Abstract - The paper analyses the Euro-Mediterranean cooperation process within the perspective of the new regionalism studies. In particular, it deals with regional partnership building on security issues. In the first section, the concept of regional security partnership is defined. In the second and third sections, the security arrangement of Europe as regional security partnership is placed in the wider context of the change of security cooperation in the world system, and data on European and Mediterranean security cooperation are analyzed. The successive sections deal with the problems of security partnership building in the framework of the Barcelona Process. These sections and the concluding remarks give the responsibility for the suspension of security negotiation in the region to the difference of security culture on the two Mediterranean shores.

Summary

 1 Regional security partnership

 2 Regional security cooperation and the world-wide trend of defense pacts

 3 Past security cooperation of the European and Mediterranean countries

 4 The European and Arab security cultures

 5 The project of the “Mediterranean Charter for Peace and Stability”

 Conclusions

 References

International regionalism emphasizes homogeneity as the condition for cooperation and integration. Homogeneity and, at least, commonality of the main aspects of culture and institutions is essential to introduce control on political interdependence, further institutional cooperation and adopt norms of conflict management and resolution. No homogeneity/commonality causes instability, conflict and any cooperation and integration. This approach to regionalism is confronted with new forms of co-operation at the region level in which the origins of cooperation/integration are perceptions of common problems and the consequent intensification of political dialogue between the governments of the region. The argument for this change of perspective on cooperative regionalism is almost the following one: cooperation between the countries of a geographical area occurs when the governments of the area/region recognize that negotiation for introducing some forms of policy coordination is the best thing to do to cope with problems widely caused to the countries of the region by some global trends.

Governments recognize the dangerous effect on their countries of problems the origin, development and solution of which overcome national borders in as different fields as environment for the problem of pollution, demography for the problem of migration, and public security for the problem of organized crime and illegal trade. Because of the interconnection of contemporary societies and states, governments are unable to provide states with stability, people with personal security, societies with economic growth, and groups with social and cultural protection unless they turn to cooperation and some forms of policy coordination with the governments of neighboring countries. One country’s action and inaction with regard to trans-border problems directly affects neighboring countries. The decision to adopt an action divergent from the neighbor’s action aggravates the problem suffered by both states. Alternatively, inaction either aggravates or drops the problem into the neighbor’s territory. On the contrary, problems caused by interconnection are better taken under control by national governments when policies, strategies and regulations of the national level are coordinated with the policies, strategies and regulations issued by international institutions. In some cases, pre-existing institutions take as their responsibility the solution of these problems. EU, ASEAN, APEC, NAFTA and MERCOSUR are examples of attempts to either build regional institutions to face the challenges of global trends or extend the problem-solving responsibilities of existing organizations. These organizations use various means of coordination and action at the level of the region even though they were not created for this goal.

In such a perspective, region analysts are invited to turn their attention to geographical areas, like the Euro-Mediterranean region, which include states belonging to groups of countries, which are not considered as regional political systems because they lack the homogeneity/commonality attribute. So far, these geographical areas have been ignored by region analysts as regions of cooperation because of the low frequency of the relations between the participating countries and lack of common values/identity within the affected groups of people. These facts notwithstanding, interactions within some non-homogenous regions – namely, East Asia and the Mediterranean - are growing in number between states and societies. At the same time, cooperation projects have been put in place by the governments of regions, like the Euro-Mediterranean region, with no strong commonality of attributes. The (functional) cooperation imperative pertains also to the countries of these regions despite they have no tradition of making collective decisions to face common problems. In this perspective, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership is a region institution-building process to set appropriate means of reaction to global trends and settle the specific aspects of these problems in the region (on this perspective see, among others, the recent study by Aliboni, Ammor, de Vasconcelos, 2002).

The present paper analyses the Euro-Mediterranean cooperation process within the new regional studies perspective that has been briefly illustrated here above. In particular, it deals with security partnership building. In the first section, the concept of regional security partnership is defined. In the second and third sections, the security arrangement of Europe as regional security partnership is placed in the wider context of the change of security cooperation in the world system, and data on European and Mediterranean security cooperation are analyzed. Last two sections deal with the problems of security partnership building in the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. In these sections and the concluding remarks, responsibility for the suspension/hibernation of security negotiation in the region is put on the gap between the security cultures of the groups of countries on the two sides of the Mediterranean basin, that is the European and Arab countries.

Analysis of international regions greatly benefits from comparative studies and researches. Here, attention is called on the importance of putting regional studies also in relation to evolution and changes of the world political system. Some important changes in security cooperation at the world level affect the political arrangement of individual regions. At the same time, it is demonstrated in this analysis, in the last thirty years, Europe has been very much concerned with important security changes that could become important in other parts of the world, especially in Asia and the Mediterranean. This signals the importance of taking into consideration concurrently the study of security cooperation at the level of the world system and regional systems. With regard to the world system, the present analysis relies on the hegemonic theories of world politics (see Denemark, Friedman, Gills and Modelski, 2000). With regard to regional analysis, instead, it relies on the knowledge supplied by schools of regional security studies – namely the constructivist school of security community (see Adler, 1998; Adler and Barnett, 1998), the security culture school (Krause, 1999) and the school of the zones of peace and war (Kacovicz, 1998; Singer and Widlavsky, 1993). This chapter also introduces in security studies the concept of regional security partnership as the appropriate analytical tool to understand the nature of cooperative regional security arrangements in the current phase of world politics.

