Source: Getty
commentary

20 Years of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership

Since its creation in 1995, almost none of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership’s ambitions has been fulfilled. What are the policy and analytical challenges that lie ahead?

published by
Mediterranean Politics
 on May 18, 2015

Source: Mediterranean Politics

This article appears as the introduction to a special edition of Mediterranean Politics “20 years of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership,” compiled and edited by Richard Youngs.

*

Twenty years have passed since the creation of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP). This span of a generation feels like a geopolitical lifetime. At its birth, the EMP was one of the EU’s most comprehensive and forward-looking foreign policy initiatives. The hope this engendered was reflected in the very creation of the Mediterranean Politics journal. Two decades later, virtually none of the EMP’s ambitions have been fulfilled. In 2009 the EMP was rechristened as the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM). Yet, despite many well-meaning policies and some islands of achievement, in Euro-Mediterranean relations, on most vectors conditions in the southern Mediterranean have worsened since 1995. Relations between Europe and Arab states, Turkey and Israel have become more fractious.

The Middle East is today the source of acute strategic challenges. War rages in four Arab states: Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Sunni radicalization, especially in the form of Islamic State (IS) jihadis, is challenging national borders. More intense geopolitical rivalries are taking shape between the region’s main powers. Sharper sectarian tensions exist between Sunni and Shia communities, amplified by regimes’ power strategies. Egypt is rocked by instability and polarisation. The Arab-Israeli peace process is for now moribund, if not definitively dead; Gaza stands in ruins, having suffered a death toll in excess of a thousand in the summer of 2014. The region is suffering its worst-ever humanitarian crisis. Illicit trade, trafficking and smuggling are rife, providing financial sources for jihadist groups and undermining the regional rule of law and economic order. Far from representing a benign link between cultures, the Mediterranean Sea is in the headlines today as the site of frequent and tragically large numbers of migrant deaths. The growing influence of non-Western rising powers in the Middle East compounds competition for strategic alliances, geo-economic gain and access to energy supplies. Regional cooperation initiatives have run aground.

The EMP’s 20th birthday is hardly an anniversary to celebrate, then. Yet it is certainly a moment at which lessons need to be drawn from the past - not least to help understand where initial promise of Euro-Mediterranean relations went so wrong, and how positive gains from the EMP might still be salvaged. In such retrospective vein, this volume collects together some of the key Mediterranean Politics articles published on the EMP/UfM during the last twenty years. The aim is to give a flavor of how debates over the partnership have evolved since 1995.

It is pertinent to undertake this retrospective now as so many of the EMP’s initial concerns have returned to the forefront of debate – indeed, in the case of some issues with greater vengeance than at any time during the last two decades. In 2015, the EU has committed itself to a fundamental revamping of its southern (and eastern) neighbourhood policy. As geopolitical conditions have led many to call for a new EU policy towards the Middle East and North Africa, today’s writings often read like epitaphs for the original EMP design – such is the gravity of this 20-year turning point.

There are policy and academic lessons to be learned from the flurry of initial debates that took place over the EMP. It is striking just how many articles were published on the EMP in the early years of theMediterranean Politics journal. It is equally notable how concerns have more recently turned to other issues, as Euro-Mediterranean relations appear to have calcified. If the EU and southern Mediterranean partners are to retain the aspirations they enshrined in the EMP in 1995, they could do worse than draw from the changing analyses of the last 20 years.

I have selected here a range of articles designed to give a flavour of the way in which the focus of analytical debates has evolved since 1995. The journal has published many more worthy pieces on the EMP and UfM than those presented in the following chapters. Indeed, it has been at the forefront of setting the terms of academic debate on a wide range of Mediterranean issues during the last 20 years. It was impossible to include all relevant articles here; in this selection I have tried to offer examples of writing that I see as representative of analytical approaches prevalent at particular moments in time. In this way, I hope to present a record of the way in which the geopolitical context has reshaped the EMP/UfM and of how leading thinkers have responded to these changing parameters. In essence, I try to recreate the fluctuating story of the EMP/UfM as leading writers saw the process at pivotal moments in its evolution.

