Joint Ownership in EU-Tunisia Relations

THE EUROPEAN UNION IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Joint Ownership in
EU-Tunisia Relations
Power and Negotiation
Federica Zardo
The European Union in International Affairs
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Federica Zardo
Joint Ownership
in EU-Tunisia
Relations
Power and Negotiation
Federica Zardo
Institut für Politikwissenschaft, EIF
University of Vienna
Wien, Austria
ISSN 2662-5911 ISSN 2662-592X (electronic)

The European Union in International Affairs
ISBN 978-3-030-30798-1 ISBN 978-3-030-30799-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30799-8
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Rosita Di Peri, Stefania

Panebianco and Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués, my research supervisors
during my doctoral studies, for their invaluable guidance to the concep-
tualisation of this work and their constructive criticism. My discussions
with Luigi Bobbio have been milestones in my professional growth as
an academic; I will always remember his thought-provoking comments.
Francesco Cavatorta, Peter Seeberg and Caterina Carta also deserve
much credit for their encouragement and their timely answers to my
questions.
I revised and completed the final manuscript at the Centre for
European Integration Research (EIF) at the University of Vienna and
I would like to thank Gerda Falkner for her advice during these years.
My colleagues at EIF, Katharina Meissner, Henning Deters, Chiara
Loschi, Magnus G. Schoeller, Peter Slominski, Georg Plattner, Florian
Sowa, Alice Jacobi, Elke Schraik and Olof Karlsson have been extremely
trustful and precious, thank you all.
This work would not have been possible without the inspiring discus-
sions with the staff of the EU Delegation in Tunis, the possibility they
gave me to look ‘inside the box’ and to access documents that would
have been impossible to get.
Finally, I am grateful to my family and all my friends for believing in
me so much, for their patience and for keeping me going.
I dedicate this book to Enrico Confienza and to our family. Thank
you for your love, your everyday help and for making me so happy.
v
Praise for Joint Ownership in EU-Tunisia
Relations
“Federica Zardo dives deep into the relations that Southern Mediterranean
countries have established with the EU, assessing actors and institutions
which have facilitated the partnership and investigating compelling factors.
The original theoretical framework and the well-constructed empirical
fieldwork make the book a relevant read for scholars specializing in
Mediterranean politics and more generally interested in external EU rela-
tions, as well as for practitioners and NGO workers.”
—Daniela Irrera, Associate Professor, University of Catania, Italy
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: Joint Ownership in Euro-Mediterranean

Relations—Why It Matters 1
2 Joint Ownership and Euro-Mediterranean Negotiations 17
3 Zooming in on EU–Tunisia Relations Across the 2011

Upheavals 39
4 Joint Ownership Under the Authoritarian Rule 65
5 Joint Ownership in Times of Transition 91
6 Conclusion: Joint Ownership Is What Actors Make of It 111
Index 121
ix
Abbreviations
CEE Central and Eastern European

CFSP Common Foreign and Security Policy
DAC Development and Assistance Committee
DCFTA Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement
ECU European Currency Unit
EEAS European External Action Service
EIB European Investment Bank
EMAA Euro-Mediterranean Association Agreement
EMP Euro-Mediterranean Partnership
ENI European Neighbourhood Instrument
ENP European Neighbourhood Policy
ENPI European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument
HR/VP High Representative-Vice President of the Commission
IMF International Monetary Fund
IPE International Political Economy
IR International Relations
JORT Official Journal of the Tunisian Republic
MEDA Mesures D’Accompagnement
MENA Middle East and North Africa
NIP National Indicative Plan
OMC Open Method of Coordination
xi
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Composition of the political groups in the Tunisian

Constituent Assembly (Source Figure created by the author,
data retrieved from the observatory of the Constituent
Assembly, http://majles.marsad.tn/fr/assemblee.
Accessed 15 March 2014) 55
Fig. 3.2 Top ten donors of gross ODA for Tunisia, 2012–2013
average, USD million (Source OECD statistics.
http://www.oecd.org/dac/financing-sustainable-
development/development-finance-data/aid-at-a-glance.htm.
Accessed 20 November 2015) 57
Fig. 4.1 National Commission for CEE–Tunisia relations, 1990
(Source Etudes Internationales, n°42, 1992) 74
xiii
List of Tables
Table 3.1 MEDA financial allocation per country 51

Table 3.2 Financial allocation to Tunisia under the European
Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument
and the European Neighbourhood Instrument 52
Table 4.1 Status of the negotiations of Euro-Mediterranean
Association Agreements 71
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Joint Ownership

in Euro-Mediterranean
Relations—Why It Matters
Over the course of two decades, the task of making sense of Euro-
Mediterranean relations has become ever more complex. On the one hand,
the political and economic crises in Europe and the uprisings in Southern
Mediterranean countries have entailed power reconfigurations at different
levels. On the other, the number of EU policies and interventions target-
ing the Euro-Mediterranean region has increased. These all address diverse
challenges and overlap significantly.
One of the key principles threading its way through the EU responses
to these challenges in the Neighbourhood over time has been that of joint
ownership (or co-ownership),1 which was formally spelled out in 2004 in
the Strategy Paper of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). With-
out the perspective of EU membership, which was a precondition for apply-
ing conditionality to third countries under the enlargement policy, joint
ownership is deemed the principle that enables the EU and third countries
to define cooperation objectives through mutual consent and ‘give added
weight to the agreed priorities for action’ (European Commission 2004a,
8). Over the years and across policies, the concept has been used by the
1 EU documents alternate joint ownership and co-ownership in their official documents.

I will use primarily joint ownership throughout the book, unless I refer more generally to
ownership by one actor (Tunisia or the EU).
© The Author(s) 2020 1

F. Zardo, Joint Ownership in EU-Tunisia Relations,
The European Union in International Affairs,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30799-8_1
2 F. ZARDO
EU as a means for achieving ‘partnership in its wished-for meaning’ (Attinà

2003, 181) and differentiating among partners in the regions beyond the
EU’s borders. Joint ownership is not easy to define nor to grasp and assess.
It is a dynamic concept that might not be directly observable. Moreover,
there are many potential policy owners. Some scholars have tried to engage
with the concept as an instance of agency in international relations (IR) and
it has proved useful for shedding light on different aspects of power, asym-
metry, and cooperation in the global arena (Boughton and Mourmouras
2002; Lachapelle and McCool 2005; Aliboni et al. 2006; Carbone 2008;
Johansson-Nogués 2011). They have not, however, advanced its defini-
tion and systematically identified the factors determining its presence or
lack thereof.
Taking EU–Tunisia relations as a case study, this book has two main
objectives. First, it contributes to the conceptualisation of joint ownership.
Second, it uses joint ownership as an analytical lens to study and better
understand power relations in Euro-Mediterranean negotiations. Hence,
the book provides answers to the following questions:
1. How did the EU and Tunisia conceptualise and pursue joint owner-
ship throughout twenty years of cooperation (1995–2015)? Which
variables determined these conceptualisations?
2. How did the Euro-Mediterranean negotiation framework affect joint
ownership in EU–Tunisia relations?
As suggested by Boughton and Mourmouras (2002), an operational

approach to ownership must include an analysis of the processes of dia-
logue, negotiation and signalling that could strengthen ownership over
time. Indeed, the dynamics and behaviour of the parties in the negotiation
process contribute to understanding policy outcomes, since they inform
mutual perceptions, shape actors’ memory and influence the nature of the
relationship (Kremenyuk 2013; Pfetsch 2012). Against a flourishing debate
on the EU’s external action especially after the Arab Uprisings, negoti-
ations over the main EU–Neighbourhood agreements have been rather
overlooked. North–South dynamics and asymmetrical relations between
the EU and third countries have been partly explored (Meunier 2005;
Elgström 2007; Dür and Mateo 2010; Reslow and Vink 2015) but when
it comes to the EU and Southern Mediterranean partners, agreements have
rarely been investigated from a negotiation perspective (Trauner and Wolff
1 INTRODUCTION: JOINT OWNERSHIP IN EURO-MEDITERRANEAN … 3
2014; El Qadim 2018). The main consequence of this gap is that partner
countries tend to be considered recipient partners (whether they embrace
the policy or not) rather than players in a two-way policy process. This
approach prevented joint ownership from being systematically traced and
studied so far. In answering the research questions, I adopt a sociological
institutionalist perspective on EU–Tunisia negotiations, concentrating on
how the structure of the negotiation process drives actors’ interactions not
only by allowing them to put forward (or not) their preferences (Aspin-
wall and Schneider 2000) but also by creating meaning and knowledge
(Finnemore 1996).
The book argues, first, that the different conceptualisations of joint own-
ership by the EU and Tunisia are both the result of material factors, be
they external or internal, and of their evolving perception of the ‘self’ and
the ‘other’ in the global arena. Then, it claims that the architecture of
Euro-Mediterranean negotiations, established and strengthened to avoid
that partners accept a pre-determined set of priorities and ensure that the
terms of cooperation could be defined by common consent (European
Commission 2003), affected the level of joint ownership in EU–Tunisia
relations over time, by constraining their capacity to shape the negotiation
outcomes and their perceptions of symmetry and asymmetry. The impact
of the institutional framework on joint ownership depends on the political
target (such as an autocratic or a democratic regime) and on the kind of
agreement under negotiation.
1.1 The Explanatory Potential of the Concept

of Joint Ownership
Why is it worth taking the concept of (joint) ownership seriously? How can
it provide new insights into EU–Tunisia relations?
Local ownership is featured in the scholarly debate on development
cooperation since about 1996, following the formal embrace of this term
by the OECD’s Development and Assistance Committee (DAC) in 1995.
Literally, it involves rights of possession. However, scholars have mostly
considered its figurative meaning, ranging from a sense of attachment
to a programme or operation to real control over cooperation processes
(Chesterman 2007). In the development field, local ownership means that
aid interventions are designed in a way that allows recipient actors to exer-
cise authority over timetables and reform processes that have been designed
far away from their reality. From a normative perspective, ownership could
4 F. ZARDO
compensate for asymmetric relations and ensure effective cooperative rela-

tions. According to its figurative meaning in this field, local actors, at dif-
ferent levels, could own the idea/objectives, the decision-making process,
the outcomes, or all of these. Chesterman and Narten have identified the
responsiveness of international actors to external interventions; the stages
of consultation, participation, accountability and effective control; and full
local sovereignty as observable criteria that can be used to measure own-
ership in state- and peacebuilding operations (Chesterman 2007; Narten
2008).
Similarly, the international political economy (IPE) literature dealing
with International Monetary Fund (IMF) reforms has examined owner-
ship primarily in the context of agency models (Boughton and Mour-
mouras 2002), focusing on how participation of local parliaments, NGOs
and local stakeholders in cooperation programmes increases the legitimacy
(Best 2007) and effectiveness (Drazen 2002) of development policies. IPE
scholars define ownership as ‘a willing assumption of responsibility for an
agreed program of policies by officials in a borrowing country who have
the responsibility to formulate and carry out those policies, based on an
understanding that the program is achievable and is in the country’s own
interest’ (Drazen 2002, 2). A narrower concept of ownership, focused on
prospects of implementation, is adopted by Bird and Willett (2004), who
argue that wider participation does not necessarily guarantee better imple-
mentation of IMF-supported programmes.
The EU integrated the principle of ownership into its external policies
later than other international organisations, as it formally appeared in EU
documents only in 2004, as a key principle of the ENP. Prior to this defini-
tion, the main ordering principle in EU–third countries’ relations was that
of partnership, designating a ‘working relationship that is characterized by
a shared sense of purpose, mutual respect and the willing-ness to negotiate’
(Pugh et al. in Buchanan 1994, 9). According to the ENP Strategy Paper,
the special relationship between the EU and Neighbourhood countries
should be based on mutual engagement, and bilateral agreements should be
‘endorsed by the highest instance in place’ (European Commission 2004b,
8). Operationally, its meaning is more ambiguous. Some scholars have indi-
rectly studied joint ownership by focusing on the decentralisation of the
programming and management cycle of EU-funded programmes (Holden
2005; Tulmets 2005). Others have conceived it as joint agenda setting (Del
Sarto and Schumacher 2005; Sedelmeier 2008; Börzel 2011) and pointed
to the potential incompatibility between ownership and conditionality as

pillars of the ENP (Del Sarto and Schumacher 2005), since joint agenda
setting may reduce the strength of political conditionality when partners’
governments do not share the EU’s democracy and human rights concerns
(Sedelmeier 2008). Börzel (2011) has also argued that joint ownership in
the ENP has limited socialisation and social learning because the imple-
mentation of reforms has become subject to negotiations. Interestingly,
all these analyses assume that ownership has increased since its introduc-
tion. Few other EU scholars have dealt, more or less directly, with the
concept. Aliboni, for instance, claims that joint ownership is based on,
first, ‘a convergence of will and, second, the empowerment of recipients
to implement the common will’ (Aliboni et al. 2006, 8). Although not
mentioning ownership explicitly, Bicchi introduces the challenges underly-
ing it through the notion of the inclusiveness of the foreign policy-making
process (Bicchi 2006). Inclusiveness involves giving voice to non-members
and empowering those actors affected by EU external action.
All in all, European studies have engaged sporadically with the concept
since its appearance in EU policy documents, with almost no attempt to
conceptualise and operationalise it. On the other hand, the IR and IPE liter-
ature described above have sought to measure the level of ownership and its
impact on policy effectiveness and sustainability. Far less attention has been
paid to how actors on both sides of the relationship conceive and pursue
ownership and how interactions affect joint ownership. Studying owner-
ship from this perspective involves looking at policy/programme design,
mechanisms of decision-making, and/or monitoring procedures to under-
stand what kind of agency local actors have in and across these phases and
how they make use of those mechanisms aimed at increasing their respec-
tive agency. Moreover, in line with sociological institutionalist thinking,
it entails considering how cooperation dynamics create meaning for the
negotiating parties, shape their respective knowledge of the relationship
and their role perceptions in the international environment. This approach
to joint ownership allows bridging the donor–recipient divide in research
and focus more on the neglected dimension of interactions (Grimm 2015).
Which stages of the policy process did Tunisia and the EU try to own over
time and what do they actually own? What is the attitude of European and
Tunisian actors to joint ownership and how did it develop over time? These
are pivotal issues that this book tackles. Tracing the conceptualisation and
implementation of joint ownership under the Euro-Mediterranean Part-
nership (EMP), the ENP, and the revised ENP after 2011 sheds light on
6 F. ZARDO
how the agent–structure dynamic evolved within and along the relation-
ship. The first analysis of official EU and Tunisian documents, especially
those establishing practices and procedures for interaction and negotia-
tions, such as the rules of procedures or the working documents, enabled
me to establish the context and identify Tunisian and EU priorities, expec-
tations and capabilities in the negotiation. Next, I looked at Association
Council and Association Committee documents provided in the Council
register or the EU’s Official Journal, including agendas, minutes and state-
ments accompanying meetings as well as formal decisions and recommen-
dations. I consulted Tunisian legislation in French by examining the main
database available, such as the Tunisian Official Journal (Journal officiel de
la République tunisienne) and the Marsad portal. Documents were trian-
gulated and fieldwork enabled me to contextualise their contents, which
was especially important with regard to Tunisian sources and potential lin-
guistic limitations. Fieldwork covered about ten months in Tunisia, four
of which I spent working as a policy assistant in the political section of
the EU delegation in Tunis. The organisation and functioning of Tunisian
ministries and institutions were then retraced by collecting regulations and
organograms.
Through an analysis of the dialogue, negotiation, and signalling pro-
cesses (Boughton and Mourmouras 2002) that enable joint ownership,
I show how the negotiation process determines reciprocal leverage and
power positioning of both Tunisia and the EU. Negotiation dynamics also
explain the consistency, or lack thereof, of bilateral agreements.
1.2 Setting the Context: EU–Tunisia Relations

