The Union for the Mediterranean: An Exercise in Region Building

This article assesses early twenty-first-century dynamics in the Mediterranean area as indications of the limited success of countries in the region to integrate further into the emerging international system.

Successive attempts to enhance regional and subregional dynamics across the Mediterranean have remained in an embryonic stage at best. A review of foreign policy priorities of the riparian states reveals a divergence in agenda setting, with either EU membership or subregional affairs dominating the foreign policy strategic planning. There is little to indicate that an intensification of trans-Mediterranean regional dynamics is taking place.

Until France officially took the initiative to promote the Union for the Mediterranean initiative in 2008, interest was waning in the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership that was launched in November 1995. The Union for the Mediterranean offers the blueprint to address the physical architectural deficit that has prevented the Mediterranean area from becoming a coherent, functional economic regional space.