ABSTRACT
History, colonial legacies, religion and culture all contribute to make Europe’s relations with the Middle East and North Africa particularly complex and sensitive.1 The Middle East is the most direct neighbour of Europe, with the physical distance at times only a few kilometres (Morocco and Spain) or even within the borders of one country (Turkey). But, the cultural distance is far greater with Europe’s Christian legacy and the Middle East’s Islamic inheritance continuing to define and express mutual perceptions of difference and otherness. Turkey’s candidature for the European Union directly confronts the question of whether the European integration process can overcome or will only exacerbate this sense of a civilisational divide. History also provides similar dynamics of connectedness and distance. The region, with the exception of Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, experienced European colonial rule and has continuing social, cultural and economic ties with European countries. But, the colonial period is also remembered as a time of humiliation and damaging legacies, the most critical and long-lasting of which is the Arab-Israeli conflict where all parties of the dispute at least agree that they were betrayed by the British. France’s complex and conflict-ridden history of occupation and colonisation of Algeria is another key and highly sensitive historical legacy.
