Quelle: The Economist | 14.11.2017

The Mediterranean will be at the heart of Malta’s EU presidency—for all the wrong reasons

“ALL that concerns the Mediterranean is of the deepest interest to civilised man,” wrote Edward Forbes, a 19th-century naturalist. Europe’s great sea will loom large as Malta, the European Union’s smallest member, takes up the rotating presidency of its Council of Ministers for the first half of 2017. That is fitting, for the Mediterranean has defined the destiny of this speck south of Sicily. The Great Siege Road, which runs along the northern edge of Valletta, Malta’s handsome capital, recalls the island’s repulsion of Ottoman invaders in 1565, an act of defiance that resonated across Christian Europe. A covetous Napoleon said conquering the strategically located island was “worth any price”. Centuries later a bull-headed Maltese prime minister shoehorned a chapter on Mediterranean security into the Helsinki Accords, a cold-war compact between the West and the Soviet bloc.

Yet Malta’s fellow Europeans have not always been so interested in the Mediterranean. The accession of Malta and Cyprus to the EU in 2004 marked the end of the club’s expansion in the region. An ill-fated “European Neighbourhood Policy” failed to draw the littoral states to the east and the south closer to the EU. In 2008 Nicolas Sarkozy, then France’s president, launched a 43-country “Union for the Mediterranean” to much fanfare but zero effect. Since then the menace of Russia and the plight of Ukraine have drawn European attention eastwards. To the south, the EU has merely watched helplessly as the promises of the 2011 Arab uprisings were swallowed by counter-revolution and civil war.

Today the Mediterranean may be back, but not for happy reasons. If, in the words of David Abulafia, a historian, the sea was once “the most vigorous place of interaction between different societies on the face of the planet”, for Europe it now represents only danger and instability. Malta’s presidency plan draws attention to the Mediterranean’s “ongoing conflict, socioeconomic challenges, terrorism, radicalisation and human-rights violations”. Analysts warn of a “wall of poverty” to Europe’s south.

Chief among the concerns, of course, is migration. This is nothing new for Malta; between 2002 and 2012 thousands of refugees fleeing war-torn African states like Somalia and Eritrea threatened to overwhelm the tiny island. Utterly unprepared for the arrivals, the Maltese shoved them into grim detention centres, which remain open today. Malta’s bid for solidarity from its EU partners went nowhere. Its relationship with Italy soured in rows over responsibility for migrants picked up at sea.

How things have changed. Thanks, say some, to a mysterious deal between Italy and Malta not acknowledged by either side, few irregular migrants now disembark in Malta; the Central Mediterranean route runs almost exclusively between Libya and Italy. More importantly, a separate crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean jerked migration to the top of Europeans’ concerns. The refugee crisis of 2015-16, when over 1m migrants hopped from Turkey to Greece and thence towards Europe’s heart, so traumatised Europe’s leaders that they have turned to the Central Mediterranean route with renewed vigour. Here the numbers have edged rather than rocketed up: 181,000 reached Italy in 2016. The difference is that they now have Europe’s attention.

Perhaps the trickiest task of Malta’s presidency will be an internal one: brokering agreement among the EU’s governments on how to share the burden of irregular migration. But Joseph Muscat, the prime minister, has bigger ideas. He wants the EU to strike deals with African countries similar to that agreed with Turkey in March 2016, which drastically slowed the flow of migrants to Greece. Details are unclear, but Mr Muscat mentions joint naval patrols of North African waters. Others have revived an old notion of offshore asylum-processing centres in Egypt and Tunisia. “I’m aware these are controversial ideas,” says Mr Muscat. “But there is no other option.” He will advance his arguments at an EU summit in Malta next month.

The prime minister says most EU leaders agree with him. But the Turkey deal offers few lessons for Africa. Almost half of the migrants in Greece last year fled the civil war in Syria. But most of the migrants in the Central Mediterranean are seeking better wages, not fleeing war, which means their asylum bids are likely to fail. Failed asylum-seekers are devilishly difficult to deport, as countries like Germany have been learning. And where Turkey is well governed (if increasingly despotic), Libya is in chaos. This week Italy reopened its embassy in Tripoli and signed a migration and security agreement with one of Libya’s two governments. But such is the volatility in Libya, says Mark Micallef, a Maltese Libya-watcher, that there is no guarantee Italy will have any partner at all in a few months.

The thick blue line

The Mediterranean is not without hope. Against the odds Tunisia, just 300 miles from Malta, is consolidating its post-revolutionary democracy. The EU seems determined to buttress Libya’s notional government, if only to have a partner to help it stem the migrant flows. To Malta’s east, hopes are high that 2017 may finally bring an end to the decades-long division of Cyprus (reunification talks were being held as The Economist went to press). A Cypriot deal could improve the EU’s relations with Turkey, unlock oil and gas supplies in the eastern Mediterranean and smooth the burgeoning relationship between the EU and NATO.

But the EU has cleaved the sea in two. “Club Med” may have struggled inside the euro, but EU membership has consolidated democracy in Portugal, Spain and Greece. Malta itself is economically thriving and a far more relaxed place than the hidebound country that joined the EU in 2004. Outside the union, to the south and east, the Mediterranean is a sea of troubles. Malta’s politicians have often warned that if the EU fails to export stability to its southern neighbourhood it will find itself importing instability instead. So far, they have been proved right.