Thirty Years of the Difficult Euro-Mediterranean Partnership

• CommentaryEurope and Global Governance · Middle East and North Africa
  by Caterina Roggero

Is there any change to be expected in the Euro-Mediterranean policy of the new European Commission? If we look at the difficulties, hesitations, steps forward and many steps backward of (at least) these last thirty years, there are no illusions. Despite the good intentions and the flaunting of common and shared values and strategies, from the Barcelona Process onwards, if not from even earlier, that is to say from the outdated Euro-Arab Dialogue, Euro-Mediterranean policy has always been driven by emergency issues, in turn connected to safeguarding the economic and geo-strategic interests of the Northern shore and not the Southern one. What is certain is that, even on the part of North African and Middle Eastern (MENA) countries, the attitude has been characterised, over the same time, by closures and divisions as well as by the physiological pursuit of the personal/national advantage of mostly authoritarian regimes.

Emergency! The North calls the South

The 1973 energy crisis was the first emergency faced by the European powers. Georges Pompidou's Gaullist France then succeeded in convincing the other members of the European Economic Community (EEC), the ancestor of the EU, that it was indispensable to break free from American control through direct negotiation and relations with those oil-producing countries, which during the Yom Kippur war had implemented an embargo on exports to Western countries supporting Israel, causing the economic shock. Promoted by France, the Euro-Arab Dialogue then took shape in 1974 and was conceived as a forum for discussion between the EEC and the Arab states under the auspices of the Arab League. At the time, the Palestinian question weighed like a boulder and the Dialogue trudged, surviving the many fronts opened up in the enlarged Middle East in the 1980s (wars in Lebanon and between Iraq and Iran, international terrorism, US raids in Libya), but collapsing following the invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent First Gulf War, which scuttled any cooperation between the two "worlds". On the wave of the enthusiasm of the Oslo process and in order to carve out a space for itself in the American protagonism in the Middle East, in the early 1990s the EEC promoted a Renovated Mediterranean Policy, which was later translated into the famous Barcelona Process (1995). In those years, Europe had kept an eye on the simultaneous path of Maghreb regional integration that led to the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU, 1989): promoting this initiative of South-South collaboration was basically in the interest of the Old Continent. The emergency at that point had in fact shifted to the need to assist and consolidate the peace process, ensuring that "stability and prosperity" were established throughout the Mediterranean basin, crucial for the very wellbeing of Europeans. Peace and development on the Southern shore were necessary, if not indispensable, to the economic-political equilibrium of the North, and therefore it was necessary to "haul" the AMU and/or the individual Maghreb countries along by hooking them up to the emerging EU. Initially, the new concept proposed was that of a "Euro-Maghreb partnership", i.e. moving from a logic of development cooperation to one of collaboration between two equal parties. With the Euro-Mediterranean partnership sanctioned at the Essen European Council in 1994, and then definitively with the Barcelona Declaration in 1995, the newly founded EU extended this renewed approach to all the countries on the Southern shore (including Israel). No longer, therefore, only to the AMU, also because the latter had in the meantime lost its individuality following the crisis (1994) that blocked any initiative over the age-old issue of Western Sahara, still nowadays an irremovable stumbling block in relations between Algeria and Morocco.

The Barcelona process was an ambitious and valuable project, which aimed to foster peaceful and cooperative relations between states on the shores of the Mediterranean. However, it ran aground, ending up as a collateral victim of the stalemate in the Oslo process. This was not the only reason behind the failure of the partnership that had raised so much hope in the 1990s. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the accompanying fear of the "clash of civilisations", the new emergency for the EU was terrorism. Security needs therefore prevailed over those of intensifying economic and civil society relations. Brussels adopted the European Security Strategy in December 2003, which referred to the MENA region as a victim of economic stagnation, social unrest and unresolved conflicts, and also highlighted the relationship between global terrorism and religious extremism. Adding to this was the fact that, with the 2004 eastward enlargement, the EU had to reckon with countries with radically different, if not opposing, Mediterranean needs. The foundations were then laid for the new European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), still active today, which pursued not only those objectives of prosperity and stability but also the quest for security, against the background of sharing the same values: good governance, democracy, rule of law and human rights. The ENP looked towards cooperation with a wider neighbourhood and had a different, less regional and more bilateral approach: relations between individual states and the EU were fostered. The Union also introduced positive conditionality mechanisms that guaranteed greater incentives to those who came closest to the values-objectives set by the Union.

The perennial centrality of the migration issue

Peace-development, security-fight against terrorism: behind these binomials, there was always inevitably the migration issue. Incentivising economic-cultural exchanges was supposed to help the peaceful development of states struggling to emerge from the economic crisis of the 1980s (due to the mix of post-colonial demographic boom and international stagnation) and, consequently, discourage migration towards Europe from North Africa. Security cooperation was supposed to defuse the spiral of jihadist terrorism from the "Arab world" that was now also affecting the West. At the heart of the Euro-Mediterranean relationship, however, was the indirect support for authoritarian regimes, with which agreements were signed and whose leaders sat at the tables of the partnership negotiations sharing, only in words, those founding values. With the Arab Springs, everything was called into question and the migration crisis of 2015-2017, amid the Syrian civil war, brought the real emergency to the surface: for the EU it was now necessary to regulate the flows of those fleeing conflict, violence or failed transitions to democracy, to which were added the sub-Saharan migrants that passed through these Mediterranean lands. The ENP was at that point revised, placing even more emphasis on economic stabilisation, the security dimension and the migration issue, i.e. favouring more pragmatic and less aleatory issues, to be managed through ad hoc bilateral agreements (Partnership Priorities, Association Agendas or equivalent).

Within the ENP, just for the Southern shore, the new Agenda for the Mediterranean was approved in 2021: it still insists on the promotion of values such as the division of powers, the rule of law, a commitment to human and fundamental rights, equality, and good governance. The EU continues to fund cooperation projects with millions of Euros in various fields ranging from Human development & good governance, to Resilience, prosperity and digital transition, to Green transition, climate resilience, energy & environment. However, in order to stem the migratory phenomenon from North Africa and to ensure that the states in the region themselves are in a position to stop migrants from black Africa from crossing the sea in search of a better life in Europe, the EU is once again in talks with authoritarian regimes very similar to the pre-2011 ones. By failing to overcome the dilemma of collaborating with such regimes while promoting democracy and human rights in its manifestos, the EU has fundamentally lost credibility among the North African population. The result of thirty years of difficulties and second thoughts is that the EU is no longer perceived as an example to follow, an engine from which to draw energy, a model in the field of the affirmation of the rule of law and economic development for all. Whilst it is seen as a "fortress" closed in on itself that, for its own interest and according to the emergencies of the moment, externalises its border, agreeing with governments that barely respect the human rights of its citizens and that do even less so when dealing with those who arrive from the other side of the desert.