Can Security Be Enhanced Through the Construction of a Mediterranian Region?

Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford

Culture and identity are the kernel of the world's most intricate security problems. But to what extent are they components of a solution to those problems? How can culture and identity contribute to peace? Increasingly, both analysts and politicians associate regional security with regional integration and the development of regional identities and a common political culture. To explore the security-enhancing role of culture and identity as an integral part of regional integration, this project analyzes the process of constructing a "Mediterranean Region." It combines documentation of this process with a policy analysis that will build on an interdisciplinary, transnational, "track-two diplomacy"-type, long-standing seminar on Mediterranean regional integration.

The Mediterranean is arguably the world's most volatile region. In the area that ties together southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, the cultural cleavages between the West and Islam and the economic gap between the North and the South collide. This collision exposes the central threats of the post-Cold War era: religious fundamentalism, nuclear proliferation, international terrorism, migration, the drug trade, and interstate military conflict. The task of bridging these cleavages in the Mediterranean is urgent and long overdue.

In recent years, in fact, concerted bridge-building efforts have begun. The European Council Summit of June 1992 recognized for the first time that "The southern and eastern shores of Mediterranean and the Middle East are both areas of interest to the Union, in terms of security and social stability." Indeed, with the Cold War's end and Germany's achievement of unity and sovereignty, France feared that Europe would drift eastward; the EMP would help achieve a new power balance between France and Germany (Weinber, 1999). And the wars of Yugoslav succession reminded Europeans that the post-war peace on the continent could again be threatened. The EU longed to be an actor on the world stage, and, at the very least, a regional hegemon (Nicolaidas 1999). In November, 1995, the Spanish presidency of the EU organized a conference in Barcelona, with the 15 members of the EU and 12 countries of the South Mediterranean. The outcome was the Barcelona Declaration or Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) Initiative. Backed by the largest EU financial commitment ever made outside the Union, the Declaration launched a set of economic, political, cultural, and social initiatives, intended to reinforce one another in an open-ended process of regional integration. The stated purpose of this process was to extend southward the European area of stability. It relied on the notion of "partnership" to signal the intent to create more interdependence between the EU and non-EU Mediterranean countries, to create a multilateral framework of relations, and to thereby create a Mediterranean "region."

It is this self-conscious effort to construct a "region" in this explosive area of the world that we find most intriguing: the intent is to create "regional" interests and identities that transcend national boundaries. The Barcelona Declaration explicitly uses the language of community building to express its goals. The designers of EMP subscribe to the haunting idea that the best way to achieve security, political stability and economic welfare in the Mediterranean is neither by an elaborate system of alliances, collective security systems, or mere functional economic integration schemes. Rather, participants believe that security will be achieved by inventing a region that pools its resources and offers a shared social identity.

In proposing to study the EMP, we propose to study the birth and evolution of a new international practice and the conditions under which that practice will succeed or fail. Can the EMP process bridge the gaps between the West and Islam, North and South? Can a regional "identity" and culture—transcending national identities and cultures—be consciously constructed? And if so, to what extent does the construction of a Mediterranean region ensure stability and prosperity?

The EMP process can be considered a "hard case" of regional integration for three reasons. First, because cultural differences and economic inequalities in the Mediterranean are so explosive, the integration process will be much more difficult than the process of European integration or even integration in the Asia-Pacific region, where national cultural differences are smaller and less volatile. This instability is exacerbated by the exclusion from the process of the "outer ring" (Solingen 1999) of states facing the same explosive dilemmas surrounding (and even inside) the region: Lybia, Iraq, Sudan, and Iran.

Secondly, the social engineering inherent in the EMP process will make it difficult for participants to claim legitimacy at home for the region that they create. In Northern Africa and the Middle East, poor and predominantly Islamic states, are deeply suspicious of Western attempts to impose on them "a regional identity." Many believe that Western security concerns are unjustified and view the attempt at "region-building" as threatening neocolonial machinations. The last time that the Mediterranean was united as a region was as the "Mare Nostrom" under the Roman Empire. A forced common culture can only exacerbate conflict.

Third, many of these states are torn by internal schisms and blurred territorial definitions. Their very existence is tenuous, and their own national identities are uncertain. It is questionable whether, without a secure national identity, these states will be able to assume the regional identity believed to be necessary for regional security. Finally, conventional wisdom suggests that the fate of the EMP process is tied to the fate of the Middle East peace process. Indeed, Israeli-Palestinian bickering disrupted the 1997 EMP meeting in Malta. Since the EMP's inception in 1995, the Middle East peace process has been halting and uncertain. It is widely believed that the EMP process will always lag behind, and will even be shelved if the peace process stagnates.

