RELATIONS BETWEEN GERMANY AND THE COUNTRIES OF NORTH AFRICA (Political and Military Aspects)

The article examines the process of the growing German political and military activity in North Africa during the second half of the 2010s. The first key reason of this process was the new awareness of the regional role in the ensuring of Germany's and the EU security. During and after the "Arab Spring", the interstate "corridor of instability" arose. It went from Mali further to Niger and Libya which has been facing permanent instability after the intervention of the group of Western countries (2011, without German participation). The full-fledged functioning of the "corridor of instability" could cause the worse version of the refugee crisis and growing terrorist activity than it was in the EU in 2015-2016. The second reason was the necessity to ensure Berlin's strong political-military positions in North Africa for the realization of Germany's ambitions as a future world power. The research examines the features and "narrow places" of interstate cooperation in the security sphere between Germany and Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria. Germany became a senior partner for Tunisia in 2015-2017, and positioned these relations as exemplary. Since 2015-2016, Germany and Egypt have been supporting the realization of each other's leadership ambitions. The key elements of this tactic have been the cooperation in Syrian and Libyan armed conflicts regulation and launch of the EU-LAS negotiation format (2019). The article also shows the dynamics of partnership between Germany and Algeria, paying special attention to bilateral cooperation in the sphere of the Mali, Libyan and Western Sahara conflicts regulation. The transition of Germany's bilateral relations with Egypt and Algeria to the level of advanced cooperation in the second half of 2010s caused a powerful growth of the FRG's arms export to these countries. At the beginning of 2020, Germany launched the multilateral Berlin conference for resolution of the Libyan conflict. Germany's late but rather successful involvement in the Libyan conflict management should ensure its efforts to become the external participant of the North African regional security system. The paper concludes about the perspectives of the FRG's political-military line in the region considering the factor of COVID-19 pandemic.