What UfM is and how it works

Two declarations, four months apart

The Barcelona Declaration, adopted by the Euro-Mediterranean Conference of Ministers of Foreign Affairs on 27 and 28 November 1995, set the partnership out in three chapters: political and security, economic and financial, and social, cultural and human. A summit in Paris on 13 July 2008, under a co-presidency of France and Egypt, launched a body called the Barcelona Process: Union for the Mediterranean and left the machinery to be settled later. It was settled at Marseille on 3 and 4 November 2008. That statement shortened the name, decided that the League of Arab States would take part in all meetings at all levels, placed the seat of the secretariat in Barcelona, and named the first projects: de-pollution of the Mediterranean, maritime and land highways, civil protection, a Mediterranean solar plan, higher education and research, and a business development initiative.

The chair comes in two halves

Marseille split the co-presidency by side. One co-president comes from the European Union and has to be compatible with the Union's external representation under the treaties in force. The other is chosen from among the Mediterranean partners by consensus, for a period of two years that the text calls non-renewable. France and Egypt held the chair from Paris. The European Union and Jordan have held it since 2012, and Jordan has no Mediterranean coast at all: its only frontage on salt water is at Aqaba, on the Red Sea.

What was actually built

The statutes of the secretariat were adopted on 3 March 2010 and the office opened in Barcelona that year, the first permanent structure the partnership had ever had. Marseille set it at one secretary general and five deputies, each selected by consensus of senior officials for a term of three years, extendable once. The five deputy posts in the first term were allotted to the Palestinian Authority, Greece, Israel, Italy and Malta, which describes the institution better than any declaration does: a building in which those five administrations keep desks along the same corridor. Half of the operating budget comes from the European Commission and half from contributions by the member states.

The founding instruments are declarations. What is signed underneath them is the secretariat's statutes and a headquarters agreement with the host state, which give the office its legal personality, its autonomous status and the immunities of its international staff. No member owes another anything enforceable here.

Consensus, and what it lets a member do

A regional project carries the UfM label only when senior officials adopt it by consensus, either in a meeting or through a silence procedure in which no reply by the deadline counts as agreement. Any member can stop a project by speaking, and a project that reaches the label has passed a room seating Israel, Palestine, Syria, Türkiye and every government of the European Union at once. That is the whole mechanism: a chair in two halves, an office in Barcelona, and a record that nobody objected.

The northern half is the Union's own roster

Every European Union member state is a member here, so the roster moves whenever the Union moves. Croatia signed the Paris declaration in 2008 as a Mediterranean partner and crossed to the European side on 1 July 2013 without leaving the group. The United Kingdom signed the same declaration and is not on the list now.

A Mediterranean coast is not the qualification

Austria, Czechia, Hungary, Luxembourg, Slovakia and North Macedonia are landlocked. Ireland, Portugal, Poland, the Baltic members and the Nordic ones face other seas entirely. Mauritania faces the Atlantic. Libya, whose shore runs along the southern Mediterranean for the length of the Gulf of Sidra, holds observer status and is not a member.

What joining takes

North Macedonia's accession is the clearest published account of the price of entry. It applied in writing on 21 December 2021 and again on 21 September 2022, accepting the responsibilities of membership and the accumulated body of the partnership by name: the Paris declaration, the Marseille final declaration, the ministerial declarations adopted since, and the secretariat's statutes and headquarters agreement. The co-presidency then consulted the member states through the senior officials meeting and received no objection from any of them. Full membership took effect on 24 November 2022, declared at Barcelona.

Leaving without leaving

Syria suspended its own participation in December 2011, after European sanctions, and kept its place on the roster throughout. Nothing in the arrangement provides for expulsion, and nothing had to be ratified to undo the absence. Syria resumed full membership simply by attending the senior officials meeting held in Brussels on 8 July 2025.