and the Joint Ownership Puzzle
The relations between Tunisia and Europe are rooted in history. The
Tunisian Beylic’s2 very first exercise in contractual politics, the writing of
the Fundamental Pact in 1857, is emblematic of that. Not only are its
contents noted for having European influence—such as the prescription of
equality for non-Muslims in the right to justice, in customary law, and in
freedom of religion—but its process as well, as historians report that the
2 Tunisia in the Ottoman period was ruled by Beys , officials in charge of controlling specific
regions (the Beylic) on behalf of the Sultan.
Pact was sent for ‘approval’ to the French and British consulates before
being made official (Perkins 2014).
As a small, developing state, Tunisia was always caught between ensuring
security, building a strong economy despite limited resources, and seeking
its place at a regional and global level. These were the major concerns of
the ruling elites even before the French protectorate. Geographical prox-
imity to Europe fostered cultural influences, commercial ties and political
control, nurturing the discourse on the ‘Tunisian model’ (Mbougueng
1999), ‘Tunisian-ness’ (Hibou 2011), the ‘Tunisian specificity’ (Grimaud
1995), the ‘Tunisian myth’ (Di Peri and Giordana 2013) or, in the words of
the ‘father of the Nation’ Habib Bourguiba, the ‘Tunisian way’ (Bourguiba
1965). These designations of Tunisia as a regional exception first developed
by the country in an effort to dissociate itself from the declining Ottoman
Empire and then widely used over time with regard to Tunisian culture,
economics or politics, were recently disentangled and falsified by scholars
(Hibou 1999; Cavatorta and Merone 2013). Overall, the dynamism of
EU–Tunisia relations explains the academic interest and attempt to name
the Tunisian case.
Whether at peace or at war with its northern neighbours, Tunisia has
historically been open to outside ideas to the point of being ‘awash with
an array of exogenous influences’ (Perkins 2014, 31) at any given time in
its continuous history of statehood. This receptiveness to new ideas grad-
ually became part of the political discourse on the Tunisian identity. In the
eyes (and words) of its rulers, from Khayr al-Din to Bourguiba, powerful
cultural currents from the northern shores of the Mediterranean could be
absorbed thanks to the country’s capacity for resilience and adaptability.
The level of political and economic interdependence between Tunisia and
its northern neighbours has changed over time, but bilateral and multilat-
eral dynamics remain set in asymmetry. It is particularly interesting here to
comprehensively consider asymmetry in its material and immaterial dimen-
sion. The former consists of the uneven distribution of power (such as, for
instance, the ratio between total exports and imports from and to the two
counterparts) while the latter refers to the perception of weaknesses or
strengths in a relationship (Zartman and Rubin 2004).
Since the launch of the Barcelona Process in 1995, Tunisia has been
portrayed in both the general and the academic debate as a reliable and
receptive partner. The uprising in 2011 unveiled the myths underlying
the Tunisian case (Cavatorta and Haugbølle 2012) and deconstructed
its representation as a model partner country and bon- élève of the EU
8 F. ZARDO
(Hibou 1999). However, the peaceful outcomes of a difficult transition—

such as the constitutional process completed in early 2014 and the fair
elections held at the end of the same year—have again nourished a posi-
tive outlook for Tunisia, particularly in its relations with the EU and ‘the
West’. Tunisia was the first country that signed the Association Agree-
ment, which framed its cooperation with the EU in a wide range of areas.
It entered into force in March 1998 and still constitutes the legal basis
for EU–Tunisia relations. Ten per cent of total EU funds (from the Euro-
pean Commission, Member States, and the European Investment Bank)
for the Southern Mediterranean countries in the period 1995–2000 were
committed to Tunisia, with priority given to the privatisation process, the
rehabilitation of the financial sector and the reform of the secondary and
higher education system. Since then, EU aid increased from e428 million
in 2000 to around e886 million for the period 2014–2020. Tunisia and
the EU committed to a Privileged Partnership in 2014 after the uprisings
and, in 2017, started negotiations for the so-called advanced status.
While historical linkages and the record of joint commitments suggest
that the EU and Tunisia successfully agreed on common objectives and
applied joint ownership, the analysis of the results of bilateral cooperation
disputes this. The latter shows limited achievements—not only under the
authoritarian regime and in the realm of democratic governance and human
rights (Van Hüllen 2012) but also after Ben Ali’s rule and in depoliticised
and technical-issue areas (Barbé and Herranz-Surrallés 2013), where one
would expect more straightforward cooperation. This gap between com-
mitments and results poses a challenge to both the process of policy for-
mulation and the implementation phase. It also highlights the agency of
the two actors.
Explanations of this gap focusing on the implementation phase abound
in the literature, demonstrating how the asymmetry of EU–Tunisia rela-
tions (Cassarino 1999), the nature of incentives offered to non-candidate
countries (Schimmelfennig 2005b), and the scant use of conditionality
(Tulmets 2006) or local capacity (Fontana 2017) affected the results. These
all assume, however, that conflicts arising during negotiations are solved
and that there is, in principle, joint ownership of the cooperation goals.
There is limited knowledge on why agreements ‘reflect a lack of a political
process on the ground’ (Bicchi 2010, 214) and on the extent to which
Tunisia’s responsiveness to the EU reflected—and reflects—joint owner-
ship of the negotiation process.
The historical roots of EU–Tunisia relations described above make the

Tunisian case extremely interesting for the study of joint ownership. The
mechanisms developed by the EU and Tunisia to enable participation and
equal agency did not develop in a void but rest on a structure of established
practices and interactions. This adds complexity to the interaction between
structure and agency at the national and transnational level. Moreover,
the Tunisian case allowed me to trace and conceptualise joint ownership
in two very different political contexts: first, an authoritarian state with
a well-functioning and Western-oriented bureaucracy from 1995 to 2011
and second, a volatile, slowly democratising environment after Ben Ali’s
fall.
The choice of Tunisia as case study is also timely, since both Tunisia and
Europe are currently at a crossroads. Tunisia’s slumping economy threatens
to undermine its political transition while in Europe, centrifugal forces force
the Union to redefine what criteria should govern its relationship with
external partners. In this constellation and since Tunisia’s regime change
in 2011, the two actors have been seeking to forge a partnership model
that could frame Europe’s relations with its neighbours of greater political
affinity. Understanding how and to what extent the EU and Tunisia have
engaged in cooperation over time integrates the attention that scholars
have recently been devoting to emergency areas such as Libya or Syria and
the attention to sectoral policies such as migration and security (Del Sarto
2015; Reslow and Vink 2015).
1.3 Structure of the Book

This chapter has argued that conceptualising and tracing joint owner-
ship can advance the debate on the EU in IR and, in particular, on the
Euro-Mediterranean power relationship. It makes it possible to bring the
agency and perceptions of third countries back into the analysis of Euro-
Mediterranean negotiations and identify the structural constraints affecting
EU and non-EU actors’ behaviour in negotiations. The review of the lit-
erature on the concept of ownership and joint ownership has shown that
IR and IPE scholars have tried to measure the level of local ownership in
international donor–recipient dynamics as well as its impact on policy effec-
tiveness and sustainability. Limited attention has been paid to how actors
on both sides of the relationship conceive of and pursue ownership and to
how interactions affect joint ownership.
10 F. ZARDO
Following this introduction, Chapter 2 explains why and how negoti-

ation dynamics are the most suitable vantage point from which to trace
joint ownership. It frames the analysis in the wider debate on Euro-
Mediterranean relations and, according to the institutionalist approach,
it describes how the Euro-Mediterranean negotiation framework changed
from the launch of the Euro-Mediterranean Policy to the post-uprisings
review of the European Neighbourhood Policy. Most of the research engag-
ing with the concept of ownership or, more broadly, with power relations
between the EU and third countries focuses on the implementation phase
in order to understand what strategy or mechanism the EU leveraged to
ensure policy effectiveness (Hibou 1999; Schimmelfennig 2005a; Casier
2011; Fontana 2017). However, scholars overlooked the dense landscape
of bargaining activities involving the EU and Southern Mediterranean part-
ners. Two special issues of the Journal of European Public Policy, edited
by Elgström and Smith (2000) and Dür et al. (2010) are pivotal in study-
ing the EU from a negotiation perspective in a systematic way. However,
they mostly focus on intra-EU negotiations. Available studies on the EU in
international negotiations focus on a limited number of portfolios, namely
trade and, more recently, security and migration (Meunier 2005; Trauner
and Wolff 2014; Wolff 2014), even though EU–Neighbourhood relations
also include other policy areas such as environment, energy, cultural coop-
eration and research. The main implication of this empirical gap is that third
countries’ agency is overlooked, as partner countries tend to be considered
only recipient partners (whether they implement EU policies or not) rather
than active actors in the whole policy process. It follows that the dynamics
of EU–third countries relations is not unravelled and explored and joint
ownership cannot be systematically approached. A negotiation perspec-
tive on Euro-Mediterranean relations helps identifying agency-related and
structure-related variables that define and affect joint ownership over time.
Chapter 3 illustrates the relevance of EU–Tunisia relations as a case
study of joint ownership in Euro-Mediterranean relations. The density of
EU–Tunisia relations, as well as the seeming contradiction between high
levels of commitment to cooperation and poor results, makes the Tunisian
case suitable for tracing and assessing joint ownership. The chapter out-
lines EU–Tunisia relations in historical perspective, focusing especially on
the Tunisian attitudes towards Europe and the global arena, the level of
asymmetry between the counterparts and the historical, cultural and iden-
tity variables that should be considered when looking closer at bilateral
cooperation.
Chapter 4 analyses systematically and in detail the negotiations of the
main EU–Tunisia bilateral agreements from 1995 to 2010. It includes the
negotiations of the Association Agreement, its programming documents
(strategy papers and national indicative programmes) under the EMP and
the Action Plan 2007–2013, and its implementation documents under the
ENP. I show how the two parties conceptualised joint ownership and I
will assess it by looking at how the negotiation framework affected the
actors’ agency and perceptions. I argue that the negotiation framework
had a twofold impact on actors’ agency and on the balance of power. On
the one hand, Ben Ali’s well-rooted bureaucracy quickly adapted its nego-
tiation structure and practices to those of the EU and succeeded in eluding
commitments to democratic reforms during the bargaining process. On
the other, the complexity of the EU’s negotiation practices and procedures
acted as a constraint whenever Tunisia sought to put forward its own pri-
orities. In institutionalised settings, bilateral dialogue became a ‘take it or
leave it’ exercise for Tunisia, where the depoliticisation of high-level nego-
tiations led to a re-politicisation of post-agreement negotiations. These
dynamics, observed during the negotiation phase, contribute to explain-
ing the gap between commitments and results, joining the explanations
exclusively focused on the implementation phase.
Chapter 5 studies the negotiations of the main EU–Tunisia bilateral
agreements from the 2011 uprising to 2015. Like Chapter 4, it consists of
sub-cases, namely the negotiations of the Action Plan and its implementa-
tion strategy under the revised ENP and the Mobility Partnership, which
is the other pivotal EU–Tunisia agreement signed after Ben Ali’s fall. By
examining these cases, the chapter shows that the EU’s conceptualisation
of joint ownership as institutionalised involvement in the negotiation pro-
cess did not change after 2011. However, it was meant to include non-state
actors as well, raising expectations among Tunisian actors of the possibility
to interact with the EU on an equal footing. I argue that the complexity
of the EU negotiation framework proved to be beyond the administrative
capabilities of a country in transition. Between 2011 and 2015, the insti-
tutions set-up to pursue joint ownership—such as bilateral task forces and
tripartite dialogues—did not strengthen Tunisian agency as expected. In
contrast to the past, meeting EU practices and standards during the negoti-
ations demanded substantial efforts from the Tunisian administration and,
12 F. ZARDO
even more so, from non-state actors. Moreover, despite its higher level
of convergence with the EU, especially in the realm of democratic gover-
nance, Tunisia’s volatile political agenda hardly fitted EU needs for clear
and measurable indicators.
Chapter 6 summarises the general findings and contextualises them fur-
ther in the debate on the EU’s action in the Neighbourhood. Then, it
reflects on avenues for further research on EU–Neighbourhood relations.
In his introduction to the Handbook on the European Neighbourhood
Policy, Schumacher (2017) points to the mostly inward-looking approach
of existing analyses of EU–Neighbourhood relations. In this respect, he
joins the widespread call for a decentred approach to the study of EU exter-
nal relations, so as to bring actors ‘other than the EU’ back in (Onar and
Nicolaïdis 2013; Keuleers et al. 2016). I argue that while this gap cannot
be addressed through the addition of few articles to the existing literature,
a focus on negotiations, practices and interactions could contribute to this
endeavour.
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CHAPTER 2
Joint Ownership and Euro-Mediterranean

Negotiations
Power relations between the EU and Middle Eastern and North African
(MENA) states have been studied with increasing attention since at least
1972, when the launch of the Global Mediterranean Policy gave politi-
cal birth to the Mediterranean region (Bicchi 2007). Research has high-
lighted the unbalanced reciprocities between European and MENA actors
(Cassarino 2010) embodied in bilateral agreements (Tovias 1997; Zaim
1999). Across these studies, joint ownership (or the lack thereof) has been
indirectly discussed, focusing on how cooperation progressed over time,
how local actors or contexts reacted to EU incentives, or which strategy
or mechanism the EU leveraged to achieve convergence (Schimmelfen-
nig 2005; Casier 2011; Fontana 2017; Hibou 1999). In contrast, scholars
dedicated scant attention to the dense landscape of bargaining activities
involving the EU and Southern Mediterranean partners.
Negotiations are, however, the phase during which joint ownership, its
conceptualisation and its presence, can be better traced—particularly in the
case of EU–MENA relations—for at least two reasons. First, it is during the
bargaining process that actors put forward explicit proposals with the pur-
pose of reaching agreement where conflicting interests are present (Iklé
1964; Kremenyuk 2013). Under conditions of conflict and uncertainty,
actors try to obtain what they want and combine divergent needs into a
single outcome (Zartman and Rubin 2004). Negotiation analysis therefore
shows how and to what extent the interests of both sides eventually feature

