Chapter 2

Defining Euro-Mediterranean Energy Relations

Francesca Pia Vantaggiato    School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies (PPL), University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, UK

Abstract

This chapter investigates the process of issue redefinition of Euro-Mediterranean energy relations operated by the European Commission (EC) over time. Section 1 reviews several themes, characterizing the literature on the European Union (EU) external energy policy, insofar as it is applied to Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation. It then proposes to use policy formation literature to understand how priorities emerged and/or shifted in EU external energy policy and how they were discursively framed. Section 2 reconstructs the stages in the history of Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation. The launch of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the failed endorsement of the Mediterranean Solar Plan (MSP) are highlighted as key turning points in the discursive definition of Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation. Section 3 examines the most recent energy policy debate in light of the insights gained from the previous two sections. Section 4 is a conclusion. The analysis highlights three facts. First, Euro-Mediterranean regional energy cooperation was located within the realm of the EU’s energy policy; since 2004, the EC moved it to the “external relations” framework, to recently embed it into its Foreign and Security Policy. Second, since the enlargement and in particular since Russia–Ukraine gas disruptions, the political salience of import dependency on Russia increased, causing the EC to predicate its policy interest in Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation on drawbacks in its relations with Russia. Third, the failed endorsement of the MSP brought prospects of regional electricity market integration to a standstill, pushing the EC to fall back on existing policy templates such as the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), the ENP, and the concept of a “pan-European Energy Community.”

Keywords

EU external energy policy
regional energy cooperation
Euro-Mediterranean region
This chapter investigates the process of issue redefinition of Euro-Mediterranean energy relations operated by the European Commission (EC) over time. Section 1 reviews several themes, characterizing the literature on the European Union (EU) external energy policy, insofar as it is applied to Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation. It then proposes to use policy formation literature to understand how priorities emerged and/or shifted in EU external energy policy and how they were discursively framed. Section 2 reconstructs the stages in the history of Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation. The launch of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the failed endorsement of the Mediterranean Solar Plan (MSP) are highlighted as key turning points in the discursive definition of Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation. Section 3 examines the most recent energy policy debate in light of the insights gained from the previous two sections. Section 4 is a conclusion. The analysis highlights three facts:
• Euro-Mediterranean regional energy cooperation was located within the realm of the EU’s energy policy; since 2004, the EC moved it to the “external relations” framework, to recently embed it into its Foreign and Security Policy;
• Since the enlargement and in particular since Russia–Ukraine gas disruptions, the political salience of import dependency on Russia increased, causing the EC to predicate its policy interest in Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation on drawbacks in its relations with Russia;
• The failed endorsement of the MSP brought prospects of regional electricity market integration to a standstill, pushing the EC to fall back on existing policy templates such as the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), the ENP, and the concept of a “pan-European Energy Community.”

