With all the focus concentrated on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Mediterranean and Africa have moved further away from Brussels.

One third of the EU is made up of Mediterranean countries. They make no concerted effort to put the Mediterranean and Africa on the EU’s agenda. The Eastern Neighbourhood has been given more importance than the Southern Neighbourhood long before the aggression against Ukraine.

When will the EU wake up to its geographical reality that it will not have peace and security without peace and security in the Mediterranean and Africa?

The obvious point is not to ignore any neighbourhood. Instead of working together, we are allowing our neighbouring blocs to become openly or covertly hostile to each other, making dialogue and negotiation more difficult if not impossible. Both are mostly needed with those with whom we least agree.

Issues such as peace and security in the Mediterranean, together with the climate emergency, Covid-19 and other pandemics, migration, contested ownership of energy reserves, organized crime, artificial intelligence and automation, trade and development … cannot be tackled effectively by any single country or a small cluster of countries. We cannot deal with such issues in a piecemeal and sporadic manner.

Even simply calling for dialogue and negotiation is often denigrated as naïve. If promoting dialogue and negotiations is naïve, are military interventions and short-sighted regime change where wars are quickly won, if at all, without peace and rebuilding being secured, the epitome of wisdom?

Simply calling for hostile countries to sit together opens you to accusations of sleeping with the enemy. The more our common challenges need multilateral cooperation, the more we have weakened our ability to form common responses. We have weakened the United Nations, international laws and agreements and are setting up alternative arrangements that often marginalise and exclude those we disagree with.

Fernand Braudel says that the Mediterranean speaks with many voices and is not so much a single entity as a “complex of seas” with each voice and sea having its own geography, history and meaning often putting it at odds with its neighbour. Instead of working together and looking for a painful compromise that will respect the interests of all those involved, we choose the easier path of distrust and shut out the enemy who then hardens his position bringing further conflicts and disagreements. We allow our diversity: linguistic, religious, ethnic … to drive us apart instead of learning to live together.

How can we deal with issues like migration in a comprehensive manner if we do not get both shores of the Mediterranean to work much closer together on effective border management, fighting human trafficking, returning illegal migrants to their countries, providing shelter for those who qualify for asylum and building equal terms of trade with African countries to create wealth and jobs for those who have to look for them in Europe?

There is very little regional economic integration between both shores of the Mediterranean. Out of 500 million people living in the region, more than 25 million are unemployed, of whom 8 million are aged 15-24. The number of young people not in education or training has continued to increase. Economic growth and inclusive politics are necessary if social unrest and failed states are not to spread across the region.

Will the search for new energy supplies as an alternative to Russian oil and gas make Europe look more strategically at its southern neighbours in Africa? Will Europe take near-shoring seriously and invest in Africa as part of the new global value chain to replace more distant suppliers and buyers?

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCTFA) will connect 1.3 billion people across 55 countries, making it the largest free trade area in the world. It will happen if the necessary policy reforms and trade facilitation measures are implemented.

Babies being born now will live in a world where there will be 500 million mostly middle aged and old people in Europe and 2.5 billion mostly children and young people in Africa. Can the European Union be so short-sighted and complacent to abandon the Mediterranean and Africa on its southern doorstep to other global and regional powers?

Foresight needed

The Bible exhorts us to “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” We know how difficult this is, even among neighbours within the same block of apartments, let alone when neighbours are countries with divergent interests and a long history of conflict and mutual distrust.

And as Robert Mc Namara tells us, learning from the terrible lessons of the Vietnam War: ‘You’ve got to communicate with your enemies. Both sides made mistakes. Millions of people were killed because we both missed opportunities.”

He said that in hindsight, nuclear war was averted in the Cuban missile crisis because both the Soviet Union and United States leadership who took the ultimate decisions to de-escalate and find compromise, managed to put themselves in each other’s skin.

Within the leadership on both sides there were those who wanted war and saw compromise as a weakness. Had they prevailed, nuclear war would have ensued. Learning from our history is necessary. Looking at our mistakes in hindsight is commendable, but if we want to work to make our world a bit better, or at least a little less terrible, we must also show foresight.

The disputes and divisions in different parts of the world are not on land or in the sea, or on maps but in the hearts and minds of all of us involved, our histories and traditions.

All the states and communities involved in these disputes need somehow to be involved fully in trying to address these disputes and find ways of co-existing in a spirit of compromise, not capitulation.

If we cannot love our neighbours as ourselves, is it not possible to find ways of living side by side without being in constant conflict and tension with each other? For that to happen, we need to learn to live together as equals. Any country, especially armed with nuclear weapons, that feels superior and wants to dominate others, is putting the whole planet at risk.