The European Union’s Neighbourhood Policy and the Unacknowledged Mediterranean Color Line

Abstract Existing studies of EU foreign policy often contrast its normative and geopolitical ambitions while overlooking its colonial entanglements. Although recent scholarship has interrogated the Union’s neo-imperial tendencies, the structuring role of race in external relations remains underexplored. This article introduces the concept of the “Mediterranean colour line” to capture how the EU’s relationship with its Southern Neighbourhood has consistently cast the region as politically marginal, economically extractable, and epistemically devalued. These hierarchies are not incidental: they are central to the reproduction of capitalism within racialized global orders. The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) provides a key site to examine these dynamics. Through a critical discourse analysis of the 2021 New Agenda for the Mediterranean, the article shows how colonial logics are retooled in the language of reform, resilience, and partnership. By focusing on digital transition and green growth—domains rarely read through race—the analysis demonstrates how racial capitalist governance persists precisely where its effects are most obscured.