HELLENISM OR BONAPARTISM?

THE EUROPEAN UNION,

THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE ARAB WORLD

22 September 2004

Karen Pfeifer
Department of Economics
Smith College
Northampton MA 01063

kpfeifer@smith.edu

Tel: (413) 585-3623

Fax: (413) 585-3389

Published in Global Development Studies 3 (3-4) (Winter-Spring 2004): 121-143

 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 2

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an explanation of the Euro-Med Partnership Initiative, an evaluation

of its economic and political success so far, and an examination of possible alternative

functions and unintended outcomes of the EMPI. The last section of the paper discusses

the nature of the competitive relationship between the EU and the United States, in the

energy industry, in multilateral versus unilateral foreign policy, and in the international

arms market, and concludes by asking whether these patterns may imply a new form of

inter-imperialist rivalry in the Arab region.

 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 3

Since the time of Alexander the Great, Europeans have competed among themselves to

remake the Middle East in their image. The last 25 years have seen an intensification of Western

efforts to instruct countries in the Arab World in how to structurally adjust their stagnant statist

economies, reform their authoritarian dynastic polities, and overcome their patriarchal societies

and backward-looking religious culture. Wave upon wave of advice and example, much of it

unbidden or unwelcome, has come from quarters such as the International Monetary Fund, the

World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, European and Japanese

overseas development aid (ODA) agencies, non-governmental organizations promoting civil,

human, and women’s rights, American Universities and Fulbright-type programs, and

international bankers, foreign investors, and energy corporations.

There were two new grand efforts in competition as of 2003.1 On one hand, the United

States and United Kingdom proclaimed their ambition to remake the Middle East from the

platform of a conquered and reconstituted Iraq. On the other hand, the European Union

undertook a Euro-Mediterranean Partnership Initiative (EMPI) starting in 1995, with a

concomitant vision of linked regional development in Africa and in the Arab-Muslim World. The

original impetus to the EMPI was not economic, but rather the creation of a zone of political

stability and military security to Europe’s south, using economic tools to change the conditions

that generate instability and insecurity (Marquina 1999; Brauch et al. 2000). Going significantly

beyond the more piecemeal advice of other contemporary advisers, the Euro-Med initiative is a

comprehensive program, dealing with almost all aspects of life in the subject countries and

proposing lofty and ambitious goals (EMP 2003: “Overview”).

The following paper provides an explanation of the Euro-Med Partnership Initiative, an

evaluation of its economic and success political so far, and an examination of possible alternative
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 4

functions and unintended outcomes of the EMPI. The last section of the paper discusses the

nature of the competitive relationship between the EU and the United States, in the energy

industry, in multilateral versus unilateral foreign policy, and in the international arms market,

and concludes by asking whether these patterns may imply a new form of inter-imperialist

rivalry in the Arab region.

Hellenism versus Bonapartism

While most observers inside and outside of the region agree that its economy was

relatively stagnant in the 1990s, the Arab World was more resistant to change from the outside

than were other developing regions such as Latin America and South Asia.2 To overcome this

resistance, the EMPI proposed a step-by-step, staged approach to engage two tiers of

predominantly Muslim countries. First, the EU invited most of the eastern and southern

Mediterranean countries (Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Israel,

Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) to become “partners” through association agreements, it

being understood that, for all but Turkey, accession to the EU was out of the question. Second,

the EU reached out to the more-distant countries of the Arab World (Saudi Arabia and the Gulf

countries, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya as an observer but not yet a partner in the Euro-Med

program) with expanded and deepened trade agreements, and pledges of financial and

programmatic aid to promote internal reform, intra-regional cooperation, and more beneficial

interaction with the world economy (see EMP 2003 “Overview,” “Middle East Policy,”

“GCC…,” and “MEDA Programme”).

The EU program rings of an updated and self-conscious Hellenism, echoing the long era

of peace and prosperity that followed Alexander the Great’s military conquest of the
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 5

Mediterranean and its environs. While Greek became the lingua franca of the whole Alexandrian

empire, the era was characterized by positive interactive effects between local cultures and the

dominant Hellenistic culture. On balance, this became a relatively benign relationship and

stimulated local societies to flourish, for example in the coastal commercial cities of

Iskandariyya, Egypt, and Iskandarun, Syria (“Iskandar” being the Arabic name of Alexander).

