Europe Goes To Club Med.(World Affairs)

Byline: William Underhill

As fears over migration, energy and terror grow, the European Union wants closer friends in sunny places.

With more mountains than beaches -- the coastline is only 40 kilometers long -- Slovenia makes an unlikely Mediterranean power. But try telling the government. Next year Slovenia will hold the presidency of the European Union for the first time, and plans to mark the occasion by creating a "University of the Mediterranean," with a site by the sea, where students can "deepen their knowledge of Mediterranean issues."

Good timing. Concerns about migration, terrorism and access to energy supplies are refocusing EU attention on improving relations with the nations of North Africa, which are emerging from political and economic obscurity. Libya is fast shedding its status as a global pariah, Morocco has recast itself as a Westernized quasi democracy and tourist magnet, and Algeria -- now splurging $150 billion on an infrastructure-renewal program -- is awash in petrodollars. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking immediately after his election in May, declared: "The time has come to build a 'Mediterranean Union' that will be a bridge between Europe and Africa."

If the details of Sarkozy's plan are hazy, the outline is clear enough: a loose economic union of all the countries around the Mediterranean rim, linked to the EU but with its own trading agreements as well as regular meetings of national leaders. That's visionary stuff: nothing less than a single community of nations, rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, striving together for a better future in which post-colonial animosities can be forgotten. Says Jean-Louis Guigou, head of the Economic Forecasting Institute of the Mediterranean World: "This is the great work of the century."

Other Europeans are making similar moves. Witness Madrid's commitment to building a high-speed rail link beneath the Strait of Gibraltar, and Italy's courtship of Libya, its former colony in North Africa. Already it's getting much of its gas from a new pipeline between Sicily and the Libyan coast, funded in part by the Italian energy group ENI.

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