Regional integration in the MENA region

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is a region of abundant human and natural resources, shared culture and languages and a well-established heritage of skill in trade. With a total population close to that of the European Union, the MENA region is, however, the least economically integrated in the world. As they strive to create more jobs, attract more investment, boost growth and recover from the pandemic, countries of the MENA region today have a strong economic incentive to accelerate their efforts at regional integration.

The MENA region has been at the crossroads of regional trade throughout history. Countries have previously established a host of multilateral, regional, and bilateral trade agreements, with limited tangible outcomes. The benefits of regional integration include growth spillovers, larger markets, and production scale economies. These are well recognised by MENA economists, traders and farmers alike. What is lacking is not a rationale or capacity to integrate, but rather a sense of urgency to prioritise and move forward with integration. n the last decade, the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regional security environment has been shaped by the cycle of insecurity and instability. The structural transformation in the MENA has unleashed such forces whereby the region has been destabilized by multi-faceted conflicts, which have seen the involvement of many local, regional and global actors. The risks and security challenges produced by the wave of instability and conflicts have altered the international relations of the MENA region to a significant extent.

A retroactive reading suggests that a decade of turmoil was triggered mainly by the demands for political transformation observed in several countries. The broader transitions in the international order have also significantly accelerated the pace and direction of regional restructuring. The transformation of the regional order has been sparked by wave of popular uprisings, called the Arab Spring. Although the promise of democratic transformation heralded by the initial phase of the Arab Spring generated optimism, in its second phase, the regional transformation has increasingly been viewed in pessimistic terms. The initial prognoses for democratization produced mixed feelings about the future direction of regional transformation. However, no actor’s efforts alone were enough to assist the political transformation agenda, and diverging positions pursued by different international actors resulted in the stalling of political reforms. Increasingly, the region has been drawn into a cycle of violence as observed in Libya, Syria or Iraq, creating myriad security challenges that are threatening the local actors, as well as producing security externalities for the international system at large. This new security environment eventually altered the regional and extra-regional attitudes towards the issue of political transformation, narrowing the scope for a reform agenda.

Today, we can retroactively reflect on the overlapping processes of the reconfiguration of the states, the region and regional security dynamics, the broad parameters of which have taken some shape for now. Socio-economic pressures, various conflicts and extra-regional involvement have undermined the foundations of the regional order, with significant repercussions for the identities, borders, balance of power and alignments. Protracted civil wars, the emergence of non-state actors, proxy wars, and external interventions further undermined the semblance of a normative order. While many states of the region are struggling to preserve their sovereignty and territorial integrity, others have chosen to realign their partners. For some time, to accentuate the pressures on the nation-states and the borders, the discussions were centred on the future of the Sykes-Picot order, which arguably laid the foundations of the modern Middle Eastern states-system in the post-Ottoman era. As the centennial anniversary of the Sykes-Picot arrangements passed, the state borders have proven resilient, though the meaning and composition of putative nation-states is still being renegotiated.