From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries toward that same Europe diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. (Fanon, Reference Fanon1961: 102)
Frantz Fanon warned decades ago that Europe’s prosperity was built on centuries of expropriation, a warning that remains strikingly relevant. When Commission President Ursula von der Leyen celebrated Israel’s 75th anniversary by praising its “transformation of the desert” (Knell, Reference Knell2023), she invoked a colonial trope that erases Palestinian presence and land cultivation. Such narratives exemplify how the EU moralizes modernity while aligning with settler-colonial powers, casting colonized peoples as conditional subjects. These erasures are not accidental but constitutive. They reflect what this article terms the Mediterranean color line: a racialized ordering of space that divides Europe from its so-called Southern Neighbourhood and structures who is included in the European project and who remains governable, extractable, and external. This line is not simply a boundary, but a mechanism of racial capitalism: it organizes differential inclusion, legitimizes dispossession, and makes asymmetry appear as cooperation.
This article defines the Mediterranean color line as the racialized structuring of Europe’s southern frontier, where proximity to Europe produces not inclusion but conditional belonging premised on discipline, surveillance, and extraction. It is not a mere metaphor: it names a spatial and political order that fixes Southern Mediterranean states and societies as indispensable yet permanently subordinate to Europe.
Since the inception of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), the EU has recast asymmetry as cooperation, masking structural domination behind the language of reform, modernity, and resilience. Dominant analyses often remain within the frame of normative power or geopolitical interest, overlooking the colonial legacies and racial hierarchies that underpin capitalist accumulation across borders. To address this, the article adopts the framework of racial capitalism, drawing on Bhambra’s (Reference Bhambra2022) decolonial project for Europe and Schär’s (2022) call for a new imperial history. It argues that the ENP does not merely fail to achieve its stated goals but actively reproduces postcolonial structures of extraction and containment.
The analysis unfolds in three steps. It first outlines a theoretical framework centered on racial capitalism and develops the concept of the Mediterranean color line. It then turns to the 2021 “New Agenda for the Mediterranean,” chosen because it was the first time that the EU formally codified the so-called “Southern Neighbourhood”Footnote 1 as a distinct strategic space, differentiating it from the Eastern track of the ENP. This institutionalization matters: it crystallized a racialized hierarchy that had long been implicit, embedding in official discourse the notion that the South was indispensable but permanently external to Europe. Within this Agenda, the analysis focuses on two policy domains: economic resilience and the green transition. These areas are not selected because they are exceptional sites of contestation, but precisely because they are routinely treated as technical or developmental. By examining domains usually considered apolitical, the article exposes how racial capitalist logics operate through the mundane vocabularies of reform, sustainability, and resilience. The discussion draws these threads together, showing how the Mediterranean color line organizes the EU’s broader architecture of racialized governance, and interrogates whether Europe can imagine itself beyond the inequalities that sustain it.
From Neo-Imperial Europe to Racial Capitalism
Critical scholarship has increasingly scrutinized the EU as a neo-imperial force, challenging conventional narratives of its global role. Zielonka’s (Reference Zielonka2006) “neo-medieval empire,” Del Sarto’s (Reference Del Sarto2016) “normative empire,” and Pace and Roccu’s (2017) work highlight how the Union sustains empire-like governance while presenting itself as a distinctive and normative actor. These contributions reject the idea that imperialism was a historical anomaly tied to individual nation-states, showing instead that it remains embedded in European institutions and strategies.
Yet this literature often treats imperialism as a question of governance or political form, without fully addressing its racial and economic dimensions. Modern imperialism rarely relies on territorial domination; it functions through indirect mechanisms such as migration regimes, trade and climate frameworks, and development conditionality. These logics echo classical colonial strategies but are now enacted through multilateral governance, technocratic language, and economic instruments, no less hierarchical for being couched in managerial terms. Lambert (2021) describes this as the “colonial continuum”: even in the absence of direct colonial rule, race and racialization continue to organize EU governance, particularly in the Mediterranean, where policy discourses and practices enforce hierarchies of belonging, value, and exclusion.
To deepen the analysis, this article adopts the framework of racial capitalism. Robinson (1983/Reference Robinson2005) demonstrated that capitalism has never been racially neutral: it has always relied on racial hierarchies to organize accumulation, discipline labor, and legitimize dispossession. Du Bois had already suggested that the global “colour line” (1903/2007) was not a moral failing but the central organizing principle of modern politics, one that arose in tandem with Europe’s imperial expansion and which structured the distribution of wealth, labor, and recognition across the globe. Later, Fanon (Reference Fanon1967) underscored how racism functions as a “floating signifier”: mutable, adaptable, but consistently mobilized to stabilize hierarchies of labor, culture, and subjectivity.
Rather than treating racial inequality as residual or accidental, racial capitalism reveals it as structurally embedded in the organization of capital, labor, and governance (Bhattacharyya, Reference Bhattacharyya2018). Differentiation is not incidental but essential for accumulation. As Agathangelou (Reference Agathangelou2004) and Hall (2000) argue, capitalist development requires the continual production of racialized and gendered hierarchies that naturalize exploitation. Race, in this sense, operates as both material practice and ideological grammar: it makes dispossession appear as progress, and inequality as the natural order of things.
This lens shifts how EU external action should be read. Far from being only a set of geopolitical strategies or technocratic policies, EU action forms part of a global system of racialized extraction and rule. Gilmore’s (Reference Gilmore2007) definition of racism as the “state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” illuminates how this system operates. Racism here is not merely an ideology or prejudice but a structural relation that organizes exposure to harm and access to protection. It clarifies how the EU’s governance regimes—migration management, austerity, and conditionality—produce vulnerability as an instrument of rule. These policies do not simply reproduce inequality; they transform precariousness into a mode of governance, determining whose suffering is normalized and whose lives are rendered expendable. Migrant drownings in the Mediterranean, austerity imposed through financial conditionality, and the systematic relegation of Southern societies to permanent crisis are not implementation failures but constitutive features of the racial capitalist order that the EU helps reproduce. As Henderson (Reference Henderson2024) reminds us, white supremacy is not an aberration but a banal, everyday structure of world politics. The Mediterranean makes this banality visible: the EU speaks the language of partnership and prosperity while enacting policies that sustain hierarchy, dispossession, and organized exposure to premature death.
Importantly, racial capitalism is not only material but also epistemic. Following Haleh Davis (Reference Haleh Davis2022), neoliberal orthodoxies function as technologies of racial difference, reinforcing boundaries between the “civilised” and the “backward,” the “modern” and the “primitive.” This echoes Césaire’s (Reference Césaire2000 [1950]) warning that colonialism rests not only on exploitation but on the systematic devaluation of other knowledge and ways of being. Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2019) similarly insists that the colonial archive is not a past structure but an active grammar of global order. In EU policy, this manifests in the routine framing of Southern neighbours as lacking capacity, governance, or rationality: a deficit discourse that legitimizes European tutelage as both necessary and benevolent.
This epistemic violence is not secondary to material extraction: it legitimizes it. By presenting European knowledge as universal and local knowledge as absent or deficient, the EU reproduces the hierarchies through which racial capitalism naturalizes inequality. Aydin (Reference Aydin2017) and Elyachar (Reference Elyachar2005) illustrate how Southern partners are cast as culturally and economically inferior, incapable of meeting European standards of governance or rationality. Hobson (Reference Hobson2022) and Weheliye (Reference Weheliye2014) remind us that such discourses of “capacity” do not simply misrepresent reality; they are active practices that reproduce racial hierarchies of the human itself.
Taken together, these perspectives demonstrate why racial capitalism offers a richer framework for analyzing EU external action than accounts that focus solely on empire, governance, or discourse. It allows us to see how narratives of modernity and civilization are not symbolic veneers but instruments that authorize exclusion, extraction, and abandonment. They also explain how epistemic and material forms of domination are co-constitutive: erasures of history and culture pave the way for economic dependency, while structures of exploitation are justified through discourses of developmental lack.
The aim here is not to erase the agency of Southern Mediterranean states or societies, but to situate their constrained choices within structural forces and to highlight how the EU plays a complicit role in sustaining these dynamics. By linking EU foreign policy to global systems of racial capitalism, this article foregrounds the persistence of colonial hierarchies in contemporary European governance. The Mediterranean, as the next section will show, crystallizes these dynamics in the form of a color line: a racialized ordering of space that differentiates between inclusion and exclusion, belonging and abandonment, utility and disposability.
Methodology
This article adopts a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach attuned to the logics of racial capitalism. Drawing on Fairclough (Reference Fairclough1995) and van Dijk (Reference van Dijk1993), CDA is understood here as a method for analyzing how institutional language both reflects and reproduces power relations. It treats discourse as a social practice that naturalizes asymmetries, legitimates authority, and renders political decisions as technical necessities. Rather than approaching EU foreign policy as a collection of strategic or normative choices, the article reads policy discourse as a constitutive site of governance, where vocabularies of resilience, reform, and partnership obscure deeper structures of extraction and racialized dependency.
The analysis attends to both the linguistic texture of EU policy texts, such as their use of modal verbs, nominalizations, and euphemisms, and their interdiscursive positioning: how they draw on and reinforce broader narratives of development, security, and regional order. Discursive constructions are interpreted in relation to the institutional and geopolitical contexts in which they operate, in line with CDA’s commitment to analyzing the dialectical relationship between text and context.
The analysis focuses on two foundational documents: the Joint Communication “Renewed Partnership with the Southern Neighbourhood: A New Agenda for the Mediterranean” (EU, 2021a) and the accompanying Joint Staff Working Document: Economic and Investment Plan for the Southern neighbours (EU, 2021b). Issued ten years after the Arab uprisings, these documents represented a strategic reframing of the EU’s external engagement with its southern periphery. They responded to what was widely perceived within EU institutions as a decade of failed or incoherent policy, characterized by a tension between normative aspirations (democracy promotion, rule of law) and material interests (stability, containment, access to markets and resources) (Fernández Molina, Reference Fernández Molina and Szmolka2017). The 2021 package consolidated this shift, signaling a return to technocratic and managerial approaches that had characterized the pre-2010 ENP, but with greater emphasis on digitalization, green transition, and migration management as instruments of geopolitical influence.
Crucially, this was the first time that the EU codified its Southern Neighbourhood as a distinct geopolitical space, separate from the Eastern Neighbourhood, within the broader ENP framework. This institutional move was itself discursively significant: it formalized a geopolitical boundary that has long operated through racialized, civilizational, and economic logics, as explained below. The documents offered a re-entrenchment of pre-2010 patterns of governance, recoding asymmetrical control as mutual resilience and shared prosperity.
The article interrogates two of the five flagship policy domains: “Strengthening resilience, building prosperity and seizing the digital transition” and “Green transition: climate resilience, energy and environment.” These domains were selected precisely because they are not commonly associated with racialization, and thus allow for a critical unpacking of how racial capitalism functions through the mundane, the developmental, and the ostensibly apolitical. As argued in the theoretical section, the analysis understands race and capital as co-constituted and focuses on discursive sites where the EU constructs itself as a rational reformer or provider of modernity, while obscuring its role in structuring extractive asymmetries and postcolonial dependencies. This echoes Danewid’s (Reference Danewid2022) argument that racial hierarchies operate not only through violence or exclusion, but also through the everyday infrastructures of benevolent governance.
Methodologically, the article does not employ automated keyword coding or computational techniques. Instead, it adopts a theory-driven interpretive approach, identifying discursive formations and framings that reassert the EU’s authority to define reform priorities, legitimate policy harmonization, and shape what counts as progress. This includes attention to recurrent phrases such as “technical support,” “governance reform,” “digital transition,” and “sustainable growth,” all of which signal a set of racialized assumptions about knowledge, value, and institutional legitimacy.
Finally, the analysis is grounded in the author’s situated positionality. Past experience in policy-oriented research, particularly in think tanks studying EU institutions, often required operating within the very discursive constraints this article critiques, presenting the “Southern Neighbourhood” through the terms defined by the EU itself. This professional tension is contrasted with the author’s solidarity work on Palestine and broader struggles across the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, which has provided a deeper understanding of how racialized governance operates both discursively and materially. The methodology is therefore also reflexive, recognizing how proximity to power and practices of resistance shape what is knowable, sayable, and ultimately challengeable.
The Mediterranean Color Line
The Mediterranean color line refers to the racialized frontier that divides Europe from its Southern neighbours. Drawing on Du Bois’s notion of the global color line, it describes how the EU organizes hierarchies of belonging and exclusion through migration control, trade asymmetries, security partnerships, and epistemic regimes that consistently mark the South as proximate yet deficient. It is a structural ordering device: simultaneously geographic and epistemic, material and discursive, which differentiates between utility and disposability.
W. E. B. Du Bois distinguished between two realms: a white world and a secondary world existing “within the Veil” (Du Bois, 1903/Reference Du Bois2007: 13). By naming the color line, he identified race and racism as foundational organizing principles of global politics (Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam, Reference Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam2015: 2). For Du Bois, this “Problem of Problems” had to be grasped against the “dark colonial shadow” of empire (Du Bois, Reference Du Bois1925: 423).
His insight endures because the color line was never confined to the formal colonial encounter. It persists as a transnational ordering device, structuring global hierarchies through mechanisms of power, containment, and exclusion, mechanisms that became profitable early on, when racial hierarchies themselves began to yield dividends (Du Bois, Reference Du Bois1915: 708). Importantly, the color line does not reduce to racist imagery. It rests on the production of race as a category shaped by “racialized cultural prerogatives of the gaze” (Smith, 2004: 11), embedding racial difference in the very fabric of politics, economics, and subjectivity. In the Mediterranean, this principle operates as a racialized frontier through which the EU’s racial capitalism takes concrete form: hierarchies of labor, mobility, and sovereignty are drawn along this line, securing Europe’s prosperity through the management of Southern disposability.
Despite European attempts to obscure or disavow this history, the European project has embodied colonial and racializing dimensions since its inception. The notion of the color line remains indispensable to making sense of these dynamics: it captures the persistence of racial articulations delineating exclusion, conditional inclusion, subordination, and dispossession. Crucially, the color line does not designate a fixed geography. It is a multidimensional space in which flows of bodies, goods, and ideas are regulated alongside “regimes of truth” that produce subjectivities through discourses of European values, epistemic superiority, and prosperity (Foucault, Reference Foucault2009).
From its beginnings as the European Economic Community in 1957, the EU has actively shaped a multiplicity of color lines. The Union’s external relations regime is not organized around a single frontier but around a constellation of shifting and overlapping lines. These demarcations may differ in shape, scope, and intensity, but they converge around the global racial line Du Bois identified. Fanon’s characterization of racism as a “floating signifier” (1967) clarifies this mutability: race operates as a legitimizing grammar for continually redrawn boundaries of inclusion and exclusion across political, social, and cultural domains.
The Mediterranean as a Racial Frontier
The Mediterranean Sea exemplifies this logic. As a frontier, it functions as what Newman (Reference Newman2005) called the “21st-century colour line.” It structures life chances for millions, differentiating who may move, trade, or settle, and under what conditions. These conditions are never neutral: they hinge on racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies (Sharma, Reference Sharma2020). The Mediterranean border is a border of conditional inclusion (Anderson, Sharma, and Wright, Reference Anderson, Sharma and Wright2009): geographic proximity to Europe produces not full belonging but discipline, surveillance, and containment.
This conditionality is expressed in the racialization of Southern Mediterranean populations as proximate yet insufficiently European. They are depicted as civilizationally “incomplete” and culturally marked—above all through religion—as incompatible with European modernity (Haleh Davis, Reference Haleh Davis2022). Such racialization is rooted less in phenotype than in geopolitical positioning, cultural ambiguity, and presumed developmental lack. A Moroccan, Tunisian, or Egyptian is never simply a neighbor; they are positioned as liminal figures, close enough to be governed but too distant to be included.
This Mediterranean color line does not operate only at the water’s edge. It extends into everyday practices: visa regimes, detention infrastructures, migration conditionality, and trade asymmetries. It also extends into epistemic infrastructures—through statistics, governance benchmarks, and development indicators— that enshrine Southern states as perpetually lagging and in need of European tutelage. These forms of knowledge production are not incidental but central to the reproduction of the color line.
Multiplicity of Color Lines
The EU’s neighbourhood governance does not operate through a single, fixed boundary but through a constellation of shifting and overlapping color lines. These demarcations differ in shape and scope, yet they converge around the global racial line Du Bois identified, reproducing hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion across different geographies. Nowhere is this more evident than in the design of the ENP, launched in 2004.
Ostensibly a single framework covering both Eastern and Southern neighbours, the ENP institutionalized asymmetry at its core. The Eastern dimension carried an implicit—if ambiguous—promise of eventual membership, conditional on reform and alignment. The Southern track, by contrast, was never conceived as transitional. Integration was structurally foreclosed from the outset. Instead, Southern partners were offered “privileged partnerships” that bound them into economic, political, and security cooperation, but always on terms defined in Brussels. In doing so, the ENP crystallized what Hansen and Jonsson (Reference Hansen and Jonsson2014) describe as the Eurafrican legacy of European integration: the South as indispensable to Europe’s prosperity yet permanently excluded from its institutions.
This bifurcation codified distinct racialized hierarchies within a single policy framework. Eastern Europe was cast as an “ambiguous and transitional other” (Horký-Hlucháň and Kratochvíl, 2014), potentially incorporable into the Union’s institutional order. The Southern Mediterranean, by contrast, was positioned as permanently external: cooperation in multiple domains was possible, but membership categorically excluded (Prodi, 2002). This recalls the pre-WWII international legal order in which some non-European peoples could fulfill obligations but were denied the rights reserved for “civilised” nations (Koskenniemi, 2001).
Underlying this disparity are racialized imaginaries. Eastern Europe is perceived as ultimately white and culturally assimilable into the continent, positioned as a semi-periphery which—despite its own histories of racialization (Lewicki, 2022)—engages in “secondary Eurocentrism” (Tlostanova, 2012) and remains complicit in sustaining global racial capitalism (Krivonos, 2022). The Southern Mediterranean, by contrast, is cast as permanently peripheral, marked through narratives of religion, culture, and a “myth of mass inferiority” (Du Bois, Reference Du Bois, Foner and Louis Gates2021: 887). This juxtaposition reinforces the Mediterranean as a frontier of racialized ordering, where conditional inclusion is premised on strategic utility, discipline, and subordination.
At the same time, one of the most enduring colonial legacies is the artificial dichotomy between a “Black” Sub-Saharan Africa and a differently racialized Muslim North Africa. This divide, while historically rooted in European colonial governance, has also been internalized within African imaginaries, shaping how North African states situate themselves in relation to both Europe and the rest of the continent. For Europe, North Africa appears culturally proximate but politically and economically subordinate: an indispensable buffer for migration control, energy supply, and security cooperation. For many North African elites, proximity to Europe has been mobilized as a strategy of differentiation, distancing themselves from the “Black” South and reinforcing the very idea of the color line that subordinates them.
