ABSTRACT
Twenty years have passed since the creation of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP). This span of a generation feels like a geopolitical lifetime. At its birth, the EMP was one of the EU’s most comprehensive and forward-looking foreign policy initiatives. The hope this engendered was reflected in the very creation of the Mediterranean Politics journal. Two decades later, virtually none of the EMP’s ambitions have been fulfilled. In 2009 the EMP was rechristened as the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM). Yet, despite many well-meaning policies and some islands of achievement in Euro-Mediterranean relations, on most vectors conditions in the southern Mediterranean have worsened since 1995. Relations between Europe and Arab states, Turkey and Israel have become more fractious.
