ABSTRACT
Following the adoption of the Barcelona Declaration in 1995, a process was launched to turn the Mediterranean into an area of peace, security and shared prosperity. Since 1995 the foreign ministers of the 27 partners of the Barcelona Process have held five conferences, the most recent one having taken place in April 2002 in Valencia and known as ‘Barcelona V’. At the end of that conference, a document was issued containing the Presidency Conclusions and the Valencia Action Plan. According to this document, the participants agreed ‘that the incomplete implementation of the main objectives of the mentioned [Barcelona] Declaration, despite the progress obtained since 1995, demands a global reassessment and a new commitment from all participants to build on the reactivation of the Process since Barcelona IV (Marseilles 2000)’ [Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, 2002:8]. The same document specifies that ‘the Valencia Action Plan includes a number of initiatives in a short and medium term perspective to give a political impetus to the Process and to make it advance substantially in the pursuit of the objectives of the Barcelona Declaration’ [Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, 2002:2]. Despite the attempt to use positive language, these two statements along with the rest of the document imply that the Barcelona Process is at a standstill and that efforts undertaken in the last two years to reinvigorate it have been fruitless.
