Shoring up the EU's Mediterranean policy: Where next?

 

The Irish ‘No’ to the Lisbon Treaty may not only have complicated the French EU Presidency, but could also focus more attention on the first major event of its term at the Union’s helm - the launch of the new EU initiative for the Mediterranean on 13 July - given Paris’ commitment to produce results in other areas.

 

Plenty of issues and open questions remain over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s pet idea. So where are we now?

 

Germany must be credited for steering Sarkozy’s vision into the European fold. The outcome of the March 2008 EU Summit was the clumsily-entitled ‘Barcelona Process: Union for the Mediterranean’, and the European Commission was given the task of putting flesh on its bones with some ideas on substance.

 

On the basis of the Commission’s proposals, approved at the June European Council, the French have been conducting negotiations with their EU partners (on 27 June) and their Mediterranean ones (on 3 July) to approve the text of a Declaration for the 13 July Summit. Differences need to be ironed out, but the contours of the initiative are becoming clearer.

 

The French still hope that the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) will give a ‘new impulse’ to relations between the two shores. Firstly, the EU aims to upgrade political relations by establishing a summit of participating countries’ Heads of State and Government to take place every two years. Membership of the new initiative has also been extended from the 39 participants in the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) to 44, including Monaco and the Western Balkans states.

 

Secondly, the EU hopes to enhance co-ownership of the initiative by establishing a co-presidency for the UfM (with France and Egypt expected to take on this role first), and the creation of a new Secretariat. This will be staffed by around two dozen officials on secondment from Ministries of Foreign Affairs - half from the EU Member States and half from the Southern shore. The Secretariat will act as a clearing house in the selection of projects and organise donor conferences to seek financing for each new project.

 

The focus in selecting projects will be on areas in which the UfM can add value, even if it has been hard to identify areas untouched by the 13-year-old EMP. So far, four key issues have been identified:

 

 

Other ideas, such as a Spanish and Italian proposal to create a development agency for small- and medium-sized enterprises, are still being discussed, but the intention is to limit the number of projects.

 

In the end, after much, rhetoric, spin, and debate, the UfM bubble has burst to reveal much more limited ambitions. But there still are some practical and broader question marks over the project’s validity.

 

Granted, the debate it has stirred can in itself be seen as a merit. But uncertainties over the participation of Turkey, Libya and Algeria continue to demonstrate scepticism over the motivations driving the Elysée Palace. Given that there is no money yet to finance projects, it will also be some time before an assessment can be made of whether worthy plans to develop solar energy in North Africa will really make a difference (and whether it was necessary to create the UfM to do so).

 

The second question regards the UfM’s institutional provisions. The emphasis on co-ownership represents an attempt to avoid the EU imposing the policy agenda on its partners. On the other hand, co-ownership undermines the leverage that the Union could exercise to push for reform.

 

Why should the South Mediterranean partners adopt a reform agenda if they are not pressed to tackle their structural problems? They are under domestic pressure, with the rise of food prices and strikes in Morocco, Jordan and Egypt, making it harder to introduce reforms with social costs. And why, in any case, should they act when the EU continues to refuse to open its markets to their agricultural products?

 

The co-ownership element seems to confirm the practice so far: plenty of ‘summitry’, but no real dialogue due to the lack of genuine interest and commitment on both sides to address the real issues at stake.

 

The exclusion of the European and national parliaments and of civil society organisations also reinforces the intergovernmental and elite-driven nature of this initiative.

 

But there are broader questions too. The South Mediterranean has been the object of numerous projects and initiatives: these include the EMP, the European Neighbourhood Policy, the Broader Middle East and North Africa policy of the US, the NATO Mediterranean Dialogue and the G8 Partnership for Progress (leaving aside the various ideas that have died a natural death over the past 40 years).

 

All these initiatives have the aim of bringing about stability, security and development through political and economic reform. They are all considered, at best, modestly successful: everyone acknowledges that it is better to have these fora for political dialogue than not. But concrete achievements to date have not matched their lofty ambitions. Hence, every ‘failure’ of one project leads to the launch of a new one.

 

The real question is whether the EU is barking up the right tree. Has it really understood the reasons for the inability to address the problems in the South Mediterranean? Does it really have a common vision on the Mediterranean, or do its policies reflect the outcome of bargaining between Member States with different interests in the region?

 

The Swedish-Polish drive to follow up the French Mediterranean initiative with an ‘Eastern Partnership’ fits in with a well-known pattern of striking a delicate compromise between the EU’s Eastern and Southern priorities.

 

This suggests that part of the problem lies in the EU itself, and its lack of cohesion and of a shared vision on foreign policy.