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30799-8_2
18 F. ZARDO
in policy outcomes and what constrains the agency of the parties. Second,
and more specifically relating to the case of Euro-Mediterranean negotia-
tions, a rhetoric of equality, reciprocity or symmetry emerged from 1995
onwards, suggesting that the issue of equal opportunities during the nego-
tiations and interactions became salient on both sides of the Mediterranean
(Johansson-Nogués 2011).
Therefore, I approach joint ownership through negotiation analysis and,
according to the institutionalist perspective, I focus in particular on how
European and Southern Mediterranean actors adapted to the negotiation
framework in order to better own the process and the outcomes, and how
structural changes affected their agency and perceptions during the nego-
tiation process (the level of joint ownership). Changes in the negotiation
framework include the evolving set of institutions, bargaining practices and
norms as well as their distribution throughout the bargaining process. This
chapter frames the analysis in the wider debate on Euro-Mediterranean
relations and describes how Euro-Mediterranean negotiations changed and
which key actors, concepts, rules and arena emerged from the launch of
the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) to the post-uprisings review
of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP).
2.1 Euro-Mediterranean Negotiations Under

the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership
Negotiations between the EU and Southern Mediterranean countries for
the establishment of the EMP started after the 1994 Corfu and Essen
summits and were based on a Synthesis Report titled ‘Strengthening
the Mediterranean policy of the European Union: Establishing a Euro-
Mediterranean partnership’. The process culminated in the Conference in
Barcelona in 1995, which was aimed at agreeing on ‘political and eco-
nomic guidelines for future relations which could lead to setting up an
institutional framework’ (European Commission 1994, 3). How did Euro-
Mediterranean negotiations change with the launch of the EMP? Which
negotiating actors, practices and rules did the EMP bring forward and how
did they evolve during the negotiation process?
The Maastricht Treaty (1992) and its reforms in the foreign policy area,
the increasing politicisation of international trade, and the acknowledge-
ment of the limited results of previous EU strategies provided the EU and
its Member States with a window of opportunity for rethinking their rela-
tions with the MENA region. On the other side of the Mediterranean, the
2 JOINT OWNERSHIP AND EURO-MEDITERRANEAN NEGOTIATIONS 19
Algerian civil war and the Oslo I Accord created the political momentum
for engaging in Euro-Mediterranean talks (Barbé 1996; Bicchi 2007). The
political relevance of EMP negotiations affected the distribution of actors’
roles and responsibilities during the bargaining process. Unlike the 1992
Renovated Mediterranean Policy talks, where the European Commission
played the relevant role of broker, the Barcelona negotiations were mainly
led by the Member States. According to the newly established Common
Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) institutional framework, three coordi-
nators—Bernard Zepter from Germany, Bernard Prague from France, and
Gabriel Busquets from Spain—were entrusted with most of the consulta-
tions with Mediterranean partners involved in drafting the political section
of the Barcelona Declaration (Barbé 1996). At the same time, according
to an informal arrangement agreed to during the 1994 Essen summit, the
European Commission kept full responsibility for preparing chapters II
(economic partnership) and III (social and cultural partnership), leaving
chapter I (political and security partnership) to the Council (Junemann
1996). In line with their state structures and diplomatic traditions, South-
ern Mediterranean countries always involved the highest diplomatic and
political levels, despite the technical nature of some negotiation rounds.
The common provisions of the Euro-Mediterranean Association Agree-
ments (EMAA) negotiated since 1995 describe the EMP’s institutional
framework. Even if the design of the bilateral dimension remained similar
to the one set-up under the Global Mediterranean Policy (1972–1992), it
shows the attempt of the EU to further institutionalise the architecture of
Euro-Mediterranean relations and clarify the responsibilities of each actor
from the EU and the partners from third countries. Each EU–Southern
Mediterranean country Association Council is composed of members of
the EU Council and the European Commission and representatives of the
third-country’s government. It is the highest instance in charge of examin-
ing major political issues, meets once a year, and decides by unanimity on
the implementation of the EMAA. It is, indeed, the main arena in which
both parties can equally veto decisions. According to the common provi-
sions of the EMAA and to the established practice in EU–third-countries
cooperation, the EU prepares the draft agenda. Initially conceived as a body
for political negotiation, the Association Council often involves represen-
tatives of the EIB or officials from other donors, while the Mediterranean
counterparts are more often represented by ambassadors and ministers, as
the Tunisian case will show. The Association Committee is in charge of the
technical implementation of the EMAA and represents the senior officials’
20 F. ZARDO
level. Ministries can, to a limited extent, delegate decision-making powers

from the Association Council to the Association Committee to conduct
post-agreement bargaining. Furthermore, in order to integrate the insti-
tutional architecture, the EMAA allowed for the establishment of working
groups and subcommittees aimed at unburdening the Association Com-
mittee. The working groups and subcommittees are organised according
to the policy sub-area, are in charge of technical and operational dialogue,
and meet regularly.
This heterogeneity of the negotiation structure and the consequent need
for network coordination is important here for several reasons. First, as
shown by international negotiations studies, heterogeneity and coordina-
tion in networks increase the likelihood of the use of informal practices to
agree on decisions that would otherwise take much more time (Elgström
and Smith 2000). Second, they lead to continuous negotiations, or what
Kohler-Koch called negotiation marathons (Kohler-Koch 1996). Contin-
uous negotiations tend to become institutionalised (Carlsnaes et al. 2002)
because when people work together for a long time, shared norms and
codes of conduct may be created. Continuity also changes the ‘shadow of
the future’1 and the actors’ propensity to look forward to prospective gains
(Axelrod 1984). Hence, changes in the institutional architecture might
change the actors’ perception of the nature of the relationship and affect
roles’ boundaries.
Reforms driven by the EMP did not only involve interactions on politi-
cal issues and macro-negotiations but also the architecture framing finan-
cial and operational cooperation. The transition towards the MEDA pro-
gramme,2 the EMP funding scheme, was supported by a special, five-year
financial protocol providing 4.685 billion Ecu.3 A new organisational sys-
tem was set-up for its management (Bicchi 2004; Holden 2005b). Dur-
ing this phase, one can observe a Europeanisation of policy instruments,
since the MEDA programme was largely inspired by the Phare Programme
for Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The flexibility of the
previous scheme for external aid was replaced by a complex programming
1 According to Axelrod’s definition, the shadow of the future is the likelihood and impor-
tance of future interaction between two or more actors.
2 MEDA stands for the French term MEsures D’Accompagnement, accompanying measures
of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership.
3 The European Currency Unit (ECU) was used as the unit of account of the budget of
the European Community before being replaced by the euro on 1 January 1999.
architecture, complemented by monitoring and reporting activities to cope

with the need for accountability.
In this system, decision-making rested entirely with EU institutions, in
particular the European Commission, through the then Directorate Gen-
eral for External Relations for the programming phase and the Europe-aid
Cooperation Office for project management. The EMP financial architec-
ture required these institutions to draft and adopt country and regional
strategy papers to define long-term objectives and priority areas for the
period 2000–2006, national and regional indicative programmes valid for
three years, and annual financing plans listing the projects to be funded.
The European Commission was also given the task of promoting coordi-
nation and cooperation with international financial institutions, the United
Nations cooperation programmes, and other donors. As part of the ambi-
tious reform of EU development policy adopted in 2000, the European
Commission completed a very substantial programme of decentralisation,
with staff and competencies being transferred from the Brussels headquar-
ters to the delegations in Southern Mediterranean countries. After setting
the general political orientation, the financial perspective, and the annual
budget for external relations, the Council of the EU remained responsible
for monitoring the work of the European Commission via a management
committee.
The way the EU and Southern Mediterranean countries began nego-
tiating aid and operational cooperation constitutes a break with the past,
the consequences of which are instrumental for tracing and discussing joint
ownership. On paper, the selection of measures to be funded is based on
beneficiaries’ priorities, evolving needs, absorption capacity and progress
towards structural reform. Yet, Holden highlights that in the MEDA pro-
gramming system, Southern Mediterranean governments are no longer
legal parts of the agreement, as was the case under the Financial Protocols
regime (Holden 2005a). Moreover, they do not have the same leeway to
put forward their preferences and ‘drive’ aid. These changes, it is hypoth-
esised here, could impact not only the real agency of MENA countries but
also their perceived level of ownership of the relations.
Besides creating new bargaining arenas, bodies, and practices, the EMP
internalised a pool of norms capable of affecting the nature and per-
ception of EU–third-countries relations during the negotiations. Initially
aimed at improving the functioning of EU external action, the quest for
consistency, effectiveness and the right amount of conditionality (Nuttal
2001; Grabbe 2002; Lavenex and Schimmelfennig 2009) started framing
22 F. ZARDO
Euro-Mediterranean interactions and discourses. Consistency in its exter-

nal action has always been an issue for the EU (Nuttal 2001), although it
came to the fore more blatantly with the Maastricht Treaty, its pillars’ struc-
ture, and the establishment of the CSFP (Marangoni and Raube 2014).
The literature distinguishes between coherence as positive connection and
consistency as absence of contradictions, or negatively defines these con-
cepts through their ‘absence’ (Tietje 1997). Whatever the definition, the
EU quest for consistency involved the need to coordinate external activi-
ties, both those falling under EU competence and those jointly or mainly
dominated by the intergovernmental method. It also involved organis-
ing different policy areas, levels of governance and institutional mecha-
nisms with the aim of reaching common objectives (Krenzler and Schnei-
der 1997; Smith 2001). Its relevance for the debate on joint ownership in
Euro-Mediterranean relations is that, over time, the consistency imperative,
whose assumption was that increased coherence could lead to more effec-
tiveness, drove institutional reforms and informed the negotiating practices
and behaviours of EU actors. In the context of the EMP, for instance, the
European Commission modified and increased the number of coordina-
tion activities among European institutions, such as weekly and monthly
reporting between Brussels and the delegations in third countries. More-
over, according to many informants contacted for this research, the lexicon
used in EU documents changed. These became at the same time ‘vaguer
when discussing with third countries to make sure that all the different
voices within the EU could be included’. Yet, there was ‘less flexibility,
once an agreement within the EU had been reached, in particular regard-
ing implementation rules’ (interview 1). The quest for consistency in its
external action added complexity to the EU machinery, reduced the EU’s
leeway and capability to reach quick compromises, and contributed to slow
negotiations (Elgström and Jönsson 2004).
Regarding conditionality, the idea of making assistance and institutional
ties conditional on the fulfillment of standards was not new (Weber 1995;
Grabbe 2002; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2004). It was first intro-
duced during the negotiations of the Lomé IV Convention, motivated by
the increasing interaction of the European Commission with the World
Bank’s structural adjustment programmes. The dominant logic underpin-
ning EU conditionality is a negotiation strategy of enforcement by reward,
providing external incentives for a target government to comply with its
conditions. The concept hinges on power asymmetry, politicises negotia-
tions, and entails several dimensions of uncertainty. Therefore, observing its
strengthening and transformation from the EMP onwards and its reception
by Southern Mediterranean countries is crucial to addressing joint owner-
ship and its potential incompatibility with a conditionality-based approach
(Del Sarto and Schumacher 2005). As noted by Sedelmeier (2008), this
is particularly relevant in the case of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian
governments with a low propensity to accept political conditions.
2.2 Euro-Mediterranean Negotiations Under

the European Neighbourhood Policy
Only two years after the signing of the EMAA, which officially engaged
the parties in Euro-Mediterranean partnerships, the political debate in the
EU started being dominated by the so-called enlargement fatigue. While
enlargement negotiations with the ten candidates progressed, concerns
grew about how to deal with the countries bordering the EU but excluded
from the accession process.
The debate divided the Member States according to their geopoliti-
cal interests into a group preoccupied with the future of EU relations
with Eastern countries and a group looking at the Southern shores of the
Mediterranean. Moreover, the EMP got its share of criticism: according
to many, the Barcelona Process was not particularly innovative and would
hardly reach its objectives (Bicchi 2007). Like the EMP, the launch of the
ENP involved a reconfiguration of Euro-Mediterranean negotiations. New
actors came to the fore together with new bargaining practices and ways of
conceiving and applying the EU normative framework.
In order to reconcile the different views, the EU created a ‘Task Force
Wider Europe’ in 2003, involving civil servants from both the Directorate
General for Enlargement and for External Relations. The groups later
merged and became the Neighbourhood Unit within the External Rela-
tions directorate, in charge of implementing the ENP. It covered sixteen
countries bordering the EU, from Morocco to Ukraine and the Caucasus.
This reorganisation within the European Commission is important for at
least two interconnected reasons. First, it shows how the European Com-
mission tried to take a leading role in the area of foreign policy. Second, it
explains how the ENP was, to a considerable extent, a cultivated spillover
(Niemann 2006), adapting the logic and tools of the enlargement policy
to a group of countries not targeted by the policy.
The central role of the European Commission in drafting the ENP influ-
enced Southern Mediterranean countries’ perceptions of both the policy
24 F. ZARDO
and the actors’ roles during the policymaking process. While the EMP was
perceived as a proposal with high political relevance, supported and led
by the EU Member States, the ENP was initially perceived as an insti-
tutional reorganisation within the EU, with limited potential for Euro-
Mediterranean relations (interview 10, 11, 27, 33). The fact that the ENP
did not imply the signing of new binding agreements but was based on the
EMAA strengthened this outside perception.
Among the new actors that came to the fore in Euro-Mediterranean
negotiations during the period covered by the ENP (2004–2015) one
should mention the European External Action Services (EEAS) and
the position of High Representative-Vice President of the Commission
(HR/VP), created through the Lisbon Treaty in 2007. In the quest for
more coherence of its external action, the EU tried to foster the develop-
ment of a truly European diplomacy, composed of the HR/VP, the EEAS
office in Brussels, and the network of EU delegations abroad. The Lis-
bon Treaty particularly reinforced the political role of the EU delegations
by adding diplomatic personnel from national diplomacies to the existing
European Commission staff. Since the reform, the EU delegations are not
only implementing actors but are also entrusted to daily represent the EU
outside Europe, conduct political dialogue and make diplomatic demarches
on behalf of the EU and the HR/VP (Comelli and Matarazzo 2011; Carta
2013). The implications for Euro-Mediterranean interactions cannot be
underestimated. The Lisbon Treaty introduced new diplomatic actors in
countries, such as those in the MENA region, with extremely strong lega-
cies of former colonial diplomatic services. As much as they are contro-
versial, historical legacies also affect the balance of power (Cirtautas and
Schimmelfennig 2010) and the level of ownership of the cooperation pro-
cess. Therefore, the diplomatic component of the EEAS could be either
a more neutral alternative to negotiate with or a new source of asymmet-
ric power. Observing the interaction of Southern Mediterranean countries
with the newly established service provides additional knowledge on how
changes in the negotiation framework affected the actors’ agency and per-
ceptions.
Drawing on the experience of enlargement negotiations, the EU
brought a new set of negotiating practices and procedures into Euro-
Mediterranean interactions (Tulmets 2006; Lavenex and Schimmelfennig
2009). First, the ENP strengthened the role of the working groups offi-
cially established under the EMP, and transformed them into key negoti-
ation arenas. Adding an institutional layer to the negotiation architecture
affected not only the nature of the actors participating in the negotiation
rounds—since the working groups required more sectoral experts to follow
technical discussions—but also protracted the negotiations towards even
more continuity.
Second, the nature, structure and preparatory work of the agreements
and documents operationalising the relations changed substantially. In line
with the enlargement procedure, the preparatory phase consisted of revis-
ing the Country Strategy Papers and drafting Country Reports. This led to
the conclusion of ENP Action Plans for each country, aimed at setting the
core objectives of the relationship. The Action Plans are non-legally bind-
ing agreements, since bilateral relations between the EU and each signatory
country are still based, from the point of view of international law, on the
EMAA signed during the 1990s. While the European Commission tended
to treat the negotiations as part of the EMAA’s implementation phase,
Southern Mediterranean governments were more focused on the Action
Plans’ strong political value (Del Sarto and Schumacher 2011; interview 1,
5, 31). It is, for instance, the Action Plan that describes and operationalises
the shift from negative conditionality (withdrawn support in case of vio-
lation of democratic principles) to more positive conditionality (more EU
support in exchange for more reforms) characterising the ENP. This led to
different bargaining behaviours, understandings of the process and levels
of involvement of the parties.
Under the ENP, conditionality became a pivotal norm, framing and
shaping Euro-Mediterranean negotiations far more than under the EMP,
despite the turn from negative to positive conditionality. During the
enlargement negotiations with CEE countries, the EU outlined a detailed
and comprehensive set of political conditions for accession. Through the
Copenhagen criteria, the EU was trying to reassure reluctant Member
States that disruption risks would be minimal and guide the applicants
through the process. The assessment of CEE countries’ progress towards
political, economic and administrative standards was more accurate than
any other country analysis conducted by the EU in existing Member States
(Tulmets 2007).
The conceptualisation and application of conditionality beyond can-
didate countries has manifold implications for the conceptualisation and
pursuance of joint ownership. Strengthened conditionality requires that
a benchmarking system is set-up to monitor progress towards the stan-
dards. This introduced a new exercise in the negotiation process with
Southern Mediterranean partners, since substantial effort started to be
26 F. ZARDO
devoted to bargaining on thresholds and baseline indicators. The conse-

