Mobility/immobility in the Mediterranean: Challenges to Euro-Mediterranean cooperation via mobility partnerships

Abstract

Speaker: Stefania Panebianco Discussant: Michelle Pace This research aims to critically analyse EU cooperation on mobility with MENA countries within the framework of democracy promotion. The research focuses on the Mobility Partnerships (MPs) in the Southern neighborhood. MPs and the migration and mobility agreements that are being negotiated challenge the very idea of the EU as a ‘promoter of democracy’. When it comes to a trade-off between cooperation with authoritarian governments to ensure stability and democracy promotion, the EU (still) tends to prioritise the former. The research explores the mobility-democracy nexus relying upon MPs as a way to promote democracy and protect human rights by fostering regular migration flows and challenges the so-called 3 ‘Ms’ strategy relying upon more Markets, Money and Mobility that the EU adopted in 2011. Being cooperation on democracy and mobility a process of ‘strategic interaction’, EU’s neighbors are not passive receivers of democracy promotion, they have ‘agency’ in negotiating policy tools and leverage their strategic role as guarantors of stability in the Southern neighborhood in order to obtain more ‘money, mobility and markets’. EU’s policy tools as the MPs are currently constrained into a stability-democracy dilemma. The research zooms onto the pitfalls of such schema and explains the reasons why mobility across the Mediterranean cannot be fostered as an effective tool of EU democracy promotion in the Southern neighborhood.