Regional security partnership is the name given to the security arrangement of an international region that originates from the consensus of the states to cooperate on the reduction of violence and enhancement of stability and peace in the region by making use of different types of agreements and mechanisms like formal security treaties, security international organizations, joint action agreements, multilateral dialogue processes, peace and stability pacts including confidence-building and preventive diplomacy measures, and also measure for influencing the domestic structures and processes of the countries at risk of internal violence. A regional security partnership does not exclude any relevant power of the international politics of the region. It includes almost all the countries of a region and also extra-regional powers.

The construction of the European security system, which started with the 1972 convention of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, is the first case of regional security partnership building in international politics and, to the present time, the only true case of regional security partnership. The peculiarities of the European international politics of the bipolar and post-bipolar eras and the presence of the EC/EU, the CSCE/OSCE and the Atlantic Alliance are invoked as the reasons for the creation of the present security system of Europe. The distinctiveness of Europe and European politics, however, cannot support the argument that the European regional security partnership model is unique and will remain the only one in the world system (on this point, see Fisher, 2000, and Xenakis, 1998). Concern for security issues, which are associated with interdependence in other regions of the world like Asia-Pacific, Central Asia and the Mediterranean, points to the opposite. Three cases of regional security partnership building, in addition to the European one, are counted in the present phase of international politics. They are:

·        the ASEAN Regional Forum, also known as the ARF, in the Asia-Pacific region. ARF objectives, outlined in the First ARF Chairman's Statement in 1994, are to foster constructive dialogue and consultation on political and security issues of common interest, and make significant contributions to efforts towards confidence-building and preventive diplomacy in the region. ARF membership has increased from initial 18 to 23 countries including the United States and also the European Union (see Attinà and Zhu, 2001; Cossa, 2000; Johnston, 1998; Kivimaki, 2001);

·        the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), earlier known as the “Shanghai Five” Initiative, in the Central Asia region. "Shanghai Five" originated from the summit meeting of five states (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) held in Shanghai in April 1996. Since the first summit meeting, a series of agreements among the five states have been concluded and practical measures have been agreed on to construct security partnership. The Agreement on Confidence-Building in the Military Field Along the Border Areas and the Agreement on Mutual Reduction of Military Forces in the Border Areas, signed in 1996 and 1997, are the most important agreements to implement security partnership building among the five countries. Practical measures to crack down on international terrorism, drug trafficking, arms smuggling, illegal immigration and other forms of cross-border crimes have been included in the security partnership building measures. The "Shanghai Five" mechanism was transformed into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on June 15, 2001. After Uzbekistan’s admission, the SCO counts on six member states. SCO’s aim is to strengthen mutual trust among member states and their effective cooperation in various fields (see Attinà and Zhu, 2001; Zhang, 2001). The war in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 changed the regional environment of the SCO. It is possible that the military presence of the United States and other countries in the region will transform the partnership process;

·        the Euro-Mediterranean project which is confronted with the derailment of the Middle East Peace Process. However, the Work Program approved at the Valencia Foreign Ministers Conference (22-23 April 2002) confirmed “the mandate of the Senior Officials on the Draft Charter for Peace and Stability to continue their work as appropriate so as to enable the Charter to be adopted as soon as the political situation allows” (see Attinà and Stavridis, 2001; Aliboni, Ammor, de Vasconcelos, 2002).

The building of a regional security partnership is a process unique to contemporary international relations. It is different from all other forms of security cooperation. In particular, it differs from two traditional forms of security arrangements known as the system of opposite military alliances and the system of collective security. It is different also from the special form of security cooperation defined by political scientists as security community.

Military alliances are based on the traditional concept of state security as the condition reached by a group of states when their military forces are coordinated in order to threat the use of force to dissuade potential aggressors. States enter alliances when they encounter security dangers that they cannot otherwise neutralize. In these circumstances, governments reject reliance on self-help and national military forces as inappropriate and/or insufficient means. For political and/or strategic reasons they prefer coordinating and aggregating national forces with those of likeminded countries than relying on national armies and self-help. Governments recognize that they depend on some forms of military agreement with other governments to successfully deal with the menace of a single enemy or group of opponents fielding, or soon expected to field, superior forces. Very often, the formation of a military alliance incites an opposite group of countries to join their military capabilities in a contrary alignment. In this frequent case, the security arrangement of the region takes the form of a system of opposite military alliances, which leaves aside neutral states until incentives for neutrality are available. It must be added that military alliances do not always enhance state security but can turn into a condition of less security for some alliance members that become the object of aggression because of their membership in an alliance.

Differently from regional security based on a system of opposed military alliances, a regional security partnership is based on the concept of security developed in Europe during the Helsinki Process. In this approach to security, the dissuasion of aggressor states and avoidance of international violence in the region are believed to be at hand by including in the regional security arrangement all or almost all of the states of the region and also extra-regional powers rather than pooling national armed forces in opposed military alliances and alignments. This form of regional security maintains also that both international and internal measures must be put in place to improve the security conditions of the region and preserve geopolitical stability.