The ENP reinforced this logic by formally demarcating the Southern Mediterranean from both Sub-Saharan Africa and the wider Arab world, producing yet another color line. Hansen and Jonsson (Reference Hansen and Jonsson2014) show that Africa was central to the early European project: the myth of Eurafrica, though never realized, underpinned imaginaries of prosperity built on simultaneous extraction and exclusion. The Mediterranean border thus symbolized—and continues to symbolize—a promise of wealth and stability on one side and dispossession on the other. By sustaining the division between a “near” North Africa and a “distant” Sub-Saharan Africa, the EU perpetuates not only colonial spatial imaginaries but also the racialized fragmentation of the continent itself.
Genealogies of the Mediterranean Color Line
These dynamics were visible from the earliest moments of European integration. The Schuman Declaration of 1950, drafted while France still ruled Algeria, presented European unification as a way to mobilize “increased resources” for the development of Africa. This vision was not incidental. It represented a colonial continuum, rooted in the notion of Eurafrica (Hansen & Jonsson, Reference Hansen and Jonsson2014), where Europe’s recovery and prosperity after the Second World War depended on renewed access to African labor, raw materials, and markets. The Declaration thus revealed the racial capitalist foundations of the European project: unification was built not on a break with empire, but on its reorganization through supranational institutions. Africa was framed simultaneously as Europe’s burden and its salvation, a reservoir of resources and spaces to be disciplined for the benefit of European capital.
The subsequent decades confirmed this orientation. As Europe consolidated its institutions, Mediterranean and African states were integrated into the project not as equals but as subordinated partners. The 1995 Barcelona Declaration is emblematic. Celebrated as a landmark of “partnership” between North and South, it in fact embedded civilizational hierarchies that positioned Southern neighbours as developmentally backward and politically unstable. Partnership was conditioned on their acceptance of European templates of modernization and liberal reform. What Du Bois (Reference Du Bois, Foner and Louis Gates2021: 887) described as the “myth of mass inferiority” permeated the discourse: the South’s struggles were not understood as products of colonial underdevelopment or global capitalist asymmetries, but as internal failings requiring correction through European guidance.
The Barcelona Process promised horizontality but quickly gave way to conditionality. Trade liberalization was advanced as the engine of development, but in practice, it opened Southern economies to European capital while restricting the mobility of labor and reinforcing dependence on European markets. Development cooperation became a vehicle for diffusing norms of governance, stability, and security, while masking the extractive dynamics at play. The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership thus entrenched the colonial continuum: European prosperity sustained by the racialized framing of Southern societies as incapable of autonomous progress.
The launch of the ENP in 2004 institutionalized an asymmetry that had been present since the early moments of European integration but had until then been couched in the rhetoric of partnership. The Barcelona Declaration of 1995 had promised a “new era” of cooperation between Europe and the Southern Mediterranean, invoking horizontality and even a measure of co-ownership, at least at the level of discourse. The creation of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) in 2008 was presented as the institutional expression of this vision, a space where regional actors would shape agendas together. Yet, the UfM was quickly hollowed out, sidelined in favor of Brussels-centered management through the ENP. This marginalization was not incidental but symptomatic: genuine partnership, even symbolically, was subordinated to the EU’s preference for bilateralism under its own rules and oversight. By centralizing decision-making in Brussels, the ENP shifted the framework away from dialogue and towards unilateral governance, recasting cooperation as conditional compliance.
At the discursive level, the Southern Neighbourhood was increasingly constructed as a zone of risk. Migration, terrorism, and political instability were invoked as the main challenges, and the ENP framed Europe’s own security as inseparable from Southern compliance with European norms. Partnership thus became a managerial logic of containment. “Reform,” “modernisation,” and “good governance”—central terms in ENP documents—functioned as racialized markers of deficiency, portraying Southern societies as incapable of self-directed development and in need of European tutelage. As Del Sarto (Reference Del Sarto2016) and Pace and Roccu (2017) have noted, this was not governance in a neutral sense but a reproduction of colonial hierarchies: the South was indispensable yet perpetually subordinated, proximate yet never assimilable. Beneath the neutralizing language of technocratic cooperation, the ENP institutionalized what can be understood as a Mediterranean color line. Conditionality, surveillance, and economic integration were recast as tools of “partnership,” but they functioned to preserve Europe’s hegemonic position. This dynamic exemplifies racial capitalism: material extraction, security control, and epistemic superiority fused into a regime that fixed the South as a managed periphery, indispensable to Europe yet denied sovereignty or equality.
These dynamics intensified after 2011. The Arab uprisings briefly unsettled the EU’s narrative of stability and promised convergence, exposing its complicity with authoritarian regimes. But instead of recalibrating in the direction of solidarity, the EU responded by doubling down on security. Authoritarian resilience was tacitly accepted as the price of maintaining migration control and energy partnerships. In this context, racial capitalism’s logic of differential inclusion became clear: populations were to be incorporated selectively, as disciplined labor or as securitized threats, depending on their utility to European projects of accumulation.
The so-called migration “crises” after 2015 crystallized the nexus between securitization and racialization. In EU discourse, the Mediterranean was recoded from a “ring of friends” to a “ring of fire” (Lavenex, 2017), and mobility from the South was reframed as an existential danger. What followed was a familiar choreography of panic: social anxieties were moralized, political contradictions turned into questions of order, and extraordinary measures were normalized as common sense. This is the work of moral panic (Cohen, Reference Cohen1972; Hall et al., Reference Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts1978): the moment when crises are narrated through race and class, producing fear as a mode of governance. Huysmans (Reference Huysmans2006) captures the same dynamic through the lens of securitization: fear itself becomes policy, and anxiety a technology of rule. The so-called migration crisis was therefore not about the movement of people, but about the reproduction of hierarchy, the reaffirmation of a racial order that secures Europe’s imagined stability. At sea, this logic materialized in what Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2019) calls a necropolitical order: migrant lives rendered disposable, their deaths naturalized as collateral to European security. The Mediterranean thus appears not as a border but as a racialized infrastructure of governance, where Europe’s political economy organizes the distinction between those who may live and those who may be left to die.
This racialized bordering was not a temporary reaction but a structural feature of EU governance. It revealed what Gilmore (Reference Gilmore2007) terms organized abandonment: the systematic exposure of populations to premature death through the withdrawal of protection, while presenting this abandonment as rational crisis management. The Mediterranean color line thus manifested both materially—in detention camps, externalized border controls, and drowned bodies—and epistemically, in narratives that recast structural violence as a technical necessity for stability.