1. The EU external energy policy: frameworks of analysis

Few topics of European integration have triggered as much debate as the EU external energy policy. This is probably due to its evolving nature, its uncertain competence boundaries, its shifting policy priorities, and the challenges therein. Contributions in the literature have clustered around a few key themes. These themes constituted frameworks, serving as lenses through which policy debates have been analyzed.
A particularly prolific framework is the “markets versus empires” metaphor (Correljé and van der Linde, 2006; Youngs, 2009; Escribano, 2011). In this framework, markets represent an organization of energy issues around markets, regulation, and supranational multilateral institutions charged with achieving consensus among members and dealing with rule enforcement. In this scenario, energy matters are solved through market mechanisms, inspired by efficiency and competitiveness. In the empires scenario, by contrast, the world is split into blocks, segmented along energy-based political alliances. Rivalry and quest for resources characterize the framework, which does not exclude military intervention to secure resource access. In the literature, the EU is usually seen as a committed supporter of the markets framework.
A second very successful notion is the one of the EU as a “normative power” (Manners, 2002). In this vision, the EU boasts a magnetic force for countries surrounding it, where it seeks to export values and norms through the means of soft power and suasion. Thanks to its success as a regional model, the EU is able to draw countries toward its socioeconomic model based on democracy and the rule of law. The concept of “market power” Europe counterbalances this normative vision (Damro, 2012; Pollack, 2010) and underlines the usage the EU makes of its market size in order to impose its hegemony in its neighborhood (Haukkala, 2008)). In energy issues, the concept of normative (or market) power is called upon in contributions underlining the EU’s attempt to extend its rules (the energy acquis) onto neighboring countries.
A further, although less thoroughly explored, topic in analyses of the EU external dimension (including energy) is “regionalism.” The EU has been said to “play it regional” (Bicchi, 2006) by regionalizing areas in its neighborhood, which do not perceive themselves as regions, and by applying onto them its own institutional templates. The influence of sociological isomorphism on the EU’s institutional practice would explain this approach (Bicchi, 2006). Energy is a sector often tackled on a regional basis. Integrating markets across borders is considered to bring advantages both in terms of efficiency and in terms of economic growth, security, and political stability.1 This conception can explain the EU-specific understanding of the “Euro-Mediterranean region,” which includes the EU as well as southern and eastern Mediterranean countries (SEMCs). This concept differs from the notion of the Middle East and North African (MENA) region,2 which includes countries belonging to the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (often referred to as the GCC).
More recently, the literature has relied on frameworks based on ideas and discourse to analyze the EU external energy policy. In this case, the EU’s upholding of its energy, legal, and regulatory framework in third countries is seen as premised on deeply rooted and path-dependent frameworks of understanding, which are communicated through specific discourses. The energy policy discourse revolves around key concepts, such as market framework, liberalization, and regulation, which identify the EU as a supporter of markets and norms, or as “a liberal actor in a realist world” (Goldthau and Sitter, 2014). Nevertheless, observers have diagnosed inconsistency across EU institutions in their external energy policy discourse toward Russia (Kuzemko, 2013), revealing a mixture of neoliberal and geopolitical themes underpinning it. This view appears to be confirmed by the recent European Commission (2014), which adopts “unprecedented geopolitical tones” (Youngs, 2014).
Overall, the strenuous attempt of the EU to replicate, or project, itself onto its neighborhood pervades this whole literature, representing its common denominator.
The policy literature also fed into this debate. Contributors have understood the EC as a determined institutional entrepreneur, who appropriated the energy issue over time by exploiting political opportunity windows as they presented themselves (Maltby, 2013). In this way, the EC managed to frame internal and external energy issues so that member states acknowledged the need of supranational, EU action. The centrality of the EC to EU energy policy analyses is due to the key role it played in a matter, which was initially placed out of its institutional reach, such as energy. The process whereby the EC consolidated its grip on the rules of the internal market proceeded virtually simultaneously with its quest for a role in external energy matters. Observers have remarked on the ability of the EC to lock energy issues in overlapping policy areas falling under its legislative competence (Solorio and Morata, 2012), such as competition policy and external trade relations.
It is worth noting how on the EU side, the whole external and internal energy policy discourse has always been premised on security of supply, given its scarce fossil fuel endowment. The EU external action in energy has thus also been interpreted as an attempt to securitize its borders through extending its internal dynamics to its neighborhood (Lavenex, 2004). Specifically, the need to ensure security of supply underlies the notion of interdependence between the EU and its neighborhood in energy issues. However,

The perception of interdependence is not a fixed entity, and varies with the conjuncture of security concerns within the Union. (…) Such a perspective explains not only why specific issues of ‘domestic politics’ gain priority in relations with neighbouring countries, but also why these priorities fluctuate over time, such as manifested in EU–Mediterranean relations. Securitization from this perspective does not directly derive from objective external threats but is the outcome of framing processes within an evolving institutional environment (Lavenex, 2004).

Further insights can be gained, I argue, by relying on the policy formation and agenda-setting literature. This literature argues that policy issues are framed and reframed dynamically in time in response to endogenous or exogenous shocks. At the macro level, collective issue definition determines which issues make it to the policy agenda. At the micro level, policy actors compete to frame an issue recognized as salient according to their own policy interests and preferences. The combination of the micro level and the macro level helps put items on the policy agenda and, after a competitive process of issue definition, gives rise to the policy itself (see Kingdon, 1984; Stone, 1989; and also Nowlin, 2015). The various facets of policy may change in salience or prominence as conditions change. Conditions create windows of opportunity for policy actors to put forward their preferences and shape policy issues accordingly. Hence, policy issues are defined and redefined in accordance with variations in their political salience. The concept of issue definition is part and parcel of the policy literature on agenda setting and institutional entrepreneurialism. Maltby (2013) explores the growing role the EC carved for itself within the EU energy policy in gas, managing to frame it in security terms and thus requiring a European solution.
This contribution underlines how the security aspect of energy policy has been exacerbated by recent events involving Russia and Ukraine, allowing for stronger EC policy entrepreneurialism. Most importantly, this contribution outlines how these events impacted on the salience and the definition of Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation at the EU level, through an analysis of the EC framing of the issue. In order to grasp the magnitude of the change, I delineate the key episodes in the EC framing of Euro-Mediterranean energy relations since the beginning of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) in 1995.
The picture emerging from examination of the EC’s definitions of the Euro-Mediterranean energy relations over time is that of a movable feast: the EC shifted the Euro-Mediterranean energy relations’ issue from energy to the regional cooperation policy framework in the early 2000s; most recently, it moved it again, from the regional cooperation basket to a foreign policy and security heading, in a crescendo of securitization of energy issues.

