Speaking at a plenary session on “Atlantic multilateralism and the prospects of a pan-Atlantic community”, as part of the 11th edition of the conference “The Atlantic Dialogues”, Hilale noted that the Atlantic “is a maritime space full of challenges and contradictions, which suffers from a lot of fragility.”
“It is a space that has states from the richest and others poorer and less developed, from the most stable and democratic to others that have problems of insecurity and crisis. In short, it is a space under construction where the contradictions are enormous,” said the ambassador.
In this sense, he believed that the states of this region must aspire to “a kind of complementarity, going beyond their own security space or economic, commercial and geopolitical interests.”
“The Atlantic should not be a space of competition between its neighbors. It is a space of common destiny,” he noted, recalling that Morocco was one of the first countries to promote pan-Atlantic cooperation, including through the launch in 2009 of “The Ministerial Conference of African States bordering the Atlantic.”
“Morocco’s interest in the Atlantic is not new; it is historical, strategic, human and economic,” said Hilale.
For his part, the Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Daniel Hamilton, noted that the Atlantic countries are facing countless common challenges, ranging from terrorism to piracy through trafficking in arms and drugs, noting that these “pan-Atlantic challenges” require the development of new governance mechanisms.