quences were both technical and political. First, all documents prepared
for the meetings of the Association Councils, Association Committees and
working groups became more complex and required good management
competences for their preparation, implementation, monitoring and eval-
uation. These requirements might be beyond the capabilities of non-EU
and smaller bureaucracies, such as those targeted by the ENP (Lavenex
2008). Similarly, accession-like conditionality—combined with the princi-
ple of joint ownership of the process—added an unprecedented technical
challenge in terms of coordination for the EU as well. In fact, monitor-
ing and evaluation activities are not only the responsibility of the European
Commission but of the recipient countries as well (Avery 2004), potentially
leading to diverging positions, values and procedures.
Second, and on a more political note, negotiations on National Pro-
grammes and annual or biannual monitoring reports with their set of
benchmarks soon became the core of the relationship between the EU
and Southern Mediterranean countries. According to Grabbe’s analysis of
accession negotiations, this approach substantially reduced the scope of the
negotiation (Grabbe 1999). While interactions prior to the strengthening
of conditionality revolved more around the content of the agreements, the
debate on the Action Plans ended up focusing on the process and timetable
for accession and less on political priorities. The latter were, to a great
extent, set by the EU, with considerable implications for the principle of
joint ownership. After the summit in Copenhagen, debates on the nature,
applicability, and evolution of these political criteria in the EU remained
limited, leading to mostly depoliticised negotiations.
Beyond conditionality and similar to EMP negotiations, changes in
Euro-Mediterranean negotiations set-up by the ENP followed the quest
for effectiveness and coherence of EU external action. Indeed, part of the
benchmarking and monitoring culture described above is also a conse-
quence of EU concerns with increasing the effectiveness of the external
action. The debate on soft governance tools, diffusion through policy learn-
ing and the application of the Open Method of Coordination4 (OMC) is
interesting in this respect. The OMC is a form of soft law established in the
1990s in those policy areas dominated by intergovernmental cooperation
and is meant to achieve convergence. According to the OMC, the adoption
4 For a thorough overview of the debate on the Open Method of Coordination, see de la
Porte et al. (2001) and Radaelli (2003).
of common guidelines, the definition of indicators and benchmarks and

periodic evaluation could strengthen integration when EU countries are
reluctant to delegate power to supranational institutions. Some EU schol-
ars argue that the OMC logic drove both the reform of EU development
policy in 2000—which resulted in the negotiation of a new EU–African
Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACP) Convention (Dearden and Mira
Salama 2002)—and the enlargement policy (Tulmets 2005). Within the
ENP, it is interesting to observe how the EU tried to include both condi-
tionality and social learning as governance mechanism to increase conver-
gence and Europeanise the Neighbourhood (Schimmelfennig 2012) and
how this balance played out in the context of asymmetric interactions.
All the changes described so far also involved the negotiations related
to the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI),
which replaced the previous MEDA fund. The ENPI was created, among
other reasons, to improve coordination at the EU level and support cross-
border cooperation, using a single budgetary chapter based on the ‘co-
hesion’ and ‘external policies’ headings of the 2007–2013 financial per-
spectives. Regulations establishing the new instrument were proposed by
the European Commission as part of a radical overhaul of external assis-
tance tools (Balfour and Rotta 2005), which was aimed at simplifying assis-
tance programmes and procedures. The reform of the funding instrument
had broader implications for Euro-Mediterranean interactions. It affected
for instance the negotiation timeline, since programming for internal and
external funds had to be aligned. It also introduced new and demand-
ing management requirements that Southern Mediterranean countries had
to comply with, reinforcing the perception of asymmetric participation in
cooperation dynamics.
2.3 Euro-Mediterranean Negotiations After

the Arab Uprisings
The Arab uprisings were both the first opportunity for the EU to deal
with the Southern Mediterranean countries in a challenging context in the
post-Lisbon negotiation environment and a litmus test for the EU pol-
icy towards the Mediterranean, contributing to its further reshaping. The
political upheavals raised two main criticisms concerning the way the EU
had managed its relations with authoritarian regimes over time. First, they
28 F. ZARDO
challenged the theoretical assumption that pursuing economic liberalisa-

tion would lead to political reform and, with that, the idea that Europeani-
sation beyond Europe (Schimmelfennig 2012) was the most appropriate
approach to democracy promotion. Second, and more important to this
analysis of joint ownership, the EU strategies in the Mediterranean seemed
to neither have grasped local dynamics nor to have considered the regional
and geopolitical context enough (Biscop et al. 2012).
The European Commission Working Paper ‘A medium-term pro-
gramme for a renewed European Neighbourhood Policy 2011–2014’
(European Commission 2011a) identified the main measures to be taken
to adapt to the new context, keep some control of the political dynamics
on the ground that had emerged with the revolution, and help deal with
the uncertainty of the transition where pre-existing rules and procedures
were no longer stable nor mutually recognised. These included the need
to ‘better define the benchmarks’, the call for ‘systematic and institution-
alised involvement of civil society organizations’, and the ‘intensification
of contacts between the European Commission and line Ministers’ (ibid.,
19). As is often the case in the area of EU external action, the solutions
provided to overcome political bottlenecks were based on institutional and
structural adaptations (Maurer and Simão 2013). Hence, the 2011 Work-
ing Paper and the following Communication of the European Commission
(European Commission 2015) responding to the challenges raised by the
uprisings form the so-called review of the European Neighbourhood Pol-
icy. The revised ENP is based on four pillars: strengthened conditionality,
greater differentiation among countries, new tools to support democracy-
building, and more attention for sustainable socio-economic development.
Through the ‘more for more’ catch phrase, the EU promised at the
same time to overcome the contradictions between democracy promotion
objectives and security (Pace 2009; Zardo and Cavatorta 2018) and to
find a balance between commitment through incentives and local choice
for more or less cooperation. The ‘three Ms’—more money, more market
access, more mobility (European Commission 2011c)—were the incen-
tives on offer: a more targeted use of financial and economic assistance,
addressing some of the socio-economic challenges in each of the countries;
negotiating Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements (DCFTA);
and signing ‘mobility partnerships’ to facilitate circular and legal migra-
tion in the region, starting in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. Overall, schol-
ars agree that those changes are nominal and that continuity prevails in
the EU’s response and realpolitik dominating Euro-Mediterranean policy-

making (Seeberg 2009; Rieker 2016). Similarly, despite the momentum,
the uprising did not encourage the EU to resort to a new negotiation
approach that could strengthen political dialogue beyond technical coop-
eration or adapt the negotiation structure to the new domestic contexts.
This continuity is interesting to observe and helps tracing and analysing
joint ownership. Indeed, when domestic upheaval occurs, a redistribution
of power and resources also occurs, with new institutional structures poten-
tially leading previously marginalised political actors to power (Zardo and
Cavatorta 2018). How the EU supports or undermines different actors at
such crucial moments influences the nature of domestic arrangements, the
actors’ capacity to interact in the negotiation process, and the perception
of the relationship.
Concerning the actors involved in developing the EU’s response to the
upheavals and their role in the policymaking process, scholars agree that the
European Commission and the HR/VP are the main entrepreneurs and
opened the debate on the review of EU strategies towards the region, while
the European Council was prudent and waited for political developments
on the ground to be more stable before taking a common position (Börzel
et al. 2015; Dandashly 2015). The arena for negotiations remained the
same as in the ENP, except for two relevant developments. First, in order
to respond to the criticism of not listening to and engaging in dialogue
with civil society, the EU created ENP bilateral Task Forces, where public
and private actors as well as representatives from civil society in MENA
countries could interact. Second, the EU, the Member States and Southern
Mediterranean countries started relying more on multilateral fora, such as
the 5 + 5 Dialogue,5 or regional sectoral frameworks, such as the Rabat
Process on migration,6 to negotiate. This change could signal different
strategies to increase joint ownership, by either circumventing the formal
ENP arena for dialogue or increasing participation opportunities, without
undermining the existing institutional frameworks.
5 The official name of the 5 + 5 Dialogue is Western Mediterranean Forum. It was officially
launched in Rome in 1990 as an informal, subregional forum to foster relations between
European countries and the newly born Arab Maghreb Union. The forum involves Algeria,
France, Italy, Libya, Malta, Mauritania, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, and Tunisia.
6 The Rabat Process is a regional consultation forum launched in Rabat in July 2006, which
set up a framework for dialogue on migration, mobility, and development with Western Africa.
30 F. ZARDO
Concerning changes at the level of norms and practices in Euro-

Mediterranean negotiations, the review of the ENP reinforced the bench-
marking approach. This was done to enhance the credibility of the EU in
applying conditionality in case of future violations of democratic principles
or non-implementation of reforms. The new Action Plans negotiated with
Southern Mediterranean countries after the uprisings included detailed
annexes listing the objectives, actions, indicators and timetables. As stated
in the Communication, they would become the basis of the future ‘part-
nership for democracy and shared prosperity with the Southern Mediter-
ranean’ (European Commission 2011b). The EU was seeking to advance
cooperation on a smaller number of priorities, backed by more intense
dialogue, more precise projects and specific benchmarks. The ‘more for
more’ strategy was also reflected in the way the new financial instrument
was conceived and negotiated. A European Neighbourhood Instrument
(ENI) replaced the previous ENPI, since the latter was deemed outdated
and rooted too much in a development cooperation approach (Tömmel
2013). Therefore, Single Support Frameworks substituted the Country
Strategy Papers and the multi-annual indicative programmes in order to
guarantee quicker action. The European Commission also sought to be
more demanding when drafting and negotiating the financing agreement
with Southern Mediterranean countries.
The implications of those changes for the structure of Euro-
Mediterranean negotiations is twofold. On the one hand, this approach
limits the scope of negotiations, at least during the first years after the
uprisings, to a bargaining exercise aimed at selecting projects rather than
discussing the political substance of the relationship. On the other hand, it
presupposes well-functioning bureaucracies capable of managing the pro-
cess, which cannot be guaranteed during regime changes and upheavals.
2.4 Conclusion: Agency and Perceptions

in Euro-Mediterranean Negotiations
This book builds on the premise that legal arrangements, routines, pro-
cedures, conventions, norms and organisational forms shape and inform
human interactions, constraining or empowering actors, shaping their
expectations about which options they perceive as realistic (Aspinwall and
Schneider 2000; Bjurulf and Elgström 2004) and their perceptions of
agency and power relations (Finnemore 1996). Hence, they affect both
agency and perceptions, which are the key components of joint ownership.
The chapter described the development of Euro-Mediterranean negotia-

tions in the framework of the EMP, the ENP, and the revised ENP. It
pointed to how, from 1995 to 2015, changes in Euro-Mediterranean rela-
tions not only involved the substance of the relations but also the structure
of the negotiations. Under the EMP, the ENP, and the revised ENP, dif-
ferent negotiating actors, practices and rules came to the fore. I assume
that these evolving institutional features not only are the results of differ-
ent conceptualisations of joint ownership, but they also affect its presence
during the interactions.
As this chapter has shown, the Barcelona Conference in 1995 was a
highly politicised event, driven by the Member States and the EU, ini-
tiating a process of institutionalisation of Euro-Mediterranean negotia-
tions. The Association Council and the Association Committee, which
had remained underexploited in the framework of the Global Mediter-
ranean Policy, became the main active fora for negotiations, with associated
practices and organisational rules. The duration of the negotiation rounds
started to increase, potentially altering the ‘shadow of the future’. More-
over, conditionality and efficiency became key norms driving the interac-
tions.
With the launch of the ENP, the institutionalisation of Euro-
Mediterranean negotiations progressed. Largely driven by the enlargement
experience, the new policy towards the region added layers of governance.
The landscape of the actors involved in the process became highly hetero-
geneous and included state and non-state actors as well as national and
international institutions. Actors may interact in formal and informal are-
nas as well as in ‘networks’, which are flexible and less visible structures
whose nature and functioning in the policy and negotiation processes have
been increasingly studied by scholars (Grande and Peschke 1999; Elgström
and Jönsson 2004). Besides pointing to the multilayered nature of the
negotiations, I have also shown that conditionality, efficiency and con-
sistency evolved into pivotal norms guiding EU–Southern Mediterranean
interactions. For instance, they contributed to shaping the format of the
negotiations, which became more technical, the form of the working doc-
uments—since then based on a benchmarking approach—and the nature
of the actors involved, requiring more experts capable of dealing with the
technicalities of the dossiers.
The fact that the EU did not substantially modify its practices and atti-
tudes in the negotiations after the political upheavals in the region does not
mean that the structure of the negotiations remained the same as before. In
32 F. ZARDO
fact, a redistribution of power occurred in most Southern Mediterranean

countries, altering the asymmetry between the parties and bringing differ-
ent practices, linkages and reactions to the existing norms and institutions
in Euro-Mediterranean relations. Moreover, I argued that the review of the
ENP reinforced the benchmarking approach and this, at least soon after the
uprisings, led to even more depoliticised interactions.
Overall, the chapter shows how the structure of Euro-Mediterranean
negotiations progressively echoed the highly institutionalised, permanent
and linked negotiation environment that characterises interactions within
the EU (Elgström and Jönsson 2004). It is assumed by institutionalists that
this framework can affect the agency and perceptions of the parties (Aspin-
wall and Schneider 2000; Finnemore, 1996) and thus their ownership of
the cooperation process.
List of Interviews
Interview 1, Senior Expert, ENPI CBC Programme, Barcelona, 3 February

2012.
Interview 5, EU Member State Senior Official, Permanent Representation
of Italy to the European Union, Brussels, 6 May 2013.
Interview 10, Political Activist, NGO, Nabeul, 25 October 2013.
Interview 11, Senior Official, Ministry of Development and Interna-
tional Cooperation, General Directorate for Bilateral Cooperation, Tunis,
1 October 2013.
Interview 27, Senior Official, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic
of Tunisia, Tunisia, 14 March 2014.
Interview 31, Professor, Institut Méditerranéen de Recherche de Tunis,
Tunis 16 March 2014.
Interview 33, Senior Official, European Commission DG Trade, Brussels,
7 May 2014.
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CHAPTER 3
Zooming in on EU–Tunisia Relations Across

the 2011 Upheavals
Relations between Tunisia and Europe are rooted in history. The writing
of the Fundamental Pact in 1857 was the very first exercise in contractual
politics of the Tunisian Beylic1 and is emblematic of the complex relation-
ship between actors from the two shores of the Mediterranean. Not only
the contents of the Fundamental Pact are known for their European influ-
ence—such as the prescription of equality for non-Muslims in the access
to justice, in customary law and concerning freedom of religion—but the
process has been largely driven by Europe. Historians agree, for instance,
on the document being sent for ‘approval’ to French and British consulates
before being officialised (Perkins 2014).
As a small, developing State, Tunisia has always been caught between
ensuring its internal security, building a strong economy despite limited
resources and seeking its place at a regional level. These were the major
concerns of the ruling elites even before the French protectorate. Geo-
graphical proximity to Europe fostered the cultural exchange together with
commercial and political ties. The strengthening of these relationships con-
tributed to building a discourse on the specificities of Tunisia as a special
partner of Europe. For long, political actors and scholars referred to the
‘Tunisian model’ (Mbougueng 1999), the ‘Tunisian-ness’ (Beatrice Hibou
1 Under the Ottoman Empire, the Beylic was an administrative region, traditionally ruled
by a Bey. The Tunisian Beylic was founded in 1705.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30799-8_3
40 F. ZARDO
2011), the ‘Tunisian specificity’ (Grimaud 1995), the ‘Tunisian myth’ (Di
Peri and Giordana 2013) or the ‘Tunisian way’ (Bourguiba 1965) to either
instrumentally dissociate Tunisia from the declining Ottoman empire or,
more generally, to highlight the European traits of the Tunisian culture
and positively characterise its economic or political developments. While
the academic debate after the uprisings deconstructed this idealistic picture
of the country and demonstrated the complexity of the Tunisian context
(Hibou 1999; Cavatorta and Haugbølle 2012), the country still tends to
be treated as a unique case as a result of its longstanding and dynamic
relationship with Europe. The level of interdependence, both political and
economic, between the actors changed over time, but bilateral and multi-
lateral dynamics remain set into asymmetry. What is of particular interest
here is to comprehensively consider asymmetry in its material and imma-
terial dimension, the former being the uneven distribution of power (such
as, for instance, the ratio between total exports and imports from and to
the two counterparts) and the latter the perception of weakness or strength
in a relationship (Zartman and Rubin 2004).
Since the general objective of the book is to understand how the joint
ownership variable played out during EU–Tunisia negotiations, this chapter
will introduce EU–Tunisia relations in historical perspective, focusing espe-
cially on the Tunisian attitudes towards Europe and the global arena, the
level of asymmetry between the parties and the historical, cultural and iden-
tity variables that should be considered when looking closer at bilateral
cooperation. Moreover, the chapter outlines the different European poli-
cies that framed the EU–Tunisia relationship over time, from the Global
Mediterranean Partnership (1972) to the revised Neighbourhood Policy
after the so-called ‘Jasmine Revolution’ and Ben Ali’s getaway.
The three paragraphs cover in a chronological way the development
of Tunisian approaches to and constraints in foreign policy. Although the
time period analysed in this book is 1995 to 2015, the pre-colonial quest
for Tunisian identity and the heritage of Bourguibism will be taken into
account to understand both the structure of the Tunisian State and its
foreign policy choices. Then, I will discuss continuity and change under Ben
Ali’s rule (Deeb and Laipson 1991) before focusing on post-revolutionary
Tunisia and the fall of the ‘Tunisian myth’.
3 ZOOMING IN ON EU–TUNISIA RELATIONS ACROSS THE 2011 UPHEAVALS 41
3.1 Tunisia and Europe Between Vulnerability

and the Quest for ‘Otherness’
Ahmad Bey believed that he could relieve the discomforting sensation of

being in a vise between more powerful neighbours by adopting a bold but
deliberate two-pronged strategy. Appreciative of the Ottoman-Tunisian rela-
tions but wary of the intentions of his powerful new neighbour, he solicited
the support of Britain. […] Despite this, the Bey never lost sight of the dan-
ger of smothering in the Ottoman embrace and adamantly refused to act as
if he were no more than a provincial governor. (Perkins 2014, 38)
As Perkins rightly points out in this excerpts from his work, Tunisia was geo-
graphically, and thus culturally and politically, exposed to many influences
that shaped its identity and policies. The two poles that naturally attract
from outside the Tunisian political system are the Arab World and Europe.
Over time both of them were treated as threats or opportunities. The rela-
tionship with the EU and its Member States will be therefore examined
by taking into account Tunisia’s interdependence with and vulnerability to
Europe and its struggle for regional autonomy.
Tunisian Identity and Europe: Historical Legacies and Tunisian-ness

