After the collapse of Communism, will a new threat to the West come from Islam? A Middle East consultant believes that such fears are exaggerated. A new initiative by the European Union could point the way to greater co-operation. The European Union is trebling its investment in its mostly Arab, Mediterranean neighbours. But is its policy as philanthropic as it claims? Or is it based on fear of instability, fundamentalism and that bogeyman, Islamic terror, on its borders?

As Christian Europe heads doggedly for economic monetary union, its Islamic neighbours are spiralling out of control. Algeria has spent four years in a state of terrifying civil conflict in which fundamentalists and security forces murder each other and foreigners, including monks and the French Bishop of Oran ? men respected by even the most orthodox Muslim as dhimmis, protected monotheists.

In traditionally cosmopolitan Egypt, a respected Egyptian theologian is condemned as an apostate and ordered by the supreme court to divorce his wife. His crime? His liberal interpretation of the Koran has disqualified him from conjugal union with a Muslim.

In the Palestinian Territories, a right-wing Israeli government and an autocratic Palestinian regime unwittingly lure wretched camp-dwellers in search of solace and roots into the arms of the fundamentalist groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. How many a pathetic home have I visited in Gaza?s Shati camp with a niche bearing its proud photograph of an Islamic martyr!

Turkey, meanwhile, is enjoying an uneasy coalition between a fundamentalist Prime Minister and a pro-Western Foreign Minister pulling the country between West and East under the hawk-like gaze of a staunchly Kemalist, secularist army.

Further afield, the Taleban have imposed such a puritanical regime in two-thirds of Afghanistan that Herati families are sending their daughters to fundamentalist Iran for a modern education.

Is Europe, self-confident and economically powerful, together with an increasingly uncompromising Israel, in danger of forcing its humiliated neighbours into a pan-fundamentalist pact? Should we entertain Samuel Huntington?s popular theory that there is a clash of civilisations, with Islam replacing Communism as the new threat to the West?

Despite the bitterness, the answer is almost certainly no. The disunity among Muslims revealed by the 1991 Gulf War was itself enough to dispel any such myth. Links between Islamic groups are often exaggerated, and the outside support they receive is disparate and often given more on pragmatic than ideological grounds.

Thus Pakistan supported the Taleban in the mistaken belief that they would keep open the roads for its new trade links with the Central Asian republics. Saudi Arabia had supported the Afghani Mujahideen in the mistaken belief that its enemy was international Communism rather than the fanatics inside the kingdom itself, who hark back to the capture of the Great Mosque in Mecca in 1979 ? men even more extreme than Saudi Arabia?s own puritan founders.

It is, rather, the despair and disunity of Europe?s neighbours that makes them so dangerous. An ethnically mixed Europe confronts an Arab world and a Turkey now devoid of their minorities and rooted in an increasingly uncompromising Islamic mould. The brilliant Jewish populations of Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and Morocco had been forced, partly by Israel?s Jewish Agency, to migrate to Israel by the early 1950s, and today the influential Palestinian Christian population is fast emigrating to the New World. By eliminating strangers from their midst, countries impoverish and weaken their own societies.

The monks of Medea had lived for years in peace in the heartland of Algeria?s fearsome Groupe Islamique Arm? (GIA) before being slaughtered by the same GIA last May. Bishop Pierre Claverie had been Oran?s bishop for 15 years when he was blown to pieces in Algiers in August. Since 1993 some 40 French nationals have been murdered in Algeria, including 19 monks and nuns.

Europe?s response to such instability is healthy in principle, but some fear that it will be cosmetic in reality. After a delay created by now customary Greek protests over Europe?s ties with Turkey, the European Union has launched a ?4,000 million programme aimed at raising economic and social standards among its 12 Mediterranean neighbours, conditional on good governance and a clean human rights bill. The package was initiated at last November?s European summit at Barcelona, which EU officials saw as a turning-point.

But critics fear that the real aim is to create a cordon sanitaire. They believe that the new package is inspired by Europe?s increasing fear of immigration and fundamentalism, and their perceived concomitant, terrorism; that Europe seeks its own security and prosperity as its neighbours face social and economic breakdown.

The programme is based largely on Europe?s own post-war experience which involved the dismantling of trade barriers and the creation of an organisation to oversee economic recovery. At present its 12 southern neighbours conduct some 50 per cent of their trade with Europe but only about five per cent among themselves. Europe wants to help them clean up their shop so that they can become healthy trading partners ? but partners who no longer want to cross the water.

The new policy involves agreements which have already been negotiated with Israel, Tunisia and Morocco. By the end of 1996 similar agreements should be in place with Jordan, the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon. It all sounds rather utopian but the EU hopes that the new millennium will see a vast free-trade area stretching from Finland in the north to Algeria in the south, and from Turkey in the east to Morocco in the west.

Cyprus and Malta are now on their way towards full membership of the European Union. Turkey, which has been disappointed constantly in its struggle to join, was allowed to become a member of the European Customs Union early this year. But, berated by the European Parliament for its abysmal human rights record and constantly stonewalled by Greece, it is not included among the 12 countries named as candidates. With its pro-Western Foreign Minister, Mrs Tansu Ciller, relying on the good offices of a pro-Islamicist Prime Minister to stave off corruption charges, Turkey may in any case be turning away from such a close identity with Europe.

Long overshadowed by the United States in the Middle East, Europe is trying to secure a position it feels it deserves. The EU?s relationship with the north African countries has been inspired from the start by France?s continuing links with its former colonies. President Chirac?s brave if attention-seeking behaviour in Jerusalem last month when he called on Israel to trade peace for territories and lost his temper with Israeli security men in front of television cameras, reflected concern about Franco-Arab ties.

Tit for tat, Britain?s Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, responded during his subsequent visit to the region by urging Israeli redeployment from Hebron, where 400 Israeli settlers live among 100,000 Palestinians, and calling for Palestinian statehood. In a policy address last week designed to raise Britain?s profile in the region, he suggested setting up a new organisation in the Middle East to reintegrate pariahs such as Iraq and Iran. It would borrow from Cold War experience overcoming mistrust between former enemies.

Mistrust has been a common theme between Europe and its neighbours, highlighted by the 1991 Gulf War when even polite Arab society ladies in London supported Saddam Hussein on the grounds that although he was a tyrant, he was their tyrant. Half a decade later, Europe?s Arab neighbours are learning to their dismay that far from welcoming them, Europe?s Schengen Accords on immigration are making their access to Europe on visits humiliatingly difficult.

With EU countries already hosting 11 million legally resident immigrants and a possible four million illegal ones, mostly from Algeria, Morocco and Turkey, Europeans are becoming increasingly xenophobic.

Sceptics see Europe?s new partnership as ambitious and extremely idealistic, at least on paper, but flawed. They say it offers little guarantee of a solution to the southern countries? social, political and economic difficulties and contains contradictions, both in the Schengen Accords? prohibition of the free movement of populations and in limiting the import of agricultural products from countries such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

It would be unfair at this stage to condemn such an apparently philanthropic initiative and one, in theory at least, so closely linked to the twin issues of democracy and human rights. But Brussels will have to reassure Europe?s troubled Arab neighbours that the new programme will be genuine.

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