These characters of the regional security partnership are relevant also to the difference with the collective security system. In the latter, the international security agreement includes the commitment of the member states to make national armed forces available against the aggressor and instantly prepare collective forces in case of need. Responsibility for the domestic conditions of peace and security, i.e. conditions inside the countries of the region, is not included in the agreement.

Security partnership arrangements are different also from arrangements known as security communities, initially theorized by Karl Deutsch. In Deutsch’s terms, a security community is “a group of people which has become integrated” (Deutsch et al., 1957: 5) and, therefore, constitutes a group of countries which consider war as an obsolete instrument of conflict resolution. A security community is brought into being by the high level of transaction and communication flows that bind together a group of people which think of themselves as a community, thus producing favorable conditions for the establishment of institutions of peaceful conflict resolution.

Security partnership agreements, in contrast, are formed within groups of countries characterized by conflict division and small flows of transactions and communication but disposed to manage their conflict divisions by taking steps towards reducing the risk of violent confrontation and allowing the flow of communication and transactions to increase on their own. It is possible that as much as a security partnership becomes stronger and durable over time, it develops into a security community, but no evidence of such a change is thus far available. On this regard, it is worth to notice that the use of the concept of security community to define the state of security relations in Europe is appropriate only to conceptualize the condition of the Western Europe and North America countries, the so-called North-Atlantic Community. The concept of security community does not yet pertain to the Pan-European system, i.e. the group of the OSCE countries. The security arrangement of these countries is properly defined by the concept of regional security partnership, as this arrangement is neither a system of opposed military alliances nor a security community in deutschian terms, i.e. “a group of people which has become integrated”.

A security partnership arrangement is based on a set of documents that include one or more fundamental agreements and a number of related operative agreements. In the fundamental agreement - namely, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and the 1990 Charter of Paris for A New Europe; the June 2001 Declaration of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; the 1994 Chairman’s Statement at the First ASEAN Regional Forum; and the 1995 Barcelona Declaration on the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership - shared principles of peaceful relations are proclaimed and also sources of conflict, tension and instability are made public by the partner governments. In the operative agreements, governments arrange measures directed toward managing both international and internal problems of security. The partner governments can create also international organizations in order to prevent the risk of violent conflicts that can break down the stability of the region and assign to these organizations the task of dealing with the measures of the operative agreements. The fundamental agreements are the initial step of partnership building, but the regional security partnership truly comes into existence when operative agreements and mechanisms are established.

During the last ten years, the European security partnership has been developing the largest group of operative agreements. For this reason, the following lists of means to strengthen international and internal conditions of security in a region are based on the experience of the European security system which developed after the Helsinki Process and matured in the 1990s with the creation of the OSCE offices and mechanisms and their integration with other multilateral mechanisms and organizations like NATO, NATO’s projection mechanisms like the Partnership for Peace and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, the EU’s security and defense policy (ESDP) and Rapid Reaction Force (RRF), the EU’s economic cooperation programs like PHARE and the enlargement policy.

The means to strengthen international security include:

1.      measures of cooperative security and confidence-building measures to prevent misunderstandings and the preemptive use of military force,

2.      measures based on the commitment of the states to provide resources for collective security such as rapid intervention forces to interrupt military conflicts and deter aggressive actions,

3.      military and civilian crisis management capabilities to restore peaceful relations.

The means to strengthen internal security conditions include

1.      measures of economic aid to the countries in need and policies of economic integration of the countries of the region in order to ease inter-state tensions by means of collective economic growth and welfare;

2.      political assistance to improve internal democracy in order to constrain the aggressive aspirations of leaders and social groups by the values and procedures of democracy;

3.      programs for developing domestic civil societies and building relations between national civil societies in order to ease tensions by promoting social pluralism and creating mutual understanding among the countries of the region with the promotion of trans-national social relations.

All these measures were created in Europe and experimented in the post-communist transition of some former Soviet countries and in the violent conflicts of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The SCO and ARF agreements consider some of the international measures of the European security partnership as instruments of the Central and East Asia/Pacific security systems. However, specific international and internal measures are expected to develop according to the nature of the international relations and security culture of the region.

Although international organizations are the most important collective actors of security partnership agreements, especially in as much as they are responsible for peacekeeping operations, ad hoc security agreements between the countries of the region also play important functions in the regional arrangement of security. Both international organizations and military coordination agreements have the effect of defense de-nationalization (Zang and Zurn, 1999) as much as they create structures of common defense and multilateral forces of intervention which are important to building security partnership. 

The nature of regional security partnerships can be summarized as it follows.

TABLE

Pre-conditions

·        awareness of the countries of the region for interdependence and the local effects of some global problems,

·        relaxed or no power competition in the international politics of the region,

·        no violent international conflict.

Conditions

·        consensus of the governments of the region on reducing violence in international relations, improving international and domestic stability, and promoting peace and economic growth,

·        no system of opposite military alliances.

Structures

·        written fundamental agreement(s),

·        operative agreements and international organization(s),

·        a set of international measures and mechanisms,

·        a set of internal measures,

·        involvement of extra-regional powers (very probable).