The 2021 New Agenda for the Mediterranean and its Staff Working Document (EU, 2021a; 2021b) crystallized this long trajectory. Emerging a decade after the uprisings, amid deepening authoritarian entrenchment, the Agenda did not signal rupture but continuity. For the first time, the Southern Neighbourhood was codified as a distinct strategic space, institutionalizing a racialized spatial order long assumed but never formalized. Framed around “resilience,” “mutual prosperity,” and “geopolitical realism,” it reconciled the EU’s liberal self-image with structured dominance. Resilience here is telling: rather than addressing root causes of inequality or domination, it asks Southern societies to absorb shocks without destabilizing European prosperity. In this sense, resilience operates as racial capitalism’s idiom of governance, teaching populations to endure dispossession while maintaining the structures that generate it.
The New Agenda thus represents not a shift in policy but the codification of Europe’s long-standing racialized governance of the Mediterranean. It enshrines asymmetry as partnership, containment as cooperation, and subordination as resilience. By reading these continuities through the lens of racial capitalism, we can see that the EU’s Mediterranean project is not an imperfect attempt at equality, but a coherent strategy of managing difference, extracting value, and reproducing hierarchy across its Southern frontier.
Interrogating Racial Capitalism through the ENP: Analyzing the “New Agenda for the Mediterranean”
This section examines how the EU enacts containment strategies through racialized economic norms and asymmetric integration policies in two domains of the New Agenda for the Mediterranean (EU, 2021a): “Strengthen resilience, build prosperity and seize the digital transition” and “Green transition: climate resilience, energy, and environment.” These policy spheres, though not usually associated with racialization in EU external action, reveal the everyday functioning of racial capitalism. Drawing on Haleh Davis (Reference Haleh Davis2022), the analysis traces how the EU assumes a neo-colonial role, imposing modernity and progress under the guise of integration and reform, while maintaining both material and epistemic hierarchies. Rather than fostering equitable cooperation, these mechanisms secure the EU’s hegemonic position through the rhetoric of mutual interdependence. In practice, they reproduce exclusionary dynamics that erode sovereignty, restrict self-determination, and perpetuate global asymmetries.
To show how these logics operate, the following sections analyze instances of racial capitalist violence across the Southern Mediterranean. These examples, though varied, expose a recurrent pattern: structural dispossession is consistently repackaged as digital development or green partnership, ensuring the South’s continued subordination. The Council’s 2021 Conclusions on the Agenda make this explicit, describing the Southern Neighbourhood as a “strategic priority for the EU” and committing to “further deepen economic integration and cooperation” (Council of the European Union, 2021: 2, 5). Such language demonstrates how the region is instrumentalized as a managed periphery, essential to European stability and competitiveness, rather than recognized as a locus of autonomous agency.
Building Prosperity or Perpetuating Dependence? The Economic, Trade, and Digital Agenda
In the context of “Strengthening Resilience, Building Prosperity, and Embracing the Digital Transition” (EU, 2021a), the Agenda outlines a series of initiatives that appear mutually beneficial but operate as instruments of containment and dependency. Trade, digitalization, and economic reform are presented as pathways to modernization, yet in practice, they extend Europe’s dominance by structuring selective integration on European terms. What is framed as a partnership becomes a strategy of racial capitalism, reinforcing hierarchies that position the Southern Mediterranean as peripheral to European prosperity.
The Agenda repeats a patterned discourse of development: a deficit is named, European tutelage is offered, compliance is tied to finance and market access, and the end state is an economy rendered legible to European investors and profitable on European terms. This is not neutral modernization; it is governance through mimicry and audit.
EU policy discourse makes this clear. Speeches by figures, such as former High Representative Josep Borrell, frame the region not as an equal partner but as a space to be “managed” in response to crises coded as migration, terrorism, or instability, each shaped by racialized assumptions of disorder. In his infamous garden vs jungle speech, Borrell evoked a colonial metaphor that distinguished Europe as the site of civilization and cast its Southern neighbours as chaotic and less-than-human (Borrell, 2020). Such imagery echoes the civilizing missions of empire, recasting the EU as steward and disciplinarian.
The economic agenda is similarly racialized. A central aim is to “enhance the region’s appeal to investors” (EU, 2021a: 2), integrating it into global neoliberal markets under the guise of shared benefit. Yet this positions Southern states primarily as resource reservoirs to be exploited for European growth. Far from autonomous development, integration functions as an extension of racial capitalism: wealth and value are extracted from the South while dependency is deepened. The language of “strategic importance” signals continuity with earlier colonial logics, where Southern Mediterranean economies were structured to supply raw materials to Europe while importing higher-value goods.
The rhetoric of resilience threads through these initiatives. Presented as empowering, resilience is in fact a racial capitalist technique: it demands that racialized populations endure structural harm without disrupting the global order that produces it (Shilliam, Reference Shilliam2018; Sharma, 2021). As critical peacebuilding scholarship shows, resilience often individualizes or nationalizes failure, placing responsibility on states to “bounce back” despite legacies of dispossession and decades of imposed reform (Azarmandi, Reference Azarmandi2023). The EU’s notion of “resilient economies” (EU, 2021a: 8) therefore encodes disposability: lives and livelihoods in the South are valuable only insofar as they absorb crisis and sustain European prosperity.
This logic is stark in the EU’s approach to Lebanon, where resilience discourse is closely tied to migration management. Here, resilience does not mean building sustainable solutions but managing population vulnerability to contain refugees. Refugees’ endurance is reframed as resilience, while the structures that displace and impoverish them remain untouched (Fakhoury & Stel, Reference Fakhoury and Stel2022). Resilience thus legitimizes abandonment, ensuring that racialized populations carry the burden of crisis while Europe secures its borders.
Trade relations reproduce these dynamics. References to “supporting the region’s integration into the AfCFTA” (EU, 2021a: 12) and “deep and comprehensive free trade agreements” (DCFTAs) promise economic diversification, yet in practice they entrench dependency. As Langan & Price (Reference Langan and Price2020) show, these agreements replicate colonial production patterns: Southern states export raw materials while importing processed goods, locking them into extractive roles. In Morocco, for instance, agricultural exports to Europe have expanded, but local processing industries remain underdeveloped, cementing its role as a supplier of raw produce rather than a value-added competitor (Gallagher, 2020). This mirrors the colonial division of labor, where the South supplies resources and the North captures profit.
Privatization and structural adjustment deepen this dependency. In Egypt, EU-backed reforms of the energy and water sectors have raised costs for ordinary citizens, disproportionately harming poorer communities while opening markets to European corporations (Sourani, 2018). Algeria’s 1957 admission into the European Economic Community under French colonial conditions reminds us how little has changed: institutional frameworks have shifted, but the core dynamics of subordination endure.
