Libya and the European Union: shared interests?

Abstract

Libya has always remained outside the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, although it enjoys the status of an observer. The European Union has, for some years, sought to bring it into a structured relationship similar to that of the Barcelona Process, but allowing for the objections Libya has voiced to full membership of the Partnership itself. As a result, it has been negotiating a Framework Agreement since 2007 to this end. The real purpose of the Framework Agreement, however, is to formalise Libya's role in ensuring the Union's external security and over the control of migration, as a study of its implications for Italy make clear. In the current climate, however, little progress can be made in completing the negotiations until the political situation inside Libya is clarified.

Keywords:

• Libya
• European Commission
• Framework Agreement
• Italy
• migration
• border security

Notes

The concept of hegemony referred to here is derived from Henri Lefebvre rather than from Antonio Gramsci, in that it is concerned with control of geopolitical space, rather than culture or ideology within society (see Lefebvre 1992).

The term was first used by Romano Prodi in introducing the Union's new European Neighbourhood Policy in 2002 and 2003, itself in part a response to the United States' Middle East Partnership Initiative. See, for example, his speech in Washington in June 2003, at http://www.europa-eu-un.org/articles/en/article_2477_en.htm.

See Niblock (2001) for a comprehensive analysis of sanctions regimes and their effects in Libya.

The term ‘neo-liberal’ is used here to denote a developmental model that proposes that economic under-development is a consequence of the inefficient use of resources because of the application of inappropriate pricing policies for the most efficient use of those resources. Thus, if appropriate pricing policies were to be used, this would maximise economic efficiency and this can best be done by allowing the global market to price resources. Furthermore openness, transparency and accountability are essential to ensure market efficiency, as is the removal of the state from direct interference or control of the economic environment. Surpluses – the consequence of resource use efficiency within the global market, allied to the exploitation of comparative advantage – will then trickle down through the economy and improve general prosperity whilst creating jobs as entrepreneurial dynamism is released. See Todaro (1989, p. 83)

This becomes evident from a cursory reading of the United States' Department of State's annual report on human rights in Libya. See United States Department of State (2010).

By that time, too, Libya had resolved outstanding issues with the United States, restoring diplomatic relations on 16 May 2006 – although several hitches meant that full relations were only restored in May 2007 – after having agreed compensation with the families of the Lockerbie victims, having renounced terrorism and its programmes of weapons of mass destruction and having been removed from the Department of State's list of terrorist-supporting states.

Undocumented or irregular migrants – those migrants who lack the necessary official authorisation to immigrate into Europe or elsewhere – are inevitably described by the European Union, European states and South Mediterranean states as ‘illegal’.

FRONTEX is the European Union's border agency created in October 2004, which began operating in 2005. In theory, it was only a coordinating body, located in Warsaw but now increasingly acts as an independent agent for border security in the South Mediterranean.

Of course, it could be argued that the Union's normative objectives were also rather formulaic in the past as well. Thus the Union's ‘troika’ only visited Algeria over human rights abuses during the civil war there in 1998 and then only in response to pressures from the European Parliament and public opinion. Yet, in 1989, it was action by the European Parliament, backed up quietly by the Commission that led to improved human rights practices and positive changes in governance in Morocco, for instance, and similar pressure induced change in Turkey during the past decade, as Accession negotiations opened after 2004. Now there seems little enthusiasm for such action, either at the level of the Commission or amongst European states as far as the situation in North Africa and the Levant are concerned. Instead, the emphasis of European action is placed squarely on measures against trans-national terrorism and irregular migration. See Edwards and Meyer (2008).

According to Amnesty International, in a press release dated 23 June 2010, there are 9,000 UNHCR-registered refugees in Libya, together with 3,700 asylum-seekers. The expulsion was apparently caused by the fact that the UNHCR had never signed a formal agreement with Libya over its operations there and Libya insists that all illegal migrants inside its borders are solely ‘economic migrants’ so that it regarded the UNHCR as stirring up trouble. The UNHCR now insists that it will only return to Libya if the country signs up to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention.

Italy has also tried to establish formal repatriation relations with Libya, according to the MIREM project at the Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies in the European University Institute in Florence (http://www.mirem.eu/donnees/accords/libye). Libya signed a repatriation agreement on 13 December 2000 that came into operation in 2002, a further agreement on 3 July 2003, a memorandum of understanding on 18 January 2006 and a police cooperation agreement on 29 December 2007. At least one of these agreements concerned the abortive project to create Italian-financed and Libyan-controlled ‘repatriation camps’ in Libya, a project that was abandoned over human rights concerns (see Paoletti 2010). Malta signed a police cooperation agreement with Libya in 1984 that came into operation in 2001 and Britain has signed a memorandum of understanding, connected with the British desire to deport persons suspected of terrorism as well as illegal migrants, on 18 October 2005 but it is not in operation because of domestic legal issues in Britain. Spain and Ukraine are negotiating about cooperation agreements also.