Current mood:	sympathetic
Current music:	Laibach, "The Final Countdown (Juno Reactor Version)"

[BRIEF NOTE] Morocco and the European Union
The European Union has quite a few peripheries unlikely to join the European Union for some time yet. Take the states of the west Balkans--Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Republic of), non-Yugoslav Albania, and, perhaps one day, Kosova. Had Yugoslavia remained united, three of these states (possibly four, depending on how you see the Serbian-Montenegrin relationship) would have been ready to join the European Union. Yugoslavia was, after all, the most prosperous and liberal of Europe's Communist states. The Wars of Yugoslav Secession changed this. Ukraine and Moldova might be culturally European, and extraordinarily dependent on the future EU-25 for whatever prosperity and stability they might enjoy, but their very desperation makes them unsuitable candidates. Turkey has tried to get into the European Union for forty decades and is only now getting up to the minimal standards of membership.

And then, there's Morocco. As Uganda's New Vision has noted, Morocco's government and people are quite eager to distance themselves from Africa.

This land of 30.5 million, whose coastline is washed by both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, is geographically misplaced in Africa, so its people love to think.

It could as well have been designated part of Europe, being separated from Spain by just the seven-mile wide Strait of Gibraltar. Though racially considered an Arab land, half of its population speaks French as their mother tongue. Spanish, the other colonial language, is widely spoken too.

For the better part of the 38 years during which Hassan was in power, he was convinced Morocco rightly belonged to Europe so much that the country's policies were decided not in Rabat but in Paris and Madrid.

Europe is so much in the life of the Moroccans that 60 percent of the country's exports go to that continent. The trappings of Europe are evident all over here in Marrakech, where yours truly is penning.

For example, forget about Toyotas ruling the roads as you see in Kampala, giving the impression that everyone is driving Japanese. On the Marrakech roads, it's European cars par excellence: Peugeot, Fiat, Renault - names that are almost extinct on Ugandan roads!

Seeing Europe right in his face and the real Africa far away beyond the vast Sahara Desert, King Hassan before he died in 1999 could not help knocking on the doors of the European Union (EU) asking for Morocco to be let in as a member.

The EU rebuffed Hassan, but his son, the youthful Mohammed V (38yrs) a.k.a. M6, in Moroccan speak, has carried on the fight. The young King is so Euro-centred that he got a PhD in EU matters. But all these pro-Euro credentials of Morocco do not amuse the Europeans.

Brussels sees Morocco as nothing more than another African country with depressing economic stats not worth exporting to mainland Europe-50 illiteracy, massive unemployment etc. Above all, the Europeans view Morocco as the springboard for the illegal African immigrants, a source of drugs-and more dangerously terrorists.

Instead, the Europeans seem to be just content flocking to Morocco as tourists, basking in the more milder winter temperatures, across the Mediterranean.

Morocco's problem is, indeed, that it lacks any one set of skills or traits that it can provide the European Union. Morocco can serve as a source of resources just as well outside the European Union as inside. As a source or corridor of illegal immigrants, most prominently to Spain and France, Morocco is positively unwanted.



Morocco, like Turkey, might be a Westernized Muslim country close to Europe and its Union in more ways than one. However. Turkey might be poor by European Union standards, but it at least is a relatively modern society: mostly urban, modestry industrial, politically modern. Morocco, for its part, remains a rural and tribal society, fundamentally poor and underdeveloped, still run by a fairly authoritarian monarchy.

As the BBC observed, more than 60% of Morocco's exports might go to the European Union, and Europe provides "most of Morocco's tourists, remittances and loans." Morocco might even have a free-trade deal with the European Union that has already caused many European textile companies to relocate to the country for cheap labour. So far, though, in a world economy where free trade and unrestrained flows of finance and (non-dual-use) technology coexist alongside the restriction of labour movements to and from the countries at the heart of the world economy, though, Morocco (and individual Moroccans, of course) look set to be kept perpetually outside the European Union. The best symbol of this might lie in the status of physical connections between Morocco and the European Union:

A hint might lie in the fate of the bridge planned to span the Straits of Gibraltar.

Announcing the project in 1988, the late King Hassan undertook to complete it before 2000. Work has yet to begin.