One of the challenges of Euro-Mediterranean relations lies in the difficult
overlap between ‘the self’ and ‘the other’ (Pace 2005) and this is even more
true in the case of Europe and Tunisia.
The ‘scant eighty-mile width’ separating Tunisia from the Sicilian chan-
nel (Perkins 2014, 30) is a key variable in the definition of the country’s
identity because it transformed the small Ottoman Province into one of
the easiest entry points for the European influence to the African Con-
tinent. By and large, cultural exchanges and political control have been
crossing the Mediterranean more in one direction, from the Northern to
the Southern rim, than in the other. Whether at peace or at war with its
northern neighbourhood, Tunisia has been historically susceptible to the
reception of outside ideas to the point of being ‘awash with an array of
exogenous influences’ (Perkins 2014, 31) at any given time in its history.
This receptiveness towards new ideas gradually became part of the politi-
cal discourse on the Tunisian identity. In the eyes and words of its rulers,
42 F. ZARDO
from Khayr al-Din2 in the sixteenth century to Habib Bourguiba after the
French colonisation, the country’s resilience and adaptability allowed to
take in different cultures from the northern shores of the Mediterranean
while keeping the core of the country’s identity. Khayr al-Din’s adoption
of western institutions was, for instance, an attempt to forestall European
imperialism by showing that his administration was capable of supporting
the European standards in terms of organisation and responsibility. Thus,
he created a Western-like state bureaucracy that, as shown in the next chap-
ters, made Tunisia sensitive to and at ease with the European policymaking
style.
President Bourguiba kept the same approach, assimilating and cham-
pioning European values and ideas while at the same time recognising
and endorsing the Arab-Islamic heritage as a pertinent component of the
local identity (El Houssi 2013). Unlike pre-colonisation rulers, whose main
concern was to take some distance from the declining Ottoman Empire,
Bourguiba’s communication strategy integrated the Arab culture into the
Tunisian identity (Bourquin 2005). At the same time, post-independence
Tunisia strengthened its relationship with Europe. Even if the quest for
modernity through a cultural and religious melting pot also entailed deep
frictions in state–society relations, the official political discourse in Tunisia
at the time and the following scholarly analysis depicted the country as the
only example in the region capable of successfully dealing with its mul-
tiple heritages. In an interview released to the journal Foreign Affairs in
1965, Habib Bourguiba defined the ‘Tunisian Way’ to approach Europe:
‘The basis of our strategy was realism. We had to recognize our weaknesses,
work to overcome them, consolidate our internal as well as our international
position, and at the same time curry the favour of the French government,
seize every chance for talks, and present a moderate, evolutionary program,
acceptable to any man of good will. Thus, our realism implies progress by
stages. The policy is the more effective because it takes into account the
psychology of the adversary, the forces it must deal with in his own camp,
and making compromise appear the lesser evil to all concerned. […] The
same fundamental choices which dominate our domestic policy are seen
in our foreign policy. Our action here shows that we have neither inferior-
ity nor a superiority complex; we are realists animated by solid optimism’
(Bourguiba 1965).
2 Khayr al-Din was an Ottoman admiral who secured the Ottoman dominance over the
Mediterranean during the sixteenth century.
Hence, historically Europe was both ‘the virus and the antidote of devel-
opment’ (Powel and Sadiki 2010, 22). Rulers were aware of the balance
of power around them, internally and externally, and were aware of the
allies they needed. Its heritage and identity, together with its confidence in
cultural responsiveness to external influences are the background picture,
and the immaterial dimension, of EU–Tunisia asymmetrical relations.
Economic and Regional Constraints in the Making of Bourguiba’s

Foreign Policy
The Arab world and Europe have been not only sources of ideas and cultural
exchange for Tunisia but also the main foreign policy partners. Their pref-
erential position as partners is even reflected in the distinction that Habib
Bourguiba used to make between closer Europe and Maghreb countries
on the one hand, and the ‘wide’ Western and Arab world on the other,
namely the United States and the Mashreq and the Middle East regions
(Hinnebusch and Ehteshami 2002). Strengthening the country’s ties with
these regions while claiming independence and diversifying foreign policy
options was part of Bourguiba’s zero enemy diplomacy. It was meant to
both make the most of its size and vulnerability at the international level
and to overcome internal dissent.
Security in the Maghreb region was pursued by supporting the widening
of the Arab Maghreb Union to more than three States (Tunisia, Morocco
and Algeria), thus offering more flexibility and potential for manoeuvra-
bility. Bourguiba’s prompt recognition of Mauritania’s independence in
1960, for instance, was as an attempt to alter the regional balance of power
and give more freedom of action. The same applies to Tunisia stormy rela-
tionship with Libya, which was included as a member of the Permanent
Consultative Committee of the Maghreb (CPCM) since the establishment
of this forum for economic cooperation in 1964 in order to prevent the
country from falling into the Egyptian sphere (Deeb and Laipson 1991).
Bourguiba’s strategy towards the region was not only aimed at securing
its independence. He also aimed at building a strong economy despite
limited resources by looking at potential economic synergies in the Arab
world, namely through complementarities with its southern neighbour.
With its shortage of skilled and semi-skilled labour throughout the post-
independence period, Gheddafi’s Libya could provide Tunisia with a close
job market. At the same time, Tunisia could offer many consumer goods
that its neighbour was missing. This interdependence should have made for
44 F. ZARDO
a fairly smooth relationship, but the states did not need each other in quite
the same way and Tunisia soon became more dependent and, therefore,
weaker vis-à-vis the other. Libya did not depend on Tunisian labour while
Tunisian workers had very few alternatives to Libya. Thus, the country suf-
fered from the vicissitudes of Tripoli’s changing policy, which Bourguiba
tried to tackle by negotiating, in September 1977, a Special Agreement
on the management of the continental shelf, a major bone of contention
between the two parts.
Although the disparities, especially those related to the military forces,
led to an attack in 1980 and Tunisia was able to negotiate only the first
part of the agreement, this case contributes to illustrating Tunisia’s style in
foreign policy against its vulnerability, which was that of pragmatic nego-
tiation rather than confrontation, without upsetting the applecart. The
applecart at that time was Tunisia’s economic ties to its neighbour, which
were conducive to the flourishing 1970s (ibid.). Similarly, the active role in
the formation of the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) points to the Tunisian
preference for a regional collaborative system granting greater political free-
dom to cooperate both with Morocco and Libya with no interference, for
instance, from Algeria (Deeb 1989).
Bourguiba’s active involvement in North African diplomacy is almost
forgettable when compared to the network of relations built with the
western world, and Europe in particular. Building on a long-lasting pro-
European attitude which dates back to Khayr al-Din’s Tunisia (Powel and
Sadiki 2010) in 1830, the President pledged his new nation’s support for
the West. Not only he remained oriented to France as a key cultural and
commercial outlet, but he also allowed a limited military presence in the
North of the country, close to the strategic port of Bizerte, and placed less
emphasis than other regional actors on the development of a self-sufficient
defence force. Instead, he relied for his security and territorial integrity on
Western major powers, first and foremost France and, after the 1961 crisis,
following Tunisia’s support to the Algerian independence struggle which
soured the relations with Paris, on the United States, West Germany and
Italy.
As recalled in the previous section, the general discourse supporting
these tight links was that the country was unable to separate his identity
from the many others that had been absorbed from the various conquer-
ing forces. While Tunisia’s concept of the West in the immediate post-
independence period was less EU focused than today, Tunisia was at the
forefront of Arab and Arab Mediterranean countries in recognising the
importance of the European integration process. This comes from the close
links between Tunisia’s security interests and economic growth and from
the dependence of its prospects for growth on trade relationships.
The country engaged with the EU in negotiations over preferential trade
arrangements since the early 1960s (Zartman 1991) taking advantage of
the French interest in maintaining and fostering its legacies with the for-
mer colonies through the EU. Bourguiba was not completely keen on this
increasing attachment, his proximity with the United States and the pre-
eminence of American donors being an achievement that the President did
not want to shadow (White 2014). Nevertheless, the EU’s value to the
Tunisian economy was lure enough to push the government to maximise
its efforts to achieve the associate status, while finalising bilateral treaties of
cooperation and commerce with both France and Italy. Since then, the abil-
ity to diversify its links within Europe became a mark of Tunisia’s foreign
policy. Agreements with the Maghreb states were generally posited on prin-
ciples of mutual advantages rather than the more precise and demanding
concept of reciprocity. This difference, the next chapters will demonstrate,
played a role in shaping Tunisia’s perception of its own agency during the
negotiations with the EU and the conceptualisation of joint ownership.
Indeed, they led to trade preferences in industrial and agricultural products,
aid in the form of financial and technical cooperation, labour cooperation
and creation of joint institutions.
The first EU–Tunisia cooperation agreement, which was essentially com-
mercial in character, was signed in 1969 before being upgraded under
the Global Mediterranean Policy. Unlike the first cooperation agreement,
wherein France was almost the only source of aid or other forms of cooper-
ation for it maintained considerable economic and political interests in the
Maghreb, the 1976 bilateral financial protocol was integrated for the first
time with economic and financial aid. Aid provided through the financial
protocols was aimed at the development, modernisation and diversification
of industrial and agricultural industries, and these objectives mirror the
gradual shift of the whole MENA region from being the target of tradi-
tional development policies to being treated as ‘Neighbourhood’. Notwith-
standing the cooperation goal, financial protocols also imposed important
restrictions on Tunisia and the other Southern Mediterranean countries,
to prevent competitive Mediterranean goods, essentially in the realm of
agriculture, from entering the European market. Preferential tariffs were
granted for certain agricultural products such as citrus fruits, exonerated
46 F. ZARDO
from 80% (as Spain was not a member yet), or olive oil exonerated from
30% (as Italy could not meet the EU’s market demand) (Bicchi 2004).
A severe economic crisis hit Tunisia in 1980, due to the deterioration
of the three main sources of income. These were hydrocarbon export rev-
enues, foreign borrowing and labour remittances, all affected by declin-
ing oil prices, diminishing debt credibility, rising debt-servicing costs and
reduced demand for Tunisian labour in Libya and the Gulf region. The crisis
forced Bourguiba to resort to an International Monetary Fund-sponsored
programme, which was then implemented by the newly arrived President
Zine El Abidine Bin Ali (Murphy 2013a). The crisis shaped the Tunisian
foreign policy towards an even more opportunistic approach seeking exter-
nal support for stability in the domestic, regional and international envi-
ronment. This allowed the country to exploit the maximum of economic
opportunities with the least political resistance.
Tunisia’s stronger or weaker embrace of Maghreb integration and eco-
nomic coordination was also affected by its relations with the EU. Until
the launch of the ENP, that strengthened bilateral cooperation to the detri-
ment of South-South regional cooperation, Maghreb integration was wel-
comed by the EU. The 1976 EU–Tunisia agreement mentions the impor-
tance of promoting regional cooperation between Tunisia and other states.
Among the Southern Neighbours, Tunisia was the most committed to
the regional project and often tried to play the role of mediator in the
region. This approach was mainly due to the small size of its own domestic
market. The Arab States often found Bourguiba’s diplomacy disconcerting
(Murphy 2002). While politics dominated their international agendas from
early in their independent lives, the Tunisian President quickly determined
that political economy should guide his country’s policies. Realism and self-
interest predominated over any ideological persuasion. Overall, Bourguiba
sought not to balance East and West but rather to extract the maximum pos-
sible from both, thereby reducing Tunisia’s dependency on either. When a
compromise was not possible, for instance, Bourguiba switched from nego-
tiation to the tactics of mass agitation to persuade French public opinion
of the instability of the Tunisian status quo.
‘In the Middle East Bourguibism has been interpreted to mean one
thing only, and even that is misunderstood: take what is offered and then
ask for more. This is equivalent to saying that one should accept any-
thing. No, that is not Bourguibism’ (Bourguiba 1965, 481). Scholars often
used the term ‘enlightened pragmatism’ to describe Bourguiba’s approach
(Deeb and Laipson 1991). This definition does not only point to the cau-
tious realism underlying foreign policy choices, but also to the personali-
sation and the importance of leadership in policymaking. In the interna-
tional arena, the President ‘was’ Tunisia as he ‘was’—in his own words—the
Tunisian system within the domestic arena (Moore 1965). Thus, it is not
surprising that, when in the mid-1980s the domestic and regional situa-
tion worsened, with Islamic groups raising throughout the country and
the economy being about to implode, the international responsibility was,
more or less explicitly, on the ageing Bourguiba. Whether or not foreign
actors such as France and Italy contributed to the so-called medical coup
and the arrival of Ben Ali (de Vasconcelos 1988), the new leader of Tunisia
did not come as a shock in the international system (Deeb and Laipson
1991).
Bourguiba’s heritage described so far is useful to better understand the
strategies that Tunisia tried to adopt during the negotiations with the EU
to pursue joint ownership or to oppose the perceived lack of reciprocity.
Economic and security concerns drove several foreign policy choices of
post-independence Tunisia. Yet, identity played a key role in framing its
relations with its regional neighbours and in Europe and it also shaped the
Tunisian memory of its own agency in the international arena.
3.2 Ben Ali’s Model

