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Union for the Mediterranean—Pragmatic Multilateralism and the Depoliticization of EU-Middle Eastern Relations

The Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) was launched by French President Nicolas Sarkozy together with 42 European and Middle Eastern state leaders in Paris on July 13, 2008. It was established as an attempt to revitalize the Barcelona Process, but at the same time the founding document stated that the UfM takes ‘into account the shortcomings and difficulties in . . . multilateral co-operation which the EU has pursued since 1995.’ The UfM creates a new political and institutional framework for the relationship between the EU and the Middle East. But rather than following the normative, regionalist approach of the Barcelona Declaration, the UfM attaches importance to selected projects, dealing with issues like depollution, infrastructure, civil protection and solar power. These are designed not to cause significant political problems. Thus, with the UfM a tendency to a depoliticization of European-Middle Eastern relations seems to be developing. In this sense—and compared to former practices—the UfM apparently represents discontinuation. Yet, at the same time it stands on the shoulders of the Barcelona Process and the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), and in this way can be seen as part of a continuing political and institutional development. The purpose of this article is to discuss whether it is meaningful to characterize the UfM as a depoliticization of relations in the Mediterranean. A classic line of thought concerning European integration in the second half of the twentieth century claims that in order to defuse the antagonism between France and Germany, it would be necessary to find uncontroversial ways of developing integration, so that future conflicts could be avoided. Jean Monnet and other architects of European integration, having failed to promote direct routes to federalism, found a second-best solution: to integrate the coal and steel sectors. Ernst Haas, in his influential work,