Consequences

·        reduction of the gap between the security doctrines and cultures of the countries of the region,

·        increase of defense de-nationalization,

·        development of security community (possible).

State security is a stake achieved by governments adopting more than one means of the available ones. Different means are adopted according to policy-maker preferences and system conditions, i.e. great power competition and security culture. Furthermore, practices and instruments of security change over time. New ones are invented, experimented and added to instruments and practices already in use. With regard to the change of security practices, the overall argument of the present analysis is that the emerging practice of regional security partnership is part of a worldwide process of change in security cooperation. In particular, concerning the emergence of regional security partnership, the argument can be conceptualized as the supplement hypothesis, that is to say that regional agreements of security partnership are supplementing military alliances and defense pacts in providing security to states and might remove from military alliances the role of principal structure of coordination for the security of states. Differently said, the building of a regional security partnership is not an accident in the history of Europe but the result of the transformation of security coordination that has been developing along with the evolution of world politics in the last two centuries. This section analyzes the recent evolution of security cooperation in the world. The next section places the European security system within the context of the evolution of multilateral security and defense coordination and compare the European and Mediterranean cases. The analysis is based on military alliances data recorded at the University of Catania for the research project on “Evolution of Security in World Politics” [1] .

States decide to bind their military forces to bilateral or multilateral pacts in order to counter actions and projects of enemies and rivals. For the past two centuries, military pacts and security alliances have been the most common form of coordination of the strategic efforts and military power of the states to cope with threats to national security. However, the preference of governments for military alliances is not the same over time. It changes in relation to systemic causes and pressures.

The aim of allied countries is a defined objective as, for example, either the defense or change of a territorial settlement. But overarching political structures and processes shape cooperation and conflict relations between states at the bilateral and regional level in security affairs. Great powers normally press less powerful countries to conform to the political setting of their design. In other words, the political structure of the global system and world political factors and processes do influence the choices of the states with regard to military power aggregation and alliance formation as well as military power de-aggregation and alliance unmaking even when other objectives are taken as substantive grounds for decision and action.

Here, it is maintained that security cooperation changes in relation to two system factors: great power competition and security culture. Great power competition, i.e. system polarization, influences the military cooperation of states because security alliances are wanted by great powers to either consolidate or change the existing political order. Security culture influences security cooperation because shared values and norms about security, stability and peace determine the preference of national governments for a definite form of military cooperation over others. Therefore, any analysis of security cooperation must pay attention to the state of global power competition and system polarization and the predominant security culture of the system under analysis.

In contemporary world politics, the preference for security cooperation in the form of defense pacts (DP) has not been constant over time (see Figure no. 1 and data in Appendix A). Defense pacts, the most important form of security alliance, are military agreements among governments which pledge to coordinate their defense systems and decide to have some aggregation of their military forces [2] . The number of defense pacts sharply increased in the aftermath of World War II because of the polarization of the system, and decreased ten years later when a growing number of states reacted to the great power pressure for security alignment. In the following years, the number of defense pacts gradually increased but continued to be lower than in the Cold War time.

The number of defense pacts, however, does not accurately reflect the preference of the states for military coordination. Relevant information, instead, is provided by two indexes of defense aggregation: the DP intensity and DP magnitude indexes. The former is the percent number of defense pact members on the total number of the states of the international system (and any group of countries such as a regional system when relevant to the analysis). DP intensity gives an indication of how much popular defense pact coordination is to the governments of a system. The DP magnitude index is the mean size of defense pacts, that is the statistical mean of the number of the states which are members of all the defense pacts of the international system (and any group of countries). It shows the preferred size of coordination (i.e. small and large alliances) and reveals the dominant security culture, i.e. multilateralism and collective security vs. small-sized coalitions consonant with the self-help defense principle of the system of states.

The intensity of defense aggregation has been decreasing quite steadily for the last thirty-five years, signaling both de-polarization of the system and increase of preference of policy-makers for self-help and/or reliance upon other means and institutions rather than defense pacts as the foundation of state security. At the same time, the magnitude of defense pacts doubled after 1955 - i.e. after the end of the most intense period of the Cold War - and did not change much over the following years, signaling the preference for a quite large defense aggregation rather than self-help, especially by the governments that adopt defense coordination as their preferred means of state security. In general terms, this constant value can be attributed to the learning of multilateralism that has been developing over a long-time process. In the post-World War Two period, large military alliances were created in the attempt to create communities of states [3] . The United Nations also played a role helping to re-create the multilateralist security culture that the League of Nations had attempted to do in the period between the two World Wars. Further experiences – like multilateral peacekeeping operations conducted or authorized by the United Nations and the European security and cooperation process known as the Helsinki Process – also help to explain the learning of the multilateralist security culture in the current world system. Lastly, this culture is sustained by security partnership arrangements created at the region level in recent times. However, further research is needed to define the nature of the present-day worldwide multilateralist security culture. In particular, the study of the change of the defense culture of the states on a long time scale can augment knowledge about the evolution of security culture. A world-wide learning process seems unfolding from the epoch of the culture of self-help defense and ad hoc war coalitions, i.e., the time of the origins of the state system and stable diplomacy, passing through the period of the dynastic and marriage coalitions of the 16^th to 18^th centuries and the era of written (bilateral and multilateral) defense pacts of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, up to the present time inclusion of defense pacts in a wider setting such as that represented by regional security partnerships. Further research is needed also on the security culture of individual international regions and the discontinuity and difference between the worldwide security culture and the security culture of the regions of the present world system.

