The Union for the Mediterranean: a rescue plan for Europe an opportunity or an opportunity for the Maghreb

The Union for the Mediterranean

II/ The Union for the Mediterranean:

«The Union for the Mediterranean» was suggested by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy during the French presidential campaign of February 2007. The project tends to take precedence over «Barcelona Process", which was admitted as a failure by the French president. The proposal of the UfM raised mixed reactions from economic and political analysts, since it does not include all European states. In fact, initially the project included only countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. However, the plan was modified when Germany stressed on the need to include all EU members. Finally, the project came to encompass 39 states and includes 700 Million people. Indeed, the UfM is mainly revolved around socio-economic and environmental plans of development. Furthermore, it targets to develop the whole region, with a focus on the states that witness economic backwardness, so as to make out of the Mediterranean zone an influential pole at the global scale. Moreover, the UfM is a geostrategic plan that aims to up-grade logistics (i.e. ports, highways, sea routes), in order to ease the flow of trade and economic exchanges between the two shores of the Mediterranean. However, the creation of a Euro-Mediterranean partnership is not a revolutionary idea, in the sense that similar plans of partnership were in place before N.Sarkozy's suggestion. Indeed, since the establishment of the European Economic Community in the late 50s, European leaders have always viewed the development of trade and economic ties as a vital instrument to improve bilateral relations with the neighbours of the southern shore of the Mediterranean and especially with Maghreb countries.

1- The Steps Towards the Construction of the Union for the Mediterranean:3(*)

A/ 5+5 Dialogue:

The Cooperation Process in the Western Mediterranean, known as "Dialogue 5+5" was launched during a ministerial meeting, held in Rome on October 10, 1990. A constitutive declaration emanated from this meeting, which is known as the «Rome Constitutive Declaration». The document stipulates the necessity of holding regular meetings to discuss issues of common interest. Indeed, «Dialogue 5+5» includes 10 countries of the western Mediterranean basin (Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, France, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain). Since 2001, ordinary ministerial meetings have been regularly held, to foster the process of cooperation and to strengthen principles adopted in the different declarations (i.e. Algiers declaration, Barcelona declaration, Tripoli Declaration, Saint Maxime Declaration and Tunis Declaration).

B/ Barcelona Process:

«Barcelona process» was established in 1995 in order to foster the relations between the states of the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, the process gathered the states of the European Union (15 states at that time) and 12 states of the south Mediterranean region. It aimed at settling the disputes in the Mediterranean region (i.e. the Arab-Israeli conflict), assuring security in the area (i.e. radicalism in Algeria) and achieving economic development. Moreover, the process forecasted the establishment of a free trade area between the two shores of the Mediterranean by 2010. Hence, under the umbrella of «Barcelona Process», the EU has entered into bilateral trade agreements with Tunisia (1995), Morocco (1996), and Algeria (2002). Agreements with Tunisia and Morocco had come into force in early 2005, while agreements' ratification process was ongoing for Algeria. Indeed, post-Barcelona «Association agreements» offered states parties the opportunity to deal simultaneously with regional (inter-Maghreb cooperation) and global economic issues (trade and investments) in the sense that it would give the Maghreb region more important role in the international economic scene. Indeed, the most important aspect of these agreements is the fact that they focus on a wide range of key economic issues (i.e. Industry, agriculture, foreign trade, financial assistance, transport and communication). However, for some analysts, «Barcelona process» represented a failure, since it did not fulfill its targets. Indeed, ten years after the process' creation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was still persisting and the bilateral economic exchanges remained more or less, at the same level before the process. In deed, Francis Wurtz a French Member of the «European Parliament» believes that the failure of the process was mainly due to the divergence in points of view among the European leaders and most importantly because of the «policy of enlargement» that the EU had undertaken concerning the admission of new members to the EU from East European states^4(*). Therefore, the rapid integration of new states in the European Union produced a phenomenon of transfer of weight, from the West to the East of the European continent. Thereby, influential European states such as Germany privileged economic exchanges with newly joining states. Consequently, the Euro-Mediterranean partnership (Barcelona Process) became a project of secondary importance and did not match initial expectations.

* 3

Ahmed Ounais (former ambassador and professor of international relations at the University of Law, social and political sciences, TUNIS). « Union pour la méditerranée: avatar d'une communauté Européenne ». IFRI (Institut Française des Relations Internationale).

* 4

Francis Wurtz: « Tirer les leçons des échecs précédents », l'Humanité, 12 July 2008.