Nonetheless, both despite the fact that this is a "hard case" of regional integration and because of that fact, it is an important and unprecedented one. For precisely the reasons noted above, it is our expectation that if regional integration is achieved in the Mediterranean, it will not follow the European model. It is likely to be constructed in such a way that it can neither be mistaken for a Northern economic hegemonic design nor for an attempt on the part of Southern states to impose a new economic order on their Northern "partners." We suspect that in order to invent the Mediterranean region, participants will need to both invent and to reinvent themselves. And when the various regional actors have developed a culture of dissent without having to resort to violence in the Mediterranean, they will have built a stable Mediterranean culture with its multiple identities and beliefs.Other empirical cases of integration, such as Southeast Asia (ASEAN) suggest that such a development is necessary: political elites have begun to change the way they understand security and their concept of "home" (Acharya, 1993; Mack and Kerr, 1995). And they are discovering that it has become imperative to their security and welfare to "co-bind" (Deudney, 1996) their destinies into larger political entities that do not come at the expense of their existing cultural identities and allegiances.

Furthermore, we would advance the counterintuitive expectation that the fate of the Middle East peace process is tied to the fate of the development of a Mediterranean region, and not the other way around. National, transnational, and international actors and organizations around the Mediterranean sea, empowerd by the EMP initiative, have continued to lay the foundations of dense social networks that we believe are necessary for the development of a "region." If they continue to grow, we suspect that the EMP will begin to cast a shadow on the Middle East conflict, and that political pressures or even calls for international intervention to end the conflict will increase. Indeed, the EMP process might even be used to pressure Middle Eastern states to put an end to the conflict. Despite stagnation in the peace process and the failure of Syria and Lebanon to exclude Israel from the EMP process, Arab states remained in the negotiations and meetings (Weinber, 1999).

New theoretical perspectives on the role of culture, identity, and social communication in international relations suggest that the EMP process may be an important case of international change (Adler and Barnett, 1998; Katzenstein, 1996; Finnemore, 1996). This literature suggests that cultural and normative factors are critical to the development of international cooperation. Moreover, peaceful change may depend on the development of mutual trust and shared identities. These may develop through transactions, socialization processes, and common institutional developments. Furthermore, socio-cognitive perspectives of International Relations are pointing to the fact that states' interests and their sense of security are relative and dependent on their identities (Wendt, 1994)). The definition of an actor's identity ("we") is always in reference to another actor ("them"), and this need for an identity defined in opposition can lead to conflict (Mercer, 1995). As new regions are created and existing regions enlarged, a new "we" is created. A common identity can ease negotiations and compromises among conflicting interests, provide a basis for shared interests, and thus create a more solid basis for political stability. New social identities are constructed around commonly agreed attributes, norms, and principles of legitimate behavior. The identification of shared identities and mutual interests can thus replace threat perceptions. "Talk-shops" and confidence-building measures, widely practiced by the OSCE, NATO's Partnership for Peace, and a variety of Asian institutions, are strategic interactions aimed at creating an environment that can lead to the creation of shared meanings, social reality, and mutual trust.

This approach to security is consistent with a "social communication" theory. This theory suggests that a regional social identity does not emerge from the convergence of preexisting actors' interests but through conceptual bargaining and argumentative consensus. It arises from active persuasion and socialization rather than solely from instrumental bargaining and the exchange of fixed interests (Deutsch et al., 1957; Habermas, 1984). Instrumental agreements are not unimportant, however. Given certain conditions that require specification, they may become preconditions for deeper processes of social communication and the internalization of norms.

Moreover, transnational social identities develop around "constitutive" values and norms (Kratochwil, 1989). These norms provide guidelines that instill the belief that people across borders inhabit a single region where, being at home, they can feel safe. In such cognitive regions (Adler, 1997) people can imagine that they share their destiny with people of other nations, who happen to share their values and expectations of proper action in domestic and international affairs. Karl Deutsch called these regions, security communities, in which integration leads to a "real assurance that the members of that community will not fight each other physically, but will settle their disputes in some other way" (Deutsch et al., 1957: 5). While we do not expect the development of a Mediterranean security community any time soon, the EMP and related Mediterranean activities are nonetheless driven by a conception of regional security, that is consistent with the development of security communities. This security community perspective suggests that where such communities develop, security becomes less identified with balance, and more closely associated with establishing a community in one's neighborhood. State security, in short, becomes a function of belonging to a region where actors share social identities and trust.

