The Union for the Mediterranean: A zombie organisation

In March of this year I looked at the Union for the Mediterranean for the last time, and it was clear that this Sarkozian project was deadly frozen.

A freshly published Council document reporting about the outcome of a meeting in June of the "Directors-General of Civil Protection of the Union for the Mediterranean Member States" pretty much proves how dead this Union is, although it pretends to be alive.

The document appears to talk about possible joint goals and cooperation projects on civil protection mechanisms in the countries of the Mediterranean Union, an area that in my opinion could offer ground for non-political cooperation for the benefit of the participating member states.

However, the document is, even in diplomatic terms, extremely vague.

Where it talks about clear goals it uses extremely weak verbs or sentence constructions that run in cycles:

"[T]he Mediterranean countries [...] have to get organized in order to implement a real joint coordination to foresee catastrophes and accidents for the populations."

(They have to get organised to implement - not: They have to implement...)

"[I]n the continuity of the reinforcement of a training network, the possibility of focal points presenting the necessary guarantee of quality could be explored in order to create recognized training with diplomas."

(Note: The possibility could be explored, in other words: Nothing.)

And where it uses rather clear verbs the goals are totally imprecise:

"...this cooperation having to be reinforced by developing coherent actions, namely in prevention planning preparation."

But most importantly, the "recommendations" this document is supposed to provide already start (and end) with a sentence that says "We should rather do nothing new, what we have has to be enough." (bold in the original version):

"Particular emphasis was given to the Mediterranean’s existing mechanisms and frameworks."

Altogether, nothing in this document is clear, nothing is agreed, nothing seems to be firmly stated. This seems to be the general state of the art in this "Union".

The Union for the Mediterranean has been nonsense from the beginning, and this newly published document is definitely no refutation to this opinion of mine.