While the construction of the Tunisian identity and the struggle for a suc-
cessful independence dominated the country’s foreign policy during Bour-
guiba’s rule, neo-liberal globalisation became the leading ideology under
his successor, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali (Hinnebusch 2015). Scholars tend
to describe his foreign policy strategy in terms of continuity rather than
change (Deeb and Laipson 1991). However, Ben Ali had to face different
domestic and international contexts.
On the one hand, he had to adapt foreign policy choices to a domes-
tic environment which was less and less at ease with traditional Tunisian
pro-western attitude. Although young political elites continued to seek
educational and employment opportunities in Europe and in the United
States, a more assertive pro-Arab awareness emerged. The assassination of
the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s deputy Abu Jihad in 1988 by
Israel reinforced pro-Arab feelings and had a strong impact on Tunisi-
a’s external relations (Perkins 2014). While willing to keep the relation-
ship with Europe and the US stable, Ben Ali immediately highlighted the
48 F. ZARDO
importance of solidarity between Tunisia and the Arab, Muslim and, more
broadly, Mediterranean communities. He warmly endorsed the long-term
goal of Maghreb unity as a key priority of the new government (Ware
1988).
The weakness of the Arab Maghreb Union, however, compelled Ben
Ali to rely also on strengthened bilateral relations, especially with Libya.
The choice proved successful: Gaddafi began repaying millions of dollars
of frozen Tunisian assets and invited tens of thousands of Tunisian workers
back to the country. Borders were opened and an estimated one million
Libyans visited Tunisia since the relation was revived (Deeb and Laipson
1991). Ben Ali also pursued cooperation with Algeria, Morocco and Mau-
ritania, although less intensely than with Libya, and the 1990s were charac-
terised by an acceleration of bilateral ties with Egypt. These had been, until
then, ambiguous due to the hard-line position of Nasser on the Israel—
Palestinian conflict and security issues to contain Islamic extremism became
the main cooperation issue. Only then Ben Ali worked to develop joint eco-
nomic goals, through nine agreements signed between the two countries
on energy, transport and communication (Maddy-Weitzman 1999).
Concerning Tunisia’s relations with Europe, there is little doubt that the
creation of a single market on the other side of the Mediterranean and its
development run over Southern Mediterranean economies and impacted
on the Tunisian perceptions of power relations in the region, adding to the
increasing ambivalent attitude of public opinion towards Europe. Tunisian
workers’ resentment against European companies becoming more and
more hostile to migration from third countries increased the awareness
that educational and professional opportunities in Europe could enhance
long-term career (Murphy 2002). These concerns shaped Ben Ali’s foreign
policy agenda and attitudes, while Tunisia’s well-functioning bureaucracy
and pragmatic voluntarism became trump cards to negotiate with Europe
in a stronger position than other countries in the region.
On the one hand, as pointed out by Hibou (1999), the government
established a technocratic state system and constructed a powerful liberal
discourse which was highly appreciated by international donors. This con-
tributed to shaping even further the Tunisian external image and identify-
ing the ‘Tunisian model’. Since the EU was looking for more efficiency in
its external cooperation system, measured in terms of absorption capacity
and implementation record of the partners (Fontana 2017), the Tunisian
discourse and functioning administration was instrumental in accelerating
dialogue. On the other hand, Ben Ali’s liberal discourse also touched upon
sensitive issues for Europe. The Tunisian government was conscious of the
impact of increased migration from the South of the Mediterranean on
the developing common market and the European interest in limiting the
flow. Hence, he built a powerful discourse on the mutual interest of secur-
ing Tunisian economic growth to strengthen the local job market in order
to increase investments and assistance. Migration was also strategically con-
nected to the challenge of security in Euro-Mediterranean relations. The
end of Bourguiba’s era, which was characterised by the raising Islamic threat
and a sense of urgency about stability in the Maghreb region, gave Ben Ali
the possibility to play the role of the modern and reliable partner of the
western world. Since then, and more openly after the terrorist attacks of
September 11th and the many arrests all over Europe, Tunisia became a
primary ally because of the expertise of its secret police and its ability in dis-
mantling its own domestic Islamic networks (Cavatorta and Durac 2013).
Cooperation on security also allowed Ben Ali to pursue its strategy of
diversification of foreign partners and maintain the long-lasting relations
with the United States, only interrupted during the 1985 and 1988 cri-
sis with Israel. Compared to the EU, the United States was historically
much more active in deepening the links with the regime with a view to
strengthening its coalition against terror. Since 2001, contacts between the
two countries reached unprecedented depth, with the former Secretary of
State Colin Powell visiting Tunisia in 2003 and Tunisian Foreign Minister
visiting Washington in 2004 (ibid.). Hence, both the IMF and the EU pro-
gressively raised the budget allocated for the country, the latter granting
Tunisia the highest amount per inhabitant within the MEDA I and MEDA
II budgets (White 2014). Especially in the realm of bilateral trade and aid,
the United States remained a secondary partner of the regime, since the
American government privileged economic cooperation at a regional level
through the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) and the Broader
Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) initiative run since 2004. On
the contrary, Europe remained the main target of Tunisian imports and
exports.
Thus, keeping positive relations with many international partners
remained an important foreign policy goal for Ben Ali as it was under
Bourguiba’s rule. This was also the case within Europe itself. If France,
Germany and Italy were the bulk of Tunisian trade, they were also, with
the exception of Germany, the main competitors in agricultural production,
especially for olive oil. The strategy adopted to reduce the dependence of
the Tunisian economy from these European Member States was mainly to
50 F. ZARDO
promote the country as an ‘open for business’ environment (Hinnebusch

and Ehteshami 2002) and to increase the use of the English language to
emancipate itself from the francophone past and system.
When preparing the national economic plan and Euro-Mediterranean
negotiations in 1992, the Tunisian government pursued at least two tracks.
The first was to promote the idea of Tunisia as a platform from which non-
European countries could enter the EU market, taking advantage of Tunisi-
a’s upgraded relations and related benefits. The second encouraged part-
nerships based in Tunisia, in which local manufacturing enterprises would
benefit from outside investment and technology and the jointly produced
wares could compete in new markets, in the EU or elsewhere. The early
signature of the Association Agreement in 1995, before any other Maghreb
country, followed this twofold path. Hence, Tunisia was the first partner to
sign an agreement with the EU in the framework of the Barcelona process,
which entered into force in March 1998 and still constitutes the legal basis
for EU–Tunisia relations.
Consistent with the three pillars structure of the EMP, the Association
Agreement included a political and security partnership, a financial and
economic partnership and a social, cultural and human partnership (Barbé
1996). The idea of pursuing democratic reforms through increased eco-
nomic cooperation, already inherent in the Renovated Mediterranean Pol-
icy in the 1980s, became explicit with the launch of the EMP and was linked
to a mechanism of negative conditionality (Youngs 2002; Schmid 2004;
Gomez 2003) according to which the agreement could be suspended in the
event of major human rights violations. Nevertheless, although stalemates
occurred between Tunisia and the EU, with the European Parliament and
the European Economic and Social Committee overtly reporting on Ben
Ali’s violations of human rights, cooperation was never interrupted.
The MEDA programme was the main instrument of the EMP and
according to its financial rules, the EU and Tunisia had to draft and sign a
National Indicative Programmes (NIP) allocating the EU assistance to the
country.
Ten per cent of the total EU funds (included those from the EU budget,
Member States budget and the European Investment Bank) for the South-
ern Mediterranean countries over 1995–2000 were allocated to Tunisia,
as reported in Table 3.1, with priority given to the privatisation process,
the rehabilitation of the financial sector and the reform of the secondary
and high education system. The European Commission itself (EIB funds
Table 3.1 MEDA

e million MEDA-1 MEDA-2 MEDA 1
financial allocation per
(1995–1999) (2000–2004) and 2
country (1995–2004)
Bilateral funding
Algeria 164.0 232.8 396.8
Palestine 111.0 350.3 461.3
Egypt 686.0 353.5 1039.5
Jordan 254.0 204.4 458.4
Lebanon 182.0 73.7 255.7
Morocco 660.0 677.1 1337.1
Syria 101.0 135.7 236.7
Tunisia 428.0 328.6 756.6
Total 2586.0 2356.1 4942.1
bilateral
Regional 471.0 739.8 1210.9
funding
Total 3057.0 3095.9 6152.9
funding
Source Author’s elaboration based on Evaluation Reports of the MEDA

programmes
included) earmarked 14% of the overall MEDA I bilateral funds (3435 mil-
lion Euros to be shared among nine Mediterranean countries) for Tunisia,
namely 428 million euros.
Since 2004, EU–Tunisia relations developed in the framework of the
ENP, on the basis of the EU–Tunisia Action Plan which was adopted in
2005 for a period of five years. The Action Plan was not meant to sub-
stitute the Association Agreement, but to integrate it with the ENP reg-
ulatory approach based on a benchmarking system, objectives and indi-
cators borrowed from the enlargement process (Gänzle 2009; Lavenex
and Schimmelfennig 2009; Lavenex 2004). The activities could be imple-
mented through a substantial allocation, illustrated in Table 3.2, from the
European Neighbourhood Partnership Instrument, that came to substitute
the previous MEDA scheme.
Despite some initial resistance (Hinnebusch 2015), neoliberalism and
authoritarian upgrading framed foreign policy attitudes under Ben Ali.
Moreover, the economic crisis of the late 1980s, external support to neolib-
eral responses from international financial institutions and the increasing
52 F. ZARDO
Table 3.2 Financial

Mio Euro ENPI ENPI ENI
allocation to Tunisia
2005–2007 2008–2013 2014–2016
under the European
Neighbourhood and Total 144.00 530.00 246.00
Partnership Instrument funding
and the European
Source Author’s elaboration based on the National Indicative Plan
Neighbourhood (NIP) 2005–2006, NIP 2007–2010, NIP 2011–2013 and Single Sup-
Instrument port Framework 2014–2015
limitation of domestic freedom all shaped Tunisian perceptions of the inter-

national arena both at the level of ordinary citizens or civil society organ-
isations and at the level of bureaucrats involved in Euro-Mediterranean
negotiations.
3.3 Dancing with the Transition:

The Post-Ben Ali Era
When the jasmine revolution began in Tunisia in Tunisia and Ben Ali
fled the country, international actors were taken by surprise (Malmvig and
Lassen 2013). The formal reaction of the EU and the Member States was
slow (Zardo and Cavatorta 2018) but public statements and promises of
new funding immediately suggested that the uprisings were changing the
international arena, irrespective of the domestic result of the revolutions.
Before investigating the changes or continuity in foreign policy choices and
attitudes of Tunisia after 2011 (Abderrahim et al. 2017; Hinnebusch 2015;
Teti 2012), scholars have focused on the many disconnections between
the country as economic and political model in the region depicted for
years and the reality on the ground that the revolution brought to the fore
(Murphy 2013a; Cavatorta and Haugbølle 2012; Hibou and Khiari 2011).
This disconnection formed the basis of Tunisian relations with Europe
and its international partners. While demonstrating the gap between the
strategic and powerful rhetoric of the authoritarian regime and the reality
of Tunisia’s economic, cultural and regional vulnerability, studies revised
also existing explanations of EU–Tunisia balance of power and perceived
asymmetry.
The upheavals unveiled a multi-faceted Tunisian identity, an unevenly
performing economic system and a vulnerable country at the regional level
(Di Peri and Giordana 2013; Cavatorta and Haugbølle 2012). The fol-
lowing paragraphs describe the post-revolutionary context and look more
precisely Tunisia’s foreign policy attitude, its economic and regional vul-
nerability and its changing identity which might have affected the con-
ceptualisation and pursuance of joint ownership in its relations with the
EU.
The ‘Jasmine Revolution’

The fall of Ben Ali and the following wave of uprisings in the Middle East-
ern and North African region have attracted a lot of academic interest.
Scholars overall agree on the fact that the mass demonstrations and Ben
Ali’s getaway cannot be explained without looking at the gap between the
‘Tunisian model’ constructed by the authoritarian regime and the reality of
a country characterised by rooted discontent and widespread inequalities
(Murphy 2013a). The combination of massive youth unemployment, deep-
ening poverty, rampant corruption, rising fuel and energy prices and sys-
tematic violations of human rights by a fifty-five year’s long regime unavoid-
ably led to popular reaction (Gana 2013). Early 2011, when Constitutional
amendments and ad hoc political make-ups having kept Ben Ali’s stay in
power became unsustainable and could no longer stop street demonstra-
tions, the dictator fled to Saudi Arabia to look for asylum. At first, his Prime
Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi declared himself acting President accord-
ing to the Constitutional law. Then, he was promptly substituted by the
president of the Chamber of Deputies, Fouad Mebazaa, as a result of the
recognised vacancy at the head of the State. Two interim governments led
by Mohamed Ghannouchi and then Béji Caid Essebsi under the Presidency
of Mebazaa tried to keep the system alive but, when two disproportionate
police reactions to peaceful demonstrations suggested the governments’
unwillingness to reform the State, the Assembly was dissolved and general
elections were announced, for the first time in the Country, on July 2011.
After these attempts to keep the system stable, Tunisia officially started a
transition that lasted at least three years, until Presidential elections in 2014
and the solution of the political stalemate that followed (Perkins 2014).
This historical move towards democracy was delayed to October 2011,
waiting for a legal framework to be approved and prescribing, among other
norms, that judges, regional governors, local officials, military personnel
and former senior officials of Ben Ali’s party, the Democratic Constitutional
Rally (RDC), could not run (Murphy 2013b).
The reconfiguration of the political landscape following the dismantling
of the one-party system is important to understand the Tunisian agency and
54 F. ZARDO
perceptions of its relations with Europe during the negotiations. Even if

the impressive number of lists that registered for the elections of the future
Constituent Assembly were only ‘concoctions of local self-interested per-
sonalities’ (ibid., 238), the number of approved parties was 112, while
162 were denied the imprimatur to legally organise a campaign and run.
This is indicative of the political dynamism and high expectations after
the regime change. The main competitor was the Muslim party Ennahda,
legalised by the interim government in March 2011. Ennahda immedi-
ately faced the opposition of forces whose origins drew from Bourguiba’s
and Ben Ali’s opportunistic pluralism, lacking any real political idea or pro-
gramme. Among these were the Parti Démocratique Progressiste of Chebbi
and Ettakatol of Mustafa Ben Jaafar. Other parties included the Tunisian
Workers’ Communist Party (Parti Communiste des Ouvriers de la Tunisie),
and the Renewal Party (al-Tadjd), both heirs of the Tunisian Communist
Party. Two new parties that then took the front-row seat on the political
scene were the CPR (Congrès Pour la République) created by the human
rights activist Moncef Marzouki and the party Afek Tounes, centre left.
Among the many ex-RDC loyalists were al-Moubadara of Kamel Morjane
who nonetheless received limited support.
The limited funds and time to prepare for the elections prevented the
numerous parties and lists from developing substantive political campaigns.
One of the consequences of this was that political debates were relatively
unsophisticated and became largely reduced to arguments about the poten-
tial impact and risks of the Muslim party Ennahda to get the majority of
parliamentary seats. In was indeed Ennahda that succeeded in building the
most structured campaign, with real nationwide door-to-door campaign-
ing and a comprehensive and political manifesto made of 365 ambitious
policy commitments covering politics, economics and social development.
As represented in Fig. 3.1, Ennahda eventually received 41.1% of the votes,
the CPR came in a distant second with 13.8% and Ettakatol received less
than 10% of the votes.
As there was no possibility for CPR and Ettakatol to have a say in
decision-making other than joining the Ennahda coalition, they decided to
rely on political groups as much as possible and to form what was then called
the governmental Troika. Hence, after more than one month, Moncef Mar-
zouki (CPR leader) was chosen as President, Hamad Jebali (Ennahda) as
Prime Minister and Mustapha Ben Jaafar (leader of Ettakatol) became Pres-
ident of the Assembly. Overall, the elected parties coordinate to form six
parliamentary blocs. If it true, as Pickard notes, that the turnout represented
Political groups - October 2011

Deputies not belonging to any bloc
(Popular petttion 24 +Al Moubadara 5 +

Workers Communist Party 3 + People's
Movement 2 + Social Democrats Movement 1 +
National Liberal Union 1 + Militantism
Ennahda
Progressive Party 1 + Independents 19 + CPR 1
+ Nation Union
(Ennahdha 89 + Social Democrat
Movement 1)
Freedom and Dignity
(Independent 2 + Popular Petition