The early years

In the years following the EMP’s inception, expectations were high. This collection begins with an article written by Esther Barbe for the very first edition of the journal, which explains how the EMP represented an ambitious new multilateral approach to Euro-Mediterranean relations. This article highlights the symbolic political importance of the EMP’s creation. The new Barcelona Process indicated that the EU would not neglect the southern Mediterranean as the Union immersed itself in preparing central and eastern European candidate states for accession. And its guiding philosophy was notable in rejecting realpolitik strategies - ostensibly basing itself on a progressive notion of cooperative security, joint decision-making, region-building, political reform and social integration. The very fact that the EU chose to focus on deepening a ‘Mediterranean’ rather than ‘broader Middle East’ policy suggested a preference for inclusive cooperation with the Union’s neighbours. The EMP was not only an important policy milestone; it also nourished distinctive theoretical conceptualizations of EU foreign policy.

At a moment, in the mid-1990s, when the distorted spectre of a ‘clash of civilizations’ framed much analytical discourse, the EMP ostensibly enshrined a firm rejection of exclusionary and defensive geo-strategy. It was at this stage one of the most significant examples of the EU’s commitment to a distinctive type of liberal-cooperative foreign policy. The EMP appeared to correct some of the ad hoc bilateralism that had previously dominated European-Arab relations. As Barbe’s article reminds us, member states still held different perspectives on the southern Mediterranean, yet compromised sufficiently to agree an apparently common approach to the region – even if many details of how the EMP commitments would be implemented remained sketchy.

While hopes were high at this point, not all reactions were positive. The volume’s second contribution is a 1997 article by George Joffe that recalls how southern Mediterranean states were unhappy at what they saw as the euro-centric assumptions sitting at the heart of the EMP.  Both Joffe and Eberhard Kienle – in his 1998 article on the EMP’s ‘destabilizing’ elements, reproduced below as our third essay - warned in these early days that the long-term consequences of the EMP template could be counter-productive. In particular, early concerns were raised that the EU was relying far too heavily on an assumption that support for economic liberalization and integration would deliver security benefits, inter-regional harmony and political modernization.

Several southern Mediterranean governments signed up to the EMP without enthusiasm and largely because in the mid-1990s they saw few other strategic alternatives. Critical voices at this stage bemoaned the extent to which the EMP enshrined European hegemony over Arab states – illuminating to recall, given that today there is far more concern over the absence of EU influence in the region. Critics did not believe the EMP’s security elements were strong, inclusive or distinctive enough to off-set US primacy. Arab regimes disliked the focus on human rights and democracy. In contrast, civil society groups complained that the focus on democracy was not strong enough and feared that the EMP’s economic dimension could worsen the prospects for political liberalization. Many observers felt the EU’s understanding of political Islam was simplistic in the rather instrumental way the EMP treated this question. The then-raging Algerian civil war was one of the policy challenges that motivated the EMP’s creation; but the EU appeared to have neither the will nor tactics to ensure that the Algeria’s Islamists were brought into inclusive, mainstream politics. Crucially, many of the points raised by Joffe and Kienle regarding the EMP’s original design flaws have become more prominent and more debilitating as the years have gone by.

Paralysis in the Middle East peace process soon undermined the EMP. Debates by the late 1990s and early 2000 were heavily concerned with this ‘infection’ between the Arab-Israeli conflict and broader Euro-Mediterranean relations. The EMP was conceived on the back of the 1994 Oslo peace accords and in essence offered the social, economic and political means of locking-in the regional benefits of Arab-Israeli reconciliation. Without that reconciliation, the EMP’s forums for low-politics cooperation became paralyzingly politicized. The faltering peace process encouraged a spate of analytical work on the EMP’s shortcomings as a pan-regional framework that included Arab states, Israel and Turkey.

9/11 and beyond

If initial enthusiasm in the EMP had begun to drain away, the political context was about to get even more complicated. While concerns over radicalization informed the EMP’s comprehensive approach to security, they were not primordial to its genesis. This changed on 11 September 2001. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC, and then later in Madrid and London, opened a new phase in debates over Europe’s Middle Eastern policies. For several subsequent years, analytical work focused on the dynamics of securitization in Euro-Mediterranean relations.  

I include here as a fourth piece one of Richard Gillespie’s articles from this period, which admirably captures the post-2001 turn within EMP deliberations. This article explains how the EMP’s security basket had remained largely empty and notes how the EU sought to inject life into the social, cultural and human affairs basket as a route to addressing strategic concerns. This reflected the heightened importance of justice and home affairs matters, as well as incipient de-radicalization initiatives. These were corollaries to the more intense counter-terrorist cooperation that took shape across the Mediterranean Sea after 2001. Gillespie recalls here that this policy shift sharpened tensions between soft-power and direct security approaches – even as these two components were supposed to be mutually reinforcing within the EMP. This was because the justice and home affairs strand seemed to cut across the EMP’s narrative of inclusion, its positive approaches to soft security and the primordial importance supposedly attached to rights-protection. It seemed to drag the EMP away from long-term community building to short-term threat-containment. While this policy shift may have been an understandable response to terrorist attacks, it was pursued in a way that compromised the EMP’s geostrategic comparative advantage.

These tensions set the terms of debate for most of the decade that followed the 9/11 attacks – in many senses, of course, we are still living with their consequences. In the next article, Frederic Volpi attempts an analytical conceptualization of how the EU was responding to security concerns. He neatly categorizes the EMP’s constructivist tone of joint cultural shaping between European and southern Mediterranean states, and distinguishes this from realist recipes for the post-2001 geostrategic context. He observes how far short the EU had fallen in actually following through on its own liberal-cooperative ideals of shared identity building – and the consequent limits to the constructivist framework.

This article echoes other writings of the time: after the shock of 9/11 EU leaders rhetorically recommitted themselves to the founding principles of the EMP. The EMP seemed to have been ahead of its time in speaking of cultural understanding, regional integration, economic development and political reform being essential to reducing the risks of radicalization. The reaffirmed commitment after 9/11 raised the policy stakes and meant that by the mid-2000s much analytical work centred on the EU’s failure to adhere to its own rhetoric.

The EU introduced a number of new democracy and human rights initiatives. Leaders spoke frequently about the need finally to ‘get serious’ about political reform: giving citizens a genuine voice to hold their governments accountable was the best way to address the social discontent that drove radicalization. They admitted the EMP had made limited progress in this area. The European Neighbourhood Policy was conceived, to add more tailored action plans in each partner state. Yet, after a flurry of post-2001 activity, any new momentum behind EU support for democratic reforms in the southern Mediterranean soon dissipated. The collection’s sixth article by Dorothee Schmid reveals how cautious the EU remained on pressing for political reform, lest this hinder short-term counter-terrorist cooperation.

In a 2005 article included here, Michelle Pace unpacks the obstacles to embedding an ethos of multi-level and co-shaped dialogue between European and southern Mediterranean partners. As security concerns intensified so did the challenges facing EU and Mediterranean states in developing mutually beneficial relations through a culture of dialogue. A plethora of links now existed between the northern and southern sides of the Mediterranean below the level of the state. The EMP was almost uniquely rich in this domain. It had facilitated dialogue between NGOs, municipalities, youth groups, journalists, unions, business actors, parliamentarians and artists. Yet the results of all this activity were disappointing and dialogue was increasingly imbalanced. In part this was because many cultural and social partners operated under regimes’ restrictive tutelage. In part it was because the scale of such initiatives was not sufficient to make a decisive difference. And in part it was because many partners in the south complained that the nature of cooperation was being framed on European terms.

From a similar perspective, in their 2006 article on the shift in security discourses, Federica Bicchi and Mary Martin point out that the 9/11, London and Madrid attacks encouraged some European actors to engage more systematically with political Islam across the southern Mediterranean, invariably to the chagrin of regimes. Yet this engagement was less than whole-hearted. Sceptics thought that most European governments were not at all genuine in their claim to have realized the importance of reaching out to Islamist parties. Some states’ securitization of Islam sat uneasily with the EMP’s founding tenets.

In brief, by the mid-2000s, now ten years on from the EMP’s creation, analysts were concerned that EU governments seemed to be reducing their commitment to the southern Mediterranean and reverting to some of their pre-EMP policy approaches. I am personally taken back to 2005 when Haizam Amirah Fernandez and I got together a group of experts to assess the EMP’s first ten years.1 Our resulting book recorded analysts’ very downbeat evaluations of the EMP’s responsiveness to a deteriorating security, economic, social and political environment. Another ten years on from that, I find it sobering that even in that fairly critical review we all generally failed to see just how dramatically events might proceed during the EMP’s second decade – or just how amorphously insipid would be the EU’s response to the impending turmoil.

