As Israeli troops advance deeper into Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, the war’s impact has continued to widen. In European states, domestic polarization has risen over whether or not Israel should be pressured into a cease-fire due to the horrific civilian death count in Gaza. But that has led to the conflict being debated as a foreign policy crisis with little direct connection to the internal workings of the European Union. Yet as the war continues to escalate in ways that affect every state in the Eastern Mediterranean, efforts by Brussels to keep the horror currently engulfing Gaza and Israel at arm’s length from the EU are unlikely to remain sustainable for long.
Brussels’ strategy toward the Eastern Mediterranean has long been most notable for its confusion over how to organize its relations with the states in the region. Though Turkey’s EU membership candidacy is effectively suspended, even if accession negotiations remain formally underway, it still enjoys substantial access to the EU’s Single Market through the Turkey-EU Customs Union. So, too, does Israel through an Association and Free Trade agreement. By contrast, the EU’s approach toward Egypt, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority has largely remained limited to development aid and economic investment that avoids any lowering of visa and security barriers.
This tendency to treat the countries in the Eastern Mediterranean as a geopolitical periphery reflects the legacies of both the imperial rivalries of the 19th-century and the collapse of empires following World War I, which led to the emergence of impoverished states fighting over contested borders. Ever since, tensions between Greece and Turkey have remained acute over the control of islands in the Aegean Sea and other legacies of the wars they fought in the early 1920s. Cyprus has been another source of confrontation, though Athens and Ankara’s mutual NATO membership has acted as a check on wider escalation.
What transformed the Eastern Mediterranean’s position from external periphery into core concern for European institutions was Greece’s accession to full EU membership in 1981 as part of its transition to democracy. Despite Athens’ initial economic weakness, the presence of Greek leaders at the heart of decision-making in Brussels ensured that Greece’s maritime claims in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean would define EU strategy toward the region.
Moreover, Greece’s firm support also ensured that Cyprus was able to join the EU in 2004, despite the island still being divided between the Republic of Cyprus in the south and the Ankara-backed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The presence of both Greece and Cyprus within EU institutions has meant that Brussels cannot be a neutral actor in the region. Through the two countries’ maritime boundaries and Exclusive Economic Zones, it also placed the EU’s borders directly adjacent to those of Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and Syria.
This proximity between the EU and these geopolitical fault lines in the Middle East already forced Cyprus to ask for assistance from Frontex in 2019 to manage the influx of refugees arriving by the hundreds on boats setting sail from Lebanese ports. These requests mirrored similar Frontex-led operations to handle refugees and migrants crossing from Turkish beaches to Greek islands along the Aegean. In the past three weeks both of these Frontex operations have been preparing to expand capacity in case further escalation in Gaza leads to greater refugee flows on a comparable scale to that of Syrian refugees in 2015.
The EU is itself a regional actor exposed to the fallout from conflict and crisis across the Eastern Mediterranean, making a complete reappraisal of its incoherent strategic approach to the region overdue.
Alongside such anxieties over refugee migration, there are also concerns that the conflict could widen, drawing in Hezbollah in southern Lebanon or rekindling the insurgency in Sinai, in ways that could affect trade and fisheries throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. A scenario in which Israel becomes engulfed in wars with Hezbollah and Hamas involving naval operations, while the Egyptian army struggles with insurgents in Sinai, will also compound fears in Nicosia and Athens about indefinite delays to regional infrastructure and gas-extraction projects that both had hoped would give their fragile economies a boost.
This potential for deep economic damage has been underscored by the seizure of Western cargo ships in the Red Sea by Iran-backed Houthi fighters in Yemen aligned with Hezbollah and Hamas. With other cargo ships diverting away from routes running through the Sinai Canal and shipping insurance rates for the region beginning to tick upward, such destabilization could have dire effects on key business sectors in Greece and Cyprus. If two EU member states become directly exposed to another round of conflict around the Eastern Mediterranean, it is highly unlikely that Brussels could continue to behave as a distant observer, rather than as the directly affected regional actor that, in reality, it is.
The extent to which the EU, through Greece and Cyprus, is itself a regional actor exposed to the fallout from conflict and crisis across the Eastern Mediterranean has made a complete reappraisal of its incoherent strategic approach to the region overdue. Rather than trying to deal with each regional state and source of tension separately, while relying on U.S. willingness to act as diplomatic arbiter and security guarantor, Brussels will need to develop a more comprehensive framework to secure regional stability.
Breathing life into the EU’s so-called Southern Neighborhood strategy with a focus on more wide-ranging and integrated regional infrastructure and economic development projects could provide positive incentives for governments and nonstate actors in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Egypt to seek negotiated outcomes. To be sustainable, such a renewed strategic effort would also need to find ways to improve cooperation between Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and Northern Cyprus. Rather than viewing these conflicts as separate from one another, Brussels, in partnership with Athens, needs to look at how a de-escalation strategy toward one geopolitical conflict requires also addressing other ones in the same region.
Such an integrated regional plan would also require more distant EU states to be willing to open access to the Single Market further to Arab states bordering the Eastern Mediterranean. Currently Brussels handles these states through Neighborhood Development and International Cooperation Instruments that focus on aid, without substantially reducing trade and travel restrictions. Instead, the EU could use forms of conditionality to promise a gradual removal of some barriers as long as these states pursue a course of regional de-escalation, negotiation and universal democratization for their citizens, regardless of ethnic and religious background.
With the Israeli military currently in the process of brutally devastating large parts of Gaza in retaliation for the crimes committed by Hamas in southern Israel, such a partial integration and development plan by the EU may seem hopelessly optimistic. But even if its implementation may be years or decades away, it’s not too soon to present a clear framework for de-escalation and negotiation that regional actors could draw on once a state of permanent warfare no longer seems viable to elites and the wider public.
As the EU evolves into something more like a state, regions along the Mediterranean that have been intertwined with each other for millennia now find themselves split between those societies that can shape the European order from within and those on the outside of the EU’s hardening borders. Yet as the impact of war and refugee migration once again becomes felt by each state along the Eastern Mediterranean, the reality that societies on both sides of that line are profoundly connected with one another can no longer be avoided. However much Brussels might prefer to hide behind U.S. efforts to manage escalation, EU policymakers must realize that wars they think are “over there” always profoundly affect a shared “here.”
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union’s border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.