Security communities, however, do not develop spontaneously; they are actively promoted by regional international and transnational institutions. Security-community—building institutions use material resources (and expectations of increased welfare and security in the future) and normative concepts of proper and legitimate domestic and international behavior (democracy, human rights, sustainable development, "the Asian way to development," etc.) to "socially construct" transnational identities.

The project has three short-term goals. First it will document the process of social engineering of the Mediterranean region. We expect that the process will involve national, international, and transnational interactions. Second, the project interpret those interactions and assess both the opportunities and constraints facing the regional community-building process. Third, the project will offer policy prescriptions: In addition to basing these prescriptions on documentation and interpretation, we will look to models and linkage strategies. What is the best "model" for the construction of a Mediterranean region? When should Mediterranean "community entrepreneurs" look toward Europe? When should they look to other regional groupings such as ASEAN? Is any regional model appropriate to community building in this region? Finally, we incorporate an analysis of the most long-standing violent conflict in the region. How can the Middle East Peace Process be linked to this process of region-building? The creation of the European Community was in many ways an effort to get France and Germany to bury the hatchet once and for all; how can the construction of a Mediterranean region help stabilize Arab-Israeli relations?

This project's long-term goal is the institutionalization of a long-standing seminar, modeled after the seminar that met for several decades between the superpowers on nuclear arms control. This seminar, which would include a mixture of academic experts from a variety of disciplines as well as national, international, and transnational political actors from around the Mediterranean, will meet regularly to discuss issues and problems concerning the EMP. It will also serve as a bridge between academicians and politicians and will create bridges between the civil societies of the countries involved.

1. Hold several interdisciplinary academic conferences on the construction of the Mediterranean region
2. Supervise and edit several books and academic articles on the subject
3. Organize and supervise the holding of a long-standing "Mediterranean Seminar."

1. A history of region building efforts in the Mediterranean
2. The social construction of a collective Mediterranean identity and the areas and attributes around which this identity could develop
3. Dimensions of culture that promote and constrain the development of a regional identity
4. The development of emerging EMP directed economic, social, and cultural transactions and their impact on region-building, 50 region-building in comparative perspective.

Tentative book outlines are presented in the Appendix. The authors will present these papers at a second conference, to take place in Malta in 2001. We subsequently will edit a book on the basis of these papers.

Part I: Intro and History

• Ch. 1. Theoretical Background (us)
• Ch 2. A History of the Euro-Med Process (??)
• Ch.3. Culture, Civilizations, and Regions: The Mediterranean Region in Broad Historical Perspective (Bassam)

Part II: Mediterranean Culture?

• Ch.4-5. The Development of the Myth of a Mediterranean Culture. Northern and Southern Perspectives (Thierry, ??)
• Ch.6-7. Perceptions of the Mediterranean: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (???)
• Ch.8. How Med. Cultural Meanings Help Constitute National Interests and Policies in Med. Countries? (???)
• Ch.9. Dimensions of Culture that Promote and Constrain the Development of a Med. Culture (Heper)

Part III: New Emerging Practices in the Med. Region

• Ch. 10. Economic Practices (Alfred)
• Ch..11. Security Practices (Kalypso)
• Ch.12. Political Practices (Solingen)
• Ch.13. Cultural Practices: Basket III (Marquina?)

Part IV: Great Power and Policy Prescriptions

• Ch.14. Great Powers (mainly the US, Germany, Russia) and the Med. Region (Attina)
• Ch.15. Policy Prescriptions (collective?)
• Ch. 16. Seminar Diplomacy in the Med Region: Setting the Med Seminar (us?)

Part V: Conclusions

• Ch. 17. Region Building in Comparative Perspective (Steph?)
• Ch. 18. Conclusions (us)

In the project's second stage, which will depend on additional funding, we intend to launch the Mediterranean Seminar, which will meet, intermittently, in Florence, Italy, Cairo, and Jerusalem. Attending the seminar will be high level practitioners, journalists, and scholars who will systematically discuss the constraints and opportunities facing the construction of a Mediterranean region. These meetings will last 3-5 years. The input of this long-standing seminar, as well as the written products of two additional conferences, will serve as the basis for at least two additional books on the Mediterranean region. The first book will offer detailed and specific studies about functional areas and their contribution to the creation of a Mediterranean culture or cultures and a shared identity. The second book, which we will write once the last stage of the project has been finished, will summarize, and report on, the project's (and the long-standing Mediterranean Seminar's) major findings.