Another NATO

The Arab spring entered a new phase with the collapse of the Gaddafi regime, but it’s still far too soon to pronounce North Africa stabilized. International peacekeeping arrangements may yet be needed in a Libya riven by ethnic and religious differences, and policymakers should also be looking further afield and considering a new collective security framework for the Maghreb region as a whole. In short another NATO, but this time called the North Africa Treaty Organisation.

The unrest and instability of the Arab spring - a term that many Arab political activists reject in favour of revolution or uprising - is far from over. And the best way to calm tempers and move towards democratic governments and much more vibrant development is for Europe to balance economic cooperation with a regional approach to security.

The Arab League failed to play an adequate role as the popular uprisings against dictatorships gathered momentum, and NATO says its own role in North Africa is coming to an end. The alliance has neither the political appetite nor the financial resources to remain involved in Libya. The way ahead there, when tensions between the western and eastern parts of the country are likely to remain, is probably a force of UN peacekeepers drawn from Asia or Africa, along with a distinctly Arab international security mechanism. Hence the idea of a NATO Mk II.

But rather than be linked to NATO, it would be preferable to create a new North African security umbrella under the aegis of the EU. European governments know they must be in the vanguard of a strategy for reconstructing the Arab world’s failing economies, and it would make sense to introduce a strong security element to their development partnerships.

Europe’s security and defence policy has so far been dogged by EU countries’ waning military capabilities and a general lack of cohesion. Helping to calm the turmoil by bringing security and political stability to the Arab world would not only be a major achievement, but also few if any can match the EU’s track record on the voluntary pooling of sovereign powers.

It would until very recently have been unthinkable for EU policymakers to contemplate a security framework. The politics that the European Commission’s eurocrats are most familiar with are those of trade and economic cooperation. Now, though, with the 2009 Lisbon treaty’s creation of an EU “foreign ministry” – the European External Action Service – Brussels has a mandate for making security policy key to its relations with Arab countries.

There’s a lot of ground to be made up. Europe’s relations with its Maghreb neighbours have been disappointing. Neither Arab autocrats nor the EU have wanted a collective approach, so “tailored” bilateral trade deals and association agreements between Brussels and individual governments have been the norm.

But this separateness of Arab governments has been at the heart of their countries’ poverty and lack of opportunity. Only two to three percent of North African countries’ already modest exports are to one another, so they’ve missed out on the surge in international business that over the last two decades has lifted billions of people out of backwardness and misery in Asia, Latin America and even sub-Saharan Africa. By all accounts, the lack of jobs has been as important as the lack of freedom and human rights in fuelling the Arab spring.

The Maghreb nations have attracted little more than a trickle of investment and trade, and the chief source has been Europe, with EU farmers’ vociferous lobbyists making sure that their access to European markets for obvious exports like agricultural produce remains limited. Small wonder that the Maghreb countries’ principal export has been young men seeking a better life.

Where the Arab spring is headed nobody knows. But it’s clear that in Egypt and Tunisia as much as in Libya, post-revolutionary politics aare going to be extremely volatile. A first step towards calming them will be to create a permanent forum for the new leaderships to wield collective muscle when talking about terms of trade and other economic issues, and also to be in constant touch with each other. The early history of NATO was that as well as being a bulwark against Soviet encroachment it enabled former World War II adversaries to create close new links.

From the EU’s timid Barcelona Process of the 1990s to the damp squib of the current Union for the Mediterranean, Europe has been torn between a concern to stave off trouble and unrest in North Africa and its self-interested measures to protect of its culture and economy. With the turmoil in the Arab world far from over, European politicians are waking slowly to the idea that they must construct a relationship that is much more generous and far-sighted. It won’t be just a security mechanism, but nor can it be limited to economic matters alone.

By Giles Merritt

Secretary General of Friends of Europe

Friends of Europe will be organising a summit in Spring 2012 entitled 'Europe’s response to the Arab Spring’, as well as welcoming Mohammed El-Baradei to its upcoming President's Dinner.