A COMMON POLICY TOWARDS AFRICA?

H.E. Dr. Ugo Mifsud Bonnici
Former President of Republic of Malta

Some of the hardest lessons of history and the considerable cultural elaborations and reflections which followed upon them, have now become the implied premises of the process of European integration,  culminating in the European Union.  Europeans have re-learned that war between nations, as well as civil war and other intolerably wasteful forms of strife, are not necessarily the result of a clash of ideologies or the byproduct of dictatorship.  Frequently, they have been the result of a clash of economic interests as well as of the temptation to translate military might or cultural sway into economic advantage. The outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) ...

THE MEDITERRANEAN COMMUNITY AND THE EU: THE ITALIAN PERSPECTIVE

Franco Cardini

The still too short life of the Mediterranean Forum of the European Community (EUROMED) has already proved that Europe is changing one of its earlier ways of matching political issues. This was the approach that consisted of considering itself just as a continental land and addressed its interests mostly towards the west-bound and the north-bound. It is possible to say, however, after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the USSR and the start of a new world order dominated by just one nation - the US - that a fundamental change has taken place: Europe has ‘rediscovered' its links with the East and the South, ...

THOUGHTS ON EURO- MEDITERRANEAN PARTNERSHIP PROBLEMS

Rachid Driss
Tunisian diplomat, historian, poet, novelist and journalist. The author stresses that the views in this  article are non-official and  personal 

I first have to mention some basic facts : geographical, historical, demographic and environmental considerations.  Tunisia is situated in North Africa, at the junction between the East and West Mediterranean sea,  just across the water from Sicily, which means close proximity to Europe,  with whose history it has  always been involved.   From Carthage and Hannibal to the present time, the Euro-Mediterranean connection is one of the most striking  aspects of  Tunisian political life,  its observer at the Helsinki Conference in 1975 insisting on  the interconnection between Tunisia and Europe.  ...

THE EU AND THE MIDDLE EAST: AN EGYPTIAN VIEW

Dr. Emad Gad

Despite its vital interests in the Middle East and the link between European and Middle East security, Europe has once more, now that the consequences of the oil crisis of the 1970s have long since receded, ceded the ‘management' of Middle Eastern affairs to the US. The European Union (EU) has accepted the well-worn statement that Washington holds most of the cards in its own hands. This tendency has been reinforced by the EU's lack of a clear, common policy on foreign policy and security issues for most of the past two decades. The EU has continued to refine its experiment in regional cooperation in economic and social issues, or what is termed ‘low politics', but has not given serious consideration to the issues of ‘high politics', first and foremost foreign policy and security.

SECURITY PERCEPTIONS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN :  WHICH FACTORS FOR CHANGE ?

Ouelhadj Ferdiou
Professor of politics, University of Algiers

Attempting to master change and collectively drawing lessons from current international relations in order to define the targets and face in common challenges of security in  the  mediterranean may, inherently, steam up from  opportune and reliable but highly ambitious, conception. 

Opportune conception, in fact, given the transformations the world has witnessed since the post cold war era which have drawn the interest of international community as a whole on the       acuity of existing solidarity networks and security doctrines behind which states stand to ensure their survival or defend their own interests...

THE INTEGRATION OF THE MOROCCAN ECOMONY INTO THE NEW EURO-MEDITERRANEAN STRATEGY AND SPACE: THE PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT BETWEEN MORROCCO AND THE EUROPEAN UNION

Dr. Abdelkader Lahlou
Professor at the Faculty of Law, Rabat

Introduction
For geopolitical, cultural and economic reasons, the Mediterranean Sea is a sea for all. The European Union and the southern coastal states of this sea, mainly the Maghreb, would like to promote in this “Tibirate Lake” a strategic space for multidimensional cooperation. These countries share a large responsibility, targeting a harmonious development of the Mediterranean region, the original seat of civilization. Their future is consequently intertwined... 

SOME COMMENTS ON THE EUROPEAN UNION'S MEDITERRANEAN POLICY

Martin Ortega
Senior Lecturer in International Law and Relations, Complutense University, Madrid; Research Fellow, EU Institute for Security Studies, Paris

The purpose of this article is to examine briefly the two most important aspects of the EU's Mediterranean policy: the Barcelona process or Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) and the EU's role in resolution of the Middle East conflict.
Towards the end of this article some ideas to reinforce those policies are presented, since – it is here submitted – adequate instruments for implementing a valid European policy on the Mediterranean region already exist,  but more determination is needed to carry them through...

SUSAN STRANGE GOES TO THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN  

M. Fatih Tayfur
Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University. This essay is a byproduct of the ongoing multidisciplinary project on the Eastern Mediterranean carried out within  the Middle East Technical University, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences.

The Turks have never defined or conceptualised the Mediterranean region as a totality, and thus there is no comprehensive understanding of the Mediterranean in Turkish foreign policy. In general, the Turks perceive the Mediterranean region as being ...

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SECURITY AS A COMPONENT OF COMPHERENSIVE POLICY

Àlvaro de Vasconcelos
Director, IEEI, Lisbon

All the signatories of the Barcelona Declaration claim to support a comprehensive security concept, as is the case with the members of the Forum for Dialogue and Cooperation in the Mediterranean (Mediterranean Forum). It is not clear, however, that they all share a common understanding of what that concept is and we need to ask the question,  to what extent comprehensive security means the same thing for all the states concerned, and for the different national constituencies within them? Furthermore,  to what extent is the dominant role given to the war on terrorism generating ambiguity over such a concept, on the one hand, and contributing ...

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SULAYMAN THE MAGNIFICENT AND CHRISTIANITY: THE LIMITS OF AN ANTOGONISM

Gilles Veinstein
Professor at the Collége de France (Paris)

The epoch of the Crusades, from the 11th to the 13th centuries, remained in the memories of the Muslims  as well as  Christians,  as the peak of confrontation between the two religions, as an emblematic forerunner of all the ‘clashes of civilisations' to come. However, another more recent period of history, namely the 15th and 16th centuries, could be characterized in the same way.  Western  historians have given these decades  the enhancing  title of Renaissance, but they could also have discerned a spectacular resurgence of antagonism between Christianity  (henceforth torn apart between...

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THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE TO STRENGTHENING EURO-MEDITERRANEAN RELATIONS

Dimitris K. Xenakis
Dr. Dimitris K. Xenakis is Strategic Analyst at the Defence Analysis Institute in Athens. Since 2000, he has held  an Honorary Research Fellowship from the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter, UK, and is Research Fellow on Mediterranean Affairs of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy in Athens. He is currently teaching International Relations and Euro-Mediterranean Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Crete. The views expressed here do not necessarily coincide with those of the institutions above.

The shift in the vocation of the post Cold War European international system has resulted in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe  aspiring  to become  part of the European Union's (EU) zone of democracy, stability and prosperity.  Yet, it is also no secret that the stability and prosperity of the Mediterranean is of great importance to Europe. Since the mid 1990s, the EU's Mediterranean policy has gained a significant degree of multilateralisation, as compared with previous European approaches to the Mediterranean. The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), launched in November 1995 has, by putting an institutional face on  the forging of co-operative policies between the EU and its 12 Mediterranean partners (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, ...

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