Abstract
In 1972 the EC announced its Global Mediterranean Policy (GMP), a unified approach to preferential trading relations with non-member countries in the Mediterranean Basin.1 All the Mediterranean countries except Albania and Libya participated in the GMP. Then in the 1980s Greece, Spain and Portugal, became EC members. For the other Mediterranean countries the allure of the GMP faded, and the EC’s 1992 programme appears to be the last nail in the GMP’s coffin. The Mediterranean countries, seeking alternatives to the preferential trading arrangements of the GMP, have followed different strategies, which make it impossible to consider the EC’s external relations in the region as a unit in the 1990s.
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Notes
Armindo da Silva, ‘The Portuguese Experience of European Integration’, in G. Yannopoulos (ed.), European Integration and the Iberian Economies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 108, found that EC quotas benefitted Portugal in 1977 and 1978, but after 1979 they became binding on some clothing exports which were sufficiently important that these restrictions wiped out any net benefit to Portugal from preferential access to EC markets. For Portugal such restrictions had to be temporary as her accession negotiations moved to a successful conclusion. It is difficult to draw general conclusions on the textile and clothing restrictions’ impact without detailed microeconomic studies, which scarcely exist, but the EC was clearly most concerned about Turkey and Portugal, where textile and clothing exports to the EC were exceeded only by the USA and Hong Kong in the early 1980s’ (Pomfret, op. cit., p. 91). The next largest Mediterranean non-member suppliers were Tunisia, Morocco and Malta, for whom anecdotal evidence suggests that few if any of the EC’s textile and clothing quotas were binding.
This became more apparent when the EC’s only concrete reaction to easing adjustment costs from Spanish and Portuguese accession was the Integrated Mediterranean Programme re-offering support to affected regions within the EC. Even this measure was limited in scope — see George Yannopoulos, ‘The Management of Trade-Induced Structural Adjustment: An Evaluation of the EC’s Integrated Mediterranean Programmes’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 27 (1989), 283–301. For a broader treatment of the EC’s reaction to the Iberian enlargement
Alfred Tovias, Foreign Economic Relations of the European Community: The Impact of Spain and Portugal (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1990), who concluded that ‘the Community is taking a back seat in the Mediterranean’ 82.
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© 1992 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Pomfret, R. (1992). The European Community’s Relations with the Mediterranean Countries. In: Redmond, J. (eds) The External Relations of the European Community. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22207-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22207-0_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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