Global IssuesEUROPE: A Year On, Sarkozy's Euromed Struggles
A year ago Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy launched the Union for the Mediterranean, or Euromed, a grouping of European Union nations plus 16 non- EU Mediterranean states. Since then, critics say, the initiative has made little tangible progress.
'The Euromed initiative has been stillborn from the outset,' Hassan Nafaa, political science professor at Cairo University told IPS. 'In terms of its chief objectives, it has made very little headway up until this point.'
The Euromed project was formally launched in Paris Jul. 13 last year. The inaugural brought together heads of state from the 27 nations of the EU and 16 countries of the Middle East, North Africa and the West Balkans. Participants from the Middle East and North Africa included Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania and the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.
First proposed by Sarkozy in 2007, the initiative's stated aim is to bolster cooperation between member nations in the fields of security, immigration, environment, civil rights, education, culture and development. 'We don't only want to be neighbours, but partners,' the French President declared at the inauguration.
Sarkozy presided over the event as co-president representing northern states, while Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stood as co-president for states of the southern and eastern Mediterranean regions. Union summits are expected to be convened every two years.
The initiative seeks to revive the long-stalled Barcelona Process, a 35-state European and Mediterranean region grouping launched in 1995 with the similar objective of fostering ties between member states. The Barcelona initiative was subsequently bogged down by political and trade disputes between southern member nations and their more affluent northern counterparts.
'Today's summit puts cooperation between the regions of the Mediterranean at the forefront of concern,' Mubarak declared a year ago in Paris. 'It represents a new phase of the partnership that first began in Barcelona.'
'The Barcelona Process has been revived and given a wholly new dynamic,' German Chancellor Angela Merkel said then. 'I believe that all of Europe, with all its states, working with those Mediterranean countries which are not a part of the EU, sends an important signal.'
From the outset, however, critics - especially those from non-EU member states - have complained that the initiative will inevitably favour monolithic Europe over its non-European Mediterranean neighbours.
'By its very nature, the scheme is lopsided towards Europe,' said Nafaa. 'Whereas the EU acts as a single, extremely powerful political bloc, non-EU Mediterranean states all act according to their own individual policies. For this reason, the initiative will end up serving the interests of the former at the expense of the latter.'
In spite of such criticism, a handful of Euromed follow-up meetings have been convened at the ministerial level in recent months.
In November, Euromed foreign ministers agreed to fund a number of projects in the areas of energy security, higher education, research and environmental protection. Participants also agreed to hold regular discussions on the Middle East political situation and on cooperation against terrorism.
Last month, Euromed environment ministers convened in Paris, where they discussed several environment-related initiatives. These included ways of fighting pollution in the Mediterranean Sea, promoting solar energy use, and building regional land and sea highways.
Most recently on Jul. 7, Euromed finance ministers met in Brussels where a number of European loans were pledged to finance projects in non-EU member states. 'We want to broaden and make more flexible the conditions of use of credit that we accord through local intermediaries,' Philippe Maystadt, head of the European Investment Bank was quoted as saying at the meeting.
But according to Nafaa, the unfolding global economic crisis - a de facto worldwide depression - threatens to negatively affect finance projects undertaken within the context of the Euromed scheme.
'The EU was expected to pump money into the non-EU Mediterranean states with the aim of slowing illegal immigration to Europe and boosting cooperation against terrorism,' he said. 'But the initiative lacked clear mechanisms for implementation from the very beginning, and the global economic crisis can only be expected to aggravate the problem of financial disbursement further.'
Arab critics also see the Euromed as an indirect means of normalising Arab diplomatic relations with Israel in the absence of Israeli concessions on the issue of Palestinian statehood.
'The initiative essentially aims to ignore the Arab-Israeli dispute in general - and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular - while concentrating solely on economic issues,' said Nafaa. 'But this approach is a non-starter. It was one of the chief reasons for the failure of Barcelona, and it will be one of the main reasons for the failure of the Euromed.'
Egypt, Jordan and Qatar are the only Arab nations that have official diplomatic relations with Israel. The rest refuse to normalise relations with Israel in the absence of a mutually acceptable peace deal with the Palestinians, including the establishment of a Palestinian state.
'As long as these disputes remain unresolved, cooperation between Arab states and Israel is out of the question,' said Nafaa. 'Arab countries that still refuse to acknowledge Israel - especially 'confrontation states' such as Syria and Lebanon - will never move towards normalised relations in the absence of Israeli political concessions, regardless of financial incentives from Europe.'
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service