KRONBERG (Germany): Three months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the idea of a comprehensive security organization for the Gulf and the Middle East is gaining ground.
The aim would be to bind together countries as disparate as Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and eventually Israel and the Palestinians in a structure that would foster political dialogue, economic development, modernisation and democracy.
Some policymakers see the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe — the umbrella body that helped prepare the way for the peaceful transformation of Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War — as a model for the unstable region.
If that sounds utopian at a time when the Middle East is prey to conflicts, militancy, economic stagnation and political repression, the idea is at least on the minds of policy elites in the region and beyond.
Ministers, politicians, diplomats, businessmen and opinion leaders from the Middle East, Europe and the United States agreed at a conference run by Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation that Saddam’s removal at last made such an initiative thinkable.
Under the ground rules of the Kronberg Talks, hosted by the think tank arm of the German publishing group, the proceedings may be reported but the participants may not be identified.
A strategy paper prepared for the meeting suggested two structures to reintegrate Iraq with its neighbourhood and to promote wider political and economic change in the Middle East.
SECURITY SYSTEM: On the one hand, it said, “Iraq should be gradually integrated into a security system with Iran and other Gulf countries in order to alleviate Iraq’s threat perception and check renewed attempts at regional dominance”.
It also suggested that the European Union should extend its partnership with 10 south and east Mediterranean states, known in EU jargon as the Barcelona process or Euromed, into a wider Euro-Middle-East partnership as a new umbrella for cooperation.
A recently retired US official noted that the Middle East was the least institutionalized region in the world, lacking the kind of structures that foster cooperation in Europe, Latin America, Africa or Southeast Asia.
Such ideas have foundered in the past on the long-running Arab-Israeli and Iran-Iraq conflicts, and on Washington’s desire to keep both Tehran and Baghdad isolated and contained.
A senior Russian official said it was no longer premature to imagine a security structure for the Gulf including all regional states and the permanent members of the UN Security Council.
Arab and Iranian speakers were keen to attract greater EU involvement in their region, now that the expanding 15-nation bloc has a co-sponsor role in Israeli-Palestinian peace moves alongside the United States, Russia and the United Nations.
Some pleas came from members of an “Old Guard” in the Arab world uneasy at US pressure to democratize, and wary of US military might on their doorstep.
“Does the United States give itself the right to monopolize management of the region?” one asked.
“The EU is highly qualified to deal with the region for reasons of geopolitics and history. The US cannot impose its own vision on the Middle East,” he said.
BIG CARROT: European ministers and diplomats were wary of being pitted against US efforts to transform the region, even if, as a Brussels official quipped, the EU tends to carry a big carrot rather than a big stick in the region.
The Europeans see a need to be more assertive in promoting “modernization” and “liberalization” — euphemisms for fighting dictatorship, corruption and crony capitalism.
If candidate Turkey eventually joins the EU, Iran and Iraq will be new neighbours of the bloc.
Yet given the meagre results of the Barcelona process, launched in 1995 amid optimism about Israeli-Palestinian peace prospects, some experts doubt the chances of engaging the wider Middle East in such an ambitious transformation exercise.
Despite the latest fragile revival of peace efforts, any wider regional cooperation remains vulnerable to setbacks on the Arab-Israeli track.
The OSCE, with its emphasis on parallel progress in human rights, economic cooperation and political dialogue, helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Such a structure could be hard to sell to Middle East governments, which have desire to be written out of the script.
The way some Arab governments have harassed civil society groups sponsored by the Euromed process illustrates just how hard an OSCE-style body would be to establish in the region.—Reuters
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.