Euro - mediterranean partnership in the aftermath of the arab spring

Despite the attempt to revamp the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership launched with the Barcelona Declaration in 1995 with the Union for the Mediterranean during the 2008 Paris Summit, the new initiative was unable to achieve its main goals and seems to be drifting into irrelevance, whereas the Euro-Mediterranean project in general is in jeopardy. Deprived of its main economic subject, the establishment of mutually beneficial cooperation in the form of a regional Free Trade Area, the cornerstone of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership became the externalization of immigration policies by EU countries with the help of agreements with single southern partners, guaranteeing a more or less staunch control on migration flows to the North, in a context of enhanced security concerns. In the absence of a common regional strategy, the Euro-Mediterranean cooperation gave way to an unsafe compromise between the necessity of the northern countries to be shielded from dangers of illegal immigration, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism threats, on the one hand, and the need of receiving international support by the southern illiberal and corrupt governments, on the other, at the expenses of local populations. The recent democratic upheaval in a number of southern countries, starting with the toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, can however give the EU an opportunity to re-launch the Euro- Mediterranean Partnership on a fresh basis, by recognizing in the first place its responsibilities in the past, not having put the human rights issues at its centre, and by offering the southern and eastern Mediterranean partners genuine equality of conditions. The book content is the result of a common research project by scholars of the two Mediterranean rims and may help both take stock of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership in the wake of the Union for the Mediterranean and the Arab Spring and pave the way for a renewed EU-MENA countries relationship.