By Tony Barber in Brussels

France will launch the first project of its European Union presidency on Sunday when more than 40 EU, Balkan, north African and Middle Eastern leaders meet in Paris to inaugurate a Union for the Mediterranean.

A problem child even before its birth, the union aims to give a fresh impulse to political and economic relations between the 27- nation EU and countries as varied as Montenegro, Mauritania, Israel, Libya and Turkey.

But the question asked by diplomats and businessmen is whether the Union for the Mediterranean will add anything useful to the EU’s Barcelona Process, an initiative started in 1995 on to which the union has been tacked.

Launched in 1995 Barcelona is generally regarded as having failed to achieve much of substance. The new union has four key targets: cleaning up the Mediterranean sea, promoting solar energy, and developing shipping and ports.

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, and Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president, will attend Sunday’s summit, providing an opportunity to build on recent indirect contacts, and perhaps set the stage for face-to-face peace talks.

That would be a genuine diplomatic coup for France. In the longer term, however, it is uncertain what contribution the new union will make to solving problems in the Mediterranean, such as immigration and lack of access to EU markets for non-European farm produce.

“If Europe is serious about reversing the failures of the last decade and generating development and security on its southern shores, it must learn to give as well as take,” said Graham Watson, leader of the liberal group at the European parliament.

The union aims to improve upon the Barcelona Process by offering its non-EU members “co-ownership” of the project. The union will have co-presidents – France and Egypt, to begin with – and a small permanent secretariat.

Rosa Balfour, an analyst at the European Policy Centre think-tank, said: “The emphasis on co-ownership represents an attempt to avoid the EU imposing the policy agenda on its partners. On the other hand, co-ownership undermines the leverage that the EU could exercise to push for reform . . . The exclusion of the European and national parliaments, and of civil society organisations, reinforces the intergovernmental and elite-driven nature of this initiative.”

The European Commission has prepared a short-list of economic projects for the union, including the development of solar power in sun-soaked north Africa. But businesses want action on decades-old problems such as the poor conditions for foreign investment in north Africa and the Middle East.

“Solar power is a great idea, but conditions for investment have to be right,” said Adrian Van Den Hoven, director of international relations at Business-Europe, the pan-European employers’ association.

The new union has already been blamed for one of the worst Franco-German disputes of recent memory.

Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president and the brains behind the project, suggested last year that its membership should be confined to EU and non-EU countries with a Mediterranean shoreline. Germany, which had not been consulted in advance, saw this not only as a threat to EU unity, but as an attempt to kick existing EU policies to one side and hijack EU funds for the purposes of French foreign policy.

Mr Sarkozy also stirred suspicions in Turkey that his project was a smokescreen for quashing Turkey’s aspirations to full EU membership and fobbing it off with a lesser partnership.

These differences have now been ironed out, with Germany winning the argument for bringing all EU countries into the project, and Turkey receiving assurances that its involvement will not undermine its EU candidacy.