The Union for the Mediterranean

Federica Bicchi, Richard Gillespie, Federica Bicchi, Richard Gillespie

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317978794
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

This is the first comprehensive analysis of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), launched in 2008 amid great controversy within the European Union. Affected from the start by negative fallout from the failure of Middle East peace initiatives, its inadequacies have been underlined by the popular movement for regime change in the Arab world.

Leading experts provide here the first integrated analysis of the significance and shortcomings of the UfM. Beginning with critical questioning of the motives and institutional logics informing this venture, the collection proceeds to analyse its key actors, as well as major policy dossiers such as energy and development.

The book explains how and why an initiative aiming to depoliticize Euro-Mediterranean relations in fact proved wide open to political discord, bringing huge disruption to UfM activity. While some aspects are found to have merit, the volume is critical of the way in which EU Mediterranean policy became driven by a narrow range of national interests, lost sight of the political objectives of the preceding Barcelona Process and became overwhelmingly bilateral in approach, at the expense of more ambitious region-building efforts.

It concludes by highlighting the need to reform the EU Mediterranean policy framework in the light of the Arab uprisings of 2011.

This book was published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.

The Union for the Mediterranean, or the Changing Context of Euro-Mediterranean Relations

FEDERICA BICCHI

Department of International Relations, London School of Economics, UK

ABSTRACT This contribution analyses the set of conditions that made the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) possible, highlighting the change vis-à-vis the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) and the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). First, it develops a conceptual framework for the analysis of the actors contributing or opposing the initiative, according to their attitude, motivation and resources invested in the process. Second, it examines the institutional logics that underpin the UfM. It suggests that the UfM was launched because a very small group cajoled an uninterested majority into yet another initiative for the Mediterranean. The outcome represents a shift away from regionalism as conceived in the EMP. At the same time, the Arab–Israeli conflict has politicized and disrupted the agenda of the UfM, as national interests have come to the fore and democracy and human rights have receded.

The Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), launched by the French President Sarkozy on 13 July 2008, is the latest development in the history of Euro-Mediterranean relations. The creation of the EEC, which established a customs union among European states, early on posed the problem of how to relate to their southern neighbours in economic terms and then, as the Europeans endeavoured to find a common voice in foreign affairs, in political terms too. The Global Mediterranean Policy (1972), the Renewed Mediterranean Policy (1990), the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) (1995), all embodied these attempts at finding a common platform for dealing with Mediterranean non-members.

The latest addition by Sarkozy introduces a set of novelties, the consequences of which are still unknown. It creates a co-presidency for the southern rim, while it institutionalizes meetings at the top level of heads of state and government, as well as a small Secretariat.¹ It emphasizes the partnership between the public and the private sectors. It stresses functional projects among bordering countries.² It expands membership to include Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Monaco. After the ‘big bang’ of the EMP, which expanded the number of issues on the agenda and the institutional setting of Euro-Mediterranean relations, the UfM thus recalibrates the balance by fine-tuning some key aspects.

In academic terms, this represents a challenge, as it raises a set of important questions. Why was the UfM launched? What conditions made it possible (and, for some, desirable)? What is the meaning of the changes it has introduced? What likely outcomes can we expect? These are the issues that this collection sets out to address. The aim in this contribution is to look at the broad framework, the specific parts of which will be the focus of the following contributions.

As with any political initiative, the UfM epitomizes a time-specific political context, which is bound to affect future developments. It is borne out of and interacting with the political agential inputs that key players in the area aim to impress onto the overall system, within a broader set of macro- and micro-trends. At the same time, it is bound to have an impact on future interactions. In this respect, the UfM is not exceptional, as various types of institutionalist analysis argue. As Riker put it (1980: 445), institutions are ‘congealed’ preferences. Whereas preferences tend to vary relatively often, the decision to establish an institutional framework crystallizes a set of preferences and a specific constellation of powers. The reach of those preferences and powers is thus extended across time. The institutional setting is therefore not only the symptom of its time, but it also affects the near future by creating the playing field within which new and possibly different preferences will come to have relevance. This argument is shared by scholars from a sociological perspective, who contest the micro-analysis of rational choice, but embrace the view of institutions as shared rules, practices and normative understandings that resist change (March and Olsen, 1989).

The academic challenge is to understand where the UfM comes from, what set of preferences, rules and practices it embodies and to which likely outcomes and appropriate behaviours it is going to lead. More specifically, the UfM must be understood in relation to the EMP and to the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), launched in 2004. While the UfM embodies a dynamics of its own, it was established in a thick institutional context. Therefore, while bringing a degree of novelty and rising out of a radically different political context, the UfM is expected to relate to an already well-established set of practices and roles.

