EuroMed, European Neighbourhood Policy and the Union for the Mediterranean: Overlapping Policy Frames in the EU's Governance of the Mediterranean*

Abstract

This article uses the language of governance to explore the relationships between the EU and the states around the Mediterranean. Against the background of multiple legal, policy and institutional arrangements which have been created by the EU since 1995 to frame Euro-Mediterranean relations, the article considers how seemingly different priorities and methods come together. Of particular interest is the EU's stated goal of a 'partnership' across the Mediterranean, which is promoted by the EU at the same time as it seeks to project its own values in the countries just beyond its borders. The article considers the changing nature of 'the Mediterranean' within EU policy-making, as well as the EU's changing priorities, which suggests incoherency but which instead underlines the central role of the EU in a Euro-Mediterranean system of governance. The positive connotations of the language of governance (identified in the first part of the article) are not fully present in the overlapping policy frames since the stated 'partnership' between the two sides of the Mediterranean in a system of governance is not borne out in practice.

Civil Society Organizations in European Union External Relations: A Study of Interorganizational Networks in the Eastern Partnership and the Mediterranean

“…We studied two particular properties of these networks, which, as the literature reports (Cardwell 2011;Kochenov 2011;Korosteleva 2011), are in contradiction: genuine partnership between EU member states and the countries of the Neighborhood; and conditionality, which leads to the unidirectional Civil Society Organizations in European Union External Relations 601 dissemination of norms from the EU to the countries of its external periphery. We used network analysis to empirically assess these properties.…”

“…However, research on the UfM (Cardwell 2011;Pace 2007) and the EaP (Korosteleva 2011) shows that in practice conditionality is more prevalent that partnership. According to this literature, the EU continues to dictate values and policy, often in order to promote its own geostrategic goals (Youngs 2009), and therefore, EU-neighborhood relations are not based on partnership as much the official EU rhetoric suggests.…”

An Italian proposal on the monitoring of underwater noise: Relationship between the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) and marine spatial planning directive (MSP)

“…This could be regarded as an ambiguous role of the MSP compared to the MSFD . Another critical factor in the integration of the policies is imputable to the unclear and objective delimitation of European territorial waters by the transborder states (Cardwell, 2011). Indeed, a clearer definition and division of borders could simplify the assessment of GES, and Descriptor 11 in particular (Liquete et al, 2011).…”

Networks as First Best? Network Entrepreneurship and Venue Shifting in the Establishment of the Network of Euro–Mediterranean Energy Regulators

“…European external governance is premised on exporting European rules to the countries surrounding it to the east and the south – the European neighbourhood (Börzel and van Hüllen, ; Cardwell, ) – by leveraging both its normative superiority (Manners, ,, ) and the size of its market (Bradford, ; Damro, ). The formal aspects of the external governance consist of agreements or treaties (Lavenex and Schimmelfennig, ; Schimmelfennig, ) as well as technical assistance programmes.…”

“…This work focuses on the case of one regulatory network – the Association of Mediterranean Energy Regulators (MedReg) – that includes national energy regulators from the Euro–Mediterranean region, that is, southern European member states and the southern and eastern European neighbourhoods (Cardwell, ). Regulatory networks usually arise because of interdependencies among the energy systems of different countries, as in the market integration framework of the EU; indeed, European regulatory networks normally comprise regulators from European member states.…”