Distracted debates

In the late 2000s, the EU seemed increasingly introverted. It was immersed in drawn-out internal, institutional reforms. As the threat of radicalism and international terrorism appeared to have plateaued, EU-Mediterranean relations lost some of their drive. As its own economic crisis hit hard, the EU needed buoyant export markets. It began to accord greater priority to rising economies, especially in Asia. The Middle East slipped down its list of priorities. In hindsight, the period that preceded the Arab spring now seems notable for the EU’s failure to foresee and prepare for the social upheavals that were just over the horizon. And such distractedness was also reflected in academic work from this period.

In 2010, the journal published a special edition on ‘region-building dynamics’ in Euro-Mediterranean relations. The subject of this volume suggested that some academics still approached the EMP very much through the lens of its supposedly unique and distinctive commitment to building a shared community and polity across the Mediterranean. At the same time, some contributors to this volume began to stress the contextual shifts that seemed to render this kind of approach increasingly questionable. They talked about more ‘flexible’ approaches to region-building and in some sectors flagged up the danger of fragmentation.

I have included an article by Eduard Soler from this special edition, as this gives an excellent flavour of the very gradually shifting analytical lens through which Euro-Mediterranean relations were assessed. The piece unpacks the mix of convergence and divergence on security questions across the Mediterranean. It notes that policy dynamics depended on specific goals in relation to different issues and did not reflect any broader, all-encompassing regional security culture. Where the EU and Arab states could reach agreement it was for very pragmatic reasons, not as part of any deeply embedded ideational security community.

In line with this focus on very practical areas of cooperation, the French government proposed the creation of a new Union for the Mediterranean. After a number of diplomatic confrontations and a process of re-modelling, the UfM was effectively folded into the exiting EMP (although in policy debates both terms are still used). A new UfM secretariat was set up in Barcelona dedicated to funding joint development projects in the southern Mediterranean. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems puzzling today that so much hope was placed in this re-launch. The UfM started to focus on low-key, technocratic, development projects – apparently blind to the turbulent storm clouds that were evidently gathering over the Middle East.

Indeed, in this period, the EU often appeared immersed in arcane institutional questions, to the detriment of broad, geopolitical deliberation. To demonstrate this, I have selected here Oliver Schlumberger’s article from a special edition published in early 2011 specifically dedicated the Union for the Mediterranean. I could have chosen any number of articles from this edition, if more space were available: it is a collection that reflects well the focus of debates at that moment, as the Union for Mediterranean added another layer of institutional complexity to EU initiatives in the region. It reflected what would soon be revealed to be a disastrous myopia at the heart of Euro-Mediterranean relations: the new initiative was designed to focus on uncontroversial areas of cooperation and to take politics out of the policy equation – the kind of politics that were just about to erupt in spectacular fashion in Tunisia, Egypt and then elsewhere.

Looking back at this volume, it is remarkable how focused EU debates were on institutional structures, internal processes and rivalries – at a moment when, we now know, the social pressures were building up to burst forth in what would be labeled the Arab spring. Many articles were still concerned with very detailed EMP/UfM institutional questions. In hindsight, it is striking that virtually no articles linked the predictions of imminent social explosion in Arab countries with the need for EMP/UfM policies to move up several political gears. Even less did work in the journal foresee the kind of geopolitical shockwaves created by the now-raging conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Libya. The precursors of Islamic State crept up the agenda without forewarning from analysts writing on the UfM’s future challenges.

Impacts of the Arab spring

Self-evidently, the Arab spring marked the beginning of another phase in analytical debate. I have selected just one illustrative article from the many published since 2011 on the Arab spring. Rasmus Boserup and Fabrizio Taasninari’s short essay is a good example of the articles that appeared from 2011 criticizing the UfM for being insufficiently ‘politicized’ to react appropriately to the Arab spring. In this phase of the debate, the inadequacies of the UfM were front and centre of the analysis. The ‘return of Arab politics’ – if indeed they had even gone away – more explicitly changed the terms of academic research. It brought fully to the surface many of the concerns that had been lingering over the EMP/UfM. As did many others in 2011, Boserup and Tassinari lambast the EU for a lame response that was based on a rather bland logic of ‘continuity and upgrading’.

