The grammar of Power in Euro-Mediterranean Relations: A Gramscian Analysis of the role of civil society in the New Pact for the Mediterranean

The European Union (EU)’s New Pact for the Mediterranean has been framed as an unprecedented strategic document revising and revitalising Euro-Mediterranean relations. The Pact emphasizes notions of partnership, local ownership, and the central role of civil society in promoting democratic governance, social inclusion, and sustainable development. This discourse marks a departure from earlier state-centric and conditionality-driven frameworks such as the Barcelona Process, the European Neighbourhood Policy, and the Union for the Mediterranean. Yet, this paper argues that, rather than constituting a rupture with the past, the New Pact reconfigures and strengthens the mechanisms through which power hierarchies, colonial discourses and asymmetric relations are (re)produced across the Mediterranean space. Looking beyond the Pact’s notions of co-ownership, empowerment, resilience, and inclusivity, the paper examines how access to political recognition and material resources remains tightly regulated through project-based funding, benchmarking regimes, and partnership frameworks that privilege specific organizational forms, professionalized NGOs, and issue framings that are either depoliticised or reproduce the EU’s priorities. In this process, Southern Mediterranean civil society actors are frequently incorporated as implementers and local intermediaries, while agenda-setting power, epistemic authority, and financial control remain structurally concentrated in European institutions and transnational NGO networks. This division of labour hence reproduces long-standing colonial distinctions between knowledge producers and knowledge receivers, decision-makers and beneficiaries and marginalises local knowledge, priorities, imaginaries, and languages. By adopting a Gramscian theoretical framework, the paper conceptualizes civil society not as a neutral sphere of participation, but as a key terrain of hegemony where domination is secured through the active production of consent. Through a critical discourse analysis of official EU communications, funding instruments, and governance architectures associated with the New Pact, the paper seeks to examine how civil society in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is simultaneously positioned as an enabler of participation and a gatekeeper of political legitimacy. It demonstrates how this dual role becomes central to the reproduction of colonial hierarchies through seemingly neutral technocratic forms. The paper further argues that the New Pact institutionalizes a form of Euro-Mediterranean cooperation whereby potentially counter-hegemonic and critical social demands—relating to inequality, mobility, or authoritarian governance—are selectively absorbed, reframed, and neutralized within a dominant technocratic development and security paradigm. Through the NGO-ization of dissent and the moralization of governance through human rights and gender equality, political struggles are translated into issues of capacity, compliance, and resilience. This process forecloses structural critiques while presenting civil society inclusion as evidence of progressive transformation. By situating the New Pact within a longer (discursive) genealogy of Euro-Mediterranean governance, the paper traces how colonial power relations have evolved from overt conditionality and civilizational hierarchy toward hegemonic practices rooted in mediated participation and regulated inclusion. Hence, the New Pact’s civil society turn does not dismantle colonial hierarchies, but rather strengthens them through depoliticized forms of governance. In doing so, it invites a rethinking of civil society not only as a potential site of emancipation, but also as a central terrain through which the coloniality of power is stabilized.