Source: Carnegie

Copyright Financial Times, January 27, 2002

Before September 11, the US suffered from a chronic inability to choose among international priorities. The terrorist attacks have changed that. They have not made the US administration more sensitive to the interests or opinions of others, but they have forced it to recognise the greatest real threats to America and to shape strategy accordingly.

It is now time for Europe to follow suit, especially when it comes to the direction of economic aid - the main thing Europe has to offer to international security. The starting-point for strategic thinking on this subject should be that geo-graphy still matters, even in the context of a global struggle against terrorism and its roots.

The greatest dangers to Europeans, and Europeans' greatest capacity to do something about them, come from near - and in some cases, within - Europe's borders.

This is especially true of the Muslim states of the Maghreb on the other side of the Mediterranean: Morocco, Tunisia and, above all, Algeria.

From this point of view, there are risks both in excessive concentration on "burden-sharing" with the US and in the wildly ambitious language of global salvation used by Tony Blair, UK prime minister, at the Labour party conference soon after September 11.

Resources for foreign aid are always going to be limited. "Burden-sharing" must not come to mean Europe trailing in the wake of US military operations over which it has no influence and with which in future it may not even agree.

Nor should available funds and energy be frittered away in penny packets on a set of distant, enormous and probably irreparable catastrophes such as the Congo. If Europe is to be effective, it has to prioritise.

Europe may be just as threatened by Islamist extremism as the US - but the threat is a different one. It does not come simply from terrorism but from a combination of terrorism, Muslim immigration and European chauvinist reaction.

The Maghreb is to the southern European states what Mexico is to the US. Yet it is poorer, with faster-growing populations and with a radical Islamist threat added. Immigrants, legal and illegal, may be heading for Europe from all over the world, but by far the largest numbers in France, Spain and Italy are from the Maghreb.

And as repeated riots have reminded us, large numbers of impoverished European Muslims have good reason to feel alienated from the societies in which they live and have had great difficulty assimilating into those societies.

It is not just Muslim extremism we need to worry about but anti-Muslim extremism. Perhaps the most worrying direct result in western Europe of the September 11 attacks has been the way that they have been used by certain right wing parties to legitimise chauvinism directed against Muslim minorities and, indirectly, against minorities in general. This tendency can be seen even in Scandinavia but is most dangerous in southern Europe and, for the moment at least, in Italy.

If such parties can increase their votes by whipping up fears of Muslim immigrants and terrorism, this will be bad not only for domestic politics but also for the image of Europe as a model of relative ethnic tolerance and multiculturalism.

The impact among would-be EU members in eastern Europe, where such values are, to put it mildly, only weakly rooted, could be severe. What is more, because nationalist parties in these countries also tend to be hostile to the EU, their rise could endanger the cohesion of the union, the future of the euro and the entire European project.

Trying to check illegal immigration requires stronger border controls. From the point of view of a real contribution to European security, many of the EU's existing soldiers and sailors would be better deployed on border patrols than as members of military units that will never serve in any real military operation.

But we must be equally clear that tighter borders are not enough. We need to do everything possible to help develop the countries from which the largest numbers of immigrants originate. The problems of the Maghreb need to be seen as problems for Europe as a whole and the EU should direct much more concentrated, intelligent and generous assistance towards that region.

A potential framework for this already exists in the form of the Euro- Mediterranean Partnership, signed in Barcelona in 1995, and the EU Association agreements with the three Maghreb states.

Tunisia gives some idea of what can be achieved. It saw considerable progress in the course of the 1990s. Economic growth was an average of 4.6 per cent a year and per capita income is well above the regional average. Crucially, annual population growth has been brought down to a stable 1.3 per cent.

This progress owed a good deal to generous European aid and to European backing for assistance from the international financial institutions. It was also, critically, due to the relative openness of European markets, which take by far the greater part of the region's exports.

But even in Tunisia, annual per capita income at $2,129 in 2000 is far below EU levels and the regional average is only $1,512. Unless these figures can be radically improved, massive illegal immigration into the EU will continue.

Nw In the new international context, there is every reason to increase further aid to the Mahgreb. One important area should be education, with its key implications for combating the radicalisation of youth and improving economic growth, women's rights and family planning. Others should be transport infrastructure and rural development.

There is much talk at the moment in the US of turning Afghanistan into a successful "beachhead" of democracy and economic progress in the Muslim world. If one is to think in these terms, then even by the standards of the Muslim world Afghanistan looks like an exceptionally rocky beach on which to land. Europe might make a more useful contribution both to the war against terrorism and to its own future if it concentrated its efforts closer to home.

The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC