Brussels, 30/04/2015 (Agence Europe) - Algeria is the only neighbouring country in the region not to have yet concluded an action plan with the European Union. It has come late to the European neighbourhood policy (ENP) that the EU is now proposing in order to adapt to new urgent issues - immigration, security, growing energy needs, and budgetary rigour (see EUROPE 11290 and 11292).
A cautious change has begun - but not without reservations or domestic debate. The subject is no longer taboo, and nor is that of opening up Algeria's market (which is 96% dependent on sales of hydrocarbons and imports heavily). This liberalisation is under negotiation both with Brussels and the WTO (see EUROPE 11290 and 11292) and the need to reform Algeria's economy is deemed of the utmost importance both by Algiers and by Brussels. Indeed the need is reiterated by the EU at every opportunity. Algiers seems to be taking the consultations on the ENP as the chance to accelerate the approach it had already taken and to address its current decline in revenues (see EUROPE 11293).
For three or four years now, Algeria has toned down its reluctance with regard to Europe and more generally with regard to the European regional policy in the Mediterranean. It seems more willing to step up its cooperation, but its own capacity for reform is not fully convincing (including domestically) - as witnessed by Halim Benatallah, a former senior Algerian diplomat who was ambassador to Brussels and then secretary of state.
Questioned by EUROPE, Benatallah affirms his initial observation. “The ENP and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) have led to failure”. The approach resembled “a sort of mille feuilles in which the layers - association agreements, ENP and UfM - were put on top of each other but badly separated”, he said. “It was difficult to find the right direction in this maze. The added value of this subtle complexity was neither hard-hitting nor convincing. It has crumbled under the pressure of events”, he said. In Benatallah's view, the problem is “the pace of political changes”. “The Barcelona process, which was buried for the benefit of unworkable unilateral approaches, had - despite it weaknesses - the merit of being based on a shared vision which should have served to initiate a strategy. It was then erased by the ENP, which diluted it in a wider geopolitical package. The region lost the priority nature of it”, Benatallah added.
In Benatallah's view, the ENP was only “a fiction and not a strategic vision, (…) an unidentified object, which only served to answer one-off expectations focused on European priorities”. “The dynamic of north-south and south-south collaboration was broken by the unilateralism of the ENP and by paternalism in the conduct of UfM affairs. The presence of a co-pilot from the south gave a sense of appropriation. This only made the UfM a hybrid body born of precarious compromises from the Marseille ministerial conference [Ed: in November 2008] without any hold on reality”, Benatallah criticised. The proof is that “neither the EU nor its member states were able to perceive the changes in the region or accompany them”.
Benatallah stated that “distrust is back”. “Libya and Syria, which were put under pressure a short while ago to join the partnership, ended up being the subject of armed intervention by the same European partners. The human rights approach, the offer of sharing common values or the dialogue of cultures, for example, came out of it all discredited”, he said.
In Benatallah's view, the EU “should no longer think in isolation about adjustments or be happy with changing the packaging under the pretext of the difficulty of intra-European consensus. In order to get out of this, the conditions of a new structured dialogue must be met with a view to defining a common Mediterranean policy and a specific framework and co-financing”.
Algeria, which bears “weight and has a role in the region that would fully justify a distinct partnership, can feed a higher ambition than being a simple 'partner-student'”, Benatallah stated. He concluded that “the reforms that were started in order to be liberated from dependence on hydrocarbons and to modernise its businesses (like with regard to the association agreement with the EU and WTO accession) have sadly taken second place. The priority is now for political stability in order to diminish the effects of the upheavals in the region. Rather than working on an action plan under a European policy, which is itself being questioned, Algeria should perhaps, itself, formulate its own policy in the direction of the north and of the south, in its sub-regional environment - especially the Sahelian region - and equip it with instruments for action”. (Fathi B'Chir)