December 2024
1st of December 2024 a new college of the European Commission came into office. It took six months for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to select and later have all the 26 Commissioners confirmed.
What consequences will the new Commission have for Euro-Mediterranean relations? The novelty of the newly instated college is the Commissioner for the Mediterranean, Dubravka Šuica. It is the first time ever in the history of the European Union that a single region has had its own Commissioner. The new DG for the Mediterranean thus inevitably signals the EU’s wish to lend the region a greater political weight in the EU’s foreign and security policy. A different interpretation could also be that Dubravka Šuica will politically balance HRVP Kaja Kallas within the EU in terms of regional focus, as Kallas is known for her focus on Eastern Europe.
One of the major tasks of the new Commissioner for the Mediterranean during her mandate will be to elaborate a Pact for the Mediterranean. Ursula von der Leyen has, in her Mission letter to Šuica, stressed that a revitalized policy for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is needed, since “[a] strengthened Mediterranean partnership remains a strategic imperative for Europe and our common sustainable prosperity, security and resilience can only be build [sic.] in partnership.” The Pact will complement all the existing EU initiatives for engaging with southern Mediterranean partners, such as the 2021 Agenda for the Mediterranean or the older initiatives of the 2008 Union for the Mediterranean and/or the 2004 European Neighborhood Policy. Not too much has transpired as of date in terms of what this Pact will mean for Euro-Mediterranean relations. However, it is likely that the Pact will focus mostly on trade, regional economic cooperation, and demographic challenges as a consequence of population growth. Migration is likely to be integral to any discussions surrounding the Pact as well. The Commission has, according to the European Parliament’s Research Service, already been active in the region in terms of “steering migration, combating human trafficking and promoting partnerships with countries of origin and transit.” Energy is also likely to become an issue in the Pact. The European Parliament’s Research Service deems that “Mediterranean has tremendous trade and industrial potential for both extraction of energy (natural gas reserves) and production of clean energy (solar electricity, hydrogen). Despite having relatively large reserves of some 125 trillion cubic feet (tcf)in estimated gas reserves, eastern Mediterranean countries' reserves are 'dwarfed', however, by Russia's (1 230 tcf), Iran's (1 170 tcf) and Qatar's (880 tcf)”. What is not clear at the moment is whether the new Pact will try to promote any of the values which the EU Treaty stipulates in the European Union’s foreign and security policy, such as democracy, human rights or rule of law. While these values may still very well work themselves into the Pact, at the moment the EU appears to downplay its erstwhile ambition to promote and uphold values through its external action and/or Common Foreign and Security Policy. The Pact, in this sense, looks at these early days as more of a Donald Trump-style ‘transactional’ foreign policy.
Dubravka Šuica has also been tasked to lend support the HRVP in the latter’s mission to “take forward a comprehensive EU Middle East Strategy with a view to the day after the war in Gaza, focusing on promoting all the steps needed for the two-state solution and strengthening partnerships with key regional stakeholders”. Kallas, in her European Parliament hearings, pledged to “continue to strive for an immediate ceasefire [between Israel and Palestine], the release of all hostages and the provision of humanitarian aid, continuing its firm support for work on a long-term two-state solution.” There is thus nothing very new or original in the new European Commission’s and/or the HRVP’s outlook and remedies to this longstanding conflict of which the outbreak of war in Gaza in 2023, later involving Lebanon, are only the latest iterations. The critique that could be lodged at the new Commission and HRVP would thus be their lack of novel formulas and/or innovative intermediate policies to end the current conflict and devastating humanitarian crisis. There seem to be no vision inside the EU similar to when it comes to the war in Ukraine in terms of working with key allies to create the context for a more constructive dialogue among the conflicting parties and work for an end to the conflict. Nor does there appear to be any forward-thinking from the EU in terms of positively altering the conflict dynamics in the MENA region. In the case of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, the formula appears to continue to be the default two-state solution albeit it has yielded so little actual and positive results in the almost century since it was first proposed in 1937 by the Peel Commission. The Commissioner for the Mediterranean as well as the HRVP mandates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict thus appear to be conservative and in keeping with the European Union’s traditional role in the MENA region – as ‘a payer, not a player’ – in its willingness to provide economic assistance, but not take on leadership on political solutions.
Acknowledgement: This blog was funded by the European Union through the Jean Monnet Chair in Global Actor EU: The International Relations of the European Union in a Competitive and Fractured World (GLOBALEUTY), project number 101175018.
Disclaimer: Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union, the European Education and Culture Executive Agency or the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. Neither the EU nor IBEI can be held responsible for them.