2. Euro-Mediterranean energy relations

This section dwells on milestone events for Euro-Mediterranean energy relations. Section 2.1 briefly reconstructs the history of Euro-Mediterranean energy relations, from 1995 to the present time. Section 2.2 illustrates the reasons for the failure of the MSP, the first electricity market integration project conceived for the Euro-Mediterranean area, which transcended policy documents to come close to be implemented. Section 2.3 examines the most recent policy events, concerning EU energy policy and Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation within it. Throughout the section, the main purpose is to highlight the shifts in the EC’s definition of Euro-Mediterranean energy relations.3

2.1. A Short History of Euro-Mediterranean Energy Relations

Talks regarding regional cooperation between the EU and the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea started as early as 1995. A few years earlier, Algeria had plunged into civil war, prompting EU policy action. In 1995, the Barcelona Conference marked the start of the so-called Barcelona Process and the establishment of the EMP. The EMP was a broad policy program, covering items from democracy to trade. However, the centrality of energy issues was acknowledged, among others, in the only EC Communication entirely dedicated to energy cooperation in the so-called “Euro-Mediterranean region” (European Commission, 1996). The EMP energy vector was characterized by a twofold regional approach: political dialog between energy ministers from both shores in the Inter-Ministerial Conferences and expert dialog between representatives of the partner countries and the EC in the Euro-Mediterranean Energy Forum. Both the conferences and the forum began convening soon after the Barcelona Conference, but fell short of regular meetings thereafter.4 Cooperation did not progress as expected.
In 2004, the EC took a major policy decision by establishing the ENP, a program dedicated to cooperation between the EU and its composite southern and eastern neighborhood over a number of areas. The EMP was fitted to the ENP.5 The ENP novelty was that it combined regional aspects with a pronounced bilateral dimension: the EC proposes bilateral action plans to each of its “neighbors,” framing cooperation around a series of issues, among which is energy. The plans encourage convergence toward the EU legal and regulatory framework insofar as each concerned country is available to commit itself (Escribano, 2010). It has been argued that the bilateral dimension of the ENP was meant to bypass the political obstacles hampering regional cooperation among SEMCs (Tholens, 2014).
The ENP did not only represent a reframing of the Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation (see Vantaggiato, 2013 for an overview of the regional energy vectors of the ENP), but of the whole of the EU external dimension. Three main events occurred in or around the year 2004: (1) the Second Energy Package entered into force framing the EU internal energy policy in much more ambitious terms than ever; (2) the eastward enlargement of the EU took place; and (3) the Energy Community Treaty (ECT), extending the energy acquis to countries in South Eastern Europe (SEE), holding a membership perspective, was signed in 2005 and entered into force in 2006 – protracted and intense policy activity preceded it. This bundle of significant political steps encompassed both internal and external matters, resulting in a default extension of the EU energy market approach to a sizable area in eastern Europe.
The same could not be hoped for in SEMCs.6 Political divisiveness impeded regional cooperation among SEMCs. In the absence of a membership perspective, the EC had no coercive strength. The presence, among SEMCs, of net exporting countries (NECs) and net importing countries (NICs) that also represented important transit countries unveiled steep asymmetries of interests and bargaining power (Padgett, 2011) both among them and between them and the EU.
The ENP thus came to perform a key policy function: it marked the boundaries of the EU, separating members (and potential members such as the ECT signatories) from countries without a membership perspective (Cardwell, 2011). It also juxtaposed bilateral relations over an initiative initially premised on a regional approach. The regional component of the cooperation remained part of the ENP. However, the discourse framing regional cooperation was significantly altered.
In the 1990s the EC discourse on Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation was constructed in straightforward economic terms. In EC words (European Commission, 1996), regional energy cooperation should aim:

to develop energy planning tools based on the highly complementary nature of the Northern and Southern Mediterranean markets and supply networks; to increase trade in energy products; developing and linking up the energy networks in the various regions around the Mediterranean; promoting RTD and investment with the aid of partnerships on renewable energy sources and energy efficiency; to create a favourable environment in order to promote investment by starting or continuing reforms of the Mediterranean partners’ energy industries.

