Roberto Aliboni - Security Challenges in the Mediterranean Region

Edited by
ROBERTO ALIBONI
GEORGE JOFF
TIM NIBLOCK

First Published 1996 in Great Britain by
FRANK CASS & Co. LTD
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon,
Oxon, OX14 4RN

and in the United States of America by
FRANKCASS
270 Madison Ave,
New York NY 10016

Transferred to Digital Printing 2005

1996 Istituto Affari Internazionali

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Security Challenges in the Mediterranean Region

I. Aliboni, Roberto 327.
116091638

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 0 7146 4686 5 (h/b)

ISBN 0 7146 4220 7 (p/b)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Frank Cass and Company Limited.

Edited and typeset by
Gabriele Tonne

Roberto Aliboni

The countries south of the Mediterranean are undergoing a profound crisis. This crisis is manifest to western countries and, because of the growing importance of Muslim communities and migration, it is also overtly or covertly making its presence felt in European daily life. Still, the possible consequences of such a crisis in terms of security and foreign policy are not very clear to western and European public opinion, and are not much more evident to governments.

This book aims to contribute to clarifying the challenges to western security that are emerging from the Mediterranean area: a subject less studied and understood than the challenges from the European east. To a large extent, the book is the outcome of an international seminar organised in Rome on 23-24 September 1994 under the sponsorship of the Italian International Affairs Institute (IAI) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) . It has been published thanks to a grant from NATO and attests to the growing interest of western international alliances in the Mediterranean area and the need they feel to understand what actions, if any, are required in the region to comply with their goal of providing security to their members and contributing to international stability and co-operation.

In the wake of the implementation of the Treaty of Maastricht, the Western European Union (WEU) has added its own dialogue to the long-standing Mediterranean policy carried out by the European Community, now enlarged and renovated by the European Union (EU). After a debate launched by the Italian premier, Mr Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, at the January 1994 North Atlantic Summit in Brussels, and strongly supported by France and Spain, NATO took the decision at the beginning of 1995 to initiate diplomatic contacts with a group of Mediterranean countries. The reasons and aims of this decision are explained in the keynote address delivered to the above mentioned conference by NATO's Deputy Secretary General, Ambassador Sergio Balanzino, and found in the appendix of this book.

While the WEU's mandate towards the Mediterranean area is clear, though extremely limited, NATO's initiative has a preliminary and exploratory character. Nevertheless, both the WEU and NATO attempts to play a role south of Europe are very controversial and arouse vehement suspicions, particularly in Arab governments and Arab public opinion. It must be noted that, while the west has been debating 'risks' and 'challenges' in the Mediterranean since the beginning of the 1990s, and is very careful to distinguish the latter from actual 'threats' (considered almost absent in the region), the Arab countries perceive the west as a definite threat and look upon western security alliances' attempts to play a more precise role in the area as part of this threat.

This perception stems essentially from the sense of deep strategic insecurity that Arabs feel as a consequence of the end of east-west confrontation, which they regarded as a kind of assurance against western domination. The 1990-91 Gulf war, the sanctions and the harsh international isolation imposed on Iraq and Libya , the (perceived) one-sided support extended to Israel via the United Nations Security Council after the beginning of the Madrid negotiations and, finally, the west's failure to protect the newly-born Muslim Bosnia against Serbia as firmly as it protected Kuwait against Iraq, are among the factors that have convinced both Arab governments and Arab opinion that western policies are inherently anti-Arab and anti-Muslim and that western countries would not hesitate to strike out against them if their interests so required.

The reader will find the Arab view vividly reported in Khalifa Chater's chapter, which, as it is written by a Tunisian, reflects a moderate and pro-western point of view. The crucial argument put forward by the kind of mistrustful and uneasy pro-western Arab opinion Chater represents is that Mediterranean co-operation should be predicated on crisis prevention and not on crisis management. In other words, Mediterranean co-operation should provide southern Mediterranean countries, and particularly their governments, with enough political, institutional and economic resources to allow them to reach domestic stability. International management of their internal crises must be excluded. Even talking about it may have a destabilising effect. At first glance, this is not too distant from the debates that take place within the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, but in Mediterranean relations there is a more radically negative attitude towards entrusting collective security institutions - such as a Conference on Security and Co-operation in the Mediterranean (CSCM) - with the task of managing crises.