Beyond what most analysts saw as the EU’s lacklustre response to the Arab revolts, this new phase has also had a profound impact on the analytical narrative of the EMP/UfM.  An eclectic mix of policy dynamics characterised the EU’s response to the Arab spring.2 In some ways the EMP/UfM appeared to have become so firmly embedded and institutionalized that it struggled to react positively, strategically and in full measure to the emerging potential for political change. The relative weight of member states’ policies became more significant. Governments’ strategic calculations produced greater variation in policies towards different southern Mediterranean states, as these took divergent political paths. European governments sought to regain their sway in overall EU policies towards the Middle East.

Looking back at previous analytical work, one notes the longstanding and common view that democracy support is strongly internalized within EU identities and self-images, and pursued in a somewhat un-reflexive manner independent of geostrategic calculation. However, this was not sufficient as an explanation of EU foreign policy in the southern Mediterranean after 2011. The Arab awakening did not open the door to entirely harmonious cooperation and community building across the Mediterranean. Indeed, many of the architects of Arab change insisted that they sought more autonomy from such deep Western entanglement. And differences widened between member states as they read the potential of Arab reform in different ways. This divergence militated against the prospect of a common Europeanized cooperative security framework being fully realised in the post-2011 southern Mediterranean.

The UfM’s tools of external governance were certainly relevant in accounting for the way in which some more technical areas of EU rules were adopted by Arab states from 2011. There was a certain unblocking of regulatory harmonization in the wake of the Arab revolts. But overall, there remained much resistance to the concept of importing EU governance across the Middle East. Indeed, popular control over decision-making in many areas tipped the scales against this technocratic vision of cooperation with Europe.  A number of EU initiatives aimed to deepen civil society and people-to-people linkages. Yet government-controlled power politics also became more prominent.

While some areas of deeper cooperation were pursued within the rubric of the UfM, in some parts of the Middle East the Arab spring encouraged European governments to give greater priority to bilateral, national foreign policy action. Some member states celebrated and contributed to the Arab spring more than others. Geopolitical calculation became a more prominent strand of the EU policy-making mix. This was particularly so as the process of reform stumbled in many states and instability erupted. The new context challenged the analytical centrality of the ‘EMP ethos’ that was so extensively dissected in the early years of Mediterranean Politics. A different kind of research agenda was called for. A pattern of governance centred on national governments’ strategic calculations and actions was at least as relevant as Europeanized models of governance in structuring relations with the new Middle East. European responses were as much about national governments’ high diplomacy as they were predicated on Brussels-centred policy instruments.

While some elements of decentred, co-owned and non-state forms of governance certainly have advanced since 2011, these have been accompanied by some very traditional elements of realpolitik. European governments genuinely saw the fashioning of a new Middle East as a positive opportunity, but also sought to deploy national diplomatic means to protect against its risks and uncertainties. In some policy areas the balance between national foreign policies and common EU efforts shifted towards the former. This was seen particularly in Libya, where the divergence between member states was as fundamental as anything witnessed since the inception of the common foreign and security policy.

After 2011 a variation in European policies was driven by a combination of contrasting domestic political structures within different Arab states, on the one hand, and European governments’ contrasting security-related calculations in different parts of the region, on the other hand. Both these variables sit uneasily with explanations of EU foreign policy that attribute sole importance to common, socialized EU identities and Europeanized policy instruments. As is evident in the selected articles from the last 20 years of Mediterranean Politics, writers have commonly criticised EU policies for being too uniform - and they have argued that this is because they proceed from entrenched institutional templates and elaborately designed external policy instruments. Some elements of the EU’s response to the Arab revolts did indeed fit this institutionalist template. However, such inside-out explanations of EU foreign policy decisions look harder to sustain in the awake of the Arab revolts.

This has become even more evident as the momentum of the Arab spring has ebbed and the UfM, as well as member states’ national diplomacy, has struggled to adapt to the complex political specificities of southern Mediterranean states. The faltering path of the Arab spring has posed serious questions for standard models of political transition – models upon which the EMP was heavily predicated.

In a sense, European foreign policy has become a dependent as much as independent variable – effected by, not just effecting domestic constellations in southern Mediterranean states. The EU has responded in flexible and even expedient fashion to the fluidity and specificity of domestic developments within different parts of the Middle East. As is apparent from the articles included in this volume, this represents a notable change from the EMP’s early days. The EU has supported different types and degree of political reform in Arab states. It has pursued different mixes of bottom-up civil society support and top-down security cooperation. It is not fully convincing today to accuse the EU of seeking to foist a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model across the whole region. The EU’s reform-oriented strategy in Tunisia looks radically different from its more defensive strategy in Egypt, and both in turn diverge from the humanitarian-security turn to policy in beleaguered Jordan. Moreover, the disconnect between the EMP and the broader Middle East has become more incongruous and more of a handicap to coherent, region-wide geo-strategy.