Moreover, the EC discourse left room for coownership of the legal and regulatory aspect of energy cooperation (“An appropriate legal framework should be devised to encourage and promote regional and transregional trade”) and embedded regulatory convergence in a proinvestment discourse (“Uniform regulatory and contractual conditions must therefore be defined to encourage investments by foreign firms. The Mediterranean partners must not only open up their markets but also adopt rules which are as uniform as possible so that undertakings do not have to adapt to different regulatory frameworks in each country.”)
With the ENP, the discourse surrounding Euro-Mediterranean regional energy cooperation transformed into the idea to: “Extend the EU’s internal market, through expansion of the Energy Community Treaty to include relevant EEA and ENP countries” (Joint Paper, 2006). The idea of expanding the coverage of the ECT was first advanced in the 2006 Green Paper and subsequently reiterated in the 2011 Communication, meant as a response to the Arab Spring.
The approach underpinning proposals of extension of the ECT, however, never gathered SEMCs support: the discourse framing them is couched in a top–down policy approach, which is not supported by sufficient political clout to entice SEMCs. Moreover, cooperation and coordination among SEMCs is mostly absent. Hence their collective commitment to a regional initiative is improbable. It is thus unsurprising that energy cooperation gathered more momentum in the bilateral component than in the regional one (Tholens, 2014).
Crucially, with the launch of the ENP, the EC made Mediterranean regional energy issues exit the realm of the “EU Energy Policy” and enter the realm of “EU External Relations.”7 Before the launch of the ENP, “regional cooperation” was one item of the Community’s “energy policy.” Thereafter, “energy” became one item under the “regional cooperation” umbrella.
1. Since 2004, the EC used the heading “energy policy” to essentially refer to the internal energy market (IEM). All other energy matters became functional to its achievement. This shift in policy framing demarcates the discursive change mentioned earlier. In practice, the EC outsourced regional cooperation matters to parallel, umbrella policy frameworks in order to concentrate on its core business: achieving the IEM. Moreover, the IEM became its main negotiation tool in relation to SEMCs, which are offered a stake in the IEM in exchange for regulatory convergence.
2. In this perspective, policy frameworks such as the ENP do not appear as demonstrations of reinforced EC interest in regional energy cooperation with the SEMCs. To the contrary, they suggest a scaling down of regional energy cooperation priorities and a reinforced focus on strengthening the IEM, which by itself would increase the bargaining power of the EC in external energy matters.8
Furthermore, the enlargement altered the balance of energy priorities among the member states and for the EC. The membership of central and eastern European member states worsened figures of EU energy dependency on Russian imports. New member states advocated for the diversification of supply routes embedding their claims into a discourse of threatened national security, which transferred to EC level (Maltby, 2013). External energy policy priorities thus refocused away from SEMCs toward Russia, whose image as a dependable supplier9 was turned upside down. More precisely, energy policy interest toward SEMCs became predicated on the ebbs and flows of relations with Russia.
In the years following the launch of the ENP, slow progress in the achievement of the IEM and deterioration of energy relations with Russia added an element of urgency and a perception of threat to the EU’s energy security. Gas disruption episodes in 2006 and 2009 prompted renewed EC interest in the Mediterranean, in the form of bilateral strategic partnerships with ENP countries (such as Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt), as well as in the relaunch of regional cooperation in both gas and electricity.10 Therefore, initially EU–Russia problems played in favor of the Euro-Mediterranean energy dimension, which gained bolstered importance in 2008.