The Euro-Med project may have a darker side, however, connected to the EU’s concern

with security on its southern flank, its dependence on imported energy, the rise of U.S.

unilateralism, and the continued role of the European powers in the international arms trade. As

the Mediterranean and Arab countries have long been the most important arms market in the

world, the EU project contains hints of a potential Bonapartist agenda, reminiscent of

Napoleon’s ambitions in the late 18th and early 19th century, with the “partners” in the EMPI

becoming vassals in protecting the EU’s southern flank and extending its economic reach to the

oil-exporting region further south. Napoleon’s military conquests in the region served to break

up existing political and social arrangements (eroding the Ottoman Empire, for example) but

prevented the emergence of new indigenously-developed societies with independent economies.

Although not long-lasting in themselves, the Napoleonic conquests around the

Mediterranean ushered in a century of fierce inter-imperial rivalry, competitive European

colonialism, and European political domination of the region. In their wake came a uni-

directional European economic expansion and cultural influence, rarely benign or constructively

interactive with local society. Examples range from Algeria, where the French conquest stripped

the native population of livelihood, civil rights, and cultural dignity, to the Levant, where the

French and British cultivated the Christian population at the expense of the Muslims, to the Gulf,
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 6

where Britain created monarchy after monarchy in mini-states under its imperial “protection”

along the route to India, to the region-wide mandate system that superseded the Ottoman Empire.

For the 21st century, the Bonapartist aspect of the Euro-Med vision contains an implicit

and growing rivalry between the EU and the United States over the economic resources and

future direction of the Arab World. Consider the concept of “the Middle East,” a “region”

confected by successive imperial powers Britain and the United States that leaps over Europe,

and looks, from their Western vantage point, eastward toward Asia. In the Euro-Med vision, in

contrast, the “Middle East” shrinks and shrivels. Crosscutting the West/East axis long dominated

by the United States and Britain there arises a potentially gigantic North/South axis dominated

by the French and German-led European Union. If this competitive rivalry continues to develop

its military dimension, and to grow along the fault lines shown over the invasion of Iraq, it could

potentially be a threat to the fragile and partial peace the world has known under sole U.S.

hegemony since the demise of the Soviet Union.

Explicit Euro-Med Partnership Goals and Implementation Projects

The European Union’s Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and its concomitant vision of

linked regional development in Africa and in the Arab World was established at the Barcelona

Conference in 1995. The impetus for the project was the EU’s political concern with security and

stability to the south, including threats of terrorism, proliferation of WMd, regional conflict

(especially Israel/Palestine), state failure (as in Aghanistan and Somalia), illegal migration,

organized crime and smuggling (Perthes 2004: 7; Calleya 2000: 8-13, 19-22).

Political goals included installation of democracy and the rule of law, confronting racism

and xenophobia on both sides, and the resolution of several conflicts involving occupations on
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 7

Europe’s southern flank, namely those of Cyprus, the Western Sahara, and Israel/Palestine, along

with Israel/Syria, Israel/Lebanon and Iraq/Kuwait (EMP 2003: “Middle East Peace Policy”).

While the United States does not see the Israel/Palestine conflict as a core problem for the

Mediterranean and Arab regions, the EU believes that it is not only politically destabilizing but

an obstacle to economic progress, for example in making impossible a coastal highway system

from North Africa to the Levant and from Europe to Egypt (Perthes 2004:9).

The Barcelona Conference document announced that the EU’s security strategy would

rest not on force but on programs to address the underlying complex causes of these social

disasters, and set ambitious goals for the partner countries (Schlumberger 2000: 253-257).

Besides the basic economic objective of creating a free trade area (at least in manufactures) by

the year 2010, these included broader economic goals such as sustainable development,

environmental protection and restoration, the reduction of poverty and inequality, human

resource development, and extension of internet and communications technology (ICT).

