An Assessment of the Mediterranean's Security Prospects for the 21st Century

Download or read book An Assessment of the Mediterranean's Security Prospects for the 21st Century written by Hamid Chabane and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the end of the Cold War the Mediterranean increasingly became perceived as a dividing line between a developed, prosperous and stable North and an underdeveloped, poorer and politically unstable South, bringing about human migration and the spread of organised crime into Europe. In this context, European security challenges shifted from the Eastern European region toward its Southern periphery. As a response, the European Union implemented in 1995 a multi-faceted Mediterranean Dialogue, called the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP)-Barcelona Process, with 12 non-European Mediterranean countries, aimed at the establishment of a common zone of peace, security and shared prosperity in the Mediterranean. However, more than ten years later the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership was in a stalemate, since European countries predominantly addressed emerging issues within the Mediterranean from a fairly Euro-centric perspective, resorting to further securitisation of the Mediterranean space, with the subsequent relegation of democratisation and human development questions to a secondary, less pressing, agenda. Therefore, a new project designed to overcome that impasse was initiated by France in 2007 and eventually endorsed in 2008 as the "Barcelona Process: Union for the Mediterranean". Unfortunately, the prospects are not encouraging as the region is likely to remain volatile with persistent conflicts, clashes and tensions scattered from East to West, in addition to enduring economic problems in the South which are undermining the achievement of the projected economic convergence with the North. On the whole, it appears that all security strategies implemented so far in the Mediterranean by the European Union were defined and designed from its own perspectives, without regards for what might jeopardize its Southern partners' security.