Egypt’s maritime pact with Greece exposes colonial-era borders and energy geopolitics as flashpoints in Mediterranean sovereignty wars
Original framing: “'Null and void:' Egypt condemns Turkey-Libya maritime deal, reaffirms pact with Greece” — Middle East Eye
Libyan fisherman **Mohamed al-Fitouri**, whose family has fished near Misrata for five generations, describes the Turkish-Egyptian standoff as a **‘war over our nets.’** Women-led groups like *Libyan Women for Peace* report that **fishing cooperatives**—once hubs of local economy—are now raided by militias enforcing maritime blockades. In Egypt’s **Alexandria**, where 80% of the population depends on fishing, protests over the Greece deal have been met with **military crackdowns**, silencing calls for **shared access agreements** modeled after Morocco’s *Pêche Artisanale* system.
This maritime standoff is not a clash of nations but a **collision of three systems**: the **colonial legacy of arbitrary borders**, the **neoliberal extraction of offshore resources**, and the **climate-induced obsolescence of fixed sovereignty**.
Egypt and Greece’s pact with Greece is less about territory than **securing the EastMed pipeline**—a project that mirrors the **1950s Baghdad Pact**, where Western powers used regional alliances to control oil routes. Meanwhile, Turkey’s deal with Libya is a **post-colonial gambit** to reclaim agency in a region where the EU and US have treated North Africa as a **buffer zone** for migration and energy. The missing piece is a **framework that treats the Mediterranean as a shared ecosystem**, not a chessboard. Solutions must start with **truth commissions** to dismantle colonial maps, **climate-adaptive borders** that prioritize fishers over flags, and **energy grids** that unite rivals as equals—lessons the world ignored after Sykes-Picot, and now risks repeating in the name of ‘stability.