The change of security coordination and the reduction of defense pact intensity are apparent in Europe but with some differences from the world system as a whole (see Figure no. 2 and Appendix B for data). Over the long term, the change of the number of defense pacts in the European region largely conforms to the trend in the world system (see Attinà, forthcoming), but polarity has been stable in Europe for a longer period of time and depolarization did not produce the decrease of defense aggregation in the 1950s as it did in the rest of the world. The decline of the DP intensity index began in the early 1960s in the international system as a whole but in Europe, exit from defense coordination was not an option for the members of the opposite alliances. Defense pact aggregation in Europe abruptly decreased in 1991 with the end of the Warsaw Pact. On the contrary, defense pact magnitude, a rather stable feature of security coordination in contemporary world politics has been larger in Europe than in the world system as a whole after 1955, the year of the end of the real Cold War and the start of the arms control and disarmament talks. Briefly, the time lag of Europe’s change of the DP intensity underlines the system polarization pressure on security cooperation. On the other hand, Europe’s larger size of defense pacts underlines the importance of the security culture factor, which is discussed in the next section.

The practice of security cooperation of the non-European countries of the Mediterranean region is completely different from the European practice. Indeed, the data of the defense pacts of the North Africa countries are not comparable with the defense pact data of the European states (See Appendix C). At the exception of the League of Arab States, which is formally also a defense pact but never acted as that, and the Egypt-Jordan defense pact, the four pacts made by the Non-European countries of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) were cancelled in the 1950s and no defense pact was signed in the following years. A number of ententes were made by Med-countries but no neutrality pact. Therefore, no data analysis is possible regarding the non-European EMP countries

The difference between European and non-European EMP’s countries in defense cooperation is here explained with the nature of the security culture of the two groups of countries on the assumption that system polarization equally affected the two groups of countries.

Perception of security problems and management of external security relations depend on the views of the political leaders and the culture of the country. In the present analysis, the concept of security culture is used to explain the security policies and decisions of states as intrinsically influenced by their recent past experience in dealing with security problems. This experience shapes the government preference for certain security instruments (or combinations of instruments) rather than others that are also available. This analysis is not focused on “beliefs, traditions, attitudes and symbols” [4] but assumes that recent past experience and beliefs, traditions, attitudes and symbols are intimately related and shape the country’s security culture.

Recent studies provide evidence of security cultures common to the countries of individual geo-political areas (Adler and Barnett, 1998; Kacovicz, 1998; Solingen, 1998; also Singer and Wildavsky, 1993). A specific security culture is also an attribute of the international system as the majority of the political elites of the world share experiences and beliefs on security, stability and peace. International law, the United Nations and the world conferences for arms control and conflict issues are the institutions for the construction of the world security culture. National and international diplomatic services, epistemic communities, strategy experts, academics and political leaders are the agents of the formation and diffusion of the world security culture. Security cultures of states and regions interact and change over time under the influence of these institutions and agents and of new ideas, practices and experiences. Some traits of an individual regional security culture can be valued by the leaders of other regions and transferred from one area to another in as much as states recognize that they are tackled by similar security problems and governments acknowledge that some security mechanisms can be imported from other contexts where they have been tested to positive effect.

The security cultures of the European and Arab countries are shortly analyzed here as two separate social entities that influence the present state and future prospects of security cooperation in the Mediterranean [5] . Two qualifications of the analysis are in order here. First, both cultures are under the effect of the worldwide security culture and, for this reason, an extent of convergence of the two cultures can be reasonably expected. Second, the security cultures of states belonging to the same group are to some extent different from one another but this difference is left aside because intra-group difference is much smaller than the difference with external countries.

The European security culture. The present security culture of the European countries is based on three recent experiences:

1.      the nuclear deterrence strategy and arms control negotiations of the Cold War and détente times;

2.      the Helsinki Process with the three-decade long elaboration of ideas and mechanisms of comprehensive and cooperative security;

3.      the recent national and multilateral defense policies made to react to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to countries and non-state actors insensitive of the conventional logic of military strategy.

(1) European policy-makers focused on arms control to stabilize East-West confrontation, halt nuclear arms race and, above all, reduce the risk of nuclear war between the opposite blocs of the European countries that was contained in the deterrence strategy. The positive conclusion of all important arms control negotiations convinced the Europeans that security negotiations are a valuable management tool for reducing the risk of violence between rival countries and a good instrument for creating an extent of common socialization of the people responsible for international security relations in different countries. Analysts attributed the positive conclusion of those negotiations to a large extent to the meetings and conferences of the so-called arms control community (Krause and Latham, 1999). This network of scientists, professionals and experts of the two blocs was the agent of the interaction and dialogue that promoted the development of common meanings, innovative ideas, and cooperative solutions essential to construct the regional security system (Adler, 1998). Arm control community was so much appreciated that was replicated in the Helsinki and Barcelona Process negotiations. Adler coined the term “seminar diplomacy” with regard to the former Process (Adler, 1998: 138-142) because the expert meetings were modeled after university seminars. “Expert networks” is the term currently used to name the same practice in the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership.