There are elements of both continuity and change embodied in the UfM. Much can be said in favour of continuity. The country promoting the UfM was no surprise for Euro-Mediterranean relations. Once again, France championed the cause of the Mediterranean while making a case for France’s international profile.³ The processes that motivated the actors involved also seemed very much the same. Security, migration, energy, development, Arab–Israeli relations – all are issues the roots of which go back at times to the 1970s. They seem to remain the top priorities for all countries involved, regardless of the everlasting differences in approach. The southern Mediterranean countries welcomed the international attention that the initiative once again drew. Moreover, much of the fundamental structure of the EMP went untouched. At the core, the organizational setting remained the same, despite the addition of the Secretariat, co-presidency and top level meetings. The issues addressed in the multilateral discussion also continue to largely reflect the agenda of the EMP, although it could be argued that their normative value has changed.

Much can also be said in favour of change, regardless of the degree of apparent continuity. It cannot be assumed that an exuberant French president is all it takes to explain the new initiative, if only because the context of Euro-Mediterranean relations has substantially changed since the EMP was launched. The EU has undergone its biggest enlargement, nearly doubling in size. The shadow of enlargement was one of the triggers of the EMP (Barbé, 1998) and was thus somehow encompassed in the Euro-Mediterranean architecture of the 1990s. Most importantly, the nature of European integration seems to have subtly changed, and so has the EU agenda. The Franco-German integration engine has largely ground to a halt, leaving room for initiatives led by a small number of countries and, most crucially for our case, for French efforts to regain a leading role. The attack on multilateralism seems to have occurred in Euro-Mediterranean relations too, with a shift of emphasis in governance structures for co-operation. The existence of multilateral fora (a legacy of the EMP) seems to have lost relevance vis-à-vis the increase in bilateral relations (especially with the ENP) and notwithstanding the continuity of the EU unilateral financial instruments towards the area. The ‘dialogue’ about democracy and human rights has vanished. Moreover, in the Middle East there is no peace process to speak of. The Obama Administration faces a particularly hard-line Israeli Administration and no serious negotiations are in evidence. While falling short of a revolution, all these changes certainly represent a substantial evolution from the mid-1990s to now.

The argument presented here, which is to be read in dialogue with the following contributions, is that, despite appearances, change prevails over continuity. Although people not versed in the details of Euro-Mediterranean relations would be excused if they struggled to perceive a difference between the EMP and the UfM, this contribution will put forward the thesis that the UfM is the symptom of different political preferences on the part of the main actors and it is going to impress a different direction on Euro-Mediterranean relations, marking the UfM as a step in the fragmentation of an artificial region.

The following analysis focuses on actors and institutional logics, and on how the institutional order of Euro-Mediterranean relations has reflected a change in emphasis in these two dimensions. The first part focuses on the conceptual categories for the analysis of actors, in order to examine which actors have made the UfM possible and which have resisted it. The second part will address institutional logics, namely regionalism-bilateralism and functionalism-politicization, showing that the UfM reflects a weakened regionalism in the area (including within the EU) and displays a high degree of regional politicization, due to the collapsed Arab-Israeli peace process. The last part will bridge the analysed dimensions and compare them across time. It will show that, thanks to the entrepreneurial and/or leadership efforts of key actors, the institutional setting of Euro-Mediterranean relations has shifted from ‘regionalism+politicization’ in the EMP, to ‘bilateralism+functionalism’ with the ENP, to ‘bilateralism+politicization’ in the UfM.

Actors

The focus on actors and the UfM raises the questions of who did it, why, by what means, and what role the other actors played or, to put it differently, what kind of dynamics emerged among so-called partners. The story of how the UfM came about has been told elsewhere (see Bauchard, 2008; Gillespie, 2008; Balfour, 2009). It is well established that France was in the driving seat in leading the initiative. While the UfM can be seen as a one man’s effort, in the person of the French president, the dynamics that it engendered were much more complex than that. The issue arrived on the political agenda ‘from above’, as a result of high domestic politics. But the structure launched in 2008 differed from the early proposal by Sarkozy in 2007 in several respects, most importantly in terms of membership, which eventually included 43 countries (27 EU member states, 12 EMP partners on the southern Mediterranean rim and 4 new additions, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Monaco). Moreover, very much like the run-up to the Barcelona Conference, the momentum behind the launching of the UfM developed ‘first and foremost [as] an aspect of European foreign policy’ (Gillespie, 2008: 278). But the preliminary interactions went beyond the borders of the EU. The reaction of the southern countries to the preliminary version of the UfM showed an increased determination to participate as full members in the new framework and criticisms tended to focus on the extent to which the new initiative would allow the full expression of such an intention.⁴ It is thus important to scrutinize the role of the participant countries in bringing about the initiative, in order to forecast the potential for change of the UfM.

