ABSTRACT
The chapter exposes how and why the EU advanced intercultural dialogue (ICD) in the Mediterranean from the end of the Cold War to the eve of the terror attacks of 9/11 2001. It labels this period as the ‘phase of emergence’ of ICD. Before being formally launched with the Barcelona Process in 1995, ICD was already latently present within the early 1990s European policy considerations in the hope of tackling some of the key issues then emerging from the Mediterranean, including mounting xenophobia in Europe and escalating fundamentalism in the Maghreb. When the Barcelona Process was launched, however, the EU and its partners came to attribute a vague scope of action to ICD. This started an erratic and initially ineffectual implementation process, which only started to have some effect on EU Mediterranean policies with the launch of the first ICD programmes in the late 1990s. The chapter explains this slow and patchy emergence exposing both the suspicion of some Mediterranean countries vis-à-vis the intercultural aspect of regional cooperation, perceived as a potential form of European imperialism, and the growing but still restrained sense of urgency that the EU still had, at that time, for the specific concerns ICD was designed to address.
