Morocco Calls for a New Euro-Mediterranean Partnership Based on Balance and Common Destiny
In light of the rapidly changing geopolitical challenges facing the Euro-Mediterranean space, Morocco emphasized its rejection of a partnership approach based on short-term transactions that marginalizes the South. It reiterated the region’s need for a new strategic vision grounded in ambition and realism, focusing on economic integration, linking production chains, and establishing a balanced space based on common destiny.
In a speech delivered in Rabat during the opening of a high-level retreat on the future of Euro-Mediterranean relations, attended by European Commissioner for the Mediterranean, Dubravka Suica, Minister of Foreign Affairs, African Cooperation, and Moroccans Abroad, Nasser Bourita, highlighted that the Euro-Mediterranean partnership is at a “crossroads.” He clarified that Morocco no longer accepts the South being treated as a peripheral framework within a European program but rather as an essential part of a space that should be built jointly.
Bourita provided what he described as a “realistic and candid” diagnosis, identifying five major challenges facing the Euro-Mediterranean project, including identity ambiguity and options for its construction, the lack of symmetry in motivations between the North and South, geopolitical fragmentation on both shores, the inability to manage major crises such as the pandemic and events in Gaza, along with food and energy crises, and the weak societal legitimacy and declining presence of the “Euro-Mediterranean idea” in the collective imagination.
Conversely, Morocco proposed a series of initiatives to renew this space, including securing strategic supplies, enhancing logistical connections and value chains, mobilizing human resources through education and mobility programs, reviving political dialogue through regular forums and voluntary alliances between countries on both shores, as well as establishing a Euro-Mediterranean fund for solidarity and integration based on the principle of partnership rather than donor-beneficiary relationships.
Bourita concluded by affirming that the Kingdom carries a “transformational and ambitious” vision, albeit through a realistic phased approach, considering that the Mediterranean should transcend its role as merely a geographic neighborhood to become a space for a shared future and destiny.