Party 2 + The Neo Destourian
Party 1 + The Nation Cultural
Unionist Party 1)
DemocraƟc bloc
Etakatol
(PDP 16 + Afak Tounes 4 + Patriots
(Ettakatol 11/16 + CPR 1 + Democrats Movement 1 + JusƟce
Independent 1) and Equality 1 + Independent 2 +
CPR
(all CPR) EƩakatol 5/16 + Liberal
Maghrebian Party 1+ DemocraƟc
Modernist Pole 5)
Fig. 3.1 Composition of the political groups in the Tunisian Constituent Assem-
bly (Source Figure created by the author, data retrieved from the observatory of the
Constituent Assembly, http://majles.marsad.tn/fr/assemblee. Accessed 15 March
2014)
over 90% of registered voters, which covered only 54% of the population
eligible to vote (Pickard 2011), the electoral exercise was considered by
the international community a first important step towards the democrati-
sation of the Tunisian political system (Murphy 2013b) and a proof of the
historical legacy of institutionalism in Tunisia.
Unlike the elections, the road towards the writing and approval of the
new fundamental chart, which the Constituent Assembly was in charge of
completing, was uneasy and brought to the surface the vulnerability of a
post-authoritarian country. At the international level, the stalemate toned
down the over-enthusiastic representations of Tunisia as a new democracy
after only two years of transition and gave rise to more cautious approaches
to cooperation (Perkins 2014). It eventually took more than two years to
the Troika to get the Constitution approved in January 2014. This phase
was characterised by high polarisation of the political landscape, especially
following the murders of the politician Chokri Belaid and the secularist
member of the Assembly Mohamed Brahmi. In this context, the Tunisian
General Labour Union (UGTT) played a key role in fostering the so-
called national dialogue among the parties. This contribution legitimised
56 F. ZARDO
the Tunisian Union also in the international arena and in particular at the
EU level. Together with agreeing on the Constitutional Law, the Troika
also set a date for new presidential elections, scheduled on October and
December 2014.
The post-revolutionary political landscape described above is complex,
fragmented and polarised, but one cannot argue that the uprisings dis-
mantled the Tunisian institutional system. The level of organisation and
centralisation of the bureaucracy under the previous regimes allowed the
country to control the institutional impact of political instability during
the transition and keep a dialogue with international actors open. It did
not, however, protect Tunisia from other sources of vulnerability such as
economic and security concerns.
The Vulnerability of the Transition

The uprisings substantially changed the external representation of Tunisia’s
economic dynamism, cultural diversity and effectiveness that the authori-
tarian regimes succeeded in building and keeping for more than 40 years.
The revolution unveiled the Tunisian complexity and allowed the real situ-
ation to come to the surface (Cavatorta and Haugbølle 2012). Moreover, it
upset internal and international dynamics, affecting the key determinants of
economic and political life (Achcar 2013). Hence, the vulnerability of the
Tunisian economy, security sector and cultural and political context after
2011 were both the result of the upheavals and of long-lasting, though
well hidden, weaknesses.
First and foremost, the Tunisian economy was not the brilliant and
performing liberal model promoted by Ben Ali in the international envi-
ronment for decades and financially supported, on that basis, by interna-
tional actors such as the European Union. The focus on macroeconomic
indicators had allowed the regime to claim very good performances in
terms of growth rates (5% per year from 2000 to 2005) and financial
stability, giving credibility to the country on international markets and
ensuring low inflation. Moreover, it was also the comparative perspective
that had placed Tunisia economic performances at the top of the MENA
region (Murphy 2013a). Against limited resources, there is little doubt that
Tunisia achieved some important results, such as attracting foreign invest-
ments or improving national infrastructures and can be rightly classified
as an upper-middle-income country according to the international crite-
ria set by the IMF (OECD 2012). However, macroeconomic indicators
and a well-constructed liberal discourse concealed widespread inequalities,

both between normal citizens and the elite and especially among Tunisian
regions, high levels of unemployment and a corrupted system where the
President and his wife were the main business operators (Hibou and Hamdi
2011; Hinnebusch 2015).
The fall of the authoritarian regime, following what had already been a
critical phase that drove the GDP growth rate down to 1.3% at the begin-
ning of 2009 (from a fairly steady average approximating 5%) deepened the
economic crisis even further (Kausch 2013). At first, the interim govern-
ment led by the Ennahda party tried to reduce the country’s dependence
on EU trade, which entailed a decrease in EU’s share of Tunisia’s total
exports from 78% in 2011 to 70% in early 2012. This strategy did change
the level of asymmetry between the EU and Tunisia, since after 2011 the
latter started relying even more on development assistance (ODA), with
the EU being the largest donor, as shown in Fig. 3.2. Furthermore, foreign
direct investments (FDIs) were the first sources of income to be affected
by the uncertainty of the transition, dramatically falling from 1334 bil-
lion USD in 2010 to 432,666 million USD in 2011 before being restored
around 1058 billion USD in 2013 and decreasing again to 880 million
USD in 2017 (UNCTAD 2018).
At the political and cultural level, while the uprisings only limitedly
undermined institutional stability, they led to a legitimation crisis that is
EU Institutions 552.9
France 257.8
Arab fund (AFESO) 81.4
Germany 74
United States 63.6
Turkey 48.3
Japan 41.7
Switzerland 19.4
Spain 16.3
Italy 12.5
Fig. 3.2 Top ten donors of gross ODA for Tunisia, 2012–2013 average, USD mil-
lion (Source OECD statistics. http://www.oecd.org/dac/financing-sustainable-
development/development-finance-data/aid-at-a-glance.htm. Accessed 20
November 2015)
58 F. ZARDO
still on-going at the time of writing and that is based on the many contra-
dictions of the Tunisian society. On the one hand, the willingness to erase
the past by preventing former RDC representatives from entering the polit-
ical game was accompanied by a lack of confidence in the capacity of the
post-authoritarian government to manage the transition, because many of
those who formed the Tunisian state for more than 50 years could not be
involved in the early stages of the process. Ben Ali’s and Bourguiba’s dis-
courses on the efficiency of the Tunisian bureaucracy played a strong role
in shaping citizens’ perceptions after 2011. On the other, mistrust had to
do with the fear of Islamisation of Tunisia, since the revolution reintegrated
Muslim parties in the political life, after being excluded and pursued by the
regimes for many decades. This attitude reflects the authoritarian legacy and
exacerbated its exclusionary dynamics, questioning the democratic values
of the revolution and potentially undermining its success (Merone 2015).
Moreover, the strategy of co-optation and repression of opposition parties
under Ben Ali, which was the basis of his political strategy (Cavatorta and
Merone 2013), prevented opposition parties from cooperating after the fall
of the authoritarian regime. This fragmentation contributed to worsening
the legitimation crisis even further.
Besides economic and political vulnerability, security became a key issue
for Tunisia, both at the domestic and regional level. Internally, concerns
were related to a security apparatus weakened by the political transition
and the economic crisis, and by rising violent extremism. At the regional
level, Tunisia had to face the Libyan crisis more than any other country.
Not only it affected a vital economic relationship, but the porous Tunisian
southern border became an open door through which arms and violent
groups could enter the country (United Nations, ESCWA 2014). More-
over, the crisis in Mali transformed the sub-Saharan region in a source
of insecurity and tensions with neighbouring Algeria, since it intensified
arms and human smuggling. Even if the emergence of collective security
has increased the interdependence between the EU and Southern Mediter-
ranean partners (Kausch 2013), security challenges impacted the transfor-
mation of the Tunisian state, the definition of its foreign policy agenda and
its external negotiation capacity.
A Foreign Policy Revolution or ‘Plus ça Change’?

The first declarations of the transition government in the realm of foreign
policy suggested the willingness to rethink external relations. The need
to change the nature of existing relations and rely on more international

partners occurred quite often in the public debate, especially during the
first part of the transition and until early 2013 (Abderrahim et al. 2017).
On the one hand, the interim government tried to develop a discourse on
post-uprisings Tunisia as new ‘member of the democratic world’, which was
aimed at leveraging on the EU and the United States to increase funding.
On the other, the adoption of a legal and political framework that was more
favourable to foreign assistance has been interpreted as a strategy to look
for more international allies, in particular with regards to the Gulf region
(Sons and Wiese 2015). Prior to the uprisings, strengthened relations with
Gulf countries had been pursued through the Gulf Cooperation Council
and bilaterally with Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The economic crisis and the
decrease in Official Development Assistance to Tunisia from the Arab Fund
for Economic and Social Development (OECD 2015) soon brought the
debate on foreign donors and international partners back on the agenda.
Several official visits of Qatar state representatives along 2011 anticipated
the signature of a triple cooperation agreement to create a common invest-
ment fund managed by Qatar Holding LLC.
In line with Bourguiba’s foreign policy attitude in case of uncertainty
in the international environment, the transition government also turned
to the Arab Maghreb Union to increase the chances of securing Arab
cooperation. Regional cooperation was, however, interrupted following
the decision of the Tunisian Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali to extradite Al-
Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi, the last Libyan Prime Minister under Gheddafi’s
regime. Regional partners such as Morocco and Algeria condemned this
choice and temporarily suspended political dialogue with Tunisia. The deci-
sion had repercussions also at the domestic level, with President Marzouki
claiming not having been informed by the Prime Minister or the main
party Ennahda, and human rights’ organisations blaming it as a violation
of Article 3 of the international convention against torture. By and large,
regional and international actors interpreted the Al-Baghdadi’s affair as a
Tunisian attempt to position itself vis-à-vis the Libyan conflict and this
affected regional foreign policy.
Overall, in the aftermath of the revolution, the transition government
took few delicate decisions in foreign policy, but the redefinition of the land-
scape of international partners always remained an intrinsic issue. Beyond
the Gulf region, for instance, Tunisia decided not to criticize US poli-
cies towards Syria and North-Korea, and this position was condemned by
regional partners for being too much assertive with the western world. The
60 F. ZARDO
quest for differentiation of international partners did not, however, turn

Tunisia away from Europe. Against the sudden interruption of European
Member States’ investments in Tunisia in 2011, especially German and
French FDIs, the EU could ensure important financial support (as outlined
in Fig. 3.2), as well as external legitimacy to the transition process and the
ongoing political reconfiguration. For this reasons the EU intensified its
discourse on an EU–Tunisia ‘privileged partnership’ and this dossier was
formally put forward during the Association Council held on November
2012 and officially signed on April 2014 (EU–Tunisia Association Coun-
cil 2012). Negotiations on the new ENP Action Plan had already started
before Ben Ali’s getaway and they were only delayed of few months until
2014 (Van Hüllen 2012). In the same year, the EU and Tunisia reached
an agreement on a Declaration on a Mobility Partnership, directly tar-
geting for the first time the contentious issue of migration and mobility.
The signatures led the two parties to open negotiations on an EU–Tunisia
readmission agreement and a visa facilitation agreement, whose first rounds
took place on October 2016.
Cooperation activities after the uprisings such as the signature of new
agreements or the approval of programmes and projects suggest that regime
change, per se, did not substantially change bilateral relations. Tunisian
economic constraints played a key role in ensuring continuity but, as the
analysis of the negotiations will show, the institutional framework substan-
tially shaped the nature of the relations and altered the parties’ ownership
of the process and its outcomes.
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CHAPTER 4
Joint Ownership Under

the Authoritarian Rule
From the beginning of the Barcelona Process in 1994–1995 to the end of

Ben Ali’s regime in 2011, the EU and Tunisia negotiated two main agree-
ments which lay the basis of the relation, both accompanied by operational
documents for programming and managing financial aid. The Association
Agreement is the only legal basis committing the counterparts to coop-
eration under the Euro-Mediterranean policies. It entered into force in
1998 and has not been updated so far. In the framework of the Euro-
Mediterranean Partnership, the financial package consisted of the MEDA
programme, running until 2006. Negotiations of the Action Plan started in
2003 following the launch of the European Neighbourhood Policy. Despite
being a key political document, it did not legally bind the counterparts like
the Association Agreement, upon which it was still based. The Action Plan
was supported by the newly established European Neighbourhood Part-
nership Instrument (ENPI) through its operational programmes.
Despite their inherent difference, which will be discussed later, I con-
sidered the Association Agreement and the Action Plan as history-making
decisions in Euro-Mediterranean relations (Peterson and Bomberg 1999).
Indeed, they consisted of high-level negotiations and came at ‘histori-
cal political junctures’ (Peterson and Bomberg 1999, 11). I analysed the
MEDA and ENPI programmes, instead, as policy-setting agreements that
are discussed at a ‘policy-decision point’ (Peterson and Bomberg 1999,
16). Eventually, I also looked at the negotiations of some sectoral dossiers

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30799-8_4
66 F. ZARDO
such as the one on migration and mobility and on trade in services. Here,
EU–Tunisia interactions lead to policy-shaping decisions, ruling some pol-
icy alternatives as possible or impossible (ibid.). This heuristic framework
applied to EU–third-country relations is useful for different reasons. First,
the literature on Euro-Mediterranean relations devoted little attention to
all these levels assuming, to some extent, that high-level agreements could
provide a complete picture of the state of the art and development of
the relations. Second, although negotiations overcome different levels of
governance, this analytical tool allows understanding how different actors
behave during the bargain and whether they change or keep their attitudes
and expectations.
The previous chapters described the structure of Euro-Mediterranean
negotiation and the domestic and international conditions under which
the EU and Tunisia negotiated the EMP and ENP agreements. The book
assumes that these variables can affect the agency and the perceptions of
the parties (Aspinwall and Schneider 2000) and thus their ownership of
the relationship. Therefore, this chapter analyses the negotiations of the
Association Agreement, the Action Plan, their implementation packages
and the sectoral dossiers addressed under Ben Ali’s rule. By doing so, it
provides answers to the following questions: how did the EU and Tunisia
conceptualise joint ownership? How did the negotiation structure affect the
level of joint ownership, intended as the capacity to pursue their agenda
and the perception of their agency?
4.1 The Association Agreement

and the Construction of the Joint
Ownership Discourse
The EU and Tunisia had started their consultations to upgrade the exist-
ing framework of cooperation since the middle of 1993 and they launched
official negotiations on December 20th, of the same year (European
Commission 1995). The structure and content of dialogue on the Euro-
Mediterranean Association Agreement had been, however, already shaped
by and was inextricably linked to the Barcelona Process and the creation
of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. The EMP was meant to boost the
Renovated Mediterranean Policy of 1992 by adding a multilateral compo-
nent to the existing bilateral economic agreements, and by seeking to coor-
dinate social, economic, political and security objectives. As pointed out by
4 JOINT OWNERSHIP UNDER THE AUTHORITARIAN RULE 67
Barbé (1996, 26) ‘the idea of combining the three areas and generating a
process (a conference and its follow-up) was based on the CSCE method-
ology’.1 In other words, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership copied the
CSCE/CSCM method, although with a narrower scope.
The main scope of the Barcelona Conference was to organise an event
that could be a ‘political gesture’ (ibid., 26), through which actors could
endorse the key principles and share their objectives for the future of the
Euro-Mediterranean space. Free trade had already been embraced by the
EU and Southern Mediterranean countries in 1992 and endorsed by the
Lisbon European Council (European Council 1992). Hence, despite the
prominence of trade liberalisation in the whole process, the twenty-seven
countries attending the first Euro-Mediterranean Conference in Barcelona
on November 1995 put a lot of emphasis on the two other pillars. These
involved on the one hand security and stability, and on the other hand cul-
tural and social cooperation. From a legal point of view, the three dimen-
sions of cooperation were kept together through a single, mixed agree-
ment, bringing on the negotiation table technical and political issues. From
the discursive and normative perspective, Euro-Mediterranean interactions
stressed the idea of establishing a partnership [emphasis added] among
countries whose socio-economic realities were increasingly linked.
The analysis of the negotiations of the Association Agreement and the
MEDA package shows that, despite common wording, the EU and Tunisia
conceptualised the partnership principle in very different ways and that
the overlapping conceptualisations have been shaped and affected both
by domestic constraints and by the actors’ perceptions of the negotiation
process. These various understandings of partnership under the EMP con-
structed the discourse on joint ownership formally underlying the Euro-
pean Neighbourhood Policy.
From Partnership to Joint Ownership

The official launch of negotiations between Tunisia, the EU and its Mem-
ber States on December 1993, after about one-year of informal talks, was
surrounded by fair enthusiasm (Joffé 1997). However, both the EU and
Tunisia were experiencing internal pressure to frame Euro-Mediterranean
1 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe.

