France urged a 43-nation Union for the Mediterranean to tackle 21st century challenges from immigration to energy security at a launch today that sealed a new detente between Syria and Europe.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was to attend the Paris opening conference with over 40 other leaders including Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the first time Israeli and Syrian leaders will have been in the same room. The two countries recently began indirect peace talks with Turkish mediation.
The diplomatic breakthrough enables President Assad to emerge from isolation in the West three years after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, which many believe was orchestrated from Damascus.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said it was time the region put years of strife behind it and forge new ties with European Union states on the pressing issues of the day.
"The project is quite simply about taking in hand the big challenges of the century ahead," Minister Kouchner told a pre-summit meeting of foreign ministers from all the states involved.
"Climate change, worsening of the environment, access to water and energy, migration, dialogue between civilisations - the Mediterranean is at the heart of all the issues on which our future depends," he added.
The new organisation aims to pursue practical projects with EU and private sector funding such as cleaning up the Mediterranean Sea, using North Africa's plentiful sunshine to generate solar power, and building road and sea highways.
But the Paris summit, a diplomatic success for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who holds the EU's rotating presidency, may be richer in symbolism than substance, at least to start with.
France and Egypt will be the first countries to co-chair the new body, but details such as the location and powers of its secretariat remain to be resolved, and the Middle East conflicts that bedevilled past EU-Mediterranean cooperation loom large.
President Sarkozy was able to boast that all the leaders of the southern Mediterranean region except Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi would be present, whereas only one attended a 2005 Euro-Mediterranean summit in Barcelona.
The French leader booked a first success yesterday when he hosted talks between President Assad and Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, who agreed to normalise relations between Damascus and Beirut for the first time since independence in 1943.
"We can say that Lebanon has moved from being a zone of turbulence, a war zone, to a more pacified zone where the Lebanese, and only the Lebanese, have the right to determine their own future," said President Assad, long accused by France, the former colonial power, of meddling in Lebanese politics.
The Syrian leader accepted a deal mediated by the emir of Qatar in May to pull Lebanon back from the brink of civil war, leading to the election of President Suleiman and the appointment of a government of national unity on Friday.
President Assad has also begun indirect peace talks with Israel via Turkish mediation, but he said he did not expect direct negotiations for the next six months until United States (US) President George W. Bush is out of office because the current administration was not interested in Middle East peace.
Two countries that were very sceptical of President Sarkozy's original Mediterranean Union initiative, Germany and Turkey, gave the reshaped version their full support yesterday.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said Ankara would play a constructive role and accepted French assurances that this was not intended as an alternative to Turkey's EU membership bid, which President Sarkozy has long opposed.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who forced President Sarkozy to include all EU members in the new look partnership, said in her weekly podcast that the Middle East region and North Africa were of strategic importance to the whole of the EU.
"In future we want to discuss the problems with nations around the Mediterranean from a position of equals," she said.
Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi is also attending the summit, together with Minister for Foreign Affairs Tonio Borg, Head of Government Communications Gordon Pisani and Permanent European Union Representative Richard Cachia Caruana.