RABAT/PARIS: Nicolas Sarkozy is known for relishing a challenge but the French leader’s goal of coaxing more than a dozen Mediterranean countries into an EU-style union seems to have geopolitical realities stacked against it.

Besides sharing the same stretch of salty water, there appears little to connect the hotchpotch of seaside states that run from poor, tightly controlled societies with command economies to wealthy, secular liberal democracies.

Europhile states like Turkey would prefer to join the European Union, while some north African states interested in the economic benefits of a north-south alliance are so different that trying to include them could render the union meaningless.

Even Sarkozy with his pugnacious diplomatic style might have a hard time getting Israel, Syria, Spain, and Libya to agree a set of founding principles.

In an impassioned speech in Tangier this week, Sarkozy painted religious extremism and mutual suspicion between the north and south as aberrations for a region built on the mixing of cultures and criss-crossed by ancient trade routes.

He said the Mediterranean must unite around a common project to stop the cradle of civilisation from becoming the focal point for a clash of civilisations.

But he said details of the new union should be thrashed out at a future date, leaving analysts to wonder how ‘Club Med’ could succeed where past efforts failed.

“It’s not entirely clear what the added value of this alternative policy is,” said Professor Richard Whitman at the University of Bath in Britain. “There isn’t enough there that looks and feels different from what’s currently on offer.”

Sarkozy’s comment that it was ‘time to act’ appeared to condemn to irrelevance the EU’s Euro-Mediterranean partnership, an attempt to nudge southern neighbours towards democracy, free markets and the rule of law by rewarding progress with aid, soft loans and more access to EU markets.

The strategy, known as the Barcelona Process in honour of the city where it was launched in 1995, has failed in its most ambitious goal of establishing a free trade zone by 2010 and seems to have lost steam.

Billions of euros have been spent (in incentives) but EU policymakers still disagree on whether to use tough measures to encourage reform from southern states or embrace them in the hope they see the benefits of change.

Showering a friendly country with business deals and aid risks entrenching local elites who benefit from the status quo and dulling the incentive to change, analysts say.

“I think the Mediterranean Union idea doesn’t actually solve that classic dilemma, which is why I would expect it to be less than successful,” said Whitman.

PATIENCE, GOODWILL

The European Union began life with six like-minded countries centralising control of national coal and steel industries. The logic was not geographical but economic and political.

The Mediterranean Union would be a leap into the unknown – starting with a common location and hoping national priorities would converge through patience and goodwill.

Turkey, the most populous Mediterranean state, has made it clear it sees Sarkozy’s plan as an ‘EU-lite’, which is no substitute for the full European Union membership it covets.

Sarkozy’s project is “a way of marginalising Turkey and not allowing it to keep this momentum towards claiming entry into the European Union”, said Khadija Mohsen Finan of Paris-based international relations institute IFRI.

North Africa offers more encouraging signs.

Tunisia has a growing middle class and vibrant private sector. Morocco remains blighted by poverty but King Mohammed has begun economic reforms and bold infrastructure projects to stimulate investment and job creation.

Record-high energy prices have left oil and gas exporters Algeria and Libya with comfortable incomes and might have encouraged isolationism, but both say they want to reform their Soviet-style economies and integrate further into world markets.

“Countries like Libya, Algeria and Tunisia have shown interest in engaging European powers and that’s something we cannot ignore, particularly in the case of Libya,” said Christopher Pang at London’s Royal United Services Institute.

The bitter Arab-Israeli conflict has always made an association of Mediterranean states seem hopelessly idealistic and made it unlikely that Arab states will work with Israel.—Reuters