This article is part of SHAPEDEM-EU, an EU-funded project that aims to rethink and reshape EU democracy support policies in its eastern and southern neighborhoods.
This article is part of the European Democracy Hub initiative run by Carnegie Europe and the European Partnership for Democracy.
As the EU advances a new Pact for the Mediterranean to revamp its relations with Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, the failure of this initiative looks almost preordained. Even if EU policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were to shift, the barriers to deep cross-Mediterranean cooperation appear insurmountable.
While the EU insists the pact will add “new impetus” to Euro-Mediterranean relations, it feels more like another downward notch in the EU’s strategy toward this region. Despite much positive EU rhetoric about shared interests and partnership with Arab states, the pact needs to be judged by pared-down metrics. It is a test case for a new era in which the EU’s partnerships will be more limited, more defensive, and more openly tailored to the bloc’s geopolitical interests rather than to mutually beneficial cooperation.
Most diplomats, politicians, and analysts have been calling for this harder-edged EU approach as a necessary sign of the times. Such geostrategy will not be especially liberal or morally edifying and will entail lower ambition. The Pact for the Mediterranean will likely show the problems and tensions in the EU’s move toward an apparently postliberal foreign policy.
Another Step Away from the South
The EU has been through multiple reinventions of its Southern Mediterranean policy, and none of these has stemmed the bloc’s declining leverage in the region. As the latest attempt at a new start, the pact looks even more doomed and less promising than any of the previous reinventions—because of trends in the Southern Mediterranean, in Europe, and in the general international context.
The new Pact for the Mediterranean is a policy framework developed by the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf (DG MENA), under instruction from Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and designed to reshape the EU’s relations with its Southern neighborhood. Scheduled to be presented in fall 2025, the pact proposes cooperation on investment, energy supplies, and migration control along with initiatives to strengthen economic stability, education, and employment opportunities.
The EU stresses the symbolism of the pact being launched on the thirty-year anniversary of the Barcelona Process, which began in 1995. That process later gave way to the Union for the Mediterranean and, in 2021, the New Agenda for the Mediterranean. Each of these iterations failed to reverse deteriorations in Euro-Arab relations.
The Southern Mediterranean of today is fundamentally different from when the EU crafted the Barcelona Process. The politics of the MENA region are now far more focused on non-Western power interests and intraregional dynamics than links to European countries. The United States has retreated, no longer acting as an anchor for EU strategy, and the region is much more conditioned by rivalries between regional powers.
In the last decade, including since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Arab governments have reached out to Russia and China through a plethora of agreements, meetings, and summits. Egypt has joined the BRICS grouping, which initially comprised Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Southern Mediterranean governments have diversified their foreign relations and feel far less in need of EU support than previously. The power balance has shifted as the EU has, conversely, become more dependent on authoritarian Arab regimes for cooperation on migration and antiterrorism and for energy supplies. These Arab governments have also found it easier to take advantage of divisions between EU member states—for example, between France and Italy in key parts of the Southern Mediterranean.
Articles ritually point out how the Arab region has tired of Europe, but the reverse also seems true. Mutual antipathy has spread its unsettling tentacles across the Mediterranean, whatever official communiqués and speeches about the pact might claim otherwise. Arab regimes have given the EU no support on Ukraine; the EU has given no support to what Arab regimes seek in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The EU has ditched its neighborhood policy in recognition that this concept no longer makes sense—if it ever did. The pact takes EU-Mediterranean relations into a new phase that disconnects Arab states from the union’s Eastern European partners. This is manifest in the split of the commission’s Directorate General for the European Neighborhood and Enlargement Negotiations (DG NEAR) into DG MENA and the Directorate General for Enlargement and the Eastern Neighborhood (DG ENEST), the latter encompassing the Western Balkans and the five countries in the EU’s Eastern Partnership. With many Eastern European partners seeking fuller inclusion in the European project, the EU now treats Arab states on a different basis—more in terms of old-style geopolitics than the EU’s unique model of governance export.
Many in the Southern Mediterranean had long pressed for this move, not wanting to be part of any EU orbit or Eurocentric template. The downgrade is now increasingly apparent, as the gap between the union’s Eastern and Southern neighborhoods has widened dramatically since 2022. While some Eastern European and Western Balkan countries make strenuous efforts to move into the EU, most Arab states have become notably more hostile toward the bloc and are more willing to reject European rapprochement and suggested cooperation.
