The founding of EMUNI universities is an integral part of the Euro-Mediterranean initiative to establish and strengthen cooperation among Mediterranean countries. Namely, member states of Euro-Mediterranean integrations have already realised some time ago that the exchange of knowledge as well as formulation of common educational and research programmes importantly contribute to the establishment and consolidation of economic and political cooperation.

By facilitating cooperation among professors, researchers and students, Mediterranean states can, without any risk, concurrently form and test various protocols and scenarios of cooperation that may be later used in all other areas.

Successful patterns of cooperation in laboratories, lecture rooms, conference halls, common research groups and elsewhere may be of crucial significance to the establishment or, rather, enhancement of economic and political cooperation.
Every product of such integration is an acquisition for each state as well as the region as a whole. The advantage of such cooperation also lies in the opportunity for regional integration, whose potential focus on a certain area or activity does not cause discomfort in other members of the entire Mediterranean region?

Besides, the Mediterranean has for millennia been an area of mutual insemination/cooperation/complementation. Leaving aside conflicts and conquests filling historical reading books on prehistory, Antiquity, Middle Ages and Modern Period, the Mediterranean has always been an area of intercultural interaction. If it had not been for the Arab Renaissance, the world would have been deprived of many standard works of Greek and Roman classics, European Enlightenment, modernisation, as well as the concept of democracy and conditions for social emancipation.

What is more, the Mediterranean has since always also included its hinterlands. Just like Fernand Braudel, we, too, are finding that the so-called "inland sea" and the adjacent areas encompass much more than just the coastlines of the Mediterranean. We, too, are aware that the "Mediterranean" in the south reaches at least as far as the countries of the sub-Saharan Africa, that it touches Iraq in the east and that, to a certain extent, it has also co-shaped the destiny of the Hanseatic towns in northern Europe.

And just as in the time of Philip II, the Mediterranean in the beginning of the 21st century still is one of the three or four strategic centres of our planet and the only contact point of three continents. It is on this premise that the EMUNI University ought to build its substantive work.

Having this in mind and being familiar with the basic attributes of a good university in the 21st century, the new EMUNI president and his team, has to put the EMUNI University on the map of the Mediterranean academic landscape.