Europe: In need of a lifeline

Europe: In need of a lifeline

“We should be honest with ourselves in the European Union: we have spent billions of euros in European taxpayers’ money in aid to Egypt and other neighbouring countries,” David Cameron, UK prime minister, said at the height of the Egypt uprising in February as he bemoaned a succession of Mediterranean policies and partnerships that cost a lot but delivered few tangible successes.

For Europe, the urgency to get it right this time is apparent: pilots from EU member nations are flying bombing sorties over Libya in support of a ramshackle rebellion against Muammer Gaddafi, while tens of thousands of African and Arab refugees are turning up on its shores seeking safety.

More broadly, the bloc is fighting to retain its place on a world stage increasingly crowded by the likes of China, India and Brazil – and on which the US is seeking to take less of a leadership role. In an effort to bolster its global influence, the EU has just christened a pan-European diplomatic corps, the External Action Service, that is supposed to harmonise the dissonant foreign policy voices of its 27 member states.

Lacking US-style military muscle, the EU has instead emphasised its “soft power” through trade concessions, development aid and privileged ties to what is the world’s richest consumer market. That approach paid dividends in central and eastern Europe, where sustained investment helped to shepherd former communist countries along a path to democracy. But Europe’s experience to the immediate south, in a region known as the cradle of civilisations, may have revealed its limits.

Ana Palacio, former Spanish foreign minister, is among those who believe successive EU policies have failed because they were insufficiently frank about linking development aid to democracy – unlike the policies (and the funding) directed towards the post-Soviet nations of eastern Europe. “Unless we shift our priorities in the region toward good governance, democracy and human rights, and let our funding reflect those priorities, we risk losing momentum to support regional reforms,” she wrote in a recent paper. “Now is a rare opportunity for European leadership.”

With regional uprisings still playing out, European leaders have already gone back to the policy drawingboard. In March, they announced their latest Mediterranean initiative – the Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity.

They also like the idea of beefing up the role of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which was founded 20 years ago to finance eastern Europe’s transition to market-based democracy. Thomas Mirow, EBRD president, says it could begin lending to Egypt next year.

Cairo or Tunis in 2011 is not the same as Warsaw or Prague in 1989, policymakers caution. Still, Mr Mirow sees similarities in a young generation that wants to share the prosperity and values of its neighbours.

Unfortunately, the EU has a long history of failed plans for the region. “There has been a traffic jam of European initiatives in the Mediterranean, but the well-being of the people has not improved,” says Bichara Khader, a consultant and professor at the Catholic University of Louvain.

The Arab revolutions today are another face of the very limited success of the European partnership with the Mediterranean countries,

What we have not been very good at is how to deal with countries in the next circle – countries that are not going to become members, or at least not for a very long time

The EU can’t get into a two-year discussion about its own bureaucratic structures when the region is changing so dramatically,

“Then, Europe did a remarkable thing and offered the perspective of entry to the Union. That is not possible in the Mediterranean, but we have to find the equivalent in our system to give the money and resources needed to ensure that the revolutions do not come to mean unemployment and more violence.”

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