Europe and the Arab World is a wide-ranging assessment of the
prospects for a new relationship between Europe and the Arab world in
the coming years. Samir Amin and Ali El Kenz take as their starting
point the significantly shifting balance of political forces within the
various Arab countries, including the rise of both political Islam and
civil society. They argue that the strategic global hegemony of the
United States constitutes a major element affecting the Euro-Arab
relationship. They then focus on the European Union initiative,
originally launched in Barcelona, to put its relations with the Arab
countries of the Mediterranean and Gulf regions on a new footing of
equality and mutually beneficial cooperation. The authors provide a
detailed empirical account of the initiative as well as an historically
contextualized, intellectually critical and politically perceptive
analysis of the various realities impacting on it.
Samir Amin and Ali El Kenz conclude that, while considerable dialogue
and even institution-building have taken place in order to give
substance to this attempt to go beyond the colonial legacy of inequality
and dependence, little of a concrete kind has been achieved in
transforming the underlying economic and political relationships between
the Arab Islamic and European Christian worlds of the Mediterranean.
Among the many obstacles identified are the overriding and economically
deleterious impact of globalized capitalism, and the determination of
the United States to impose its own political objectives on the Middle
East.
The timeliness of this book's argument is highlighted by the new
tensions that have accompanied the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and
the Bush administration's political pretensions to 'bring democracy' to
the whole region.