The EU’s Euro-Med economic development vision consisted of a single, unilineal model

following the EU’s own paradigm, the same paradigm that it promoted in Eastern and Central

Europe through its self-expansion plans. For example, education systems in the Arab world were

to be reformed along the lines of the European system, with technical training of workers raised

to a higher level and the study of the liberal arts curtailed. The role of women was expected to

change so as to increase female labour force participation along with occupational integration

(EMP 2003: “Regional Indicative Programme:” 31-33). Governments were expected to cut back

on their historically extensive role in the economy in two ways. First, the aim was to favor

private enterprise, including foreign capital, to take over the production sphere. Second,

governments were to shift away from general welfare functions in favor of “modern social safety
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 8

nets” to help keep social order by compensating the losers during the transition (EMP 2003,

“Regional Strategy: 3-7; Calleya 2000: 22-24)

Rather different from the stereotypical European “welfare state” that characterized west

European development, with local variations, over many decades, this neoliberal-type reform

expected developing countries to adopt free market principles early in their transition to a

“modern economy.” The implementation of economic reform for “sustainable development” in

the EuroMed vision was actually quite similar to the “structural adjustment” programs long

promoted by the Washington Consensus (Schlumberger 2000: 253-257). It contained the same

three main planks of stabilization, liberalization, and privatisation, in a market economy defined

by private corporations and small business, and with governmental functions shrunk to the

classic Smithian formula of providing public goods, protecting public safety and law

enforcement, and promoting the sanctity of private property and voluntary contracts.

Complementary to these features of economic reform, the Euro-Med programs entailed a

commitment by both sides to free international trade as defined by World Trade Organization

rules. The goal was to establish a free trade zone, at least in manufactured goods, by the year

2010. In this regard, too, the EU approach paralleled that of the Washington Consensus, but

added, at least on paper, a much greater commitment to helping the Mediterranean partners plan

their economic transitions (with indicative 5-year plans) and to providing them with generous aid

(EMP 2003: “Regional Strategy”: 18-21).

Key to the economic integration of the European and Mediterranean partners is physical

integration that facilitates trade and private investment and institutional integration encouraging

the Mediterranean partners to harmonize with the EU’s legal system, regulatory framework, and

standards for products and services. Public investment in infrastructure looms large in the aid
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 9

packages offered the partners, especially in transportation, energy production and transmission,

and telecommunications (EMP 2003: “Regional Indicative Programme:” 25-30). Institutions are

slated to become much more friendly to free-market competition and respect for private rights in

intellectual property, including everything from patents on industrial processes, to licenses on the

manufacture of pharmaceuticals, to the use of computer software and academic publications

(EMP 2003: “Regional Strategy:” 6-7). This flow of technical expertise and investment from

North to South, and the flow of energy from South to North, implies an axis of economic

integration alternative to, and perhaps competitive with, the West-East orientation of United

States and British policy toward the development of the Arab World.

Evaluation of Economic Programme

As of the year 2000, there was little consistent progress on either the economic or

political fronts. The growth that took place tended to increase inequality between the EU and the

partners, and among the partners themselves. To the extent that increases in trade, investment,

aid, and economic growth materialized in the partner states, they appeared in a hub-and-spoke

pattern, as each partner related independently to the EU with little interaction among the

partners, which constitutes less than 10% of the partners’ total trade (EMP 2003: “Strategy:” 6,

11). From 1995 to the year 2000 (the first five years of the Euro-Med program), the southern-rim

Mediterranean partners’ trade with the EU remained about the same, at more than 50 percent of

their total international trade (EMP 2003: “Strategy:” 11). As the free-trade area to be achieved

by 2010 referred only to manufactured goods, with the lifting of restrictions on agricultural

commodities and services to be negotiated at a later date, it appeared that, so far, Europe was

benefiting more from the agreement than were the Mediterranean partners.
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 10

A parallel problem was that EU foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Mediterranean

partner economies was weaker than anticipated and was not distributed in such a way as to

maximize benefit to the poorest partners. In 1992, 2.2 percent of the EU’s total FDI had gone to

the Mediterranean partners, but instead of increasing as expected, that percentage decreased to

less than one percent in 1999. In 1999, one-third of EU FDI to the Mediterranean region went to

Israel alone, which had the highest per capita income of all the Mediterranean partners. From

about the same level in 1990, EU investment flows to Eastern and Central Europe increased by a

factor of nine, while those to the Mediterranean partners increased by a factor of three, about half

of what the EU estimated was needed to bring the partners up into the “emerging economies”

camp (EMP 2003: “Strategy:” 10).

