Amazon.com description: Product Description: This volume provides informed analysis of topical developments of international interest. As the European Union debates a major reinforcement of its Mediterranean policy, with the proposal to establish a "Euro-Mediterranean partnership", this text leads with an assessment of its Mediterranean policy in the recent past and attributes responsibility for its shortcomings as much to southern as to northern European member states. Other chapters focus on the multilateral process of Mediterranean/Middle Eastern co-operation that has unfolded since the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement; the Greek presidency of the EU and its implications for the Mediterranean; and southern European policy responses to environmental regulation. Balkan unrest is reflected in two chapters - one acounting for the decline in political relations between Albania and Greece, the other addressing the problems of ethnic minorities that look to Turkey as their "kin-state". The growing prominence of radical Islamist movements is at the centre of several of the remaning chapters, focusing on the domestic politics of Mediterrarean countries. Different state responses to Islamist movements are analyzed in studies of Egypt, Libya and the Lebanon, while the dilemmas involved in Western responses are illustrated by a chapter on Algeria. Rather different insights into political opposition in North Africa are provided by a case study of the human rights movements in Morocco. Finally, Italy's recent instability receives attention in a chapter on vicissitudes of the Italian Left.