Notions of “Europe”: Where Does Europe’s Southern Margin Lie?

Abstract

In the beginning of this book, Noel Parker introduces a “positive theory of marginality,” explicating core categories for understanding center-margin relations. Europe’s capacity to order its environment marks it out as a center in global geopolitical structures. In an attempt to test this formulation against the potentialities of margins around Europe, this chapter focuses on interactions between Europe and its southern periphery; more specifically, the settings of EU-Mediterranean relations as exposed through the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP or Barcelona Process) and the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP). It highlights that the marginal potentialities in the Mediterranean remain largely unrealized: Mediterranean partners have so far been unable either to obtain loyalty or intermediation rewards in their relations with the EU, or to establish any competitive emulation of European values. In narrating this story from the position of Europe’s self-assertion vis-à-vis its southern neighbors, the chapter advocates that for this long, “problematic” margin, more normative principles have to be instilled into the Med-Euro margin-center relation. Drawing upon Bakhtin’s (1991) and Derrida’s (1992) discursive tools, it argues that the present dysfunctional interplay in this context can be pursued through an emancipatory dialogue between Europe and its southern margins.

I would like to thank Akrivi Andreou for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter, and Iver B Neumann for his invaluable comments following a presentation of an earlier draft at the ISA conference in San Diego, March 2006. I also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the British Academy under its Overseas Conference Grant scheme. Thanks are also extended to the European Research Institute, University of Birmingham, for further financial support and the ISA for a travel grant.