There was a significant flow of aid in the same period, though not in the form or degree

that had been pledged. From 1995 to the year 2000, the EU provided 43 percent of the overseas

development aid (ODA) received by the Mediterranean partners, as compared to the United

States’ provision of 41 percent. In those years the Mediterranean Economic Development

Association (MEDA) budget planned to spend 6 billion Euros on development aid in the region,

but just 67% percent of that spending was realized (EMP 2003: “Strategy:” 16-18). Furthermore,

only 10% of the aid provided in the first plan 1995-1999 went to intra-regional projects, the rest

going to bilateral projects between the EU and individual partners. The overall EU budget for

Euro-Med projects in 1995-1999 was less than one third of its trade surplus with the partners in

1995 alone, and the Mediterranean partners (with a population of 230 million) received only

60% of the aid that was awarded to the Eastern and Central European countries (with 96 million

people) over the same period (Calleya 2000: 25-28).

 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 11

As of the year 2000, the vision of regional integration was as distant as ever. Euro-Med

supporters in Europe argued that, if the EU did not accelerate its efforts to see the Euro-Med

project through, for example by setting up and expanding investment and development banks,

the economic future of most of the Mediterranean partners would become bleaker and the region

more marginalized in the world economy (Calleya 2000: 1-7, 31-42). This, they argued, was

likely to worsen the regional instability and conflict that the Euro-Med initiative had been

intended to ameliorate in the first place.

For the next period, then, 2002-2004, the EU raised the amount of aid available for all

Euro-Med projects, in the form of grants and soft loans, to 3 billion Euros per year (Perthes

2004: 15). However, the single largest item in the 2002-2004 Regional Indicative Plan was for

the “risk capital facility.” This is a publicly funded investment and insurance program providing

backing to private firms from the EU that do business in the southern-rim Mediterranean partner

countries. The facility’s value in that plan was 100 million Euros, while all of the planned aid for

the environment, education, infrastructure, and other social projects combined came to just 93

million Euros (EMP 2003: “Programme:” 48-54).

Evaluation of Political Program

In the first nine years after the Barcelona Declaration was published, the EU failed to

move the Mediterranean partners toward democracy and protection of human rights. One reason

that the EU’s initiative stalled on the political front was that its success on the economic front

was so limited, for example in its focus on macroeconomic stabilization, and in its tolerance of

increased inequality both between the EU and the partners and internal to the partners’

economies (Neep 2004: 10).

 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 12

There was actually little consensus at the Barcelona conference in 1995 for how to

address political conflicts around the Mediterranean. As one widely quoted expert, explicitly

taking “a European point of view,” states:

The interests and priorities of the EU and the southern Mediterranean countries are not
the same. The priority for the southern Mediterranean countries is to be enabled to face
the economic gap with the North and the challenges posed by the envisaged 2010 free
trade area. For the EU countries, the main interest is to face the economic, political and
social instability coming from the southern Mediterranean countries, and to control the
proliferation of WMD and migration flows (Marquina 1999: 6).

To help manage this instability, the leading countries of the European Union have long

contributed to the deployment of UN peacekeeping forces in the perpetual hotspots around the

Mediterranean: Morocco/Western Sahara (since 1976), Cyprus (since 1974), Israel and

Palestinian Territories (since 1967, observers only), Israel and Golan Heights (since 1967),

southern Lebanon (since 1985), and Iraq/Kuwait (since 1991). However, these contributions did

nothing to settle these conflicts and end their respective occupations, but simply monitored and

contained them. Meanwhile, the southern Mediterranean and Arab countries have been frustrated

by the lack of symmetry in military and other aspects of whatever “confidence building”

initiatives were undertaken under the EU’s multilateral auspices, especially with regard to the

Israel/Palestine conflict (Marquina 2000).

The conflicts and occupations that the EU had set its sights on ending continued

unresolved into 2004 (Calleya 2000: 31). The EU wound up admitting Cyprus in 2004 in spite of

its continued division into the Greek and Turkish parts, with the northern third still occupied by

Turkey (the Greek sector was admitted, the Turkish was not). The Moroccan/Western Sahara

conflict remained deadlocked, partly due to France and the United States, each for their own

reasons, refusing to require Morocco to cooperate with the most recent compromise proposed by

Kofi Annan and James Baker III (Baker, a secretary of state in the first Bush administration,
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 13

resigned from the project in anger and disgust). Potential giant though it may be, the EU is not

able to act independently of the United States in critical Mediterranean affairs, from the Western

Sahara to the Levant.

