Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
or states to coordinate decisions and actions with the other actors involved.
Reaching an international political agreement is dii cult and there are dif-
ferent explanations about the conditions under which cooperation in the
Mediterranean Basin was achieved through the framework of MAP and
the Barcelona Convention. Haas (1990) summarizes these dif erent inter-
pretations into the main categories described below, explaining the causes
of cooperation, its ef ects and its forms in each one of the views.
Realism and neorealism are concerned mainly with the relationship
between state power and order in security af airs and the political economy
of advanced industrialized societies. Realists and neorealists would relate
cooperation to the distribution of power between the Mediterranean
states. Under this perspective the regional hegemonic leadership of France
would play a key role in developing cooperation under conditions of
international anarchy. This hegemony would dictate that the scope of
the agreements would mainly cover pollutants of interest to France but
also extend to other issues of national French interest. The strength of
cooperation - how weak or binding it is - would be dependent on French
power and might also depend on information available. Under a realistic
view the duration of the cooperation - how persistent it is - would also
vary with the two previous factors and the ef ects of the cooperation would
be to strengthen the inl uence of France in the region and achieve common
benei ts for all the Parties. However, this explanation did not prove
adequate when, after the decline of the regional French hegemony, MAP
continued to exist and to receive increased support both from the hegemon
and also from weaker states, showing that it is dii cult to predict potential
change in the motives of the states (Haas, 1990, ch. 6).
Historical materialism, as discussed earlier, is basically concerned with
distribution of economic resources and international equality, very often
expressed as the North-South divide. Historical materialists explain
cooperation in terms of the control of powerful capitalist states (that is,
European countries in the case of the Mediterranean region) over weaker
less-developed ones (that is, North African and/or Middle East coun-
tries in the same case). According to them the imperialism of European
states would lead to cooperation under conditions of capitalism. The
scope of the cooperation would not be clear but it would strengthen
areas where European states have interests. Both strength and duration
of the cooperation would vary with European dominance and ef ects of
cooperation would be imposition of unwanted forms of development
on less-developed countries, excluding alternatives, and the provision
of relatively more benei ts to European states, thus increasing com-
mercial dependence of the less-developed countries on them. So, in the
context of MAP, under a historical materialist interpretation, northern
