With Pakistan facing an election in 2013, its role as a key component in the Afghanistan equation and as a would-be nuclear state, whoever rules the country will need to address a number of critical questions that focus primarily on internal issues, but whose repercussions go well beyond domestic boundaries alone.

On April 29, 2012, Mali was on the verge of holding the first round of a wide-open presidential election. But the election calendar was suddenly set on its head when, on March 21, just over a month before voting was to take place, a military coup brought down the democratic regime whose leader, Amadou Toumani Touré (ATT), had already announced that he would not stand for a third term.

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Both the United States and the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) are facing succession crises in the autumn of 2012. One will be resolved by democratic elections, the other by democratic centralism. In both cases short-term and long-term strategies are at stake. In the short term, jockeying for power promotes radical rhetoric for immediate domestic consumption and political gain, even though this rhetoric could be counterproductive for any effective long-term strategy in a globalised economy

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One of the striking claims of the indignados in Spain, the indignati in Italy, the aganaktismenoi in Greece, and the Occupy movements worldwide has been that there is no difference between the political elite, that both conservative and social democratic parties pursue the same policies of fiscal discipline, austerity, and the free market, that the burden of the mistakes of the rich fall on the poor. Why, they ask should the burden of loans gone sour be borne in the form of higher taxes and cuts in government expenditure by the workers made redundant and the pensioners who did not benefit from the loans? And yet these are the austerity and deficit-reducing measures pursued by both conservative and social democratic parties everywhere in the West.

In a time of budget cuts the dictum that nothing is harder to get rid of than an international organization is less and less valid. In this regard, voices are beginning to be heard proposing, pure and simply, to put an end to the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM). A drastic measure that for some would mean the settling of a score with the Sarkozy who tried to re-nationalize Euro-Mediterranean policy and for others just another way to rein in southern spendthrifts.

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Frustration is growing in the Northern EU countries over the bailout of what is seen as irresponsible and overspending South, but similar signals are surfacing in the East of the European Union as well. In face of the rumours of a third Greek bailout, the Dutch parliament has only reluctantly thrown its weight behind the second Greek rescue package. The difficulties that the German Chancellor Angela Merkel has had to suffer to get her country’s parliament behind both of these bailouts are well known, and it is unlikely that the German Bundestag will agree to another contribution.

With some 180 million people, Pakistan is the sixth most populated country in the world. It occupies a position of great geostrategic importance, bordered by Iran on the west, Afghanistan on the northwest, China on the northeast, India on the east, and the Arabian Sea on the south, and maintains an endemic, at times violent territorial dispute with India over Kashmir. Among its assets, the possession of the atomic bomb.

Four years after Kosovo declared its independence, the five EU member states that do not recognise it risk being cornered into a defensive situation in the EU, despite their numerous concessions, and left with the threat of veto as their trump card on Kosovo issues. Thanks to the agreement between Belgrade – Pristina on denomination, the five countries now have the opportunity to rethink their objectives and strategy, and to play out their non-recognition in a new way, which allows them to be not just constructive, as they have proved to be in the past, but proactive and strategic.

Signs of political progress in Moldova, much in the news in March 2012, have been heartily greeted by the EU. The bloc has invested heavily in this little neighbour, both in financial and political terms, and the investment now seems to be paying off. But there is a slight whiff of desperation in the EU’s tone, and something a little unsettling about the assessment by local analysts that Moldova’s political parties are only cooperating because of EU pressure.

North Africa will have to reinvent itself if it is to meet the challenges it faces with any hope of success in the years ahead. Access to the major sources of energy and transporting it from producer to end user defines the way major powers conduct their foreign policy. What threatens Europe today is not some unlikely though widely touted alliance of Muslims against the West but an exacerbation of nationalist ambitions manipulated by major powers from outside the region. Such conflicts are comforted by the fact that military expenditure in leading Maghreb countries are, as a percentage of GDP, among the highest in the world. If North Africa fails to reinvent itself, its vast resources in oil, gas, uranium, solar energy and phosphate rock will attract ever more outside interference.

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The abuse of entrusted power by public officials in their interactions with citizens is a common phenomenon. In many countries, people see themselves obliged to engage in acts of bribery in order to access public services that should be free of charge or included in taxes: the money slipped to the bureaucrat for the issuance of a new identity card, the unofficial payment to get the family planning pills which should be distributed freely at the hospital, or the occasional bribe to the policeman to avoid harassment

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Last year Ireland held a historic general election that put an end to voting trends that had characterised the previous century and Wales held a historic referendum that would create a national assembly. The Scottish National Party won a surprise majority and the First Minister of Scotland has announced its intention to organise a referendum on independence that would put an end to the United Kingdom if successful.

A 1,85% decline in Gross Domestic Product and a big fall in tourist receipts is not a very large price to pay for the freedom to speak and vote after 23 years of increasingly corrupt rule by Ben Ali.

In view of the challenges which confront the Western Mediterranean world in the years ahead, the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs is committed to building scenarios that highlight its potential as an area of growth and innovation and fosters a better future for the people who inhabit its northern and southern shores. With that purpose in mind, and under the general title of “The Mediterranean in a multipolar world up to 2030”, CIDOB is working on a three year research program (2010-2012) whose aim is to analyse how countries in the area might overcome their differences and imagine a common future.

In recent times, the accommodation of ethnic and religious minorities and their special needs or claims has been an important concern for the European Union. In some countries challenges relate more to immigrant groups while in others they refer to native minorities.