The Israel/Palestine conflict became worse than ever during the Euro-Med’s second

phase from 2000 to 2004. EU leaders had long argued that prosperity for the Mediterranean and

Arab World as a whole could not be attained without a resolution that recognized and

institutionalized the national rights of both peoples to self-determination. Observers from the

Arab side of the Mediterranean agree that there can be no real security or stability unless the

Israel/Palestine conflict is resolved fairly, but most do not perceive the proposals or activities of

the EU or NATO as having adequately addressed this issue. They see the EU’s attempting to

control rather than to solve this key problem, and view U.S. unconditional backing for Israel as

an overwhelming obstacle to whatever initiatives the EU might undertake (Selim 2000).

Alternative Functions and Uncontrolled Outcomes of the EMPI

Given the lack of great success so far on either the political or economic fronts, the real

functions of the Euro-Med-Arab World project might be different from the announced

objectives. One unannounced function is to serve the narrow national self-interest among rivals

within the EU. The Euro-Med expansion could help France, Italy and the other northern-rim

Mediterranean countries to use their southern-rim partnerships to counterbalance the enhanced

power devolving to Germany from the accession of its economic clients, the Eastern and Central

European countries, into the European Union. This would account for the “compromise” that

enabled the simultaneous accession of those countries with that of Malta and Cyprus (although,

contrary to previous declarations of required unity, the latter remained divided.

 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 14

Another unspoken function is for the EU, even while expanding its own borders to the

east, to counterbalance the economic weight of the U.S. by establishing a regional trading bloc

southward, on the model of the United States-dominated NAFTA (and its proposed extension,

the Free Trade Association of the Americas), and the Japanese-led bloc that includes China,

Korea, and the ASEAN countries. Despite the “globalization” of economic activity governed by

the World Trade Organization, and promoted as universally beneficial by the Washington

consensus, regional trading and investment blocs remain important, and may become more so.

An emerging danger for the southern-rim and Arab partners, however, is that these trading and

investment relationships tend to benefit the “more developed” partners to a much greater degree

than the less-developed, as happened between the United States and Mexico in the NAFTA

framework.

A third function is to use the Euro-Med “partnership” to enable Europe to manage

problems that it sees emanating from the south, without ever having to solve them. One of these

“problems” is cross-national Arab cultural and political identity, which creates obstacles to

Europe’s free access to energy resources and investment opportunities in the region, and that

keeps the Palestinians from agreeing to a peace settlement with Israel that gives them much less

than they had been promised by the United Nations in key resolutions (such as the two-state

solution based on pre-June 1967 borders suggested by Resolution 242). From the point of view

of many Arabs, a “Mediterranean” identity (whatever it might have been worth in Hellenistic

times) is a new cultural construct that cuts the southern-rim Mediterranean countries away from

their historical contexts and political allies in the Arab World (Chourou 2000).

Through its economic development projects and political side agreements, the Euro-Med

partnership was intended to manage cross-Mediterranean migration into Europe from the Arab
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 15

World and Africa (Farsakh 2000: 59-61). The “incentive” side of the initiative seemed promising

because of its comprehensive multilateralism, and the increased trade might have been of some

modest benefit to the south, as it was to Tunisia and Morocco in the past. However, it may well

lead to more migration, not less, as structural adjustment and liberalization release labor from

low-productivity manufacturing and agriculture. It would likely not reduce the incentive to

migrate, because, first, remittances are so important to household income in most partner

countries that development aid could would be not nearly enough to replace them,3 and, second,

the informal sector would continue to grow faster than the formal sector under liberalized

conditions (Farsakh 2000: 70-74).

Europeans see immigration, of Muslims in particular, as diluting of their cultural

distinctiveness and threatening to their “European” (not to mention national) identities. It is

ironic that the EU quakes at the prospect of increased migration, even as Europe’s population

grows too slowly to replace itself and there are too few young workers entering the labour force

to support the social security systems that feed a growing bulge of retirees. This is the logical, if

unanticipated, heritage of the colonial era that the impoverished denizens of former colonies

migrate to the countries of the wealthy former-colonial powers to seek the livelihood that is not

available at home, partly because of that colonial experience.

