With whom and how: policy learning during critical junctures in Euro-Mediterranean relations

Structural power asymmetries and policy-learning dynamics shape the European Union’s choices of partners and cooperation formats in Euro-Mediterranean relations. The article traces these dynamics across five critical junctures, moments when accumulated experience and actor constellations may enable foreign policy change: the post–Cold War period, 9/11, the 2004 enlargement, the Arab uprisings and the post-2020 “permacrisis”. Based on process tracing, document analysis and elite interviews, the findings show that crises tend to generate first- and second-order change (e.g. new instruments), while core assumptions regarding geography, hierarchy and governance remain stable. EU-centred institutional templates, differentiation logics and limited power-sharing with partner governments and societal actors mean the EU consistently treats its own prior experience as the template for cooperation, producing selective learning that is more often exported to partners than developed jointly with them. As a result, learning is cumulative but rarely transformative, reinforcing continuity in both the spatial boundaries and hierarchical structure of Euro-Mediterranean cooperation.