Special Features

The one clear lesson that Europeans have learnt from post-war history is that we have succeeded in preserving peace and generating prosperity by forging partnerships and building a common and free market. These successes are linked to the development of a novel project of economic integration as a basis for deeper political integration. From the customs union of the sixties to the present European monetary union and nascent Common Foreign and Security Policy, a process spanning forty years has brought peace, stability and prosperity to Europe. It all began with a group of six countries deciding to pool their steel and coal resources – but it progressively evolved so that from 1 May 2004 as many as 25 countries from Western, Northern, Eastern and Southern Europe will be united in an unprecedented project bringing us ever closer together both politically and economically.

In 1995, the members of the European Union sought to share their experience of building peace through prosperity and liberty with their Mediterranean partners by jointly signing the Barcelona Declaration. The Euro-Mediterranean partnership that ensued has given a political voice to the shared ambition of 27 countries for a peaceful and prosperous Mediterranean, offering a partnership between sovereign countries and citizens willing, not forced, to engage in a comprehensive process implying reforms and rewards, challenges and opportunities.

Today in Agadir, four Arab Mediterranean countries - Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco - will sign a free trade agreement, demonstrating their political will to open a new southern dimension to the Euro-Mediterranean partnership and injecting further momentum to the goal of achieving a free trade area among all southern Mediterranean partners by 2010. By combining their efforts in a common endeavour of economic development, the four signatory parties will establish a market spanning both the Maghreb and the Mashrek, encompassing more than 100 million people and with a combined domestic product of nearly € 150 billion. It will benefit from duty free access for all industrial products to the EU market, which after enlargement will comprise 455 million people and a GDP of € 9,500 billion. The new integrated Mediterranean market will attract substantial European investment in the region, helping to create much needed employment and stimulate economic growth.

As these benefits began to materialise, I am confident that other Mediterranean countries will realise the potential of intra-regional integration as an instrument of economic growth and join the Agadir Agreement, thus becoming members of an open, cooperative free trade area with the same rules of origin.

Just as economic integration was the starting point of the European Union, so too should a free trade agreement between the countries of the Mediterranean serve as the foundation for a greater project, one that delivers not only a prosperous future, based on mutual understanding and tolerance among peoples of differing cultures and traditions. In Europe, we have learned through experience that economic integration can bring lasting partnerships for peace, that regional integration pulls together an aggregate of greater strength than the sum of all its parts.

In parallel to our support for the Agadir initiative, we, in the EU, intend to find more sophisticated ways to expand beyond our borders the stability, security and prosperity from which we benefit. This is the reasoning behind our Wider Europe Initiative, launched in March 2003. Our aim is to develop a policy that offers our neighbours progress towards the EU´s four fundamental freedoms: free movement of goods, services, capital and people in exchange for tangible political and economic reforms that our neighbours are expected to undertake for their own benefit. We want to develop with each neighbour, on the basis of our experience and of our current obligations, agreed action plans which set out the path we intend to pursue together.

Ibn Khaldoun, one of the greatest historians and social scientists, wrote more than six hundred years ago that “civilisation and prosperity depend on productivity and on the efforts of individuals in all directions, in their own interest, and for their own profit”. Khaldoun’s praise of individual initiative has not always been fashionable, just as the ideas of the founding fathers of European integration met with scepticism from many. But today’s European Union is proof that regional co-operation delivers peace and prosperity. The conclusion of the Agadir Agreement offers the countries of the Mediterranean the opportunity to substantiate this evidence.