Negative Lesson Drawing from the Barcelona Process and the Renationalization of European States’ Israeli-Palestinian Policy

In 1980, just a year after the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, with the Venice Declaration, the nine European Economic Community states set the foundations for a shared position on the Palestinian issue. Fifteen years later, and three years after the Oslo agreement, the Barcelona process had among its policy goals improving Arab-Israeli relations, on the political, economic and cultural levels. The failure of establishing viable confidence building measures which would, even sectorally, lead to bilateral or regional improvements through the EMP, led to a de-Europeanization of Euro-Med policy, with the shift towards the more technocratic and project-driven Union for the Mediterranean and the re-nationalization of several EU member states’ Israeli-Palestinian policies. This article argues that problematic cooperation and lack of trust led to negative lesson drawing -learning what not to do- (Stone 2017) and to an assemblage (Lendvai & Stubbs 2009) of scattered policies without a political framework which paved the way for selected European states to politicise this issue, de-Europeanize it and fragment previously held European consensus.