Brussels, 17/09/2007 (Agence Europe) - Béatrice Patrie, French Socialist MEP, president of the European Parliament delegation for cooperation with Mashraq countries, and a member of the EuroMed Parliamentary Assembly (APEM) is providing active support to the Mediterranean Union (MU) project launched by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Patrie believes that the Barcelona process provides a gloomy balance sheet and is asking, contrary to her political group and other political families at the European Parliament (including the EPP), whether the idea of having a Mediterranean Union should not be examined - if it proceeds with a radically different logic. In a text on her website she says they should not settle for obliging speeches on Europe's good intentions in the Mediterranean, or for cautious speechifying from everybody when the Euro-Mediterranean project has not fulfilled all the promises it created. Patrie says that additional enlargements to the non-declared objective of the EuroMed process, that of “responding to Europe's security fears” (“which would significantly undermine the credibility of the loyalty underpinning the partnership”) have made the Barcelona process meaningless. “The centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, together with the geo-political intricacies, has thrown the Barcelona process under a sheet of ice”.
Ms Patrie also affirmed that the MU needs ambitious targets “that are almost utopian, like the project of the founding fathers of Europe”. She suggests, however, limiting the MU, initially, to a “founding hardcore” with whom “stronger political integration than Euro-Mediterranean partnership” can be created. This would cover northern and southern neighbouring Mediterranean countries, as well as countries in North Africa, Turkey and Egypt.
In economic terms, Patrie explains that it is necessary to rethink the question of development and the setting up a free trade zone by 2010, which she believes is quite unlikely. She says that it would also be good if the MU concerned itself with re-investment and the financial fruits of immigration. Patrie says that setting up a consignments and loans fund, guaranteeing these flows, is indispensable. She concludes that France has the “historic legitimacy for being the driving force of this Union, together with its European partners”. (fb)