EU’s ‘Club Med’ efforts give patchy results

Date: 12/05/05

The Euro-Mediterranean partnership is nothing if not ambitious. To look at its agenda, the ten-year-old partnership sounds like the result of a focus group made up of assorted peaceniks, free-marketeers, environmentalists and energy firms.

If its aims were realised, in the next decade the EU and its ten neighbours in the southern Mediterranean (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey), would, among other things, rid the area of nuclear weapons, de-pollute the sea, create a free trade zone, a Euro-Mediterranean Development Bank and a unified energy and gas market, and prevent a clash of civilisations.

When the 'Barcelona Process', as the partnership is also known, was launched in November 1995 it was equally bold. But then its launching declaration came shortly after the signing of the Oslo peace accords, at a time when optimism reigned.

The Barcelona declaration called on all participants to respect human rights, including serial offenders such as Libya, Tunisia, and Syria. It also asked countries like Egypt and Algeria to democratise and others like Palestine and Israel to "settle their disputes by peaceful means".

Today against the background of the 'war on terror' things are much less optimistic.

Since 1995 the Arab-Israeli conflict has continued to simmer, eventually boiling over into the second (Al-Aqsa) intafada that began in 2000 and ended only this year.

Meanwhile, unemployment, illiteracy, poor standards in education and a lack of political freedom continue to dog the Arab members of the partnership, albeit to varying degrees.

The region enjoys growth levels higher than those found in the EU15, in relative terms. But compared with possible competitors in Asia or Latin America, this growth has been largely insufficient to create the jobs and wealth needed for a rapidly growing population.

It is with this in mind that the EU25 and its Mediterranean partners are moving towards the tenth anniversary of the Barcelona declaration.

The EU's ambition for the Euro-Med relationship is hinted at by the number of institutions set up to manage it. A complex lattice of overlapping institutions includes ministerial conferences, committees, Euromed working groups, Council of Ministers working groups, sub-regional working groups, thematic working groups, a parliamentary forum, a heritage foundation, a cultural foundation and civil society forums. It is at once bilateral, with agreements being drawn up with the EU and individual countries, and multilateral, through the various regional fora.

An overall assessment is difficult but according to Gergana Noutcheva of the Centre for European Policy Studies, these institutions have played a positive role.

"The institutions have worked well, and everybody agrees on that, it is the whole idea of getting the leaders together to deal with common issues, this has been important," she says.

But partnership building and complex structures aside, the basic premise of the Barcelona Process is simple: how can the EU address the growing social and economic problems of the southern Mediterranean and foster long-term stability?

To what extent has this been achieved? A quick scan around the region reveals patchy results. According to Freedom House, a US-based group, political rights and civil liberties have barely improved since the mid-1990s.

According to their calculations only in Algeria, which until the end of the last decade was in the grip of a civil war, has the situation improved at all.

But the EU hopes that its new 'Neighbourhood Policy' will help to give an additional boost to the process, enabling the parties to focus on issues of concern in more detail.

If the EU is to achieve its short-term goals of creating a free trade area by 2010, or its long-term aim of creating stability, this impetus will need to be significant to reverse the fortunes of a perennially underachieving region.

Analysis feature in which the author takes a look a the European Union's efforts to promote prosperity and democracy in the Southern Mediterranean region, 10 years after the inauguration of the Barcelona Process. He suggests that considering the ambitious and wide-reaching targets of the Barcelona Declaration progress has been modest and that the EU's Mediterranean Policy is in urgent need of a review to deliver better results in the future.

EEAS: Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED) http://eeas.europa.eu/euromed/index_en.htm

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