BOGDAN KOSZEL

For centuries the Mediterranean has been France’s special influence zone. In the Middle Ages, France, the greatest Catholic empire, was naturally drawn to the holy places of Christianity, setting the routes of pilgrimages and crusades. Its geograph-ical location had made France a Mediterranean power, while ship owners and mer-chants from Marseille looked eastwards, thinking about trade and the riches of this region. After France annexed Corsica (1768) and conquered Algeria (1832), these tendencies became even more pronounced. Napoleon Bonaparte’s adventurous ex-pedition to Egypt, the policy of protectorates in the 19th century (Tunisia and Mo-rocco) and that of mandates of the League of Nations after World War I (Syria and Lebanon) confirmed the French presence in the region (Godnin, Vince, 2012, p. 38 and next). After World War II, Paris gradually lost its colonies in North Africa. The difficult partition with the colonial empire was symbolised by the bloody war in Algeria (1954–1962) which brought about the collapse of the Fourth and the beginning of the Fifth French Republic. Over the years, however, diplomatic endeavours in the area of economy and culture allowed France to restore its influence in the region. It was thanks to France that the European Community introduced special measures (The Yaounde Convention) in 1963 to facilitate trade between the EC and francophone countries in this region (Baszkiewicz, 1999, chapters 10 and 11). German interest in this part of Europe and Africa was markedly smaller, despite German active colonial policy after its unification in 1871. German endeavours to par-ticipate in co-deciding the fate of Morocco in 1911 eventually failed, however, and Em-peror Wilhelm II had to accept the fact that France was the dominant power in the Maghreb (Czapliñski, 1992). During the Cold War, the US Sixth Fleet, France and the UK were the strongest powers in the Mediterranean. West Germany did not get involved, for obvious reasons limiting itself to providing financial and moral support to Israel. After the Iron Curtain fell, public opinion in Germany was most interested in terrorist attacks against German tourists in Egypt. After reunification, Germany had neither the concept nor the vision of how to de