TEL AVIV — The masses that went to the streets in Tunisia, Egypt, the Gulf states, and Jordan confronted their regimes in the name of the values that Europe wanted these regimes to adopt. Beginning in 1995, when the European Union initiated the Barcelona Process, Europe has worked to establish a zone of European influence in the southeastern flank of the Mediterranean, to be predicated on a free-trade area, political and security cooperation, and the respect of democracy, human rights, and a strong civil society. The European Neighborhood Policy of 2004 and the Union for the Mediterranean of 2008 are additional instruments in the same vein.

Whether or not these EU-created instruments contributed to the uprising in the Southeast Mediterranean, it is now a duty of the West, and especially the part of the EU that is geographically adjacent, to sustain the nascent process emerging in North Africa and the Middle East.

These three existing instruments were bestowed by the EU on their neighbors. All three pretend to offer partnership, but they do not. In fact, they keep the neighbors at arm’s length, offering a range of economic concessions and a limited possibility of participating in some EU projects, programs, and European agencies and organizations. All lack the vision of full membership. Even the “partnership” status has been fully dominated and controlled by the EU. The neighbors had no hope of joining the EU and no sense of joint ownership of the three mechanisms of cooperation.

The recent uprising in the Arab world has created an historical opportunity for Europe to assist the process in a significant way. Turning the region to its southeast into a stable, democratic, and economically sound area is obviously in Europe’s interest. This is recognized in the European Council Declaration of March 11 and the March 8 joint document by the European Commission and Catherine Ashton, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, which was sent to the EU Heads of State and Parliament. The opening to the joint statement is promising. “The EU must not be a passive spectator,” it says. The document’s authors recognized that the EU approach should be “innovative and ambitious.” But the reader of the document is left with a strong sense of “déjà vu, déjà lu.”

The approach presented in this communication lacks vision, lacks imagination, and would fail to stir the minds of those in North Africa and the Middle East who risked their lives.  What is missing from the present European toolbox is a fresh approach and process in which the new Arab democracies can express the extent and depth of their interaction with the European Union. The neighbors will be the co-architects of this structure. That would create the currently missing sense of joint ownership. While it is clear that the EU cannot offer full membership to the countries to its southeast and is constrained in areas such as free movement of people, it can and should develop a modular approach in which the central tenet is participation of neighbors in the policyshaping (as different from policymaking) with one major precondition – each neighboring state would have to adopt the European legislation pertaining to the field in which it could participate in the decision-shaping. This means that the neighboring state parliamentarians, officials, experts, and, eventually, the relevant ministers would participate in every stage of the legislation and decision shaping, but they would not vote. That would ensure that European values, standards, and laws become effective along Europe’s outer perimeter. It would also mean greater European budgets for the neighbors that participate in European projects. Given the euro crisis, the EU should work in cooperation with institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. A major effort of transforming Europe’s neighborhood would require the mobilization of financial resources almost equal to those invested by the EU in preparing East European states for membership. What has been offered by Europe to the Middle East and North Africa is only a small fraction of the investment in Eastern Europe. The European Council was right to express concern over the vast illegal migration, but the small, less-than-partial solutions will fail to create the economic and political environment that would anchor the potential migrants to their homes.

In May, Catherine Ashton will submit a review of the European Neighborhood Policy. There is still time to introduce a totally different and bold strategy that would give a meaning to what German Chancellor Angela Merkel called “a privileged partnership.”

Oded Eran is the director of The Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and the former Israeli Ambassador to the EU

Share/Bookmark