As Fahmi notes, the EMP resolved the major question of whether regional security would be addressed within a strictly Mediterranean context or within a wider framework encompassing European security concerns [69]. Although the Declaration did not linger over the meaning of security and stability, it produced a clearly Eurocentric perspective of the ‘common threat’ [70]. The EMP was a collective attempt to redefine European threat perceptions towards the region by addressing issues of social unrest and economic underdevelopment, rather than by detecting a direct Arab military threat. Although the initial target date for the establishment of a free trade area in the region is the year 2010, EU states made no secret of the fact that the aid plan for the transition period intended to contribute to the slowing of migratory flows to their respective societies. The argument is that with trade growing, jobs will be created in Mediterranean countries and immigration will slow down. From this view, political change in the south is expected to result from large-scale economic liberalisation. In this context, Kienle notes that this approach is a retouched version of the theory of markets as a democratising force [71]. This ‘automatic pilot’ theory of the market is among the basic tenets of liberalism. For economists and political thinkers such as Adam Smith or Herbert Spencer social harmony is spontaneous. It does not require coercive force to be produced or for that matter maintained. Laissez-faire, the argument goes, defined in the context of pursuing individual interests, is capable of producing co-operation in other fields automatically. But the proposition that this theory applies to international markets that consist only of independent agents trading for their own account and competing against each other is largely questionable. For it may well be that economic rationality, along the lines of an ‘exchange Gesellschaft’, continues to play a central role in the economic governance of an ever globalising, if not already globalised, market economy, but this is not the case in the Mediterranean, where elements of economic rationality coexist with a struggle for power. It is, then, highly unrealistic to subscribe to the view that a kind of automatic governance could spontaneously emerge from the approach adopted in Barcelona. From a purely economic perspective, the Barcelona document does not represent a radical break with past European policies towards the Mediterranean, but rather it is ‘a deepening of past efforts’ [72], in that it incorporates in its economic agenda more clearly defined global objectives. In overall terms, the entire project was a sign of the EU’s willingness to play an increasingly active economic role in bringing all partners closer together and in reducing political and social sources of conflict. But building the envisaged free trade area pre-supposes that partners will come to understand each other with the view to sharing, albeit gradually, the same practices. Since the Declaration, any rigid distinction along economic, political and socio-cultural lines can only be made at the cost of avoiding the complexity of Euro-Mediterranean social and political reality. Herein lies perhaps the most innovative aspect of the EU’s Mediterranean approach post-1995: that in addition to the traditional economic pattern of intra-regional relations, there now appears to be an intrinsic link between security and socio-cultural arenas.