(2) For the first time in history, the right of the sovereign state to secrecy in military affairs was circumvented when verification measures aimed at increasing the effectiveness of arms control agreements were invented by the Cold War arms control negotiators. The superpower governments agreed on the principle that arms control treaties are useless without appropriate measures of publicity and transparency that are needed to reduce uncertainty about the enemy’s compliance with the agreed norms. The East and West European governments acknowledged so much this principle that the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) developed the principle in the wider concept of confidence building measures (CBMs) aimed at avoiding misperceptions and make military intentions explicit. They came to believe also that CBMs are the essential element of any project of regional security (Darileck, 2000).

The early CSCE view of the CBMs included only voluntary notifications of military activities and forms of voluntary transparency, like the presence of foreign observers to military maneuvers and reciprocal visits of military personnel. In the 1992 “Vienna Document” of the CSCE, instead, CBMs were taken as compulsory instrument of the European security system. Military information and personnel exchanges were designed to regulate by mutual consent various aspects of military power, such as size, technical composition and operational practices of the national armed forces.

CBMs caused the transformation of the security relations of the countries involved in the mechanism. The European realpolitik tradition was modified to include the new concept of security as the product of mutual confidence and dialogue between enemies. Briefly, the co-operative multilateral approach was acknowledged as more efficacious than national threats, unilateral approaches and opposed strategic power systems to attain peace and security at the region level.

Given that both the Soviet and Western countries accepted the ideas of arms control and security measures, the Europeans were disposed to believe that difference of political culture and values is not an obstacle to the construction of regional projects of security built on the principle and mechanisms of co-operative security. In addition, the arms control and CSCE experiences caused the Europeans to believe that quite fast process of security culture change is possible in the contemporary world [6] .

The CSCE/OCSE security model is responsible also for the introduction of the concept of comprehensive security in the European security culture. This concept focuses on the non-military aspects of security especially in the contemporary world. It includes economic, environmental, political and human factors within the group of the factors essential to build international security. In particular, the rationale of the political and human dimension is that peaceful international relations depend on the domestic conditions of all the countries concerned. These conditions include justice and the rule of law, democracy and pluralism, human and minority rights, free and autonomous civil society, individual freedom, and market economy. Acceptance of comprehensive security by the people and governments of Eastern and Central Europe was facilitated by the crisis of communism, increasingly manifest over the years of the Helsinki Process.

Briefly, in the early 1990s, the European countries were the first group of countries to opt for a regional security partnership founded on the culture of comprehensive and co-operative security to avoid the destructiveness of contemporary international and internal wars in the region. Furthermore, they did not exclude the possibility of constructing the same security arrangement in other parts of the world. In fact, the 1995 Barcelona Declaration committed EU countries and the Mediterranean partners to work for building a Euro-Mediterranean security system with similar attributes.

(3) However, over the 1990s, the European governments recognized that some aggressive and irrational countries within the European borders, like the Serbian Yugoslavia Federation, and at short distance from Europe, like Libya, were unreceptive of the cooperative mechanisms. For this reason, without denouncing the European security model, they started a “new discourse of threat and danger” (Krause and Latham, 1999: 39). This discourse considers the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism as the principal threat to international security and, consequently, proposes Euro-Atlantic strategic preponderance as the condition for international stability and peace.

To summarize this short description of the European security culture, it can be said that this culture will have the present double-sided form and combine the concepts of co-operative and comprehensive security with the discourse of the new threats and dangers as long as an arms control culture will not gain again over the proliferation of WMD at the global level and the regional security partnership model will be firmly introduced in other regions of the world,

The Arab security culture. Strong cultural, linguistic and religious factors link the Middle East and North Africa Arab people across state borders. For this reason, the Arab leaders always exhibit support for the security of the Arab people as the security of a single nation. However, Arab governments are also very much concerned with threats to the stability of domestic regimes and the security of the elite in power. For this reason, they also manifest preoccupation for Arab trans-national movements as cause of insecurity for their country’s political order. Indeed, the security culture of contemporary Arab countries is founded on two distinct views: the Arab nation view, which advocates for an Arab trans-state community as the building block of peace and security in the area, and the view of the society of Arab states, which believes in friendly relations between the Arab states as both foundation of security in the Arab world and condition for protecting the individual Arab country against external interference.

It must be added that, in the recent past, internal problems and the international environment have negatively influenced the Arab views on international security. Domestic problems like regime stability, national cohesion and economic performance negatively influenced the Arab nation approach. At the same time, the Arab-Israeli conflict and inter-Arab state conflicts (as between Iraq and Syria, Egypt and Sudan, Algeria and Morocco) played against the society of Arab states approach. In addition, Cold War competition in the region seized many internal and international political processes and caused the consolidation of authoritarian domestic regimes and adversarial international politics because the Soviet Union and Western states provided their ‘clients’ with direct support including financial resources and armaments.