The contemporary discourse of reshoring and nearshoring exemplifies this continuity. Touted as opportunities for Southern partners to diversify value chains (EU, 2021a: 11), these initiatives, in fact, reserve higher ends of the chain for Europe while positioning the South at its lower margins. Promises of “innovative financial vehicles” (EU, 2021a: 12) mask a dynamic of racial capitalist “guidance,” in which European institutions dictate reforms that reconfigure Southern economies to remain legible and profitable on EU terms.
The digital transition extends this logic. The Agenda commits to “providing technical support to promote financial inclusion, especially on digital payments and digital literacy for SMEs” (EU, 2021a: 12). While framed as empowerment, this language presupposes a deficit of knowledge and capability on the part of Southern populations, casting the EU as modernizing tutor. Digitalization thus becomes a civilizational project in which the South must be instructed into European norms of governance and market rationality. As Danewid (Reference Danewid2022) notes, this pedagogical dimension of racial capitalism ensures that reform is not simply transactional but disciplinary.
Tunisia exemplifies this asymmetry. Under the EU-Tunisia Digital Economy Partnership, launched in June 2023, European telecom giants like Orange and Vodafone expanded into Tunisia’s market, while domestic infrastructure remained underfunded and uncompetitive (Carvalho, 2020). The result is greater access for European corporations but little sovereignty for Tunisia. The fact that Orange is headquartered in France—Tunisia’s former colonizer—underscores how colonial legacies are rebranded as modern partnerships.
This pattern of reform reveals what the EU means by “building prosperity”: not altering the structural terms of the global economy, but ensuring that Southern economies align with European priorities and remain open to European capital. Reforms are designed to harmonize regulations, liberalize investment regimes, and guarantee predictable returns for European firms. What appears as assistance or modernization thus functions as adaptation: Southern states are asked to change so that Europe can continue to accumulate. The EU never imagines reforming itself or the economic system that produces dependency; instead, it redefines the South’s subordination as a governance gap to be corrected through technical cooperation.
The EU portrays the region as having “the human capital to take advantage of the digital transformation” (EU, 2021a: 10). Yet the digital divide is not a neutral technical gap but a racialized ordering of the global economy. Southern populations are cast as under-digitized subjects, requiring European tutelage to become market-ready. This divide becomes a tool of disposability: those deemed insufficiently digitized are left behind, while others are incorporated into European value chains on unequal terms. This framing not only reproduces a deficit narrative but also obscures Europe’s structural role in creating dependency. By casting Southern economies as learners rather than co-producers, the EU normalizes a one-way transfer of knowledge and responsibility.
In this framing, Southern societies are positioned as apprentices who must “catch up” by adopting European standards, infrastructures, and compliance routines. The key move is pedagogical: reform is something done to the South, while structural drivers of dependency—ownership, market access, capital flows—remain off the table. That asymmetry matters. Mimicry without power over standards locks partners into roles as implementers and data/market suppliers for European value chains, not co-authors of the digital order.
The stakes are evident in Palestine. In Gaza, Israel’s destruction of communication infrastructure shows that digital exclusion is not a mere gap but a deliberate colonial strategy of control. By denying a racialized population access to communication, Israel curtails their ability to organize and resist (7amleh, 2024). EU digital initiatives in Palestine, such as Digital4Development, fail to confront this structural repression, instead reproducing the fiction that technical assistance can resolve a fundamentally political problem of colonial domination. These initiatives frame this as a problem of governance, depoliticizing the violence, and thus masking structural complicity in maintaining racialized dependency. The lesson encoded is always the same: the South must adapt, even when the structure is violent. Treating settler-colonial sabotage as a technical deficit cements the fiction that more training, audits, and pilots will deliver inclusion, while the material conditions of dispossession remain untouched.
Meanwhile, EU-backed biometric surveillance in Morocco and elsewhere casts racialized populations as suspects, embedding the South within a racialized infrastructure of surveillance capitalism (Jooste, Reference Jooste2021). Here, digitalization does not close divides but entrenches hierarchies of visibility and suspicion.
Taken together, these policies situate the Southern Mediterranean firmly within racial capitalism’s global architecture. Economic liberalization, digitalization, and trade integration are framed as shared prosperity, but they operate as mechanisms of disposability: extracting value, disciplining populations, and ensuring that Southern states remain structurally subordinated to Europe. The Agenda’s language of resilience and prosperity thus masks a racialized logic of dependency, one that sustains colonial hierarchies under a neoliberal guise.
Unmasking Green Colonialism: Examining the EU’s Climate Agenda in the Southern Mediterranean
A crucial policy domain in the EU’s engagement with the Southern Mediterranean is the Green Transition: Climate Resilience, Energy, and Environment (EU, 2021a). Framed as a transformative shift toward sustainability, this agenda conceals a deeply racialized logic that perpetuates material and immaterial violence. While it claims to foster resilience, the EU’s approach reinforces long-standing colonial assumptions about the region’s developmental capacities. Climate change is explicitly linked to “the unsustainable use of natural resources” (EU, 2021a: 1), subtly shifting responsibility onto Southern Mediterranean populations and portraying them as incapable of properly managing their environments (Haleh Davis, Reference Haleh Davis2022: 23). By linking climate degradation to the “unsustainable use of natural resources,” the EU subtly frames the crisis as originating in the South. This individualizes responsibility and absolves Europe of its structural role within a global system of racial capitalism that underwrites overconsumption and ecological extraction. The same logic of selective incorporation that governs digital development is reproduced in the EU’s green agenda, where resilience and sustainability become moral vocabularies through which dependency is normalized.
This phrasing individualizes causality. Ecological degradation is attributed to local mismanagement rather than to a world-economy that concentrates consumption, offshores extraction, and financialized risk (Acosta Reference Acosta, Lang and Mokrani2013). The Agenda’s preferred remedy—“resilience”—then asks Southern societies to absorb shocks without reallocating responsibility or power. Systemic drivers (ownership, trade terms, energy demand in Europe) disappear behind a story about local habits and administrative capacity. The framing echoes colonial narratives that position these populations as obstacles to progress, justifying European intervention. Sentences such as “help better equip the region for future systemic shocks” (EU, 2021a: 18) encapsulate this paternalistic logic, in which resilience is understood not as self-determination but as an externally imposed ability to endure crisis. As Gilmore (Reference Gilmore2007) shows, such framings amount to organized abandonment: the management of crisis through containment rather than transformation.
