On the first foreign mission of his fledgling administration in Tunisia last March, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi declared that Europe needed to change course and ”put the Mediterranean at the center” of its policies. The challenge for Europe, he said, “is to have an ideal vision beside the economic one.”
With Italy holding the Presidency of the European Union until the end of this year, many expect that Europe’s role in its southern neighborhood will be closer to the top of the Council’s agenda than it otherwise might be. However, successfully revising Europe’s approach to the Mediterranean will depend on whether or not Renzi can convince elites and ordinary voters across Europe that the real problem with Europe’s periphery (southern and eastern alike) has to do with the relationship between the amounts of public money invested in EU policies’ and the failure of those investments to deliver political, social, and institutional reforms.
The European Neighborhood Policy (ENP): No Return on Investment
Since 2003, Europe’s influence in its near abroad has been projected through the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) framework. With the unfolding, first, of the Arab Spring and, second, the Ukraine crisis, European elites have found it impossible to continue to ignore an uncomfortable truth: that unrest at Europe’s borders, whatever form it takes, is both conceptually and causally related to Europeans’ failure to prevent or resolve it. The conflicts to Europe’s south and east have laid bare Europe’s lack of political leverage over these regions. They have also made it clear that up to now there has been precious little room for debates over geopolitics or strategy in Europe.
“Too bad,” we could imagine the typical European “man on the street” objecting, “but I’d rather get my job back than chew on Europe’s toughest foreign problems.” This inclination to turn inward and focus on domestic troubles is the heart of the matter. Even as external demand for Europe to assume a stronger international role increases, the internal drive to refocus EU member states’ agendas on foreign policy is at an all-time low, due to Europe’s chronic financial troubles.
Is the man on the street right? Partly. Let’s look at this issue from a different angle: If Europe’s neighborhood is fractured and unsafe, it follows that the ENP has produced no return on the investment. In other words, all that taxpayer money spent on the neighborhood hasn’t created the conditions for stability and governance to emerge or for the market to blossom in the EU’s partner countries.
The Mediterranean: A Case in Point
The EU’s trade preferences and migration policies adopted for the Mediterranean provide two illustrative and highly topical examples of the ENP’s poor return on investment.
EU policies towards the southern neighborhood consisted mainly in using trade preferences as a means of providing an economic advantage to its partners. From the beginning, this approach had three main disadvantages. First, the trade preferences induced Mediterranean countries to specialize in sectors in which they are not competitive; for instance, this fact was made painfully apparent when textile quotas affecting the Mediterranean countries’ main competitors in Asia were lifted. Second, they created vested interests in the target countries opposed to multilateral trade liberalization. Third, they locked Mediterranean industries into low-value-added goods rather than promoting diversification of the production base.
Most available research suggests that, with the exception of a few of the larger developing countries and in relation to a few products, EU preference schemes have had limited success in generating significant export growth or improving the trade shares of beneficiaries.
Recent data suggest that the countries that have benefited most from preferences have been high-income developing countries with pre-existing supply capacity, and some agricultural exporters receiving high-income transfers because of high non-tariff protection.
Migration is another area where the EU’s return on investment has been poor. The ENP has failed to address Mediterranean migration positively. The EU spent nearly €2 billion protecting its external borders between 2007 and 2013, but only €700 million on improving the situation for asylum-seekers and refugees within the EU over the same period. At the same time, Europe is turning a blind eye to the human rights abuses migrants and refugees often suffer in these countries. EU migration is managed with a mix of EU and member state policies, and within a short-term framework (for example, security). Recent tragedies at EU borders have put Mediterranean migration at the forefront of the European agenda. Yet cooperation with several Mediterranean countries to create a buffer zone around the EU in an effort to stop migrants and refugees before they reach the border hasn’t had the desired effect. The EU has failed to engage in a broad, long-term debate on the ways its various external policies address migration, especially as regards policies touching on security and development cooperation; Europe has also failed to set up a comprehensive response in a revised neighborhood policy. EU policy debates on this subject have also neglected the positive potential of human mobility for socioeconomic development.
What these two areas show is that, beyond well-known strategic concerns (such as energy or geopolitical interests), European foreign policy instruments toward the Mediterranean are simply not providing good value for their costs to the common treasury. As austerity continues to hit Europe’s public spending, the question is no longer whether Europe’s role as a global actor is relevant to the man on the street, but whether it is an acceptable state of affairs that European taxpayers’ contributions are deployed in such a way that Europe remains weak and its periphery remains unstable.
Can Italy’s EU Presidency Repair Mediterranean Policy?
Addressing the European Parliament for the opening speech of the Italian Presidency, Matteo Renzi stressed that the Mediterranean would be a central focus and should be seen “not as a boundary but as the center of Europe.”
The Italian government’s Mediterranean agenda commits Europe to tackling several critical issues, from support for the processes of transition in North Africa and the Middle East and credible offers of assistance to partners in the region to addressing the external dimension of migration by establishing a culture of “burden sharing” for naval patrols.
Italy’s call for a change of mindset in handling Euro-Mediterranean relations is badly needed. Such a change is in fact a precondition for envisioning the new strategies that will lead in turn to new foreign policy instruments. Although Renzi is representing Italy’s position in Europe, he says he wants to change the whole continent as well, attempting to free up some budgetary leeway. But how much of this new spending will legitimately go to strengthening cooperation with countries in the Mediterranean? And what strategy will it support? To successfully accomplish such an ambitious reform agenda, Europe must introduce three game-changers.
First, it should launch a comprehensive spending review to evaluate neighborhood policy spending and begin to allocate resources more effectively, with attainable political targets in mind.
Second, a portion of the available resources should be allocated to support the MED Champions. These are the countries (such as Tunisia) that can legitimately seen as models of peaceful transitions to democracy; they may serve as exemplars in other contexts as well. Their success could have profound implications for regional stability. Europe should support the MED Champions through substantial financial means and strong political endorsement.
Third, the establishment of political priorities. Here, concrete steps should be taken to increase Europe’s political leverage and credibility towards the Mediterranean. As Italy’s former Foreign Minister Emma Bonino recently declared, a political priority must have a “face” and a “budget line.” The proposal for an EU Commissioner for the Mediterranean should therefore be supported.
A New Neighborhood Policy
We could also easily apply these recommendations to the eastern neighborhood, where the establishment of clearer political priorities and credibility would prevent, or facilitate prompt reaction to, future crises. For a long time, EU member states have struggled with diverging strategic interests. Southern European countries urged a greater focus on the Mediterranean basin and on challenges such as migration and maritime security. Meanwhile, eastern countries maintained that the energy blackmail and military threats emanating from Russia should be at the top of the agenda. Today, these points are converging due to Europe’s declining influence and the failure of the ENP to secure a stable neighborhood. Continuing to pour resources into the broken policies of the past isn’t a viable option; Europe needs new tools fit for the challenges of the present and future.