By Joschka Fischer

Friday, February 04, 2011

For most Europeans, the Mediterranean is an annual object of longing. It is a place for their holiday idyll, where they spend the best weeks of the year. But many Europeans’ sunny view of the region has also yielded recently to lowering clouds of pessimism.

Inside the European Union, the ugly term PIGS (Portugal, Italy-Ireland, Greece, Spain) is now commonplace, and it denotes countries that have endangered the stability of the euro and are forcing northern European states into financing costly bailouts. Where not long ago Mediterranean sunshine and solidarity were the order of the day, depression and confrontation are now the rule. Worse still, Europe’s debt and crisis in confidence also represent the gravest political crises that the European Union has faced since its inception: at stake is nothing less then the future of the European project itself.

And now the crisis has reached the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, in the form of a revolution in Tunisia, protests against the regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and a political showdown in Lebanon that has almost brought the country to the verge of war and disaster. With the European Union’s Mediterranean member states faltering simultaneously, great changes are afoot in Europe’s southern neighborhood.

So it is time to think geopolitically, not just fiscally, about the Mediterranean. What the European Union is facing in the Mediterranean region isn’t primarily a currency problem; first and foremost, it is a strategic problem – one that requires finding solutions urgently.

The overthrow of Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was the first such spontaneous democratic uprising in the Arabic world, showing that in an age of satellite television and the Internet, suppression of information and free expression by individual governments doesn’t really work anymore.

Add to this the fact that the Arab world’s nationalist regimes, which have calcified into militarized dictatorships, lost their popular legitimacy long ago. The “Chinese option” – namely providing economic rights and prosperity in exchange for public quiescence – is not feasible, owing to these regimes’ ineptness and their rampant corruption. As a result, their inability to reform, combined with rapid population growth and a rising cohort of young people, is placing the regimes under increasing pressure, creating the possibility of explosive change.

Whether a development will occur in the Arab world similar to that in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain is impossible to predict for the time being. In Eastern Europe, with the withdrawal and eventual disappearance of the hegemon that had been the Soviet Union, the floodgates were opened and a torrent of change washed over the region.

In the Middle East and North Africa, this external factor is missing; democratic change must come from within each society. Tunisia and perhaps Egypt show that no government that has lost its legitimacy and is supported only by bayonets is sustainable in the long term.

Whether Tunisia becomes a democratic, economic, and social success story or, instead, sees its revolution end in chaos, civil war, and a new authoritarian regime will have consequences far beyond the country’s borders. More recent events in Egypt appear to confirm this. Europe, as Tunisia’s and Egypt’s northern neighbor, will be directly affected either way, and should therefore become seriously involved in terms of promoting democracy and aiding economic progress. Whatever mistakes Europe may have made vis-à-vis the region’s authoritarian regimes in the past, it can now correct them by providing decisive help.

Indeed, Tunisia is a stern test of the European Union’s “Mediterranean partnership” – a long-promoted policy that so far consists of little more than empty phrases. Tunisia’s revolution provided a unique historical opportunity, and the European Union’s stake in the outcome can hardly be overestimated. European officials in Brussels and the major European Union governments should not go for political and economic half-measures when it comes to the Mediterranean states.

Specifically, beyond direct help for Tunisia at this critical moment, the European Union must breathe new life into the Mediterranean partnership. Projects for strategic cooperation in energy – say, production of solar and wind energy in the Sahara for sale to Europe – would be especially valuable.

The EU and its member states – particularly Spain, France, Germany, and Italy – should make this new form of energy production and cooperation the key project of the Mediterranean partnership, and must ensure the necessary political conditions to accomplish it rapidly. This would create new prospects for the countries in the European Union’s southern neighborhood, and thus provide the transformation processes in these countries with an economic and technological impetus.

Moreover, such projects would promote cooperation between the states in the European Union’s southern neighborhood, potentially boosting investments in education, infrastructure, and industrial development. This would help create the most important thing that these states and their rapidly growing young populations need to produce stability within the framework of democratic development: the grounds for hope of economic and social progress.

If the Europeans continue to look inward, allowing accountants to dominate discussions of Europe’s future, they will miss a historic opportunity – one that will directly affect Europe’s security. In that case, the costs tomorrow would be far higher than the savings today.

Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005, was a German Green Party leader for almost 20 years. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate-Institute for Human Sciences © (www.project-syndicate.org).