There are three characteristics that are useful in identifying the role that various actors played in bringing about the UfM (and policy initiatives in general): attitude, motivation and amount of resources invested. The attitude of actors is the first step in analysing the dynamics of agenda setting and decision making. Did actors support the initiative or did they try to resist it? In general terms, we can distinguish actors among leaders, laggards, and fence-sitting actors. According to the amount of resources invested, leaders playing a central role against an initiative can, however, act as veto-players, blocking its adoption. Moreover, the motivation of leaders helps to distinguish between, on the one hand, strategic leaders and, on the other, genuine entrepreneurs that strive to achieve consensus in the name of the common good. Finally, marginal players might behave as low-profile supporters or unhappy laggards, but they can also strategically look for side payments in exchange for their support or collectively block developments through lack of enthusiasm.

While France obviously supported the initiative and can be identified as the main actor behind it,⁵ the other key actor was Germany, though not in its traditional role. France put the issue of the Mediterranean on the EU agenda in an indirect way, as the Union Méditerranéenne (UM) was sketched out to a domestic audience, by a yet-to-be-elected candidate for the Presidency. Once the elections were over, the new president did not involve the EU and on the contrary continued to work on a proposal that would have marginalized it. Germany’s reaction was fence-sitting at first, and then ‘calling the bluff’ by acting as a veto-player.⁶ Based on the old saying of ‘no taxation without representation’, Germany’s role was pivotal in bringing about substantial changes to the initiative and in establishing a role for the EU. While the amount of material resources invested by Germany in the endeavour was not high, the political capital invested in facing Sarkozy was substantial and very public, although it was not alone. In fact, Germany spearheaded a group of countries that preferred the involvement of the entire EU and the continuation of the EMP in a different guise. This silent majority was composed not only of northern European countries, but also of Arab ones (see Driss, 2009: 2; Kausch and Youngs, 2009: 963; Schlumberger, this collection). These countries were unhappy laggards, which at times played fence-sitting and waited for Germany to take the lead in suggesting/imposing reforms to the initial project.⁷

Since the shift from the Union Méditerranéenne to the UfM, central and eastern European countries oscillated between being low profile supporters, favour exchangers and unhappy laggards, calling for an eastern equivalent and thus supporting the Eastern Partnership (see Schumacher, this collection). Other northern European countries, such as the UK, maintain a low profile on the issue, reflecting the low priority assigned to the dossier and the lack of interest in what is regarded as an essentially French political game.

Spain and Italy tried to work as co-entrepreneurs,⁸ but they met with the determination with which France tried to establish itself as the sole leader. This pattern broke with the co-operation that had emerged between France and Spain in the run-up to the Barcelona Conference, and it was instead inspired by previous forms of co-operation. In the case of the EMP, Spain invested a great deal of political capital in promoting the initiative from the early 1990s, but it was ready to co-ordinate with France, which since 1994 and until the Barcelona conference behaved as a de facto co-entrepreneur with Spain (Gillespie, 1997: 38). The run-up to the launch of the UfM was instead a very French endeavour, which resembled French behaviour leading to the GMP in 1972. At the time, capitalizing on the ongoing discussions about the role of Mediterranean countries during a period of détente, France outmanoeuvred other proposals on the table to promote the first EEC initiative towards the Mediterranean (Bicchi, 2007: 91–7). Similar to the UfM, the French activism entailed a number of ‘surprises’ for its European partners before they reached a common decision on the GMP.⁹ In 2008, France did not limit surprises for its partners to the issue of the Mediterranean (Schwarzer, 2008: 366), although the lack of communication on this dossier represented a major breach to the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)’s plea for solidarity among member states on matters of foreign policy. Southern European partners were thus relegated to the role of low-profile supporter or favour exchanger, despite the amount of resources poured into the issue, as has been the case for Spain.

Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Israel were the countries whose attitudes remained consistently (although not vocally) negative about the new endeavour. From the point of view of Turkey, a central role in the Mediterranean could not in any way compensate for the lack of a role in Europe (Schmid, 2008). At the same time, Turkey’s attitude was also lukewarm ...