The EU cooperation policy with northern african mediterranean countries and the middle east

This paper reconsiders the EU Cooperation Policy with the Northern African Countries and the Middle East, that started in the Sixties of the last century on a bilateral basis, moving into a multilateral approach in the Seventies and even more importantly in the Mid-Nineties. It reviews the Barcelona process started in 1995 and the following efforts to improve and enlarge the cooperation attempts with the above mentioned countries on a multilateral basis. The two new cooperation instruments that were set up in the 2000s, that is the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the Union for the Mediterranean, are accurately illustrated and explained, also considering the last reforms made to the ENP. After a brief economic investigation on the trade flows across the Mediterranean Sea in 2019, some concluding remarks are made. In particular it is emphasized that multiple instruments are now used in the EU cooperation policy with the two above mentioned Mediterranean regions, both bilateral and multilateral. This richness of instruments on the one hand makes EU able to differentiate intensity and size of the cooperation from country to country in correlation with the progress made in political relations but on the other hand it makes more difficult to manage them and can well give rise to inefficiencies due to lack of coordination.