EUrope and its “other”: narrations of the Mediterranean in the construction of a Euro-Mediterranean political space

The paper presents a critical reading of the spatial imaginaries by which the Mediterranean is conceptualized in Euro-Mediterranean politics and the European neighbourhood policy. There is a well known ambivalence in the recurrent attempts to constitute a Euro-Mediterranean political space: the tendency to consider the sea as a region, on the one hand, and the tendency to see it as a boundary, on the other. By presenting examples of both imaginaries, extracted from policy documents and political speeches, we wish to show how these are part of a wider narrative which is rooted in the European colonial past as much as in the geopolitics of contemporary Euro-Mediterranean relations. The discoursive construction of the Mediterranean, moreover, is a crucial component in the Europeanization strategy that the EU is pursuing both within and outside its territory. The aim of the paper is to see how the geographical imaginaries of the Mediterranean combine with the various rationales of EU’s spatial politics, what is their genealogy and what is the function that the representation of the Mediterranean “other” plays in the construction of the European “self”