France launching watered-down Mediterranean union

At Sunday's launch of the Union for the Mediterranean, the president of Syria and the prime minister of Israel are to sit down at the same table for the first time.

But French officials say no group photo is planned. Expectations are low that a new spirit of friendship will blossom over canapes and toasts — either between those mutually suspicious Mideast neighbors or in other rivalries among the 40 or so leaders at the summit.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's ambitious pet project to join the nations around the Mediterranean Sea in a cooperative union based on shared projects has been so watered down over the past year that critics now deride it as "Club Med" — suggesting it will be big on blather and low on substance.

The burning question surrounding the inaugural meeting is whether Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Syrian President Bashar Assad will talk or even shake hands.

Optimists see the union's launch as an unprecedented occasion to propel recently resumed peace talks between the two nations, conducted indirectly through Turkey, with a one-on-one meeting or an announcement of direct negotiations between the leaders.

Sarkozy has said any meeting between the two leaders would mark "formidable progress" in Israel-Syria relations. Alon Liel, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry director and lobbyist for Israeli-Syrian peace talks, said even a handshake "would be a sensation."

But Syrian officials have not spoken encouragingly of a handshake or a meeting. Israeli officials aren't expecting much, because of Syria's traditional resistance to holding talks at the very highest level before a sound basis for success emerges.

The seating arrangement at the table, said to be round, has not been made public. However, it is unlikely Olmert and Assad would be seated together or even face each other across the table.

Their nations have a long, bitter divide. Syria wants Israel to return the Golan Heights, seized in the 1967 Mideast war. Israel wants Syria to sever its ties with Iran and stop backing Lebanese and Palestinian militants committed to the Jewish state's destruction.

Other tensions underpin the summit.

Algeria's president and Morocco's king are coming, despite the long rivalry between their nations. In one upbeat note, Assad says he will meet with Lebanon's new president, Michel Suleiman, a notable encounter given Syria's long interference in that country's affair.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who issued a passionate denunciation of Sarkozy's initiative, refused to come. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, which sees the project as a way to keep Turks linked to but outside the European Union, has said he "will try to attend."

Friction with France's EU partners has also undermined the union.

Sarkozy's plan to transform the volatile Mediterranean basin into a region of peace and prosperity was supposed to be the pillar of his presidency and a symbol of France's leadership of the EU, which it holds until the end of the year.

But the union he envisioned overlapped expensive European projects in progress and was largely gutted, and effectively usurped, by the EU before even taking seed.

"Ideally, you should measure an initiative by its results ... but the measure of success has been shifted to who will be there on Sunday," said Jose Ignacio Toreblanca of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

A grandiose venue, the glass-domed Grand Palais, has been chosen for the gathering with rooms set aside for private talks. The event will be capped Monday with dozens of leaders attending France's national Bastille Day military parade as special guests.

Yet the summit falls short of the vision that Sarkozy laid out as a presidential candidate — ironically because it will be so well attended.

The union is to be made up of 44 nations — 27 from Europe and 17 from North Africa and the Middle East — a compromise pushed by the EU that watered down Sarkozy's original vision of only the five European nations on the Mediterranean joining their southern neighbors.

Tough issues like immigration or terrorism are giving way to feel-good projects. Among those to be put forward Sunday are a student exchange modeled on an EU program, development of solar energy and a clean-up of the polluted Mediterranean.

"At the end of the day, the particular projects that have been identified are very wise because they are uncontroversial," said Toreblanca. "There is a need for a happy ending and the credits at the end of the movie saying 'Thank you, Sarkozy.'"

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Associated Press writer Amy Teibel in Jerusalem contributed to this story.