The end of the Cold War and bipolar international politics did not change very much the problems of the contrasting sides of the security culture of the Arab countries but reinforced the culture of national power. In fact, social and economic problems and the policy-makers’ perception of threat to their regime strengthened the national security views of the leaders. At the same time, territorial disputes and the power structure of the area conditioned the international security views of the countries of the region. The Arab view on territorial issues as the principal obstacle to security is mostly influenced by the Israeli problem. To the Arabs, Israel is the most intrusive, aggressive and expansionist state, non-respectful of Arab states’ sovereignty and territorial integrity. Strategic parity is considered the minimal condition to get security with respect to Israel. Therefore, the state-security culture of the Arabs has been strengthened over other views of region-security arrangements.

However, in the 1990s, two views contrasting with the two mentioned views came to the front. The Arab leaders’ belief in strong military power as the key to solve the security dilemma of state and society has been contrasted by the growing concern of the people for issues different from state/regime security. New views of Arab security manifested against regime stability and the policy of diverting financial resources from domestic projects to national military force. A reformist view of Arab security developed in North Africa characterized by a strong orientation toward domestic issues, emphasis on civil society security, achievement of better conditions of life and the need for economic reforms in agreement with the traditions of the Arab culture and Islamic religion. But the largest critical movement against the status quo discourse of domestic politics is the Islamist view. It is constructed around a radical conception of the security needs of the Islamic countries. Strong emphasis on religion and culture identity makes the Islamists concerned with the external threat of the non-Islamic world and the internal enemies of un-Islamic groups. Some Islamist movements engage in violent actions; others use non-violent means. All of them criticize the state for failing to meet the socio-economic needs of the society and the aspiration to turn down external influence and intervention. 

Briefly, security cooperation at the regional level seems unfamiliar to the present Arab security culture. Building regional security through co-operative means creates strong suspicions in governments attached to national military power and the traditional view of state strategic secrecy. The Arab countries never practiced co-operative security mechanisms as the European countries did in the Helsinki Process. Also comprehensive security is a suspicious concept to Arab political elite and policy-makers. The environmental and economic dimension of security is, in principle, an acceptable concept but, in practice, is viewed as a form of external interference in national sovereignty. The human and political dimension of comprehensive security strategy is like smoke in the eyes of the Arab policy-makers. They consider the human and political measures to enhance state and region security as true violation of the Arab political order.

In conclusion, two different pictures of the European and Arab security cultures can be drawn from the analysis of present trends. Both of them include contrasting aspects but the European is more inclined towards regional security partnership than the Arab one. For the past hundred years or so, in Europe and the Western world, liberal idealism and pragmatic realism were the prevailing cultural and political approaches to solve international problems. The failure of the earliest disarmament conferences, non-aggression pacts and the League of Nations, all inspired by liberal idealism, caused the realist policy of containment and the opposite military alliance system of Cold War Europe. Subsequently, the positive results of the negotiations between the opposite alliances paved the way for change while the introduction of new perspectives on international security at the regional level was implanted in the traditional realist view of security. Pluralism is present also in the security culture of the Arab Mediterranean countries. The Arab community culture and the national power paradigm pertain to contemporary Arab countries both for tradition and recent experience. But Arab countries never practiced any form of common management of regional security problems by multilateral institutions. For this reason, the distance between the two security cultures is wide and difficult to reduce in a short time by the diplomats and experts effort to develop a peace and stability accord in the frame of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership.

The Barcelona Process was constructed on the belief that global problems and the growing interdependence between the countries of the area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea had important effects on their relationship. European governments worried about the deterioration of the state of security in the area and recognized that no-action would make the problems worsening at a fast rate and carries out new problems. Reacting to the ineffective programs of the past, the European Commission proposed a wide-range framework of initiatives and programs in the field of economy, finance, society, culture, politics and security. This proposal became the 1995 Barcelona Declaration with the annexed Work Program. The program, named as the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), was developed in the subsequent years by conferences and meetings of government representatives and experts aimed at implementing the EMP’s goals: namely prosperity, peace and stability in the Mediterranean area.

According to the EMP approach, security is both the overall effect of the multidimensional strategy of the Partnership as defined in the three Barcelona Declaration Chapters (on Politics and Security Affairs; Economic and Financial Affairs; and Human, Social and Cultural Affairs) and the object of specific initiatives within the 1^st Chapter frame.

After some years of inaction on the Politics and Security Affairs Chapter, the signature of a Stability Charter for the Mediterranean was proposed. The aim of the proposal was to draw the countries of the Mediterranean towards a regional security system designed on the European security partnership model. It is worth to mention that the French Prime Minister, Eduard Balladur, had already taken to a positive end his 1993 project of issuing the Stability Pact for Europe. Balladur’s aim was to declare the solemn commitment of all the governments of post-Cold War Europe to political stability and abstention from war to solve conflicts and disputes over border, territory and national minority problems. Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union countries welcomed the Balladur’s Pact to manifest compliance to Western values and commitment to become reliable partners and, hopefully, members of the European Union. The negotiation successfully ended in the 1995 signature of the Pact that was passed to the OSCE for implementation. The real consequence of the Stability Pact on the international politics of Europe was not impressive. Also its symbolic value was a short-lived one. Very soon, few were aware of the existence of the Pact. However, it was believed that the commitment of the European and Mediterranean governments to a Pact alike was appropriate to foster security also in the post-Cold War Mediterranean region. In particular, anchoring peace to political stability was believed to be a priority also in the Mediterranean area. But, very soon, it was understood that the Mediterranean governments had divergent perceptions of threats and challenges to political stability. Nonetheless, an agreement was reached about starting negotiations on the Euro-Mediterranean Charter for Peace and Stability at the level of Senior Officials and experts.