The Euro-Med project embodies other contradictions that may make its success self-

limiting. For example, the EU’s programme to encourage democracy from below in the

Mediterranean and Arab World involves working with non-governmental and civil

organizations. However, because of its diplomatic relations with the governments of these states

the EU has stipulated that only legally recognized organizations may qualify for its support.

Since governments are the only agency that can legally recognize an organization, this effort
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 16

may be superficial and even self-defeating, as it legitimises the very governments that the EU

would like to see changed by democratic processes (Schlumberger 2000: 248-253).

Similarly, the EU’s trade and investment programme may reinforce the monopolistic and

patron-client relations that now dominate most Arab economies, since the institutions of a market

economy are not in place. If state firms are privatised, who will have the wherewithal to purchase

them? Contrary to what it intended, the Euro-Med project may strengthen the “neo-patrimonial”

economic institutions of the region and further enrich and empower the authoritarian elites

(Schlumberger 2000: 257-258).

A number of Arab intellectuals argue that an external development plan such as the EMPI

might falter if either it succeeded too well or it clearly failed. If security problems were managed

but not solved, the Euro-Med project could stumble along indefinitely. However, if, on one hand,

security and stability around the Mediterranean were achieved, or if, on the other hand, it seemed

impossible to achieve them, then the EU might simply abandon the economic development

agenda, leaving the Mediterranean and Arab countries even weaker vis-à-vis the world economy

(Abdelkader Sid Ahmed 2000; Biad 2000). This scenario could lead to even greater “security”

issues for Europe in the future, and could drive the EU to reduce its commitment to “soft

solutions” and take up more militaristic methods to deal with its southern flank.

Competition with the United States

Energy. The European Union countries, including Britain, France and Germany in

particular, were anxious to extend and secure their direct access to natural resources in the

energy-producing part of the Arab World and to strengthen other potentially-profitable economic

links (Renner 2003, 2002; Sepheri 2002). While the U.K. hitched its interests directly to the U.S.
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 17

game plan for the region, the other EU countries, not wanting to be dependent on the patronage

of the United States for these key inputs, and negotiated energy pacts with the Gulf Cooperation

Council countries (GCC: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, and

Oman) and proposed complete free trade agreements to take effect around 2010. They proposed

similar negotiations with Iran and Iraq. Beyond just purchasing energy, these agreements would

allow European firms to participate in diversifying and privatising the producers’ economies.

The agreements covered industrial cooperation, energy, and the environment. The GCC is the

EU's sixth largest export market, with the EU having a consistent trade surplus. In the year 2000,

the EU earned 29 billion Euros from exports and spent 22 billion on imports, about 2/3 of that

being crude oil. The EU’s exports to the GCC are diversified, but 1/3 are "large machinery such

as power generation plants, railway locomotives and aircraft, electrical machinery items and

mechanical appliances," as well as medicine and medical equipment. Direct foreign investment

by the EU in the GCC was worth 3 billion Euros in 1999, and 1.5 billion in the year 2000, while

that of the GCC in Europe was 4 billion in 1999 and 4.6 billion in 2000 (EMP 2003: “The EU

and the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries, Iran, Iraq, and Yemen”).

France, Russia, and China all had dealings with Iraq that are now constrained by the

United States’ projection of hegemony in Iraq and its ambitions to remake the Middle East using

Iraq as a platform. This is one reason that France, Germany, Russia, and China all opposed the

United States and United Kingdom’s unilateral war on and occupation of Iraq. Were these

countries to become more strongly allied, they could constitute a serious challenge to U.S.

hegemony in the region. Russia and China are important producers of energy themselves, while

French companies have interests in energy production elsewhere in the world. Russia would like

to secure a special role in providing energy (oil and natural gas) directly to the European Union.
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 18

Prior to the Iraq war, Russia even considered denominating and conducting its international

energy transactions in Euros, instead of the standard United States dollars. Such a move would

have contributed to an even steeper drop in the value of the dollar relative to the Euro in the

2001-2003 period.

