Several coastal provinces from Spain and France, joined by Croatia's southern Dubrovnik-Neretva County, are now asking the European Union to establish a political framework for cooperation in the Mediterranean, which would include 22 countries with access to that sea.

The framework called EU Strategy for the Mediterranean would mean that ministers would meet once a year in a joint forum and during the year the countries would cooperate in areas such as environmental protection, migration and security.

The EU currently has four such forums, or political frameworks, through which countries located in the same region cooperate. Some of the countries are members of the EU, and some are not.

The strategy for the Baltic Sea region, which brings together the countries located by that sea in the north of Europe, was established in 2009, followed by strategies for the Danube River region (2010), the Adriatic and Ionian Seas (2014), and the Alpine region (2015).

“The Mediterranean also needs a macro-regional strategy because the problems observed in the entire Mediterranean cannot be solved only by local, regional and national forums,” said Dubrovnik-Neretva County Prefect, Nikola Dobroslavic, who is the rapporteur of the European Committee of Regions.

The European Committee of the Regions represents the interests of regions in Brussels. This month it sent a request for the establishment of this macro-regional framework. Among regions which joined the initiative are the southern French province of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Spain’s Catalonia, and now Croatia’s Dubrovnik-Neretva County.

The initiators expect the Strategy for the Mediterranean to be established after June next year when the six-month presidency of the EU will be taken over by the Mediterranean country of Spain.