|
|
|
Map of Africa Map of Europe Map of Middle East |
Email this citationCIAO DATE: 03/03
Perceptions of Security in the Euro-Med North-South Dimension: The Northern Perspective
November 2000
Abstract
The Southern Mediterranean World is viewed as an anarchic and underdeveloped world. It is a world ridden with various forms of domestic instability, controlled by authoritarian regimes lacking legitimacy, engulfed with deep economic deformities, and crises, and lacking democracy.
Mohammed El-Sayed Selim
The area currently encompassed by the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) reflects fairly well the broad Western perception of the new strategic situation established by the end of the Cold War. The North Atlantic Council described this situation very aptly in the strategic concept it approved in Rome in 1991, though it meant to refer primarily to the European East: “Risks to Alliance security are less likely to result from calculated aggression against the territory of the Allies, but rather from the adverse consequences of instabilities that may arise from the serious economic, social and political difficulties, including ethnic rivalries and territorial disputes . . . The tensions that may result . . . could lead to crises inimical to European stability and even to armed conflicts.”
As a matter of fact, no state in the Mediterranean areas included in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is regarded as willing and capable to conduct a full military attack on European Union (EU) countries and, in fact, no such threat is minimally perceived or even taken into consideration in the Northern part of the Euro-Med area. The national security of the EU countries or that of their alliances, from a military point of view, is not in question, nor is any armed conflict expected.
In contrast, the North perceives a set of risks and challenges emanating from Southern political, social and economic conditions of instability, both in the domestic and inter-state arenas. The effects of this instability are regarded in the North as factors that can affect in a negative way the democratic regimes, the social order, and the economic affluence that characterise today’s EU nations. In other words,EU security is taken in a broader rather than a military sense.
This paper discusses, first of all, the factors of Southern instability perceived by the Northern members of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. It takes into consideration two arguments: (a) the intra- and inter-state factors that generate instability in Southern Mediterranean areas and, in EU perceptions, constitute sources of risk for EU stability; (b) the spill-over effects from such Southern instability that - once again, in the EU’s eyes - affect European stability. In its last section, the paper draws some conclusions.
