Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to unite coastal nations has angered Spain and Germany.

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS - Perhaps the grandest new idea of France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, looking to give his presidency of the European Union a lasting stamp, is the Union of the Mediterranean. An effort to bind the 17 nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea with the European Union around regional projects, the new union was inaugurated Sunday at a Paris summit meeting.
But as with some of Mr. Sarkozy’s other ideas, the execution has been haphazard. The Union of the Mediterranean has created resistance among vital allies, like the Germans and the Spanish, and confusion within his own government. The result may be short on real action.
Fathallah Sijilmassi, the Moroccan ambassador to France, acknowledged that his country had hoped for more, and that the new union had been weakened through intra-European squabbling. “Choice is simple, he said. “It’s this or nothing.
After the summit meeting of European Union and Mediterranean leaders here on Sunday, all were invited to the Bastille Day extravaganza at the Arc de Triomphe - hardly a symbol of the new Europe of shared sovereignties.
The new union is an upgrading of a languishing effort of the European Union known as the Barcelona process, established 13 years ago to help develop the Muslim nations on the Mediterranean’s southern rim and support Israeli-Arab reconciliation.
French officials insist the new union may eventually produce results. It will have co-presidents, from Europe and the Mediterranean - the first ones will be France and Egypt, a way to win Egyptian support - and a permanent secretariat staffed by officials from both north and south, a promise of concrete participation that pleases Morocco and other southern countries.
Its projects are meant to be concrete: fighting pollution in the Mediterranean; developing use of solar energy; improving surveillance of maritime traffic; “civil security cooperation’’ in case of natural disaster, and for antiterrorism coordination; and establishing cultural exchanges for scientists and students.
But the initial projects “are not the most exciting initiatives, Ambassador Sijilmassi said, adding, “They won’t mobilize our populations.
Dominique Moisi, senior adviser to the French Institute for International Relations, an independent research center, said the union “was a great intuition - to extend the logic of reconciliation to the Mediterranean and deal with the issues as ‘Europe’ - but it was badly mismanaged and presented, so as a result it may lead nowhere.
When Mr. Sarkozy described the idea, in his presidential victory speech in May 2007, the thought was much grander.
He proposed a “Mediterranean Union limited to countries bordering the sea and spoke of it as a means “to end all hatreds to make way for a great dream of peace and a great dream of civilization.
His political point was much sharper. A fierce opponent of Turkish membership in the European Union, he intended to offer Turkey this instead, given its importance in the “southern tier,’’ bordering Europe but not entirely of it.
But the plan outraged Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, because it cut Germany out altogether, while taking on a European character and presuming to use European funds, of which Germany is the top contributor.
Katinka Barysch, deputy director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research group, said: “The Germans were really angry and wanted to show Sarkozy how to do E.U. business before he got started as president. They wanted him to understand that you talk to the Germans and key partners in advance, and precook, and you don’t propose new institutions that exclude other E.U. members and expect to use their money.
The plan also annoyed Spain, which was crucial to the 1995 Barcelona process, and it offended the Turks, because it was another grouping short of what they had long been promised: full membership in the European Union.
“The charitable version, said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, an organization formed last year to promote a pan-European foreign policy, is that Mr. Sarkozy was trying to “shake up the Mideast, revive the Barcelona process, reposition France with Israel and move away from the old line of his predecessor as France’s president, Jacques Chirac, whom some considered to be too pro-Palestinian.
“But many others see it less charitably, as Sarkozy launching exciting things that work as sound bites and then officials struggle to make sense of them, Mr. Leonard said.