The EuroMed Partnership: The Stepchild of the Neighborhood or the "It-Kid" on the block? Post-Cold War Mediterranean Regional Security and the EuroMed Partnership. EUMA Papers, Vol. 4 No. 7, March 2007

Boening, Astrid B. (2007) The EuroMed Partnership: The Stepchild of the Neighborhood or the "It-Kid" on the block? Post-Cold War Mediterranean Regional Security and the EuroMed Partnership. EUMA Papers, Vol. 4 No. 7, March 2007. [Policy Paper]

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Abstract

[Introduction] In this paper I seek to explore a region of the world, the Mediterranean, which has through the millennia been significant as a passageway for peoples and their trade and cultures. S. Victor Papacosma (2004, 15/6) writes, particularly concerning the Eastern Mediterranean, that despite their proximity, the diversity of the indigenous groups contributed little to harmony and much more to clashes among them … [and this region was characterized by] fragmented distributions of power and security systems that posed obstacles for this major avenue of economic and naval traffic. Today, progress has certainly been made – but much obviously needs to be done in the regions bordering the Mediterranean to remove obstacles not only to economic traffic but to build bridges to traverse the cultural and political diversity between the East and the West and the North and the South of the Mediterranean, and to substitute military clashes with peaceful socio-economic and cultural interactions. Previous experiences of regional Mediterranean integration, such as the Roman Empire or the spread of Christianity in the East and West Roman Empires were certainly not always peaceful. Hence I would like to examine here a modus operandi which is intended to serve as a peaceful “bridge” not between “Them” and “Us”, or “the West” and “the Rest”, but which utilizes approaches, such as functionalism and institutionalism, which have been historically successful in integrating neighboring countries that had an extensive history of “un-neighborly” relations, such as France and Germany, into a system which has brought not only prosperity but also peace to them, i.e. the European Union (EU), and applied it to the Mediterranean regions in the Euro-Med Partnership (EMP), also known as the Barcelona Process.

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