The European Union and Mediterranean Member States

Abstract

Any study of the foreign policies of Mediterranean EU Member states has to take account of the Union’s impact on their purposes, methods and achievements or failures. The European Union’s main impact on Mediterranean Member states has been to create elements of a common experience of economic and political life in the late twentieth-century world where otherwise the forces of friction predominate over those of harmony. The original European Community had only France and Italy as Mediterranean Member states. But the other Mediterranean states already felt the beginnings of a common experience from the early 1960s when they undertook to negotiate association or cooperation agreements with the EC (except for Albania, with its then closed Marxist-Leninist system, and Libya, with its oil-based economy and post-1969 revolutionary challenge to Western principles).¹