The Union for the Mediterranean: What a failure!

The zombie organisation named "Union for the Mediterranean" continues to fail.

Now they are not are not even able to hold the summit they planned in June and had to postpone it to November. And the reasoning for the postponement: They want to make it a "complete success" How stupid do they think we are?

And they still don't have a website.

What kind of idiot has invented this most useless of all organisations? Oh yes, an unnamed French president.

The Union for the Mediterranean: The zombie is alive!

How do you prove that a death-born child is alive? Well, you pre-select a Secretary General with Brussels experience and make five countries agree on him.

This is what according to Eurotribune has been happening at the zombie organisation known by its official name "Union for the Mediterranean", an organisation that doesn't even have a website yet (at least none known to me so far), which is an obvious signal in the 15th Muslim, 21st Christian, and 58th Jewish century (hope the figures are correct).

But apparently, Egypt, France, Spain, Tunisia, and Jordan, five countries out of 44, have agreed to nominate Ahmad Massadeh as candidate for the post of Secretary General of the Union. According to other news reports, this represents a consensus of all Union member states.

Mr Massedeh, a former minister, is the current Jordanian ambassador to the EU and NATO, and thus probably a person well known in Brussels - something important for an organisation with a majority of countries being either in the EU or in NATO.

However, seeing the speed with which the almost dead organisation has developed over the last 1 1/2 years, the main task of its Secretary General - if he will be appointed - will be to apply all life-prolonging measures necessary to keep the death man walking.

(found via alvaromillan on Twitter)

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.

The Union for the Mediterranean is frozen

Well, the Mediterranean is a rather warm area, known for its good weather and healthy southern culture.

But after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the always controversial Union for the Mediterranean has been deep-frozen, as Le Monde reports.

It seems that especially the northern African countries in that "Union" (which did never look like a Union) do not want to sit on the same table with Israel, and I suppose that many of the EU countries which have never been really in favour of this political "monster" will not be sad about these developments.

In the end, this is another setback for Napoléon Nicolas Sarkozy whose baby this Union has been during the French EU-Council Presidency.

Yet another sad case of infant mortality...

European Council on 19 and 20 March 2009: Draft Agenda

According to the draft agenda, the European Council will deal with the following issues during its session on 19 and 20 March 2009:

• The financial crisis and the measures in its context
  
• The G20 Summit on 2 April 2009
  
• Energy and climate change
  
• The Eastern Partnership
  
• The Union for the Mediterranean
  
• The Lisbon Treaty
  

Sounds quite heavy what our heads of state and government will do in two days.

The Union for the Mediterranean to be seated in Barcelona

The Union for the Mediterranean, a project that already started with low expectations, seemed to be in great difficulties until yesterday.

The foreigh ministers of the countries participating in the Union met in Marseille to discuss several issues. The International Harald Tribune told that

the Union for the Mediterranean is deadlocked over where to base its headquarters, who should attend meetings and who should get the top jobs.

It seemed as if the prestige project of French EU-Council president Sarkozy had been shipwrecked by different expections and national selfishness.

However, overnight, there has been at least the agreement to seat the Union in Barcelona. And although this might be seen as a blow to those non-EU countries participating in this Union and interested in having the seat (like Tunesia), as a follow-up to the Barcelona Process, Barcelona seems to be a quite natural host city.

Yet, this is again just a technical agreement - the form is as so often more important than the content. And so far, there seem to be many unresolved issues between EU countries, and the countries from northern Africa and western Asia.

So I do not see any success, I just see the name of a city, and a lot of money wasted for new premises (although the building will be provided by Barcelona, if I understand correctly) and for a lot of new staff that will spend most of their time on form - and not on substance...

For me, it looks as it looked several month ago: Let's keep expectations low!

Looking south with low expectations

Tomorrow, 44 heads of state and government will meet in Paris for the foundation of the Mediterranean Union, a club of EU-states and all the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea.

In fact, the expectations for this Sarkozyan project are low. For the Times, "Flop fears loom over Nicolas Sarkozy's grand plan for Mediterranean Union" and according to AFP, Amnesty International has expressed "serious concerns regarding the absence of any rights dimension" in the project.

Germany's national daily newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung" writes:

If you ask diplomats about the state of the preparations for the summit [...] you get two things: First of all the information, that they are mainly concerned with "protocolary questions". And second, the appraisal that one could be happy if on Sunday a new start-up for a Mediterranean cooperation could be "started" [at all; JF]

[own translation]

Whether this Union of friends and enemies can have any success at all is doubtable. Those sitting together around a table are having huge cultural and political differences, not least due to a history of conflict.

The only thing uniting them is this warm and salty sea that might disappear within the next 10-20 million years when the African continent has made its way below the Eurasian plate. Maybe they should try again around that time, and maybe there will also be a solution for global warming then...