With so many problems across the region and so many governments pushing against the EU, the new pact will struggle to gain any practical traction in many parts of the Mediterranean. Russia and Turkey have become principal players in Libya. Algeria is even less interested in the EU than it was at the Barcelona Process’s origins. Syria is, of course, focused on the challenges of moving beyond the rule of former president Bashar al-Assad. Even where the EU seemed to have traction, the direction of travel augurs ill: Lebanon has resisted all EU reform templates; Tunisia has rebuffed aid and trade offers linked to economic reform; and an October 2024 ruling by the European Court of Justice on the status of Western Sahara severely complicates EU relations with Morocco.
EU Denial of Arab Discontent
Under the Pact for the Mediterranean, the EU proposes strategic partnerships based on cooperation on migration, energy, investment, economic stability, and security along with some lower-level cultural and educational exchanges. The union seeks to build some kind of regional framework after years of mainly bilateral accords with individual Arab states. The Euro-Mediterranean agenda is no longer one of ambitious convergence or shared values. It feels more like a localized version of the EU’s Global Gateway initiative for strategic infrastructure investment—an area in which the region requires a great deal of funding. From the EU side, the agenda is now one of shorn-down, unsentimental protective geopolitics. Many Arabs insist that they are no longer drawn to EU cooperation; few in Europe shed tears about this.
In recent years, EU policies have done more harm than good. The new pact looks condemned to follow the same pattern. The commission speaks of the accord as more equal: co-created and co-owned with Arab partners. But the way its economic, migration, security, and energy components are framed means the pact is clearly more focused on the EU’s own interests and is justified in this way internally. Never have the EU’s cozy assertions about partnerships of equals and shared values been so obviously hollow. To celebrate the Mediterranean as a “shared space” of peace, in the words of European Commissioner for the Mediterranean Dubravka Šuica, reads almost like a bad joke in the current context.
The pact looks worse than simply pointless: It will appear to many as conceived in bad taste. It is hardly news that events in Gaza eclipse any constructive focus on or concern with Euro-Mediterranean relations at this moment. Few in the region are likely to enthuse over mundane connectivity projects or the like when Palestinians are being massacred with apparent impunity. Clearly, the EU’s reluctance to impose sanctions on Israel or support international legal cases against it have sunk the union’s credibility to a new low in the Arab region. Arabs’ unsurprising perspective is that the EU needs to rectify this situation as a precondition to reestablishing any sense of partnership with them.
None of this is new; it is a difference that has besmirched Euro-Arab relations for decades. European governments hardly need to be alerted to current Arab discontent. They are aware of the costs of their stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and yet they do not seem to see amending their position as being, on balance, to their strategic advantage.
Diplomats might reply that a focus on such low-politics areas of cooperation is all the more valuable precisely because of higher-level tensions over conflicts in the region, to keep some degree of engagement in hope of a better day. Šuica managed to get Israelis and Palestinians together in preparation for the pact and sells this achievement as its unique advantage.
Yet, this feels like denial, a willful negation of the major conflict that must be addressed as a precursor to meaningful practical cooperation. It is abundantly clear now that the EU’s signature low-politics approach has not generated stability or security. By inviting Israel to be part of the pact, the EU repeats the main design flaw of the Barcelona Process, importing the conflict into an initiative that could otherwise serve to rebuild relations with Arab states. On this, the pact brings to mind the much-used quip about trying the same failed approaches repeatedly and expecting different results.
Crucially, the focus on Gaza in some ways even underplays the challenges. It goes without saying that Arab predisposition toward the EU would improve if the bloc were to change strategy on Israel; some member states’ willingness to recognize Palestinian statehood may help in this. However, Euro-Mediterranean relations suffer from other strains that have also become more limiting.
European and Arab Societies at Odds
One area of such strain flows from another significant shift over recent years: On a range of issues, divergences have clearly widened between societies on the two sides of the Mediterranean. Given the problems above, the temptation is to call for a focus on people-to-people links as an alternative to government-level cooperation. A standard recommendation is for the EU to focus more support on civic actors, especially the youth, as a way around the current state tensions—to let the Arab region have an equal say, to circumvent political obstacles, to address the feeling that EU-Mediterranean relations are dominated by imposition from the European side, and to better build in cultural differences.
