Summary

• With the end of the Cold War, major geopolitical shifts prompted southern Europe to reorient its strategic landscape toward the southern Mediterranean. From a European vantage point, the Mediterranean's strategic importance centers on migration, energy dependence, security/counterterrorism, and trade.
• Established in November 1995, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), also known as the Barcelona Process, was intended to be Europe's answer to growing concerns about instability on its southern flank. The EMP has provided a framework for cooperation between EU members and their twelve Mediterranean partners. The partnership consists of a series of bilateral association agreements that cover trade, development, and reform issues. To date, all of the Mediterranean partners except Syria have signed association agreements.
• Aside from their primary goal of promoting economic reform and trade, the European Union's association agreements seek to encourage political reform. However, the effort to spur political reform has yielded only limited results, not least because the European Union has adopted a long-term, cautious approach in the name of preserving short-term stability.
• By and large, the European Union (like the United States) has not translated its calls for the promotion of democracy and human rights into concrete action. A variety of reasons explain this failure, including differing interests among EU members, the great reluctance of EU members to use conditionality, and the fact that the original intent of the Barcelona Process was not to promote political reform.
• Beginning in 2000, efforts have focused on reinvigorating the Barcelona Process by providing for a more vigorous and coherent democracy-promotion strategy. European strategists have sought to link European policy in the Mediterranean to the wider Middle East as well as to post-enlargement Wider Europe.
• Still, a successful European democracy-promotion policy in the Middle East is far from assured. Several obstacles could impede effective implementation. First, neither the European Union nor its individual member states have demonstrated sustained commitment to using conditionality as an instrument for reform. Second, governments in the region have not signaled their willingness to pursue genuine reform. Third, European democracy-promotion efforts risk being drowned in a sea of bureaucracy. Success depends on the European Union and its regional partners overcoming all three of these obstacles.
• Sustained transatlantic cooperation could contribute significantly to efforts to promote democratic reform in the Middle East. While direct cooperation in the region remains a distant prospect, enhanced consultation, via a variety of venues, would make a significant contribution toward democracy promotion in the Middle East.

About the Report

Since the end of the Cold War, European security concerns have focused increasingly on the potential for instability on Europe's southern flank. In 1995, the European Union developed a framework for cooperation with the southern Mediterranean nations. These efforts have included some relatively ineffective programs to promote democracy in the region. In the aftermath of 9/11, the goal of encouraging the development of Middle East democracy has acquired greater urgency, not least in the eyes of the United States, which has bolstered its own efforts to spur democratic reform.

As the United States moves forward in its quest to promote reform in the Middle East, it will be important to assess the effectiveness of other democracy-promotion activities, including those undertaken by European counterparts. This report seeks to inform discussion in U.S. policymaking circles by offering an assessment of multilateral European democracy-promotion efforts in the Middle East. A forthcoming companion paper will illuminate major reform initiatives originating from within the Arab world.

This report was written by Mona Yacoubian, a special adviser to the United States Institute of Peace's Special Initiative on the Muslim World, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate specific policy positions.