Divergences in the EU on an Active Mediterranean Policy

Abstract

The countries of the southern shore of the Mediterranean (CSSM) consider the EU an important market and a source of development assistance, especially in a period of globalization where developing countries have abandoned the prospect of achieving industrial transformation on the basis of their own internal markets. Germany and the North European countries prefer an opening to the Eastern and Central European Countries (ECEC) rather than the South. This preference is not primarily due to geographical proximity, but the result of a lack of openness towards non-European cultures. France, on the other hand, favors the Mediterranean option, certainly not in order to exclude the accession of the ECEC to the EU, but with the hope of complementing an extension to the East with the inclusion of its own neighbors among the Western Mediterranean countries of Europe, i.e., Northern Africa. So Israel faces an uneasy configuration. The member states of the European Union which are most favorable to Israel in its conflict with the Arab world, the northern European nations and Germany, are the ones which are the least favorable to a Southern enlargement of the European Union which, however, could be expected to ease political tension in the region through economic development.