Twenty-seven nations signed the Barcelona Treaty, establishing the foundation for the Union for the Mediterranean, a significant diplomatic initiative aimed at promoting regional cooperation and dialogue between European and Mediterranean countries.
The declaration signed by twenty-seven European and Mediterranean countries in Barcelona, on 28 November 1995, laid out a new, conceptually and politically ambitious paradigm for Euro-Mediterranean cooperation.
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This came after more than twenty years of European policy toward the Mediterranean that was almost exclusively economic and extraordinarily limited.
As early as 1972, the European Economic Community (EEC) had launched the so-called Global Mediterranean Policy. However, despite its sweeping name, the policy was not conceptually ambitious or sufficiently well funded and it did not yield the desired economic results.
In 1985, the Economic and Social Committee concluded (ESC 92/85) that not only had third-party Mediterranean countries’ trade deficits with the EEC not narrowed, but they had actually grown.
The idea of a Renewed Mediterranean Policy, put forward by then-European Commissioner Abel Matutes in November 1989, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, offered a change of course with regard to prior policy.
According to the European Commission, a new regional policy was required, able to address in depth the economic and political challenges of southern and eastern Mediterranean countries.
Moreover, it addressed Mediterranean member states’ concerns that the Community would devote more attention to the new democracies emerging in Eastern Europe than to third-party Mediterranean countries