This article applies a Nietzsche-inspired geophilosophy to re-examine some persistent dilemmas of European Union (EU) – Mediterranean relations. Moving beyond institutionalist and security-driven accounts, it considers the Mediterranean as a generative cultural-philosophical force whose vitality, plurality, and volatility often resist EU-drive initiatives for governance. Inspired by Nietzsche’s writings on the region, this article extracts two propositions: (1) volatility is constitutive, not pathological; (2) universalizing moral claims mask power asymmetries. These are operationalized to reinterpret the trajectory of EU policy for the region, from the Barcelona Process through the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), the 2021 Agenda for the Mediterranean and the recently endorsed Pact for the Mediterranean (2025). For each policy step, the article identifies the ‘Nietzschean’ tension at work, shows how it influenced design or failure, and derives an alternative reading of outcomes. The analytical payoff is twofold: it reframes recurrent ‘implementation failures’ as the predictable result of imposing order on a space defined by flux, and it demonstrates the added explanatory power of integrating cultural-philosophical imaginaries into EU foreign policy analysis. This methodological provocation broadens the theoretical toolkit for European studies, offering a framework capable of explaining enduring dissonances between declared aims and lived realities in the Euro-Mediterranean context.
Luigi Lonardo (Mon,) studied this question.