The new Pact for the Mediterranean, launched last October by the European Commission, stems from the European Union's (EU) acknowledgment that it has progressively lost ground in an area that for decades it has considered as its "backyard". In a Mediterranean crossed by instability, fragmentation and growing competition between external actors, Brussels has understood the need to recover centrality.
The changes triggered at the regional level after 7 October and the awareness of not having an active role in the solution of the conflict in Gaza were the spring of the change of pace of the second Commission led by Ursula Von der Leyen, which wanted to give new emphasis to the Mediterranean in the EU's foreign policy, It did so with the creation of a DG MENA, the appointment for the first time of a Commissioner for the Mediterranean and the definition of a new policy resulting from a year of extensive consultations at the level of Member States and civil society actors.
It is no coincidence that the launch of the Pact falls thirty years after the Barcelona Declaration of 1995, which gave birth to the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP). In the mid-1990s, the context was marked by optimism following the Oslo Accords and the idea that it was possible to build a common space of peace, stability and shared prosperity, leading to the creation of a Euro-Mediterranean free trade area. Not only did those ambitious goals never come to fruition, but today's Mediterranean is more unstable and fragmented than it was then. It is therefore not surprising that creating a common space A stable and prosperous Mediterranean remains the European objective even today , a necessary but difficult objective .
The distance between ambition and results refers to a structural knot: the EU is an economic actor and not a geopolitical one . The lack of a genuine common foreign and security policy, together with divisions between member states, has limited Europe's ability to influence conflicts in its neighbourhood. This limitation is clearly perceived by the Mediterranean partners, who continue to look primarily to the United States at the strategic level. On the economic level, the EU as a whole retains a leading weight as the Mediterranean partners' main trading partner, covering 41% of their external trade, while China and the United States count for a lesser extent. respectively for 10% and 8%. In 2024, trade with the ten Mediterranean partners amounted to €245 billion, which for the EU represents just 5% of the total volume.
If the objective of the Pact remains the same as in previous policies, the question is what changes compared to the past. The first difference concerns the underlying logic. The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership aimed to trigger processes of internal transformation through economic incentives linked to effective reforms in the partner countries, in the belief that economic openness would gradually foster political openings and ultimately initiate processes of democratization. After the Arab uprisings of 2011, the logic of transformation was progressively replaced by a logic of stabilization, based on the containment of crises – from Syria to Libya – to reduce their spill-over effects to Europe.
The second new element consists in the adoption of an essentially pragmatic approach, with less emphasis on political conditionality. The Pact is proposed as a flexible framework for cooperation on concrete initiatives (about a hundred listed in the document), articulated around three pillars – people, economy, security and migration management – and based on the participation of the Mediterranean countries "with variable geometry". The aim is to prevent unresolved political issues, as happened in the multilateral framework of the EMP following the deterioration of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, from paralysing the entire architecture of cooperation.
This realistic approach takes into account both the lessons of the past and the greater assertiveness of the Mediterranean partners, who are now more diversified in their external relations and less inclined to accept agendas perceived as one-sided. However, while calling for co-ownership and shared responsibility, the Pact remains an initiative defined in Brussels and inevitably centered on European interests: stabilizing the neighbourhood to strengthen its security and prosperity and regain influence in an area of increased competition.
Against this background , it remains to be seen first of all what level of interest and participation of the Mediterranean partners will be in a European initiative that so far does not seem to have aroused great enthusiasm. At the launch of the Pact in Barcelona, in fact, only four (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine) of the ten parties were represented at the level of Foreign Ministers . For the effective functioning of the initiatives envisaged by the Pact, much will also depend on the financial resources that will be put in place and the areas of cooperation to which priority will be given. also in terms of funds. The preparation of the Action Plan, which will make the Pact for the Mediterranean operational, will therefore be crucial to understand whether the EU has taken the right direction to relaunch relations with its southern neighbourhood.