Europe and the European Union’s evolving role in the Middle East and North Africa

Description

A keen understanding of geopolitics was at the heart of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez’s decision to launch the Barcelona Process a generation ago. The EU’s strategic failure in the early 2000s is to have failed to read the Russian leader Vladimir Putin correctly and to become the sub-contractor of American policy in the Mediterranean. As the fear – irrational or not, of being invaded
by the Other from the South grips European leaders, the failure to rethink its relations with the Mediterranean countries will condemn the European project to strategic irrelevance.