As European Union summits go, the March 13-14 event in Brussels is turning out to be short, sedate and – dare one say it – soporific. It’s Friday morning now – day two – and the 27 national leaders won’t even be sticking around for a group lunch. People are wandering around the venue, the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, with summit badges, mobile phones and that look on their faces which says: “If 99 per cent of life is just being there, at an EU summit it’s 100 per cent.”
Even French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s performance at a midnight press conference was as thin as a crêpe dentelle. He claimed his fellow EU leaders had welcomed his call for a Mediterranean Union “with great enthusiasm” at a dinner on Thursday evening. But I have run into delegates from at least four countries who say the idea was approved in an “oh, well, let him have his toy if he wants it” sort of way.
The Mediterranean Union (MU, pronounced “Moo”) is one of those EU schemes that you can tell is going nowhere right from the start because of a debate over what to call it. It appears that from now on it is to be known not as the MU but as the Union for the Mediterranean (UM, pronounced “Um”). For the hundreds of millions of people who live on the sea’s shores from Valencia to Tel Aviv, whether it’s Moo or Um cannot make the blindest bit of difference.
The idea behind Moo/Um is to strengthen co-operation between the EU’s 27 member-states and non-EU countries that have a Mediterranean coast, from Morocco and Algeria to Lebanon and Syria. It will reinforce and upgrade the EU’s Barcelona process, which started in 1995 and is generally regarded as, to put it kindly, an underperforming asset.
Why is that? The ever honest José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, provided an answer this morning to a few reporters over breakfast: “The Barcelona process has at times suffered from negative developments in the Middle East peace process.”
You can say that again, José. At a meeting in November 2005 marking the 10th anniversary of the Barcelona process, the only non-EU leaders who bothered to show up were Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Why Moo/Um should fare any better is hard to see. As things stand, Sarkozy is planning a one-day summit in Paris on July 13 that is supposed to bring together the EU 27 and the North African and Middle Eastern states of the Mediterranean. But it only takes one look at the recent violence in Israel and Gaza over recent weeks to suspect that a repeat of the November 2005 fiasco, with practically no Arab officials showing up, is all too possible.
There is a lesson in all this, if the EU chooses to take it. As Ayman el-Amir wrote two years, what matters are the root causes of conflict between cultures. Moos and Ums are all very well, but the real point is that it’s high time for the EU and its southern Mediterranean neighbours to put aside pious nonsenses about a “dialogue of civilisations” and tackle the hard political issues that divide them.
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