On April 1999, the Stuttgart EMP Ministerial Conference made public the state of the process. It was recognized that a strict legal conception of the advocated Charter was not on agenda but a document committing the partners to political dialogue, evolutionary and progressive development of partnership-building measures, good-neighborly relations, regional cooperation and preventive diplomacy. The Stuttgart Conclusions included the Ministries’ commitment to endow the Charter with the “appropriate decision-making mechanisms” to make all decisions by consensus. “Guidelines for Elaborating a Euro-Mediterranean Charter” were annexed to the conference Conclusions assigning to the EMP Group of Senior Officials the task of working out a comprehensive schedule including additional ad hoc meetings in order to complete the elaboration of the Charter by the successive Ministerial Conference. In addition, the Euro-Med Ministers welcomed the initiatives aimed at exchanging information on the signature and ratification of international instruments in the fields of disarmament and arms control, terrorism, human rights, and international humanitarian law. They also underlined the importance of developing partnership-building measures [7] , like the establishment of a Euro-Med system of disaster prevention, mitigation and management. But, since the Stuttgart Ministerial Conference no real progress has been made. On the contrary, the Charter eventually disappeared from the EMP agenda as no mention of the negotiation was made in the 2001 Marseille Ministerial Conference Conclusions. The Charter project came to the surface again in the Work Program approved at the April 2002, Euro-Med Foreign Ministers Conference in Valencia (as mentioned in the first section of this paper) but its closing date is hard to forecast at the moment.

It is worth to mention that the negotiation on the Charter is not the only multilateral initiative for creating a security arrangement in the Mediterranean. The OSCE and, especially, NATO dialogue initiatives are of importance. In 1994, OSCE decided to establish an informal contact group with experts from Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia with the aim of sharing information on confidence-building measures with the representatives of these countries. Starting in 1995, annual seminars were organized by the OSCE and individual Mediterranean country [8] . In 1995, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia accepted NATO’s proposal to open direct dialogue with a view to achieve better mutual understanding and foster the process of regional stabilization. Later, it was agreed to hold the Dialogue session twice a year and focus the agenda on exchange of information and technical assistance in the area of civil emergency planning. The military dimension of the Mediterranean Dialogue included observation visits of officials of the Six non-NATO members to NATO exercises and military bodies, exchange of staff officers and port visits to Dialogue Countries by NATO’s naval forces. Except for seminars, conferences and other information sessions, the dialogue has been strictly bilateral, that is between NATO and the single dialogue country. In addition, in July 1997, NATO decided to create the Mediterranean Co-operation Group, a forum for political discussions on Mediterranean security issues between Alliance members.

These initiatives and the importance of the military presence of the United States in the Mediterranean area signal the need of taking into consideration the problem of including external actors in the negotiation on the Mediterranean security partnership. This problem is not on the official agenda of the negotiation between the EMP countries. But, the European and East Asia/Pacific security partnerships demonstrate the importance of including external actors and the United States as partners. 

Failure to reach the agreement on the content and signature of the Charter is mostly attributed to the worsening of the Middle East conflict. Undoubtedly, the Arab perception of the role of European states in the Middle East conflict as unbalanced towards Israel is a strong obstacle to the construction and signature of the Charter. However, the above short presentation of the security culture of the Arab states points also to other reasons as obstacles to the rapid conclusion of negotiations between the Euro-Mediterranean partners on security cooperation and the signature of the Charter as the first operative agreement of the Mediterranean security partnership. For this reason, agreements on partnership-building, conflict prevention, early warning and preventive diplomacy measures – which are proposed by some excellent studies (as, for example, Aliboni, Guazzone, Pioppi, 2001; Biad, 1999; Spencer, 1999) – seems feasible only on a later stage of the building of the Mediterranean security partnership. Research and political initiatives aimed at reducing the gap between the two security cultures should be considered as priority task of diplomats and security experts engaged in the project in order to form the consensus on which the regional security partnership is set up. In fact, the European approach to the Mediterranean agreement of security partnership challenges the Arab security culture that is currently centered on self-help and national military power. Moreover, the double nature of the partnership security strategy (i.e. the co-operative and comprehensive dimension) is difficult to accept to Arab policy-makers. The Arab elite does not deny the benefits of good relations and economic co-operation with Europe, but the conditional requirements posed by the European Union to socio-economic and political adaptation and to military and strategic transparency cause strong resistance.

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Appendix B

Defense pacts in Europe, 1945-1999

Appendix C: Defense pacts of the EMP countries, 1945-1999