The Triple Logic of the European–Mediterranean Partnership: Hindsight and Foresight

Abstract

The Barcelona process Initiative must be seen as part of a broader design of European Union (EU) evolution in the post-Cold War era, one involving spatial and functional expansion, including efforts to design a common foreign policy. Both classical security issues (the availability of non-conventional weapons in the Middle East, terrorism, oil and natural gas dependencies) and ‘new’ security issues (migration, drugs, human rights violations, environmental degradation) bear on EU concerns with the political fate of the Mediterranean basin. These concerns led to the Barcelona Declaration or Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) Initiative, designed to promote peace and prosperity in the Mediterranean region. Three main processes are critical to the relationship between the industrialized North and the industrializing Mediterranean countries: economic reform, democratization, and the role of multilateral organizations. All three are lagging in the Mediterranean South and East, with important consequences for the conception of a Mediterranean region as a whole. The consequences of this lag have implications for the broader debacle in which the Europeans and the West more generally, find themselves in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.