Mediterranean Forget-Me-Nots: MENA Countries and the ENP

As the EU’s attention is focused on the East, it runs the risk of even further neglecting the Southern Dimension of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). In the face of Israel’s war in Gaza and the impact of the climate crisis on the Mediterranean, a change in policy is urgently needed.

Jan-Malte Schulz

The events of the 7th of October 2023 and Israel’s military retaliation against Gaza poured further gas on the “Ring of Fire” that engulfed Europe’s neighbourhood. A year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which escalated a conflict that had been simmering since 2014’s occupation of Crimea, stability in both the Eastern and Southern theatres of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was on a downward spiral. Promises of shared prosperity, stability and democracy seemed further out of reach than ever before.

At the same time, the outbreak of the war in Gaza and the EU’s anaemic response to Israel’s genocidal campaign underlined the wholesale failure of the ENP’s commitment to the Middle Eastern Peace Process and opened the EU to well-founded accusations of hypocrisy. Simultaneous challenges in Europe’s southern and eastern neighbourhoods make it clear that the ENP stands at a crossroads.

Introduced in 2004 after the ‘Big Bang Enlargement’, the ENP was intended as a complementary or even outright substitutive measure for enlargement. The inclusion of 10 new Member States in 2004 went hand in hand with the acquisition of a host of new neighbours with which the EU had to contend and coexist.

While the promise of eventual accession had always been an effective tool for the EU to promote stability in its geopolitical neighbourhood and to induce political, democratic and economic convergence, enlargement fatigue and disagreements over where the borders of Europe were to be drawn made further expansion of the EU in 2004 appear unlikely. To nonetheless project power, ensure security and foster friendly neighbourly relations, the ENP, with its mechanism of conditionality and the carrot of eventual access to the Single Market, became the new framework for relations between the EU and its newly expanded neighbourhood. 

While Russia’s war against Ukraine undoubtedly represents the most significant and immediate threat to the EU’s and European peace and stability, the apparent relegation of the Southern Dimension of the ENP to a position of secondary if not tertiary importance runs a real risk of harming the EU’s security interests. It also casts further doubt on its self-conception and proclaimed mission as a normative power.

While we must acknowledge that agenda space and political resources are limited, the EU cannot afford to neglect further the Mediterranean Space. Given the US’s likely future disengagement from the Middle East, only temporarily disrupted by Hamas’ attack, the EU will need to step up to stabilise its immediate southern neighbourhood. Out of all the global actors, such as the US, Russia, and China, the EU has the most vested interest in stabilising the region, paradoxically paired with the apparently most limited influence. 

This rethinking of the EU’s approach to the Southern Dimension will necessarily have both an internal and external dimension. Responses by the EU and the Member States to the war in Gaza and the Arab Spring in 2011 demonstrated that internal cohesion and coordination on the policy towards the Middle Eastern and Northern African (MENA) region are lacking.

Going forward, the ability of individual Member States to unilaterally block EU foreign policy proposals needs to be addressed. At the same time, an overall rethinking of the EU’s goals and the means by which it intends to achieve them is urgently required in a fragmenting geopolitical context. The most pressing change here would be a move towards a genuinely proactive policy stance, the lack of which remains the most common criticism levelled against the EU’s policy.

At the same time, the EU must rethink its actual policies and their impact on the MENA countries. Take, for example, its promotion of democracy: surveys have shown that the kind of democracy promoted by the EU, which is liberal, market-friendly, and procedural rather than social, only holds limited appeal to individuals in the MENA region.  Indeed, the promotion of liberal, market-oriented reforms, long understood to form the foundation of political liberalisation, has failed to produce tangible democratisation. Focusing on economic reforms paired with demands for formal democratic trappings allowed for the emergence of new anti-democratic elites.

Instead, the EU should focus on fostering civil societies in the MENA countries (going beyond its current modus operandi, where it only supports organisations that are deemed acceptable by the autocratic regimes) and induce reforms aimed at broader socio-economic participation, thus facilitating the convergence of civil and political rights as well as economic and social rights. 

Additionally, the EU's current security and migration-management-heavy approach must be changed to emphasise the human rights and multilateral relations, which are central to its rhetoric. Subcontracting migration control to North African states neither absolved the EU and its Member States from their responsibilities towards asylum seekers nor helped democratic development in the region. Before and after the Arab Spring, regimes that regularly violated human rights were propped up as valuable partners in the prevention of ‘irregular migration’.

Overall, the EU’s track record as an actor, let alone a normative one, in the MENA region has been spotted at best. With further development of the situation in Ukraine in doubt and growing calls for the EU to embrace the motto of sic vis pacem para bellum in relation to Russian aggression, its engagement with the MENA countries has taken a backseat.

Given the outsized impact the climate crisis is going to have on the MENA region, concerted and holistic action in the vein of genuine planetary politics is urgently required. Rethinking and reinvigorating EU-MENA relations is not only a challenge to be mastered but also an opportunity for the EU to not only talk the talk but also walk the walk of a genuine force for good.