2.2. The Mediterranean Solar Plan and Its Demise

In 2008, the EMP was repackaged into the UfM, a program similar to the EMP but with a sharper focus on energy issues. Its importance resided in constituting the policy container of the first concrete attempt to approach the regional dimension of the Euro-Mediterranean Energy Partnership: the MSP. The MSP was an industrial initiative promoted in the same year by a consortium of energy companies and transmission system operators (TSOs) from various member states. It was aimed at creating a vast integrated regional electricity market across the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, fueled by renewable energy sources (RES). The MSP followed the wake of the DESERTEC initiative: an ambitious German-led industrial initiative proposing the development of RES-generated electricity in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region (thus including Gulf countries) and interconnection with the EU.
The rationale for supporting RES deployment in SEMCs has been amply discussed in the literature.11 Briefly, it can be summarized as follows: the potential of RES-generated electricity in the area is such, that it could cover a substantial part of the internal (steadily growing) demand of SEMCs. This would free up gas resources to sell on international markets (for the NECs, such as Algeria and Egypt). Also, it would reduce the deficits of NICs (such as Morocco, Jordan, and Tunisia), who feed their fossil fuel-based energy mix through imports from their neighbors. In addition, electricity generated through RES technology in the SEMCs could be exported to Europe. The EU would benefit from importing electricity from SEMCs in that it would achieve its ambitious climate targets and bolster its supply security. A bigger and integrated electricity market would ensure gains from trade for both sides. When the MSP was launched, it gained EC support as a “European” initiative. The EC sponsored the “Paving the Way for the Mediterranean Solar Plan (PWMSP)” initiative, launched in 2010 and gathering experts in charge of studying the feasibility of the plan.
The 2009 dispute between Russia and Ukraine caused grave gas supply disruption to several member states. The image of Russia further deteriorated in the eyes of the EU. The most affected member states, in Eastern and Central Europe, strongly advocated reducing the EU dependency on Russian gas supplies. The MSP came to be framed in these terms as well: RES-generated electricity from the SEMCs would both meet the EU’s climate objectives and reduce its supply vulnerability.
The PWMSP program lasted for three years, thus ending in 2013. The UfM had been tasked with drafting an MSP master plan, outlining the stages of its implementation, by the end of the program. The master plan was due to be approved at the Inter-Ministerial Conference purposefully convened in Brussels in December 2013. The ministers’ endorsement would put a European seal on the project that would set in motion investments. Unexpectedly, the plan was not endorsed, principally due to Spain’s opposition (see Carafa, 2015 for their motivation).
Lack of endorsement of the MSP is regrettable for various reasons. One of the most important from a policy perspective is its perceived ability to bring about regulatory convergence in the Euro-Mediterranean by convincingly framing it in terms of facilitated market outcomes for both shores (Escribano et al., 2013). In other words, stakeholders involved in the MSP had managed to reframe the discourse of regulatory convergence in terms more similar to those the EC used in the 1990s than to those it adopted in the early 2000s. By approximating their institutional and policy framework to that of the EU, SEMCs would lower their country and policy risk, besides lowering the costs of entry and eventually being able to participate in the EU Internal Energy Market. All stakeholders thus eyed the MSP as the gateway to the realization of several important objectives in Euro-Mediterranean regional energy relations.
The reasons for the MSP upheaval precede the Brussels Conference of December 2013. Whereas policy statements regarding this failure are rather generic,12 industry stakeholders are adamant in recognizing that:

…the rapid and sudden evolution of the Energy Reference Scenario was manifested in its entirety, caused by new phenomena: i) the structural change in the international fuel market (nonconventional fuels), ii) the interference between the production of electricity from renewable and conventional sources, iii) the reduction of electricity consumption on the Northern shore of the Mediterranean. This change of scenario impacts the assumptions of grid planning: no longer a strong production of electricity from renewable sources (RES) in the South for its export to the North, but a trading system much more articulated and complex, aimed at the integration of electricity and energy systems of the two shores of the Mediterranean (Med-TSO13 – emphasis added).

Opportunities and benefits for a massive renewable deployment in Southern Med countries were identified by institutional and industrial stakeholders, embedding a consistent import of energy to Europe for their bankability. When RES4MED was created, the vision of South Med as a ‘green energy reservoir for EU’ started to be challenged and today does not hold anymore (RES4MED Annual Conference14 – emphasis added).

Due to the economic crisis, energy demand in the EU has been shrinking for a few years now. Further, a quicker rate of emissions reduction was achieved than was expected, due to energy efficiency measures but also due to reduction of economic activity. At the same time, the RES support schemes enacted in several member states meant the take up of RES proceeded quicker than expected. The fact that the marginal cost of RES-generated electricity is zero allowed it to flood the wholesale markets and displace all other fuels. Furthermore, additional RES capacity has not been matched by equivalent plant decommissioning. This state of things would require a growing demand to be efficient, but demand is not there. In short, many member states suffer from overcapacity on their electricity markets. Lack of adequate interconnection infrastructure traps overcapacity within national boundaries. Hence, the failure of the MSP is premised also on the failure of coordination of member state national energy policies.
Demand in northern Mediterranean countries (NMCs) may recover to levels sufficient to alleviate these concerns. This is however not expected to happen in the short term. The situation is so critical that the idea is emerging of investigating the possibility to export electricity from NMCs to North Africa in the short term, rather than the contrary (Dii Report, 2013, p. 2; OME Electricity Committee Meeting Minutes, 2013, p. 5, 2014, p. 2). Demand in SEMCs, in fact, is projected to keep growing steadily in the next two decades.
Following the December 2013 Ministerial Conference, the MSP evaporated and silence fell over the Euro-Mediterranean electricity market integration debate until November 2014, when the Italian Presidency of the European Council gathered energy ministers from the Euro-Mediterranean region for the relaunch of regional energy cooperation in the area.

