Parachutists and richly decorated cavalry greeted the inauguration of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Union for the Mediterranean on Bastille Day. But whether this union is more than a “giant photo opportunity remains to be seen”, says Katrin Bennhold in the International Herald Tribune. The original idea behind “Club Med”, billed as the centrepiece of France’s six-month presidency of the EU, was to form an organisation of countries with a Mediterranean coastline, establishing formal links between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa – binding 800 million inhabitants across 43 countries.
Unfortunately, Sarkozy’s “great dream of peace” was poorly conceived, says The Times. Germany and Britain were first to object, suspicious that the idea was a “subtle means of burying Turkey’s application for EU membership” in a much wider agreement with all Muslim Mediterranean states. Libya saw it as a “means of reasserting French colonial ambitions in North Africa”. But there are bigger obstacles anyway, noted Bennhold – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a closed border between Morocco and Algeria and the unlikelihood of some of the countries involved ever joining the EU.
Nevertheless, it’s a good idea, says The Daily Telegraph. Sarkozy isn’t proposing any supra-national laws or bureaucracies, simply “pragmatic, issue-by-issue collaboration”. And there is much to discuss, not least terrorism, illegal immigration and drug smuggling. Initial measures are modest – including cleaning up polluted sea waters and developing a region-wide solar energy project. And getting the Syrian and Israeli premiers to sit down for the first time was a coup. But the real motive may be simpler, said Bennhold. Europe’s partners in the union are currently the second-biggest recipient of foreign direct investment in the developing world, after China. In ten years’ time, Europe’s positioning of itself as partner may well be seen as visionary.