Report: EU and Mideast

Today the Arab League and the European Union (EU) open a joint liaison office in Malta, that small but strategically important island at the center of the Mediterranean and which for centuries was on the front line between the Muslim and Christian worlds, between North Africa and the Middle East on one side and Europe on the other.

The opening is a small step in an extremely important journey for both organizations and both parts of the world, especially now with the EU on the brink of a new phase of its development under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty and the appointment of a “president� and a full-time minister and ministry running a unified European foreign policy. The treaty is expected to come into force by the end of the year after Irish voters finally approved it in a second referendum and Poland ratified it last Friday. Despite last-minute stalling, it is thought the Czech Republic will ratify it shortly.

Dialogue between Arabs and Europeans is not some pleasant intellectual but ultimately meaningless affair. It is going to have real, hard consequences — political as well as economic. The EU is after all the Arab world’s main trading partner — by a long shot; that goes for Saudi Arabia too. But Arabs have so long seen Europe as a cultural concept rather than a political one and still think of trade and political relationships as being with Germany, with France, with the UK and the other EU members. These are compared to trade and relationships with the United States, with China, with Japan and others. The comparison, certainly when it comes to trade, makes them seem less important.

That will is bound to change for GCC members of the Arab League when plans for a free trade agreement between the EU and the GCC come into effect — although they are still some way off. But it is in politics that significant developments will be seen for all 22 members of the Arab League and the 27 members of the EU. That is where the two organizations most clearly overlap. Areas of cooperation were highlighted in the “Malta Communiqué� last year at the end of an Arab League-EU foreign ministers’ meeting on the island under the co-chairmanship of the Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal and the foreign ministers of Malta and Slovenia (the latter at the time holding the rotating European presidency). There were collaboration on political and economic development, climate change, security and terrorism, cultural dialogue and, perhaps most important of all, regional affairs — specifically Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.

On these last four, European words and action have till now been of little consequence. It is the French or British views or those of other individual EU members that have mattered because within the EU foreign policy has been nationally driven. That is going to change as the EU starts to speak with one voice on foreign policy and has the economic clout to make its views felt.

From an Arab perspective, that is going to make the new office in Malta quite important.