Abstract

Europe and the Arab World is a wide-ranging assessment of the prospects for a new relationship between Europe and the Arab world in the coming years. Samir Amin and Ali El Kenz take as their starting point the significantly shifting balance of political forces within the various Arab countries, including the rise of both political Islam and civil society. They argue that the strategic global hegemony of the United States constitutes a major element affecting the Euro-Arab relationship. They then focus on the European Union initiative, originally launched in Barcelona, to put its relations with the Arab countries of the Mediterranean and Gulf regions on a new footing of equality and mutually beneficial cooperation. The authors provide a detailed empirical account of the initiative as well as an historically contextualized, intellectually critical and politically perceptive analysis of the various realities impacting on it.

Samir Amin and Ali El Kenz conclude that, while considerable dialogue and even institution-building have taken place in order to give substance to this attempt to go beyond the colonial legacy of inequality and dependence, little of a concrete kind has been achieved in transforming the underlying economic and political relationships between the Arab Islamic and European Christian worlds of the Mediterranean. Among the many obstacles identified are the overriding and economically deleterious impact of globalized capitalism, and the determination of the United States to impose its own political objectives on the Middle East.

The timeliness of this book's argument is highlighted by the new tensions that have accompanied the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and the Bush administration's political pretensions to 'bring democracy' to the whole region.

'These essays offer a forceful indictment of the European attempt since 1995 to put the relationship with neighbouring Arab countries on a more equitable footing.'
The International History Review

Samir Amin has a worldwide reputation as one of the foremost radical thinkers of our generation. Among his many institutional roles, he has been director of IDEP (the United Nations African Institute for Planning) from 1970 to 1980; the Director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal; and a co-founder of the World Forum for Alternatives. His most famous works are Accumulation on a World Scale and Unequal Development. Among his recent books in English are Re-reading the Post-War World: An Intellectual Itinerary (1994) and Empire of Chaos (1993). Ali El Kenz is Professor in Sociology in Nantes University, France. His work is focused on Arab research in the social sciences and he has published books, chapters and articles in both French and Arabic.