GTFS: Global Trends and Future Scenarios Index

The Mediterranean in 2030: Routes to a Better Future

[PDF]

Introduction (excerpt)

The Mediterranean Basin has developed a fabric of economic, political and human relations that lend it a definite regional dimension. The raid of the Arabic revolts came to remind that this dynamics could also take the shape of a political convergence. Structurally nevertheless, the Mediterranean integration is highly varied, depending on the country or subregion concerned. The European Union plays a central role for all Mediterranean countries, which might be members or future members, or have established agreements and privileged economic relationships with it. Although Latin Europe, the Adriatic countries (Western Balkans), the Middle East and the Maghreb display geographical continuity, from an economic, institutional and socio-cultural point of view, their heterogeneity is obvious.

The Mediterranean is in progress and is the object of political and private investment. The motivation behind such investment might be grounded in economics, politics, citizenship, society, ecology or culture, depending on countries and their inhabitants. But these initiatives all tend to weave closer what history has done and undone, to accelerate the income dynamics of the region and to speed up its global ranking as compared to world economic giants.

This region is subjected to strong uncertainties on its future, whether it is national or collective: the deepest crisis that Europe has ever known since the 1930s reaches today not only the springs of its recovery but questions its own construction (in particular the economic governance of the Euro zone). This economic and institutional crisis also affects the countries of the Adriatic promised to an integration that the community uncertainties and the starts of the Greek crisis handicap. The Arabic revolts engage a powerful reforming impulse but pull countries into a phase of inevitably long transition which does not exclude backlashes or plunging certain States into a phase of reaction with impacts in terms of stability and economic growth to more or less short term.