Multilateralism versus Unilateralism. European representatives to a conference on

security in the Gulf and “greater Middle East” (as it was referred to by the Bush administration)

are critical of U.S. declared intentions of inflicting a major transformation on the region through

forced “regime change “ in Iraq and threatening pressures on neighboring regimes to make

political and economic reforms to its liking (Kraig 2004: 22). The Europeans criticize the United

States for a simplistic understanding of “democracy,” detaching it from the historical and cultural

specificities of the countries in question, and not understanding that democratization is a

complex process rather than a precisely defined end in itself.

For example, the Europeans see Iran as “not as an ideal partner, but as the most

democractic and most pluralistic experiment in the region so far,” while U.S. policy makers see it

“as the major ‘rogue’ left after the fall of Saddam’s regime” (Kraig 2004: 34). The European

approach to dealing with difficult political entities such as Iran has long been “constructive

engagement,” meaning the use of economic incentives to “draw wayward regimes into the fold

by first enticing them into the structures of European capitalism” to persuad the regime to give

greater freedom to the reformists (Neep 2004: 9).

Despite the lack of obvious success in either the Euro-Med project or Iran, the Europeans

continue to position themselves as multilateralists trying to solve regional conflicts first, which

will then give the countries in question time and space to make internal reforms. They prefer to

“build regional structures” to create a stable platform on which domestic democratic change can
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 19

take place (Kraig 2004: 35). Agreeing with the Europeans, the authors of the Arab Human

Development Report 2003 argue that the Arab authoritarian regimes can play on the presence of

external threats to postpone democratic reforms, but have no cover if multilateral peaceful

relations are in place.

The Europeans fear the violence and upheaval that might arise from revolt of the region

that it has been trying to bring peacefully into its orbit. At this point, they argue that the U.S.

unilateral intensification of its military role has contributed little positive in the way of new ideas

to promote reform, but rather has been destabilizing, with the case of Iraq the most recent and

dramatic (Kraig 2004: 34). They have expressed resentment and frustration with the U.S. gambit

for hegemony in Europe’s backyard, but so far seem powerless to directly oppose the United

States.

There are hints that the Europeans may be abandoning the Cold-War institutions that

assumed the United States would protect them militarily, raising the necessity that the Europeans

would have to arm and organize for their own military protection. As NATO has become less

and less relevant, and the United States constricts its military presence in Germany, two

competing trends are building. One trend is for the United States to construct a military web,

either with its own bases or through tight alliances, all along the borders of Europe, running from

the Central Asian republics Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, through Turkey, Israel,

and Egypt, to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and the horn of Africa, to Morocco and,

now, Algeria in northwest Africa. If the United States continues its hostile unilateralism,

Europeans might feel threatened by this military encirclement.

Another, as yet embryonic, trend is for some Europeans to begin to construct an

independent military apparatus, to the point that representatives of France, Germany, Belgium
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 20

and Luxembourg held a meeting about it in April 2003. The idea appears to have been so

shocking that it was quickly abandoned, but if the United States continues on its unilateral path

of military domination of a greater and greater swath of Eurasia, the Middle East, and North

Africa, it is likely that such an idea will resurface. However, the EU is quietly expanding the

powers of the European Maritime Force, which now polices the Atlantic, to include Euro-Med

partners in a quasi-military structure that could police the Mediterranean, dealing with issues of

migration, smuggling, and pollution, among others (Calleya 2000: 16-19). While this constitutes

no explicit threat to U.S. hegemony at this time, it contains the germ of greater military

preparedness. Meanwhile, the Europeans go about their business of competing with the U.S. to

sell arms on a large scale, particularly to the Mediterranean and Arab Worlds.

Armaments. The lucrative international arms bazaar generates an entire sphere of

competitive and contradictory relations among the European powers and the United States,

Russia and China (all data from the Center for Defense Information, 1998-2003). Developing

countries have long purchased the lion’s share of armaments on the world market, between 60

and 80% each year over the last 20 years or so. The United States is the largest supplier of arms,

on average 45% of the market. France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Russia vie among

themselves for the second to fifth places in the size of their arms sales.

