COMMENTARY

Spring 2010

by Claire Spencer

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The ‘Arab world’ is an elusive construct, as Abdullah Baabood readily admits. But the absence of a clearly delineated European ‘Arab strategy’ hardly prevents Arabs from integrating towards a common cause. The Arab League, as he says, comprises 22 different states and entities and some 350m people across an area straddling the Mediterranean basin, the Levant, Asia’s borders, the Horn of Africa and the Gulf. The first two are in Europe’s immediate backyard and the rest are on the edges of other geopolitical sub-systems.

The demise of the Euro-Arab Dialogue some 20 years ago was entirely a consequence of these geopolitical complexities. It takes two to dialogue and there has to be both a purpose and substantive outcomes for either to see the point. This is where the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership stepped into the breach from 1995. The logic of engaging some, if not all, of the Arab world in the Barcelona process was clearly influenced by the promise of the parallel Oslo process to deliver peace between Palestinians and Israelis. The EU’s Barcelona partners, whether on the Mediterranean littoral or not, were chosen because of their proximity to Israel and Europe, and for the possibilities that an all-encompassing free trade zone would offer them. The hope was that these possibilities could support the political solutions anticipated through Oslo.

When Oslo failed, Barcelona’s supporting mission also failed. The substance of the EU’s Barcelona offer to the Mediterranean Arabs, above all those without oil revenues, was economic development through trade, with pressures towards liberalisation and political reform as a counterpart. Looking towards the Gulf, however, none of this made sense: What the EU could offer, the GCC in large part already had. What the GCC wanted from EU states was above all military hardware, high-end imports and expatriate technical, educational and managerial assistance. Most GCC governments could, and still can, pay for these, so with them there’s little or no room for the EU’s Mediterranean-style aid-and-trade leverage.

What unites the remaining countries identified by Abdullah Baabood – Iraq until recently, Yemen, Sudan and the Horn of Africa – is their aid dependence. The EU and other international actors have struggled to create, rather than reform, viable governance structures in these weakened states, even where the U.S. (in Somalia and Iraq) holds a critical responsibility for their fragility. No room here, either, for more than attempted leverage. Dialogue with several rather than a single set of stable state leaders is the norm.

Missing from all these equations is any imperative from within the membership of the Arab League to address these different needs and circumstances themselves. Why look to the EU to provide, persuade, cajole or impose what a functioning Arab region should be looking to do for itself? A more deeply committed and integrated set of Arab League leaderships could set their own terms for dialogue with the EU, and condition where and how the European development assistance and political frameworks are directed.

The real answer, perhaps, lies less with the much commented on deficiencies of EU policy, than with the prevailing divisions within the Arab world. One shared wound is the debilitating lack of a Palestinian state, despite endless attempts to counter Israel’s resistance to the clear demand formulated in recent years by the Arab League; namely, to withdraw from the occupied territories in return for full diplomatic normalisation with all 22 of its members. The other shared wound is the highly unequal division of resources, not only across the region but within individual Arab states and societies.

If the Arab League cannot devise its own approaches to dealing collectively with these issues, no amount of EU strategising from outside will do it for it. This is not to say that the EU’s own exploitation of the gaps between its external relations and foreign policy objectives is entirely blameless. The history of individual EU member states breaking ranks across the Arab world also has much to answer for. Unavoidably, any Arab regional integration strategy worthy of the name has to begin at home.