One can only hope this kind of approach might work, but the suggestions surely look naive and Panglossian for now. The pact’s focus feels highly state-oriented compared with the role given to nonstate actors in the original Barcelona Process thirty years ago. The pact does not appear to offer Arab societies much, as ever more entrenched authoritarianism has not delivered to citizens in the Maghreb or the Mashriq, arguably unlike in the Gulf.
Indeed, Arab regimes have increasingly squeezed independent civil society, in some countries almost out of existence. Getting European support to civic actors in the Southern Mediterranean is much harder today than ten or twenty years ago. Focusing on nonstate actors is not an apolitical strategy. As regimes choke off foreign funding to civil society, supporting civic actors requires more critical intrusion, not less; more controversial politics, not less. Analysts often fail to recognize this when they call airily for the EU to support the people as an alternative to governments. The kind of apolitical pragmatism that the EU espouses for the pact no longer suffices for meaningful nonstate cooperation.
Societal trends are not promising on either side of the Mediterranean. The far right is becoming stronger in Europe, as is ethnocentric, authoritarian nationalism in North Africa. Articles and reports ritually call for more people-to-people contacts, and the new pact includes a commitment to these. In the current context, these contacts will be difficult to develop in practice and might risk stirring mutual hostilities even more. Ironically, if there is an element of convergence between European and Southern Mediterranean social values, it appears to be on conservative-nationalist ones. Yet, it is difficult to imagine these forming the basis of cooperation between the two regions—quite the contrary.
In the last several years, the decolonization perspective has become more dominant in the Arab region and has emboldened strong pushback against Europe from both governments and societal actors. Participate in any EU-Mediterranean dialogue forum today and the overwhelming tenor from Arab civic actors is hostility and distaste for the EU; participate in a similar event with civic partners from Eastern Europe and they will press for more EU involvement and values. For anyone present in the Barcelona Process meetings in the late 1990s, this shift is immense.
A small number of Arab civil society organizations (CSOs) have begun to refuse EU funds because of the bloc’s failure to act against Israeli actions in Gaza. This admirably honest stance symbolizes the breach that exists not only at the governmental level in Euro-Mediterranean relations but also at the societal level. Many in the EU suggest the union needs to direct its funds to those countries whose societies eagerly want to be part of the European project and away from regions where the abiding mentality is distrust of EU influence.
Arab civil ciety is divided on this question, and in some ways, the EU cannot win. Some CSOs in the region push for the EU to cease its support for authoritarian regimes; others have sought to work with the union’s more pragmatic approach. While many actors in the region berate the EU’s values-oriented policies for being intrusive and neocolonial, others want more European funding and insist that it is the EU’s increasingly unprincipled transactionalism that is neocolonial. An uncomfortable message to the EU that is heavily present in dialogue with Arab CSOs today is: We want your money but please stay out. A more realpolitik EU is unlikely to accept this demand when the bloc is ever more concerned with its own loss of power.
All this looks like a rupture from both sides. Even if it is worthwhile to continue with people-to-people exchanges and foster dialogue where possible, these divides cannot be mended through a few superficial youth initiatives or the like. Societies on the two sides of the Mediterranean are simply not on the same page, whatever diplomatic balm might suggest. Many articles call for the EU to understand the region better, but harmony cannot be conjured out of thin air where it does not exist.
A Test Case for the Geopolitical EU
The pact will be signed, not much loved by its adherents, and events will rumble on, with cross-Mediterranean relations unimproved in any tangible way. Most assessments of EU-MENA relations run through all the manifold problems and tensions but then insist these need to be overcome through more cooperation, more diplomatic effort, more resources, and a doubling-down of the original Euro-Mediterranean ethos of building a shared community. However, the trends outlined above surely call for a rather different ethos of strategic care. An ill-designed pact that glosses over problems and imbalances that are now deeply rooted will likely worsen current tensions.
Shared challenges of course call for efforts to improve cooperation across the Mediterranean, at both the governmental and the societal level. Yet, the most realistically pertinent question for now is whether the EU’s pared-down, instrumentalized policy in the Southern Mediterranean even serves its own interests. It is not yet certain that the pact clears this basic hurdle. This test case for geopolitical power shows how the EU’s new hard-bitten transactionalism—now much trumpeted by diplomats and analysts alike—is no panacea. The union’s approach may to some extent be necessary in the current context, but it comes with clear downsides, too, as it begins to rebound against the bloc’s ability to wield constructive influence.