Within this framework, the Green Transition becomes a mechanism that displaces responsibility while denying structural accountability. Vulnerability is cast as the outcome of Southern populations’ alleged “mismanagement” of resources, absolving the EU of its own historical and ongoing role in driving environmental degradation, economic precarity, and dispossession. Critical scholarship on resilience demonstrates that this discourse of resigned survival normalizes abandonment by asking populations to adapt to injustice rather than redress it. By presenting ecological precarity as a governance problem rather than a consequence of racial capitalism, the EU reproduces the logic that certain groups are inherently less capable of managing their environments or futures. Underpinning this logic is an epistemic violence: Southern knowledge systems of land and resource management are erased, while European expertise is recast as universal. In Shilliam (Reference Shilliam2018)’s terms, these lives are rendered less grievable, their losses folded into a narrative of inevitable vulnerability.
This perspective entrenches a racialized global hierarchy in which agency is systematically denied to Southern Mediterranean populations. The Green Transition, rather than fostering structural change, consolidates Europe’s dominance under the guise of sustainability. The suggestion that these populations require assistance not only from the EU but also from “IFIs and the private sector” (EU, 2021a: 19) reflects a profoundly myopic approach. It disregards the role of these actors in perpetuating economic and environmental injustices, whether through extractive industries, neoliberal restructuring, or climate finance that privileges foreign capital over local sovereignty (Ben Gadha et al., Reference Ben Gadha2022). Egypt provides a telling example: reliance on IFIs and private investors has deepened socio-environmental inequalities rather than alleviating them (Perry & Sealey-Huggins, 2023).
The EU’s reliance on these institutions as facilitators of the Green Transition only deepens dependency on external actors while obscuring their complicity in producing the vulnerabilities they claim to address. Blended-finance architectures intensify this displacement. Risk is socialized in the South; returns flow North. Project design centers bankability and grid integration for export; local energy sovereignty and land/water stewardship are secondary. The result is a decarbonization for Europe, not with the South.
The push for green energy production in the Southern Neighbourhood reproduces extractive dynamics under a low-carbon guise. As the Staff Working Document notes, the EU aims to “accelerate the production of green hydrogen” in Morocco through targeted technical and financial cooperation (EU, 2021b: 6). Hydrogen thus functions as a textbook case of green extractivism: Southern land, water, and labor subsidize Europe’s transition, while technology, IP, and pricing power remain European. Calling this a “partnership” obscures how costs and benefits are distributed.
While framed as a partnership, such strategies position Southern states as production sites for European energy needs, raising critical questions of ownership, distribution, and sovereignty. Green hydrogen thus becomes not a shared ecological transition but a racialized commodity extracted from peripheries to sustain Europe’s decarbonization goals. Beyond extractivism, the EU’s climate strategy is deeply entangled with the financialization of ecological governance, turning the Green Transition into another frontier of capital accumulation. International financial institutions and private investors dominate renewable energy projects in the Southern Mediterranean, structuring them to ensure returns for European capital rather than energy sovereignty for local communities. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the World Bank, and EU investment funds channel billions into large-scale infrastructure projects under the banner of “green growth,” yet these overwhelmingly benefit European corporations. EBRD financing in Tunisia and Morocco has supported renewable energy projects built and operated by European multinationals such as EDF Renewables (France) and Siemens Gamesa (Germany/Spain), with limited local ownership or technology transfer (EBRD, 2025). The EU’s Sustainable Finance Strategy and the Green Deal explicitly promote “blended finance” to “de-risk” investments for European firms, ensuring that capital flows remain in the control of financial actors rather than communities most affected by climate change (O’Sullivan, Omukuti, and Ryder, 2022).
The EU’s climate strategy is thus not limited to physical infrastructure but extends to the financialization of ecological futures. Instruments such as Green Bonds embed the region into EU-defined circuits of value, where climate action is governed not through democratic priorities but through market logics that reproduce colonial hierarchies of expertise, creditworthiness, and ecological worth. This is particularly evident in Morocco’s Noor Midelt solar project, where EU-backed development has taken place on lands reclassified from communal to “underutilised” (Hamouchene, Reference Hamouchene2021). Hailed as a model for transition, the project enables European firms to extract profits while Moroccan communities bear the costs of dispossession and water scarcity. Similar dynamics are unfolding in Tunisia and Jordan, where EU-backed projects are integrated into European-dominated markets rather than serving local needs. Such cases illustrate how the Green Transition ensures Southern Mediterranean countries remain peripheral suppliers of energy for European consumption rather than autonomous actors shaping their ecological futures.
Despite rhetoric of a “green and fair transition” (EU, 2021a: 18), the EU’s strategy prioritizes European interests, maintaining the racialized hierarchies that underpin global capitalism. As Europe imagines its climate future, it secures European lives while externalizing environmental costs to racialized peripheries. Here, racial capitalism functions not only economically but ecologically, organizing a hierarchy of ecological worth in which some futures are preserved at the expense of others. The EU’s emphasis on “clean hydrogen production for both domestic consumption and export” (EU, 2021a: 21) exemplifies this: framed as sustainability, it reproduces colonial resource extraction, disproportionately impacting communities already marked by environmental degradation and colonial histories.
The 2021 Agenda further underscores a “climate, security, and defense nexus” tied to “climate and energy diplomacy” (EU, 2021a: 14). This aligns with imperial traditions of control over Southern resources, where access to natural wealth is treated not as a right but as a strategic asset for global powers. The EU’s invocation of “converging interests” (EU, 2021a: 19) highlights fossil fuel dependency as integral to these relations. Post-Ukraine energy realignments have deepened reliance on the region as a “reliable partner” for oil and gas, reinforcing extractive dynamics while prioritizing European demand. This nexus exposes the racial capitalist logic at play: the Southern Mediterranean is expected to fuel European prosperity while bearing the social and ecological costs of extraction (Daggett, Reference Daggett2020).
The persistence of fossil fuel extraction within the Green Transition undermines the EU’s decarbonization claims. Even in European Parliament debates, references to “reliable partners” reveal ongoing reliance on Southern fossil fuel imports, all while presenting the Green Transition as a solution to climate change. This paradox underscores how racial capitalism structures the energy transition, keeping Southern Mediterranean economies extractive peripheries for European needs. Europe’s “green” future rests on a precarious foundation that preserves fossil fuel capital while obscuring its racialized consequences (Schuetze, Reference Schuetze2023; Cowen, Reference Cowen2014).