The Middle East is by far the largest market in the developing world. It took almost 60%

of all deliveries per year, on average, from 1995 to 2002. MENA countries have long accounted

for 5 or 6 out of the top ten buyers in the developing world. For example, in 2002, Saudi Arabia

took $26.6 billion of arms transferred, while Israel took $4.3 billion ($3.4 of that from the United

States), Egypt took $2.1 billion, and Kuwait took $1.3 billion. The United Arab Emirates (UAE),

with a citizen population of just __ (__ if all the guest workers are counted) was the second
 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 21

largest buyer from 1999 to 2002, accounting for 10.7 percent of all transfer agreements world

wide in those years. The main reason for this was the construction of U.S.-run bases and the

prepositioning of weaponry in preparation for the U.S. and U.K. war against Iraq in 2003.

The United States is the largest supplier to MENA, providing 60 to 75 percent of all arms

transfer agreements from 1995 to 2002. The next six in terms of size of sales are Russia, France,

Germany, Britain, Italy, and China. But there is a certain division of labor in who supplies

whom. Russia supplies Iran, Algeria, and Yemen, although the United States is encroaching on

the Algerian market. China supplies Algeria, Kuwait, and Yemen. Along with the United States,

the EU big four (France, Germany, Britain and Italy) supply Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel and

Kuwait. The weapons supplied by the arms merchants to the Middle East in 1999-2002 included

tanks, self-propelled guns, armoured vehicles, supersonic combat aircraft, helicopters, air

defense missiles, and anti-ship missiles. British exports, in particular to Israel, have raised vocal

critiques in the Parliament and press. For example, in 2003 they included not only mortars,

rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons, military explosives, and infrared and radar sensors, but also

leg irons, electric shock belts, and tear gas and other chemicals -- all claimed by the sellers to be

“defensive,” but used actively against Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The Crossroads of a New Imperialism?

Such sales by members of the European Union, besides cynically bringing in profits to

private corporations while the EuroMed partnership allegedly promotes “dialogue” and “peace,”

implies a military as well as an economic and political agenda for the Euro-Med region and the

Arab World. The EuroMed Partnership programme contains a deep contradiction, with the

potential to go in either a peaceful “Hellenistic” direction, with economic development, cultural

 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 22

exchange, the spread of peace and an end to occupations, or a “Bonapartist” direction, with the

spread of military influence, neo-colonial domination and a regional hegemony to rival the

influence of the United States.

One European intellectual, a Middle East specialist who has strongly promoted the Euro-

Med project, argues that U.S. credibility in the region was undermined by the practices of the

military in Iraq and at Guantanamo, and by its refusal to sign on to the International Criminal

Court treaty. Europe will do better then, he advises, by putting even more resources into a new

phase of its peaceful Euro-Med security strategy, effectively pursuing a course “complementary

[to], but distinct” from that of the United States (Perthes 2004: 15).

Which road is taken depends not only on the foresight and wisdom of leaders in the

European Union, but also of those in the United States. Despite what might appear to many in

the United States to be a girlie desire to go to extremes to pursue peace and avoid war, the EU

represents a sleeping military, as well as an economic, giant. Multilateralism and the seeking of

common ground between these two powers in strengthening institutions of international

governance, such as the International Court of Justice, and logically extending this institution-

building to include the two other potential rivals for world power, Russia and China, could help

Europe avert its lurking Bonapartist tendency and fulfill its Hellenistic promise. Until the peoples

of the southern-rim Mediterranean countries and the Arab World wrest control of their political

and economic destiny from their authoritarian regimes, the Hellenistic alternative is clearly

preferable for them and the rest of the world.

 EU, Mediterranean, and Arab World page 23

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1
Some examples of alternative packages of ideas for reform that rely more on internal leadership in the Arab world can be
found in the Arab Human Development Report 2002 and 2003, and in Hoekman and Messerlin 2002.
2
A regional research agency, the Economic Research Forum for the Arab World, Iran and Turkey, also promotes reform
from within the region, but its sponsorship and programs come essentially from the World Bank. Its most important
function is to cultivate modern social science and train practitioners in the region (claiming the tradition of their medieval
forbears, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Batuta, et al.).
3
Farsakh 2000 calculates that from 1977 to 1992 EU aid to the Maghreb countries fluctuated between 5 and 10% of
remittances (p. 70).