Who reaped the Arab Maghreb Union?
Maghreb leaders are not very enthusiastic about their union. Although each of them has his reasons and motives behind this, they all agree on one thing, which is that they are not ready to slam the door behind them and withdraw from the Arab Maghreb Union. They know very well that they may not gain circumstantially from staying in it, but they see, probably, that what they can lose by getting out of it may not be a small thing. But if that regional structure still exists today, what is the sign that there is, in fact, a well-established and existing entity called the Arab Maghreb Union? Some might say it's the official papers or it's that submerged building in a suburb of Rabat above which a flickering flag of stars with red, white, green and yellow symbolizes the flags of the five North African countries. But the paradoxes are beyond limitation. And the last of them may be the gas pipeline that connects Algeria with Spain and passes through Morocco and has so far retained the name “Maghreb-European Gas Pipeline”, although everyone knows that Algeria had announced at the end of last October that the contract to export its gas to Madrid through it would not be renewed. He ruled out that it views with alarm and dissatisfaction the decision of the Iberian authorities early this month to respond positively to Rabat’s request “to obtain liquefied natural gas from international markets and deliver it to a re-conversion plant on the Spanish peninsula and use the Maghreb gas pipeline to transport it to its territory,” as announced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Spanish Environmental Transformation. Likewise, one of the Maghreb capitals is hardly devoid of a square, square, or street bearing the name or description of the Maghreb, although it seems unlikely that anyone would ask a simple question or inquiry to government officials about what such phrases and descriptions have come to mean for them. What happens is that things are constantly taking on the opposite meaning. Instead of the gas pipeline transiting Morocco being a living and stable embodiment of the values of Maghreb solidarity before the Maghreb-European solidarity, in which there is no place for political fluctuations, it has turned into a tool for reprimand and revenge that one Maghreb country uses against another. Instead of reminding the streets, squares, and squares passing by and passing by, the strength of the bonds that unite the Maghreb, it does not stir anything in them, but rather provokes their disregard, and at best their contempt and anger. Thus, very few will notice today that the Arab Maghreb Union will close tomorrow, Thursday, its thirty-third year. It is not at all surprising that the last thing that may concern Libyans, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans and Mauritanians in this circumstance is the survival of that union, which was officially established on the seventeenth of February 1989 in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh, or its absence and disappearance. Many regional and global crises and problems, perhaps even geographically distant, such as the expected war in Ukraine, as well as the internal and local issues that concern each of the five Maghreb countries, have become closer to them than a union that has for years no longer had anything but a fading cartoon presence. But what explains in this case, then, that the Maghreb leaders, despite all their differences and all the contradictions in their policies and even the number of enmities that govern them, have adhered to this structure until now? What is their interest in remaining in the state it is today? They are clearly finding it difficult to shake off what now looms to many as a scarecrow. Each of them is waiting for the other to fire a bullet of mercy at the union and officially announce his withdrawal from it, but in return he does not dare to take that step. This contradiction may be difficult to understand.