In October 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron was greeted with great pomp by the Moroccan monarch, Mohammed VI. This visit had been preceded a few weeks earlier by the decision of Macron to (openly) recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over the occupied territory of Western Sahara. To understand why Macron made such a decision, it’s essential to broaden the historical, political, and geographical analysis, going back to the early years following World War II. Indeed, analyzing the Eurafrique project developed in the 1950s helps us identify enduring European ambitions in Africa that remain relevant today.

In light of this project, there’s no doubt that Macron’s Sahrawi “gift” to Mohammed VI is, above all, a strategic opportunity serving France’s—and, more broadly, the European Union’s—geostrategic interests, enabling France repositioning on the African continent following its Sahelian setback. It is undeniable that the Eurafrique project was developed methodically, taking time, geography, and opportunities into account. In essence, Eurafrique was designed with a very long-term vision—and in that sense, it is still unfinished.

After World War II, French strategists argued that for the then-weakened France to maintain its position as a global power, Paris would need to rely on France’s African territories, which could play a key role in its international ambitions. For them, France’s industrialization depended on a Euro-African perspective, closely tied to geostrategic and military considerations. Africa’s land, energy, and raw materials would allow France to maintain its global political and economic stature. A key aspect of the Eurafrique project was that it would also serve as a counterbalance to the anticolonial positions and growing influence of the United States and the former USSR.

However, for France and Europe to fully exploit Africa’s opportunities, it was first necessary to strengthen the European continent. In this regard, the Schuman Plan (1951) and the construction of the European Union were indeed part of this broader Eurafrique project. The first step was to unite and develop other European nations, such as Spain and Italy. The reunification of Germany was also considered part of Eurafrique’s strategic process. It is difficult—if not impossible—to disconnect the Eurafrique project from Gaddafi’s fall in 2011; although Eurafrique’s theorists could not have predicted this event, Libya’s geostrategic position was nonetheless explicitly mentioned in the project.

In 1952, Anton Zischka already argued in his book Afrique, complément de l’Europe that Europeans needed to focus on countries along the northern and southern Mediterranean coasts. According to him, “Libya, a matter of European—even global—interest, is a ‘test case’ for the entire African continent.” He added: “Fortunately, work is being done in the French possessions of North Africa, especially Morocco and Niger.”

This speaks to the strategic planning of Eurafrique—requiring patience and adjustments. Consider this passage from 1957:

We must talk about Eurafrique, and talk about it a lot. The concept, full of possibilities, is still undefined and will only become clearer through a slow process shaped by competing trends. This current lack of form is not a flaw but a chance to shape it with evolving ideas and facts. Key words like “slow process,” “to shape,” and “evolution” emphasize the need for strategic planning and flexibility according to historical developments.

Given Europe’s strategy and adaptation to events, Gaddafi’s fall is clearly tied to the ongoing construction of Eurafrique. In this respect, Libya reminds us of geography’s critical importance with Robert Kaplan and Nicholas Spykman arguing in The Revenge of Geography (2013) that geography “reveals a government’s long-term intentions and remains the most fundamental factor in foreign policy, because it is the most permanent.”

Regarding Libya, in 2019, French authorities stated that “we support everything that ensures the safety of the French people and France’s allies, including backing Haftar and his Libyan National Army.”  What’s more, a 2008 French white paper on defense and national security already noted that France’s “strategic priority zone” stretched from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, including the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Sahel-Saharan region.

Gaddafi was a real thorn in Paris’s side with respect to its former African colonies. By pouring oil dollars into the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD), which he founded, he tried to diminish France’s influence over these countries. After his fall, Morocco attempted to take over CEN-SAD’s leadership, even hosting a meeting of its foreign ministers in Rabat, reiterating its ambition to lead the region—possibly securing greater support for its aspiration to control the Sahara-Sahel area.

With Morocco—France’s key regional ally—at the helm of CEN-SAD, Paris would wield even more influence over Sahelian states. This strategy is reinforced by Israel’s growing regional presence and unwavering alliance with Rabat. As such, Morocco’s recognition by France regarding Western Sahara clearly aligns with a broader Eurafrique strategy.

