The unexpected political earthquake in Northern Africa - the ousting of the autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, a violent revolution in Libya and popular protests in Algeria, Morocco and Jordan – has re-opened the old debate over the distribution of European Union funding to the countries in its neighbourhood. Like in the past, when the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was being created, the EU is still split along geographical lines. On the one hand, Mediterranean EU member states are calling for a strengthening of the Southern dimension of the ENP by increasing the EU’s political and financial engagement in this region, even at the cost of its support to the East. This position was expressed in a letter and ‘non-paper’ sent by the foreign ministers of France, Spain, Greece, Malta, Cyprus and Slovenia to EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Catherine Ashton, on 16 February. On the other hand, the EU’s Central European member states are advocating a more balanced approach with stricter conditionality towards all the EU’s neighbours – an idea supported by German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle in a letter sent to Ashton, in mid-February, as well as by his Swedish and Polish counterparts, Carl Bildt and Radoslaw Sikorski, who expressed similar views in a letter sent to Ashton in early October 2010.

Meanwhile, a potential increase of funding under the new financial perspectives (2014-2020) for any of the two regions requires consensus among all member states. All of them also have to give their nod to any shift in the way the funds are distributed. Against the backdrop of a prolonged economic crisis, negotiations on both ideas might prove to be tricky, involving heavy bargaining between competing interests. A handful of member states, led by the UK, have already signalled their opposition to any increase in EU spending during the next financial perspectives. They suggested instead a freeze at the 2007-2013 level. In general, the chances are rather slim, according to experts and diplomats who spoke to Europolitics,for any significant increase of ENP funding in the future or any major reorientation of support from one region to the other. The latter idea has recently been rejected by the European Parliament, which spoke instead in favour of preserving the status quo (see Europolitics4163).

The current distribution of funds between the two regions was decided in June 1995, during the Cannes European Council, where the rule of directing two thirds of all funds to the Mediterranean countries and one third to the Eastern European neighbours was established. It was further confirmed by a joint declaration of the European Commission and the Coreper, adopted in 2006. The rule has been respected strictly until 2009, when the European Commission decided to allocate over €300 million to the Eastern Partnership. Iván Martín, associate researcher at the Instituto Complutense de Estudios Internacionales (ICEI) in Madrid, argues that since then there has been a gradual shift in ENP financing to the benefit of the Eastern region. “This trend was upheld by the approval of the ENP national indicative programmes 2011-2013 by the European Commission in March 2010, where the average increase for the Eastern Partnership countries was 58%, whereas the average increase for the Southern neighbours was less than 30%,” says Martín in an interview published on the Eastern Partnership Community website ⁽¹⁾. He argues that per capita aid to the Eastern Partnership countries during that period (€6 per inhabitant and per year on average) would for the first time overtake per capita aid to Mediterranean countries (€4.2 per inhabitant and per year on average).

Meanwhile, Elina Viilup, a research fellow at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, says that while the EU’s political attitudes towards its Eastern and Southern neighbours have always been distinct, there has been “an overall balance of financing per capita” between both regions. “A closer look at the table (see below), when removing from the equation the obvious cases, ie the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Israel and Russia, shows an overall balance of financing per capita between the East and the South,” says Viilup in her paper.