Greek Diplomatic Life Official Site
Editorial
April 2025
Issue Number 543
Greece adopted, for the first time, a comprehensive and institutionalised Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP). This marks a significant strategic milestone in the country’s spatial planning. All of Greece’s actions are based on the Law of the Sea and do not constitute a challenge, but an exercise of sovereign rights. The establishment of a maritime spatial planning framework within the EEZ and the country’s territorial waters does not require any negotiation or consent from third parties.
MSP is the tool to manage the use of our seas and oceans coherently and to ensure that human activities take place in an efficient, safe and sustainable way.
Many activities take place in Europe’s seas. At any given time, fishing, aquaculture, shipping, renewable energy, nature conservation and other uses compete for maritime space. That is why the EU has legislation on maritime spatial planning. One of its main objectives is to increase cross-border cooperation between EU countries to develop renewable energy, allocate shipping lanes, lay pipelines and submarine cables, etc.
Greece and Cyprus consist of the Southeastern border of European Union and are part of the greater region of Eastern Mediterranean that extends from the Arabian Sea to Crete. It is an area with significant opportunities for the states of the region at the energy and commercial level, given dynamics in the cultural and technological sphere, but also with vital geostrategic challenges not only because of the non-state actors operating there, but also because of the illicit strategic targeting of some countries.
One of the main reasons for the constant geostrategic fluidity that permeates this subsystem is revisionism. This kind of stance does not only create problems for the rational states of the greater Eastern Mediterranean, it also functions as an insurmountable obstacle to the detailed mapping of the region’s energy map, as an emphatic destructor of the prospects for the transport and transportation of commercial and energy power loads from Asia to Europe and as a catalyst for eliminating the prospects for primary wealth production for the states of the region, their allies and the international business world. In other words, revisionism not only undermines strategic stability in the greater region, but also holds hostage entrepreneurship and regional prosperity.
Nicolas Boutsicos
Managing Director – Editor
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