In this respect, and as Malek Bennabi wrote in La lutte idéologique (2014), “Colonialism will always find someone willing to hand over the keys of the fortress in exchange for financial compensation to corrupt their conscience.” For Bennabi, colonialism’s ideological strategy is to prevent contact between thought and political action—rendering thought sterile and politics blind. It adapts continuously, exploiting mass ignorance and relying on money as a weapon. Bennabi further explains:

Civilizations are not created at random. Colonialism devises military plans and sends instructions informed by deep psychological knowledge of colonized societies, allowing it to act accordingly to manipulate their consciences by class and social level. It uses a psychological map of the colonized world, updated daily by specialists in idea surveillance and control. Colonialism uses the language of ideas—easily corruptible among the intellectual class.

Today, Eurafrique is increasingly relevant as France and the EU face political and economic setbacks from emerging economies like China and the BRICS+ bloc. In a 2024 report, Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, warned that Europe is falling behind the US and China. For Draghi, the EU now faces an existential threat and is doomed to “a slow death” if it does not change course.

Initially, Eurafrique was conceptualized with long-term strategy, requiring patience and adaptability. It was not meant to exploit Africa immediately, but to lay rational foundations and prioritize which objectives would be achieved first. For Zischa , “the creation of Eurafrique is a concrete, simple, controllable enterprise—a task for engineers, unconcerned with global peace congresses or advertising slogans. Eurafrique will be built by technicians, coldly, on concrete data.” Clearly, patience, strategy, adaptation, and cool-headedness have always been the guiding principles of Eurafrique’s architects.

Thus, Macron’s decision to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over the occupied Western Sahara territory must be analyzed through the lens of France’s broader geostrategic ambitions in the Sahel—part of the Eurafrique plan.

Expelled from the Sahel by the front door, France intends to return through Western Sahara, via Morocco. Concerning France’s presence in the Sahel, former French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian once described an “intelligent reorganization” as “reducing our military presence while increasing our influence.” Given the new geopolitical reality, Paris is shifting its strategy toward Rabat.

In this regard, analyzing Iran in a 2009 report titled Which Path to Persia?, the Brookings Institution explained that it may be difficult for the US to directly intervene in Iran for a regime change. For the authors, one credible and safe option would be to “leave it to Bibi”— that is, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Analyzing the Sahel geopolitical situation, a close parallel can be drawn between Iran and Israel with Morocco and the Sahel region.

By recognizing Morocco’s sovereignty over the occupied Western Sahara, Paris is repositioning itself in order to maintain its presence and geostrategic interests in the Sahel region. During Macron’s visit to Morocco, he and Mohammed VI ceremoniously declared a “new bilateral chapter,” a “new ambition for the next thirty years” with broad strategic aims to anchor this renewed Franco-Moroccan relationship at the crossroads of Europe and Africa, at a time of rapid transformation of the international landscape. In other words: “Leave the Sahel to Mohammed VI!”

It is also through this wider regional geostrategy that Morocco is luring those Sahelian landlocked states such as Mali into a hypothetical project that would give them access to the Atlantic Ocean through the Western Sahara occupied territory. But, as the Malian Doulaye Konate of the Association of African Historians rightly puts it, “whoever controls Mali controls West Africa, if not all of Africa!”

This new equation also shows—above all—that while the Eurafrique project might seem, to the average person, to be forgotten in some dusty archive box, it is in fact very much alive in the minds of shadowy geostrategic planners. As the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak reminds us, “the things that we do behind the scene, far from the public eye, are far more important than the slogan charade.”

Last but not least, through Morocco, this new French diplomatic offensive also underlines that Africa as a whole remains a theater for the great powers. In this regard, according to Achille Mbembe, “Africa has been—and remains—the laboratory of a ruthless globalization.” The inability or refusal of many African leaders to understand this, their lack of planning and long-term strategic vision, facilitates the entrenchment of foreign powers—militarily, politically, economically, and culturally—across the continent, endangering the very nature of Africans’ existence. In this respect, it is important to note that while African countries have won political independence, they have not yet won the battle of ideas.

And as long as their leaders do not recognize that understanding the causes of their failure is more important than fighting the symptoms, there will be no salvation for Africans. As Malek Bennabi aptly said, “a society experiencing a dual ethical and intellectual crisis at the level of its leadership cannot ensure the conditions necessary for immunity and effectiveness of ideas. Worse still, it becomes vulnerable to pernicious intrusions due to either an ethical deficit within its environment or an intellectual deficit that betrays it.” Meanwhile, there is no doubt that after reducing its military presence in the Sahel, Paris fully intends to increase its presence in Africa, relying on Rabat, which is itself a close ally of Tel Aviv.