for what it is—its own sharp edges, its own bent light—we’ll keep speaking a language of friendship that fewer and fewer people are willing to believe.