2.3. The Recent Relaunch of Euro-Mediterranean Regional Energy Cooperation

During its Presidency of the European Council, the Italian Government hosted an Inter-Ministerial Conference of Euro-Mediterranean energy ministers. The outcome of the conference was the establishment of three platforms for Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation: gas, electricity, and RES. A chronology of the main steps taken toward this result is given.
In March 2014, European Council Conclusions called on the EC to “conduct an in-depth study of EU energy security and to present by June 2014 a comprehensive plan for the reduction of EU energy dependence (…) including through the development of interconnections. Such interconnections should also include the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean area.”
In response, in May 2014, the EC released its Communication on the Energy Security Strategy, which places energy among the topics of EU Foreign Policy, and argues for the creation of a Mediterranean gas hub.
In July 2014, a conference entitled “Security of gas supply: the role of gas developments in the Mediterranean region” was held in Malta. It was attended by energy ministers from the EU and the SEMCs, industry representatives, and key stakeholders in the energy sector, including the EC. The ministers agreed on the establishment of a Mediterranean gas platform of cooperation.
In November 2014, the conference held by the Italian Government during its Presidency of the Council took place. On this occasion, regional cooperation in electricity and RES, largely absent from EC communications, is put back on the agenda.
In February 2015, the EC issued a further communication, launching the European Energy Union. It strongly advocated the completion of the internal market and for enhanced interconnection among member states. The discourse framing these topics was based on geopolitical worries and energy security. The Mediterranean entered the picture of the Energy Union due to gas supplies present in the region. The concept of the Mediterranean gas hub was reiterated. Steering committee meetings for the gas platform began in March 2015.
In May 2015, the new EC Commissioner for Energy undertook an energy diplomacy trip to Algeria and then to Morocco, so as to deepen energy ties. A political dialog on energy was established between the EC and Algeria. In Morocco, the three platforms were relaunched.
The platforms are inscribed into the framework of the UfM. However, the Observatoire Méditerranéen de l’Energie (OME) industry association has been nominated as secretariat for the gas platform. The UfM secretariat, instead, will coordinate the work of the electricity platform together with Mediterranean Energy Regulators (MEDREGs) and Med–TSO associations, as well as the RES platform.

3. Issue (re)definition in the Mediterranean: the securitization of energy matters

Recent events may suggest that Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation is back among EC agenda priorities. In order to understand what caused this revived interest, one should take a broader view and bring member states back into the picture.
Escribano (2011) clustered EU member states according to their main energy suppliers to gauge their expected policy preferences in external energy matters.15 He distinguished four groups: European, Euro-Russian, Russian, and Mediterranean. One of the countries in the “Russian” group identified by Escribano (2011) is Poland, a long-standing advocate for reducing reliance on Russian gas imports at the EU level. On April 10, 2014 the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk submitted a “nonpaper” to the EC. The document called for an energy union to increase the EU’s bargaining power toward its key gas and oil suppliers, first and foremost, Russia. Weeks before this move, a referendum made Crimea part of the Russian Federation. Soon afterward, the outbreak of unrest in the separatist provinces of Ukraine triggered EU sanctions toward Russia.
It seems that the tensions in Ukraine made eastern European calls for import diversification echo louder at the EU level. In other words, the circumstances of the Russia–Ukraine dispute heightened the political salience of diversifying gas suppliers and routes. The EC seized the occasion to borrow the concept of the Energy Union expressed in Tusk’s paper and reframe it to encompass the whole range of its policy priorities. Importantly, the EC maintained both the tones of urgency and the perception of threat contained in Tusk’s paper.
Within the new discourse, the “Euro-Mediterranean region” is functional to ensuring the EU’s gas supply. Given this reformulation of the EU energy policy, the failed endorsement of the MSP, and the crisis on EU wholesale electricity markets, the issue of electricity market integration with SEMCs lost its prominence on the policy agenda. A further element confirming this is the EC choice to rely on an industry association to coordinate the works of the gas platform, while placing electricity and RES within old, enfeebled policy frameworks such as the UfM.
Moreover, the recent EC/European External Action Service (EEAS) joint consultation paper (2015) on the future ENP does not make reference to gas. The EC/EEAS joint communication on the ENP implementation in 2014 does not make any reference to energy cooperation within the Euro-Mediterranean area. Hence, recent policy documents suggest that the EC has pushed Euro-Mediterranean energy (particularly gas) relations out of a regional framework such as the ENP, which is premised on the notion of “cooperation,” to firmly inscribe them into foreign policy and security items.
In this respect, it is worth mentioning that in 2003, the European Council issued a document entitled “A Secure Europe in a Better World,” where it outlined the European security strategy by identifying five key threats: terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, state failure, and organized crime. The document “provides the conceptual framework for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).”16 In that document, energy dependence was only mentioned as a concern of the EU, without further specification being given.
On July 20, 2015 the Council of the EU adopted its conclusions on the EU Energy Diplomacy Action Plan proposed by the EC and the EEAS within its CFSP framework, arguing that “The full range of foreign policy instruments should be used to provide support in promoting common messages and ’narratives’ on the top priorities and challenges for EU energy diplomacy.”17
In the process of securitizing energy issues, the EC has radically redefined its attitude and demands toward the Euro-Mediterranean area. The energy relations discourse with countries in the area (in accordance with its overall change) shifted farther away from the tones it had on its inception, following a discursive evolution pattern bearing striking similarities to the process of securitization of public issues outlined in Buzan et al. (1998):

