Arab spring + European autumn = Mediterranean crisis

[pampango]

Almost all the countries round the Med are gripped by instability or uncertainty


Satellite image of the north African coastline and the Mediterranean sea.

We talk about the world economic crisis, though Asians sometimes prefers to see it as a north Atlantic crisis and a few Brits as the eurozone crisis. It is all of those things, but seen through a less self-centred prism it is also a crisis of the Mediterranean, one of the oldest and most fruitful nurseries of human progress in history.

What unites this disparate group of states apart from access to one of the world's loveliest little seas and much shared history? For the first time since the decline of the Ottomans in the 16th century, wealth and population are starting to shift south and east again, just as the Muslim world re-enters Europe, this time via peaceful (so far) immigration.

We are starting from very different positions (Silvio Berlusconi has a flamboyant Gadaffi-ish style not evident in the Lutheran Angela Merkel) but we all want similar things.

There are no easy lessons to draw from such a story. Eurosceptics (mostly on the right) who will pounce on red tape as proof that governments are always the problem might wisely ponder that the absence of strong and effective government has been a fundamental failure in the eurozone crisis since 2008. Euro-federalists and other pro-state idealists (mostly on the left) might wonder if they were right to seek to impose such uniformity – including a currency – on heterogeneous Europe, whose diversity has usually been a strength.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/blog/2011/nov/10/arab-spring-european-autumn-mediterranean-crisis