In sum, the Arab revolts and region-wide geopolitical changes have given birth to a more pluralist set of European approaches in the southern Mediterranean. European policies today reflect less a singular identity and more a calibrated moulding to varied trends in different parts of the MENA region. The revolts and the ‘new geopolitics’ have contributed to making the EU a more eclectic foreign policy actor, both in terms of substantive output and the institutional-governance dynamics it employs. It is difficult today to describe EU foreign policy parsimoniously or convincingly to show that it unequivocally accords to only one dominant conceptual dynamic. This volume’s 20-year retrospective reminds us just how much this change contrasts with much of the foregoing EMP narrative – and helps emphasize just how much of an analytical shift this entails.

The past’s path to the future

In conclusion, I have tried to select articles that recreate the story of Euro-Mediterranean relations during the last twenty years. In sum, we can observe that debates have passed through several phases, shifting in turn from a focus on the EMP’s institutional configuration, to reactions to 9/11 and the emergence of concerns over international terrorism, through to the Arab spring. The crucial question is what we should learn from this trajectory. How can the articles of the last twenty years inform current debates – when the consensual view is that the Middle East now stands on the precipice of pervasive instability?

The articles that follow are offered in the spirit of better delineating the terms of current debates. Some conclude in these essays that the EMP enshrined an enlightened, long-term strategic vision – of admirable foresight compared to today’s lack of leadership and long-term thinking – that was simply not followed through. Others find in the selected articles evidence that the EU always had it wrong – and that its particular, euro-centric vision of international relations never had a chance of putting down roots in the southern Mediterranean.

Today it seems that the next phase of debate will have to include questions related to conflict, violence, instability, humanitarian tragedy and the pushback against democratic reform that dominate today’s Middle East. The EU’s focus is likely to be on protecting itself against such turbulence – this is implied in documents released as part of the ENP review process. The emerging, geopolitical policy dilemmas bring with them a conceptual dilemma. During the last 20 years, the way the EMP/UfM was designed fitted into a particular analytical-theoretical model of EU foreign policy. A crucial academic question is whether the same kinds of analytical, governance models will be so prominent in Mediterranean Politicsarticles during the next one or two decades – or whether analysts will have to re-adjust for the failures of the last twenty years just as much as EU policy-makers. One wonders what kind of work published now will stand the test of time, when the 30th or 40th anniversary of the EMP comes around – if indeed, the EMP or any comparable policy still exists then.

In terms of what should happen, my view is that the EU’s ‘geopolitical turn’ should not divert the UfM from trying to tackle the most deep-rooted causes of today’s strategic tensions. Taking geopolitics seriously means thinking what strategies are necessary to oxygenate EU efforts to foster structural reforms – it should not mean suffocating such approaches. The times indeed warrant a more hard-headed approach to security. But a wholesale switch from inclusive, cooperative policies to exclusionary realpolitik is not the answer. The adoption of a more geopolitical policy should not serve as a pretext for arguing that opening European markets or offering freer movement to Arab workers is no longer necessary. Nor should it become shorthand for a policy of keeping the region at a distance instead of working to deepen inclusive cooperation. And it should not point the EU towards using its funds to prop up regimes guilty of atrocious rights abuses. The EU would be equally ill advised to give up entirely on encouraging regional cooperation. With many medium sized powers competing for influence, and no clear hegemon in the region, efforts to build regional norms and rules are more, not less, necessary. While a focus on security is understandable and indeed necessary, exclusionary containment is unlikely to preserve the EU’s long-term strategic interests in the Mediterranean.

This article was originally published as the introduction to the May 2015 special edition of Mediterranean Politics.

Notes

1 R. Youngs and H. Amirah Fernandez (eds.), Ten years of the Barcelona Process. Madrid: Instituto Elcano/Fride, 2005.

2 This argument draws from R. Youngs, Europe and the New Middle East: opportunity or exclusion? Oxford University Press, 2014.