‘Security’ is the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics. (…) In theory, any public issue can be located on the spectrum ranging from nonpoliticized (…) through politicized (…) to securitized (meaning the issue is presented as an existential threat, requiring emergency measures and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure).

The urgency injected into the EU energy policy discourse by the Energy Union concept justifies the unprecedented geopolitical tones (Youngs, 2014) retrieved in EC communications. It also explains the current EC Commissioner’s energy diplomacy trips (i.e., the establishment of openly political dialogs for an actor, normally depicted as supporting market frameworks and whose energy policy discourse had been premised on the necessity to depoliticize energy issues). Most importantly, it justifies the centralization of external energy policy issues at European level and a strong push toward completing the IEM as an energy security measure.

4. Conclusions

This chapter examined the evolution of Euro-Mediterranean energy relations by emphasizing changes in the discursive frameworks adopted by the EC to define them. The analysis recognized a distinct shift in discursive approach at the time of the establishment of the ENP, when Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation exited the “energy policy” box to become one of the items in the basket of a broad external relations strategy, thus losing specificity and policy focus.
The EC policy dialog, initially rooted in straightforward economic terms and mutual gains from cooperation with the ENP, transformed into a discourse bearing hegemonic tones and expecting compliance in return for access to an as yet incomplete IEM. Furthermore, the enlargement increased the political salience of dependency on Russian gas supplies, bringing the EC to reorient its external energy policy attention eastward.
The launch of the MSP in 2013 breathed new life into a stagnating Euro-Mediterranean energy dialog. The failure of its endorsement froze prospects of large-scale electricity market integration between the two shores of the Mediterranean for the short to the medium term.
Most recently, worsening of the Russia–Ukraine crisis represented a window of opportunity to speed up the pace of completion of the IEM and diversification of gas import routes. The EC seized this occasion, reframing its energy policy discourse once again through a strategy of securitization, whereby energy issues entered the realm of EC Foreign Policy. This meant its discursive framing of Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation changed as well: it is now premised on an explicitly geopolitical dialog.
Electricity and RES issues have lost prominence on the policy agenda, and have been inscribed into existing policy frameworks, such as the UfM, devoid of purpose after the failure of the MSP.
Important actors within this context, stakeholder associations are instead already working on reframing cooperation in electricity and RES, including by considering the option to export electricity from NMCs to SEMCs in order to obviate to the overcapacity problem plaguing them. Stakeholder work on regional electricity market integration between the two shores will likely continue in the background of the current developments, waiting for more propitious political times.

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1 This circumstance is often mentioned in contributions on the importance of energy policy for the EU, itself born on the basis of energy-related agreements (see Kanellakis et al., 2013, for a thorough review).

2 The MENA region concept is widely adopted by international organizations such as the IMF (see El-Erian and Fischer, 1996), the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank (WB) as well as in policy papers such as El-Katiri (2014) and Romdhane et al. (2013).

3 The EC can communicate its vision over any matter of relevance through nonbinding documents such as Communications, White Papers, and Green Papers. The contents of these documents normally outline EC policy goals and prelude legislative or policy initiatives. Hence, EC Communications often point to the direction policy will take. This is why relevant EC Communications and Green Papers are often referred to in this contribution.

4 The first Inter-Ministerial Conference was held in Trieste in 1996. Other meetings followed in Rome and Athens in 2003. They were then discontinued until 2007 (Limassol, Cyprus) and 2014 (Rome, Italy). The Euro-Mediterranean Energy Forum convened for the first time in Brussels in 1997, then in Granada in 2000. It proved extremely difficult to retrace the chronology of forum meetings thereafter. The Athens meeting of 2003 appears to mix Forum and Inter-Ministerial Conferences together. Following the Athens meeting, the Energy Forum as conceived within the EMP seems to have been discontinued.

5 The ENP financial instrument, called ENPI, financed various voluntary stakeholder cooperation initiatives in the area, such as the Association of Mediterranean Energy Regulators (MedReg), the Association of Mediterranean Transmission System Operators (Med-TSO), and others (see Hafner and Tagliapietra, 2013; Carafa, 2015).

