Limited as it may be, the potential for systematising a new politics of institutional accommodation in the region awaits utilisation. Working on the concept of a socially viable Euro-Mediterranean order implies maximum use of civil society mechanisms and monitoring structures with the view to improving, as opposed to merely increasing, the levels of transparency in the workings of common institutions of governance. A difficulty associated with this line of development is that the socio-cultural Partnership has not yet operationalised or even regularised the normative ambitions of the Barcelona Declaration. The levels of complexity stemming from the particular nature of protracted conflicts and threat (mis)perceptions constrain the implementation of agreed principles and objectives. Linked to the above is the claim that effective order-building cannot be realised under the present institutional configuration of the EMP as a whole. Although its flexibility is a positive element in managing interdependence, its weak institutional structure makes it difficult for partners to sacrifice the pursuit of short-term interests on the altar of substantive regional co-operation. But what model of institution-building should the Partnership proceed with so as to reorganise the Euro-Mediterranean order? A plausible answer is that the partners would have to foster an atmosphere in which norms of good governance act as a system-steering agency in the construction of a larger pluralist order. In this context, the prospective Charter of Peace and Stability may lay the groundwork for mutual governance based on legitimate patterns of shared rule, while also provide the levels of transparency, stability and trust needed for any meaningful regional partnership to consolidate itself. But it must be flexible enough to allow the southern partners to develop their own ‘styles’ of political liberalisation. Some tentative conclusions Although the regional process cannot but go ahead by trial and error, it is crucial to keep a fundamental direction: designing efficient systems of internationalised shared rule requires a maximum of what might be called ‘capacity for governance’. At the macro-systemic level, such a capacity is presently lacking, not only due to various institutional weakness per se, but also due to the absence of credible political commitments by the partners to make effective use of existing arrangements. As Couloumbis and Veremis note, ‘the central question, in theory as well as in practice, is whether the Mediterranean region ... will manage to fit into a functionalist paradigm which permitted Western Europe ... to move forward toward economic and political integration employing the geoeconomic premises of Jean Monnet and abandoning the military power considerations of Clausevitzian geopolitics’ [94]. From this view, the EMP, combining both low and high politics areas, may prove instrumental in fostering a new co-operative ethos among its members. The argument is that interest-convergence around economic tasks acts as a means of contributing to a relaxation of tensions in areas where controversy is more likely to arise than not. The composite nature of the EMP offers a wide range of opportunities for the functionalist expectations of the partners to form the basis of a consensually pre-determined set of policies, which are crucial to overall systemic stability. The Partnership can thus be taken as a system of rules governing the interaction of interdependent actors around functional tasks. By elevating the creation of rules of transaction to a systemic property of the regional process, a certain economic bias may prevail, whose liberalising effects could offer a platform from which substantive rewards can be gained for all. This points to a preference for a functionalist strategy that is nevertheless embedded within the practise of market-oriented regimes.
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