Moreover, the EU’s invocation of “preserving our Mediterranean common goods” (EU, 2021a: 3) illustrates how environmental governance is framed as European stewardship rather than local sovereignty. While evoking shared responsibility, it legitimizes the EU imposition of labor and environmental standards that privilege European interests (Zielonka, Reference Zielonka2006). Nowhere is this clearer than in occupied Western Sahara, where renewable energy projects such as the Boujdour II Wind Farm proceed without Sahrawi consent. European companies, including Siemens Gamesa (Germany/Spain) and Enel Green Power (Italy), operate in partnership with Moroccan entities despite widespread condemnation by Sahrawi groups and the Polisario Front (Western Sahara Resource Watch, 2021). This expansion of “green” infrastructure into occupied territory exemplifies how the Green Transition continues colonial subjugation, subordinating international law to capital accumulation.
At a broader level, the EU’s proposed climate solutions, both in mitigation and adaptation (EU, 2021a: 19), reinforce accumulation while failing to address systemic injustices that render the region vulnerable to climate violence. As O’Sullivan, Omukuti, and Ryder (2022) note, climate policies that sidestep racial capitalism only deepen inequalities, disproportionately affecting racialized and colonized communities. The EU’s Green Transition is thus not a rupture with colonial exploitation but its continuation under new guises. This systemic violence was further exemplified by the EU’s decision to host COP27 in Egypt, despite repression of climate activists (Español, Reference Español Escofet and Domínguez de Olazábal2022). It reflects the EU’s broader strategy of advancing its climate agenda while sidelining movements demanding genuine transformation. Far from emancipatory, the Green Transition sustains global racial capitalism by ensuring that the costs of environmental change are borne by the Global South while the benefits are concentrated in the Global North (Domínguez, Reference Domínguez2022).
Taken together, the Agenda’s climate vocabulary performs three moves: it (i) diagnoses the crisis in local behavior and governance, (ii) prescribes externally benchmarked “resilience” and private-finance solutions, and (iii) routes value through European firms and markets. Each step shifts responsibility onto the South while preserving Europe’s carbon-intensive prosperity as the horizon to be safeguarded.
Across both the digital and green agendas, the EU deploys the language of partnership, modernization, and sustainability to conceal structural dependence. Digitalization and decarbonization are framed as pathways to shared progress, yet they rest on the same racial capitalist logic: extraction and dispossession are recoded as cooperation, while vulnerability is repackaged as resilience. In each case, the South is cast as deficient and reformable, tasked with aligning to European norms rather than confronting the global structures that sustain inequality. In both domains, the EU’s rhetoric of partnership and sustainability functions as a moral alibi for racial capitalism, maintaining European accumulation by narrating Southern underdevelopment as the problem to be fixed.
Discussion: Racial Capitalism through Liberal Rhetoric
This article has introduced the concept of the Mediterranean color line to capture the racialized ordering of the EU’s relationship with its Southern Neighbourhood. More than a boundary, the Mediterranean marks a zone of structured inequality where economic, ecological, and institutional asymmetries are naturalized through the language of reform, partnership, and resilience. Situated within the framework of racial capitalism, this relationship rearticulates colonial logics of extraction and governance under the guise of modernization. The Mediterranean color line thus names both a spatial division and a structural condition: it determines whose futures are planned, whose resources are managed, and whose sovereignty is curtailed in the name of “stability” and “shared prosperity.”
In his controversial “garden vs jungle” analogy mentioned above, Josep Borrell cast Europe as a civilizational ideal, erasing the colonial foundations of its prosperity. As with von der Leyen’s earlier invocation of the “desert transformation” trope, such rhetoric exemplifies how the EU projects a liberal self-image while disavowing the racialized accumulation that sustains its wealth through the exploitation of labor and territory across the Global South, including the Southern Mediterranean. Borrell’s metaphor, analyzed in greater depth elsewhere in this Special Issue, reinforces how Europe’s liberal narratives naturalize racial hierarchies while presenting them as civilizational truth.
By exposing these dynamics, the article contributes to critiques of Europe’s post-racial self-image. EU policies perpetuate colonial hierarchies while disavowing the violence they reproduce. Southern Mediterranean populations are framed not as marginalized by systemic inequality but as inherently vulnerable, which justifies continued intervention and control. Liberal discourses of resilience, solidarity, and modernization mask domination, while Europe’s color-blind universalism sustains global inequalities under a veneer of neutrality and benevolence (Lentin, Reference Lentin2004).
The entrenchment of racial capitalism also illuminates the rise of the far-right, which exploits racial anxieties by portraying Southern Mediterranean populations as threats to European values. Yet this rhetoric does not arise in a vacuum. The same logics are already embedded in liberal governance, where discourses of resilience, partnership, and modernization mask practices of dependency and exclusion. In this sense, far-right hostility intensifies rather than departs from mainstream EU strategies: trade regimes that reproduce dependency and migration policies that externalize control sustain the very hierarchies that the far-right weaponizes. Europe’s hegemony thus rests on a continuum where liberal benevolence and illiberal antagonism reinforce one another.
The Mediterranean color line holds these dynamics together. It captures Europe’s civilizational superiority, its technocratic externalization of violence, and its reproduction of asymmetries through climate, trade, and security regimes. It is not a metaphor but a structural principle: geographically embedded, racially coded, and economically enforced. The forthcoming New Pact for the Mediterranean, currently under preparation, repeats the logic of the 2021 Agenda, promising opportunity while reinforcing racialized divisions of labor and sovereignty.
This article, in turn, seeks to contribute to reparative social science by uncovering how racial capitalism structures the EU’s Southern Neighbourhood and by foregrounding the colonial continuities that underpin its external action. As Bhambra (Reference Bhambra2022) argues, reparative work must go beyond critique to demand material, institutional, and epistemic redress. A truly reparative stance requires reckoning with ongoing forms of colonial governance: border regimes, trade conditionalities, and ecological governance.
This raises a deeper question: can Europe exist without the inequalities that have sustained it? Can a project forged through empire and racial stratification become something else, or does its prosperity always presuppose a Southern “Other” to be governed and extracted from? Unless confronted directly, any discourse of “shared prosperity” will remain anchored in the very hierarchies it claims to transcend.
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to the conveners and participants of this Special Issue, whose collective work has been a source of insight, encouragement, and care. This project has exemplified not only intellectual rigor but also kindness, patience, solidarity, and generosity, a rare combination that has made the process itself a form of scholarly community. I am also profoundly grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their unending patience, attentiveness, and incisive suggestions, which have strengthened this article in both substance and clarity.
Funding statement
I declare that no funding was received for the research or preparation of this work.
Competing interests
None.
