Throughout 2009, different countries around the world have been celebrating the important contribution they made to the historic peaceful end of the Cold War. As an advocate of international peace and security since becoming independent in 1964, Malta also played an important role at this historic moment in international relations when President George H.W. Bush and President Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta in December 1989.

The winds of change that literally swept across the Maltese Islands during the superpower summit that took place 20 years ago has resulted in a complete transformation of the international system. The re-unification of Germany, the integration of Eastern Europe into the European Union, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the transformation of Nato have contributed to the emergence of a transatlantic geo-strategic landscape that is much more stable than at any other time during the second half of the 20th century.

The East/West nuclear showdown that was part and parcel of our daily lives disappeared and ushered in a new era that many hoped would result in a peace dividend, with massive weapons procurement programmes giving way to investment in education, health care and infrastructure upgrades.

The benefit of 20 years of hindsight is enough to comprehend how truly historic the Malta Summit of 1989 was. Successive enlargements of the European Union have seen peace and stability become a permanent feature of eastern and western Europe. This trend will continue in future decades, when EU accession of the Balkan States will also bring stability to a region that has witnessed some of the worse atrocities in contemporary European relations.

The international conference on The End of the Cold War and the Mediterranean being hosted by the Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies (MEDAC) at the beginning of December will provide an opportunity to take stock of post-Cold War international relations, with a specific focus on relations in the Mediterranean area.

As a candidate, partner and now member of the European Union, Malta has been directly involved in the transformation of European relations in the past two decades. As a consistent and persistent champion of Mediterranean issues, Malta has succeeded in raising the profile of such concerns on the international stage. The disappearance of the East/West bipolar international system has brought into renewed focus the north/south division that exists between the wealthy countries of the world and the rest. A key challenge facing us today is that of preventing the Mediterranean from becoming a wall of poverty along the EU’s southern periphery.

If this is to be avoided, the international community must focus its political and economic resources on ensuring that the Mediterranean does not become a permanent North/South divide. Managing more coherently sources of instability that include terrorism, illegal migration, the proliferation of weapons and drug trafficking is a prerequisite to creating a more stable and prosperous Mediterranean area.

Integrating the Mediterranean into the 21st century’s international system through mechanisms such as the EU’s Union for the Mediterranean policy and a sustainable Middle East Peace Process is the immediate challenge that the international community must confront.

The concept of regionalism in international relations denotes an intensity in the pattern of relations between states that are geographically proximate to one another. Such a pattern of interaction can take place at different levels, including political, economic and cultural.

In the Mediterranean, such patterns of interaction have largely taken place at a sub-regional level, that is, not across the Mediterranean basin but in different pockets of this geographical space. Thus, while an increase in the intensity of interaction has been evident in southern Europe, the Balkans, the Maghreb and the Mashreq, there has been no major trend towards an intensity of interaction between the sub-regions of the Mediterranean.

Before the Union for the Mediterranean initiative can be successfully implemented, there is thus a necessity to build and nurture both a mental conceptual blueprint and physical infrastructure of regionalism in the Mediterranean. In other words, the peoples of the Mediterranean need to believe that they share more than a common history. They must also believe that they share a common destiny, be it at a political, economic or cultural level of analysis. To date, this is not the case.

A dynamic Union for the Mediterranean would be one where the necessary political will is invested by all countries in the basin and those extra-regional actors with an interest in the Mediterranean. The goal would be to create a more interactive political, economic and cultural unitary framework that connects Europe to the Middle East and Africa and the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean in a more systematic and regulated manner.

In a globalised world, a common regional platform that ensures stability is essential if the Mediterranean is to continue to prosper. The Euro-Med Partnership and Union for the Mediterranean follow up should be regarded as vehicles of regional promotion that are seeking to enhance political and economic relations between the countries across the basin.

The first two decades after the Malta Summit of 1989 have seen the successful integration of Eastern and Western Europe. The challenge now is to ensure that the next two decades do not see the emergence of a new geo-strategic fault-line across the Mediterranean.



Professor Calleya is director, Mediterranean

Academy of Diplomatic Studies, University of Malta