ABSTRACT:
Ever more explosive conflicts seem to surround the European continent. The past war in Iraq, the conflict over Palestine, the welfare border at the Straits of Gibraltar are just examples. At the same time, and seemingly against all odds of the ‘conflict between the civilizations’, the European Union continues its policy of the Mediterranean partnership . The European Com-mission considers Turkey – a secular country with an overwhelming Muslim population ma-jority, with good reason as candidate for membership in the European Union, all the more so since the far-reaching reforms enacted by the Turkish Parliament in Summer 2002.
It is shown in this essay that summarized research on the theme of the European Neighborhood policy over the last years and presents new results on the issue of South-North migrations, featuring so prominently in the essays by Haffad and Kudrina in this volume that not a Huntingtonian development failure of “Muslim culture” is to blame for many of the ills of the region, but that policies, based on the “Washington Consensus”, have reached their limit.
When Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Spain, handed over the keys of the city of Granada to the Catholic rulers in 1492, it was perhaps for the first time in history that the keys to the European common house figured prominently. Are we Europeans entitled to keep these keys in our hands forever, and to exclude the neighboring world of Islam?
Europeans should remember that the keys of the ‘common European house’ do not belong to one cultural tradition only. The world of Islam was pivotal to the European path to the Ren-aissance and to the re-discovery of classic Greek philosophy. Muslim tolerance and knowl-edge enabled us Europeans to develop. While there were terrible persecutions of Jewry in Europe, the world of Islam was generally tolerant towards Jewry and to Oriental Christianity, and even provided a safe heaven of refuge for the Sepharadic refugees, expelled from Spain in 1492.
An EU-25-Europe, comprising now 25 states, and stretching from the doors of Saint Peters-burg to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from the western shores of Ireland to Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily, not too many miles away from major population centers of the Arab world, has to sys-tematically think about its long-term neighborhood and its relations to the “outside world” (see especially the contribution by Manuela Moschella to this volume). This essay now systematically tries to link results, presented in this volume, to ongoing debates in the empirical world system debate .
A successful integration of the Mediterranean South would have tremendous and positive repercussions for regional and world peace. And this question is made all the more relevant by the expected demographic shifts in the vicinity of Europe until 2050. Politometric results about Muslim cultural orientation, migration and development support this approach.