6 Comparison between the EU approach (and results) to external energy policy in the case of the establishment of the Energy Community Treaty (ECT) and Euro-Mediterranean relations are often made in the literature (see Padgett, 2009 for a short and clear overview).

7 This is also evidenced by the fact that the EUR-Lex database does not include ENP-related documents under the Energy subject matter. The ENP is in the scope of activity of the EEAS.

8 In this context, the proliferation of stakeholder initiatives in the Mediterranean area can be seen as an attempt to rebalance the policy focus: in the face of scant ENP progress, the stakeholders took it upon themselves to steer the process of regional energy cooperation in the Euro-Mediterranean area. As a matter of fact, MEDREG, Med-TSO, and the MSP are all voluntary initiatives.

9 Expressed, for instance, in the 2000 Green Paper.

10 At the 5th EuroMed Energy Ministers Conference, held in Limassol (Cyprus) in 2007. On that occasion, the then EC Commissioner for energy launched a renewed Euro-Mediterranean Energy Partnership. An Action Plan for the region was also launched on that occasion covering the 2008–2013 time span.

11 See Mason and Kumetat (2011), Brand and Zingerle (2011), Jablonski et al. (2012), Trieb et al. (2012), Carafa (2015), Khalfallah (2015) to mention just some of the most recent contributions.

12 “Question for written answer P-014428/13 to the Commission from Gaston Franco (PPE) – (23 December 2013). Subject: Failure to adopt the Master Plan for the implementation of the Mediterranean Solar Plan. (…) The Master Plan for the implementation of the Mediterranean Solar Plan (MSP) was intended to be a strategic reference document to promote renewable energies and energy efficiency, strengthen electricity interconnections between the two shores of the Mediterranean and develop integrated regional markets. In the end the long-awaited adoption of this Master Plan following the meeting of the Energy Ministers of the Union for the Mediterranean, held on 11–13 December 2013 in Brussels, did not take place, owing to Spain’s veto in particular.

1. Could the Commission provide its analysis of the failure to adopt the MSP Master Plan at the meeting of the Energy Ministers?Could the Commission provide its analysis of the failure to adopt the MSP Master Plan at the meeting of the Energy Ministers?
2. Does it believe that the European energy market needs to be perfectly integrated prior to adopting the MSP Master Plan?
3. When will this Master Plan be tabled for adoption again?
4. Does the Commission intend to support electricity interconnections in the Mediterranean by building underwater cable links?
Answer given by Mr Oettinger on behalf of the Commission – (27 January 2014). The Mediterranean Solar Master Plan is a non-legally binding, policy orientation document. It suggests guidelines for the development of consistent and effective renewable energy and energy efficiency policies in the Mediterranean; it does not identify concrete projects nor provide for any type of financing. The Commission regrets that consensus could not be reached on the Master Plan. It considers, however, that lack of formal endorsement by the Union for the Mediterranean Ministerial (UfM) meeting does not prevent UfM Members from continuing and intensifying efforts for promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency, and more generally energy cooperation, in the Mediterranean. The Commission seeks to facilitate the integration of electricity markets around and across the Mediterranean. This requires, inter alia, the construction of electricity interconnectors between the south and the north rims of the Mediterranean. In this sense, the Commission supports and works with all relevant public and private stakeholders committed to the development of transMediterranean electricity interconnections.” (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1436089288587&uri=CELEX:92013E014428 (accessed 05.07.2015.).

13 http://www.med-tso.com/mediterranean.aspx?f= (accessed 05.07.2015.).

14 http://www.res4med.org/uploads/activities/AnnualConference2015/VIGOTTI_RES4MED_20%20APRIL%202015.pdf (accessed 05.07.2015.).

15 Security of supply is certainly not the only aspect that matters in energy policy. For instance, although Denmark belongs to the European cluster and Germany to the Euro-Russian cluster in Escribano’s classification, these countries both have considerable industrial policy interests in RES technology. This explains their interest in RES technology deployment for electricity generation in the Mediterranean and also why they figure as the only European sponsors of the RCREEE initiative (www.rcreee.org).

16 http://www.eeas.europa.eu/csdp/about-csdp/european-security-strategy/ (accessed 23.07.2015.).

17 The EU Energy Diplomacy Action Plan (annexed to the Council Conclusions) appears to complement the previously established Climate Change Diplomacy. The EC and the EEAS defined “climate change” as a threat multiplier in 2008 (Climate Change and International Security – Paper from the High Representative and the European Commission to the European Council) and in 2011 (Joint Reflection Paper – “Towards a renewed and strengthened EU climate diplomacy”), arguing for the framing of climate change targets within the European Security Strategy outlined in the Council document of 2003.

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