68 F. ZARDO
relations according to domestic constraints and their conceptualisation of

the partnership principle reflects this pressure.
In the EU, as soon as the cold war faded into history (Bicchi 2007),
immigration from the Southern and Eastern borders, Islamic extremism
and new forms of terrorism became security challenges to be tackled
through a strengthened external action. In this respect, Southern Mediter-
ranean countries’ fragile economies were a key concern, since bankruptcies
would have raised the unemployment rate and fostered either migration
towards Europe or exclusion and fight through violent groups. These chal-
lenges also increased the Member States preoccupation about the relevance
of the Mediterranean region in the EU foreign policy agenda and the quest
for institutional balance within the EU. Indeed, Spain, France and Italy, for
whom the Southern Mediterranean border was a source of threat and a key
target of the EU external action, were concerned by the impact of different
geopolitical interests’ of prospective Members such as Austria, Finland and
Sweden. The opening of negotiations to Cyprus and Malta partly reduced
this concern, which remained, however, on the backburner of intra-EU
negotiations, as proved by the launch of a common Neighbourhood Pol-
icy targeting sixteen very diverse countries.
The focus on security and stability in the Mediterranean, and the need
to secure support also among the European Member States explains why
the EU conceptualised partnership as institutionalised political dialogue to
be ensured through the creation of ad hoc arena, procedures and norms. As
reported by some EU officials, the preamble of the Association Agreement,
stating that the parties were ‘desirous of establishing and developing regular
political dialogue on bilateral and international issues of mutual interest’
(Official Journal of the European Communities 1998, 2) represented the
EU understanding of the EU–Tunisia partnership at that time (interview
23, 33, 39). Strengthened participation of Tunisian representatives was a
‘requirement for mutual interests to be really respected’ (interview 23)
and the EU conceived the EU–Tunisia institutional framework established
through the Association Agreement as the means to achieve these goals.2
According to both Tunisian and European officials (interview 11, 12,
18, 23, 33), the attention paid by the EU to the institutional reorgan-
isation of the Euro-Mediterranean financial architecture was also meant
2 The institutions created through the Association Agreement are described under the Title
VIII (Article 78–86) and then regulated by ad hoc rules of procedures (EU–Tunisia Associ-
ation Council 1998).
to strengthen the partnership principle by ensuring that documents such

as the Country Strategy Papers and the National Indicative Programmes
(NIP) could reflect the countries’ needs. At the same time, scholars agree
on considering the new structure of Euro-Mediterranean aid as a response
to the quest for the coherence of the EU external action (Bicchi 2004;
Holden 2005; Carbone 2008; Tannous 2013). The MEDA programme
was characterised by a significant centralisation of power in the hands of
the European Commission, supported by the network of EU delegations in
the third countries whose responsibilities increased compare to the past. As
pointed out by Bicchi (2004), these changes reflected general trends within
the EU having little to do with strengthening the Euro-Mediterranean part-
nership. They did, however, impacted joint ownership, to the extent that
they affected the EU and Tunisian capacity to negotiate on an equal basis
and put forward their priorities, as demonstrated in the following section.
Unlike in the EU, Tunisia’s domestic constraints were mainly eco-
nomic in nature. In 1990, Ben Ali had pointed to the need to
revise the EU–Tunisia cooperation agreements following the accession of
Spain, Portugal and Greece. The government was highly concerned by
the impact that the Single European Market could have on bilateral and
multilateral economic relations, and by the status of Tunisian workers and
families living in Europe. On the one hand, not only the country was
going through a phase of economic instability, with growth rate decreasing
from +7.6% in 1990 to +2.2% in 1993, before raising again to +3.3% the
following year (Chourou 1998). Tunisia’s signature of the General Agree-
ment on Tariff and Trade (GATT) in 1990, at the urging of international
financial institutions, had also changed the prospects of EU–Tunisia coop-
eration. Indeed, since its acquisition of the status of associate member in
the European Economic Community in 1969, Tunisia had received prefer-
ential treatment in certain aspects of trade with Europe. By the mid-1990s,
the recently integrated European economy was supplying 70% of the coun-
try’s imports and purchasing 80% of its exports, thus being Tunisia’s most
important commercial partner. GATT negotiations, however, had banned
the ‘most favoured nation’ principle Tunisia was benefitting from as a ‘dis-
criminatory trade practice’, and pursuing free trade agreement represented
the only realistic mean for the government to secure a stake into the EU
market. On the other hand, the Schengen Agreement of 1985 and the
strengthening of the EU’s external border controls started being perceived
as potentially threatening the community of migrants living in European
countries. The call for ‘new narratives and new instruments in EU-Tunisia
70 F. ZARDO
relations’ to manage migration from third countries by the former Tunisian

State Secretary for European Affairs in 1992, Noureddine Mejdoub, high-
lighted this concern (Mejdoub 1992).
These constraints explain the Tunisian focus on co-development as a fun-
damental requirement for the new partnership with the EU. As reported
in the speech of the Tunisian State Secretary Noureddine Mejdoub (ibid.),
held before the launch of the EMP and the opening of official negotiations
of the Association Agreement, President Ben Ali and his Minister of For-
eign Affairs Ben Yahia developed a strong narrative linking the partnership
principle to those of co-development and solidarity. This conceptualisation
of partnership had a broad scope, since it was at the same targeting regional
partners, in view of strengthening regional cooperation, the Tunisian con-
stituency, to legitimise the choice for an asymmetric and risky association
with the EU, and the EU, to secure cooperation by playing the card of
the responsible and tough partner. As confirmed by EU officials and by
a Tunisian diplomat involved in the negotiations, the country ‘insisted
on including an explicit reference to co-development in the Agreement
and a sentence acknowledging the asymmetry between the European and
Tunisian contexts in every document framing the cooperation’ (interview
13, 35). The request was eventually accepted by the EU and the preamble
of the Association Agreement recalls ‘the economic and social disparities
between the Community and Tunisia’ and the objective of establishing
‘lasting relations, based on reciprocity, partnership and co-development’
(Official Journal of the European Communities 1998, 2).
The length of the negotiation process illustrated in Table 4.1, covering
the year 1994 and part of 1995, was circumscribed, especially if compared
to the negotiations under the ENP and the revised ENP. This duration
prevented major domestic reconfigurations, such as the political reshuf-
fling that occurred in Tunisia in the mid-2000s, from affecting the final
agreement and the perception of agency in the process. The length of
the negotiations and the parallel process taking place in most of the other
Southern Mediterranean countries also supported a competitive dynamics
at the regional level, especially with Morocco. Interestingly, most of the
Tunisian interviewees that were involved in the drafting and signature of
the Association Agreement often referred to the process in a comparative
perspective with the timing and results of the regional neighbour (interview
18, 25, 40).
Domestic constraints affected the way how the EU and Tunisia concep-
tualised the partnership principle and how they tried to pursue it during
the relationship. For Ben Ali’s government, a strong partnership under the
Table 4.1 Status of the negotiations of Euro-Mediterranean Association Agree-

ments
Country Start of Agreement Agreement signed Entry into force

negotiations concluded
Tunisia December 1994 June 1995 July 1995 December 1997

Israel December 1993 September 1995 November 1995 June 2000
Morocco December 1993 November 1995 February 1996 March 2000
Palestine May 1996 December 1996 February 1997 July 1997a
Jordan July 1995 April 1997 November 1997 May 2002
Egypt March 1995 June 1999 June 2001 June 2004
Algeria June 1997 December 2001 April 2002 September 2005
Lebanon November 1995 January 2002 June 2002 April 2006
Syria March 1998 October
2004/December
2008
a Interim Agreement signed by EU and the PLO (for the benefit of the Palestinian Authority)
Source European Commission, Directorate-General for Trade. Overview of FTA and other trade negoti-
ations (https://ec.europa.eu/chafea/agri/content/overview-fta-and-other-trade-negotiations. Accessed
20 October 2017)
EMP meant that the EU should recognize the economic asymmetry in the
drafting of the Association Agreement and that its provisions should target
the disparities. For the EU, partnership could be ensured by strengthening
the opportunities for Tunisia to take part in the bargaining process and
interact on equal footing. The following sub-chapter illustrates how the
level of joint ownership changed during the negotiations, intended as a
combination of agency and perception of agency of the parties, and which
factors affected those changes.
Level of Joint Ownership Under the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership

In line with the goals of the Barcelona Declaration, aimed at establish-
ing ‘a comprehensive partnership through strengthened political dialogue
on a regular basis, the development of economic and financial coopera-
tion and greater emphasis on the social, cultural and human dimension’
(Euro-Mediterranean Conference 1995, 2), the EU–Tunisia Association
Agreement included three dimensions: cooperation on political and secu-
rity issues, the economic and financial pillar and one on building a social,
72 F. ZARDO
cultural and human partnership. Its structure followed a standard pat-

tern, common to most of the other agreements signed with the Southern
Mediterranean countries, excluding Turkey and Israel (Zaim 1999). Alto-
gether, it was formed by eight titles and 96 articles. The final content of the
agreement and the negotiation dynamics show the extent to which Tunisia
and the EU succeeded in putting forward their respective priorities and
how they perceived their bargaining power.
Since the beginning of Euro-Mediterranean dialogues, the Association
Agreements were meant to liberalise bilateral trade in different areas and
this explains the relevance of the economic and financial dimension in the
agreement. Free trade as conceived under the EMP implied two really new
elements: reciprocity of commercial preferences on industrial products and
the substitution of the traditional five-year financial protocols by the MEDA
programme. The initial EU offer included as a negotiation basis in most
of the Association Agreements was free trade. Whereas the liberalisation of
industrial trade posed few problems to both sides, agriculture and migra-
tion were far more contentious issues. According to some EU officials in
charge of the dossier (interview 4, 5, 15, 24, 33), Tunisian demands were
often far in excess of the concessions the EU was prepared to make and
often called for the intervention of EU member states representatives to
protect bargaining positions, since the European Commission could not
contain the talks at a technical level. These dynamics support the claim
that the negotiation structure may enable or constrain the agency of the
parties. Even if the European Commission was in charge of conducting
the negotiations, according to the share of responsibilities within the EU,
the Member States strongly swayed over the terms of the agreements. The
Council attached footnotes to each of the Commission’s negotiating man-
dates stipulating that traditional trade flows should be the guiding principle
and specifying the upper limit of trade concessions (Gomez 2003). In addi-
tion to keeping to these targets, the European Commission was asked to
avoid proposing additional concessions on sensitive products for some EU
Member States.
In order to maximise its bargaining capacity, Tunisia reacted in two
ways. On the one hand, Ben Ali adapted the national bureaucracy to
strengthen the administrative competencies required to negotiate with the
EU and control the process. On the other hand, the government resisted
the depoliticisation of the negotiations by relying as much as possible on
political representatives rather than only technical officials. This approach
explains why the working groups and sub-committees created by the EMP
to relieve the EU–Tunisia Association Committee of some responsibilities

and speed up the negotiation process,3 did not meet on a regular basis
until at least 2003. As reported by a former Tunisian diplomat: ‘the EMP
working groups worked well, but we [diplomats and political representa-
tives] kept full control of the process to safeguard Tunisian interests, espe-
cially those related to workers residing abroad’ (interview 25). At the same
time, Ben Ali adapted the Tunisian institutions to the perspective of deeper
EU–Tunisia relations and to dialogues covering many interrelated issues.
In 1990 he created a National Commission within the Presidency, chaired
by the Prime Minister and the Secretary-General, to analyse the impact of
the single European market on the country and prepare the negotiations
of the Association Agreement. While this decision was initially part of a
presidential attempt to keep foreign policy under the control of the Gou-
vernement de Carthage, during the EMP negotiations ‘the establishment
of a centralised or Ministerial service within the Tunisian administration,
in charge of following the convergence towards the EU legislation was
repeatedly suggested by the EU’ (interview 39).
Thus, the National Commission was further strengthened through a
complex bureaucratic structure aimed at involving all the Ministries directly
or indirectly targeted by the Association Agreement (Mejdoub 1992). At
the end of the 1990s, the Commission involved 14 sectoral ministries (see
Fig. 4.1), coordinated by a specialised committee, an enlarged committee
and a permanent committee under the responsibility of the Ministry of For-
eign Affairs. In the authoritarian context, such a structure required signifi-
cant coordination efforts to ensure efficiency and strengthen the Tunisian
ownership of the negotiation process, while at the same time maintaining
the centralisation of power. Ben Ali’s government did not always succeed
in this respect and some changes in the Tunisian foreign policy machinery
resulted in very delicate inter-institutional relations. For instance, rival-
ries between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Develop-
ment and International Cooperation started arising from 1995, even if the
authoritarian regime kept the system strongly in the hands of the central
government. The increasing responsibilities related to the programming
and implementation of the Association Agreement and the EU pressure
for achieving more coherence, consistency and effectiveness in cooperation,
3 According to the Decision of the Association Council, the sub-committee “shall have no
decision-making power. It may, however, submit proposals to the Association Committee”
(EU–Tunisia Association Council 2003a).
74 F. ZARDO
Ministerial Council
President: P.M.
Secretary General: M.F.A.
Permanent Council
President:M.F.A.
Secretary General:M.F.A.
General Policy
Follow-up of the
Orientation
single market
Members: M.F.A.
Enlarged committee
Education and Education and

Specialised committees professional training Research
Socio-
Foreign institutional
Affairs development Tourism Tourism and Handicraft
Social Tunisian Transport Transport

Affairs Diaspora S.M.E. Fiscal
Public service Harmonisation
and support Telecommunication
and VAT Telecommunication
Agricultural Administration and audiovisual
Agriculture products
Demography and
Economics Public Market territorial Regional
Central Bank Financial
Environment and development Development Plan
of Tunisia services
Finance
Fig. 4.1 National Commission for CEE–Tunisia relations, 1990 (Source Etudes
Internationales, n°42, 1992)
giving prominence to negotiations of policy-setting documents, resulted in

the Ministry of Development and International Cooperation’s claims for
more leeway in the negotiation process (interview 1, 28, 40).
This competition, partly stimulated by the government’s attempt to
increase Tunisian agency vis-à-vis the EU, started undermining the regime’s
balance of power. However, through the negotiations, Tunisia obtained
quotas and tariff reductions on agricultural and fishery products which
were not substantially different from those contained in the recently expired
EU–Tunisia Fourth Protocol. In the realm of migration, the EU did not
accept in full the Tunisian proposal on the Article 69 on political dialogue
and the rights of migrant communities, but a declaration was attached
to the Association Agreement to point to ‘family reunification as a basic
right of Tunisian workers residing abroad…notwithstanding the bilateral
agreements concluded between Tunisia and some Member States of the
European Union. Tunisia wishes the question of family reunification to be
the subject of in-depth discussions with the Community with a view to
easing and improving the conditions for family reunification’ (European
Commission 1995, 207).
On the EU side, negotiations succeeded in making sure that Tunisia

would align with the fundamental principles of EU competition policies.
The request to adapt the Tunisian anti-trust system to the EU model is
an example of this process. The Association Agreement did not provide
for alignment of Tunisia with EU standards, but the expectation was that
of gradual regulatory convergence. As highlighted by an informant from
the European Commission, ‘the establishment of a free trade area assumes
the alignment of the legislative framework in the fields covered by the
agreement, and the alignment should be rationally pursued towards the
most developed counterpart. This is what we reasonably expected from
the Mediterranean partners’ (interview 33). Some scholars consider that
this dynamics, where regulatory standards could not be jointly established
but were rather borrowed from the EU, framed a relationship between hubs
and spokes (Tovias 1997; Chourou 1998), with Tunisia paying a high price
for this convergence effort.
Overall, increased participation through the negotiation format estab-
lished by the EMP and some strategic concessions by the EU nourished a
feeling of ownership by Tunisia that partly overshadowed the asymmetric
relation framed by the Association Agreement. The analysis of the negoti-
ation documents shows that, in terms of content, few substantial changes
to the initial EU proposal were eventually finalised. However, on the one
hand, the effective adaptation of the country’s institutions to the EU nego-
tiation system allowed Tunisia to increase its agency. On the other, percep-
tions played a significant role in shaping the feeling of joint ownership. In
this respect, it is interesting to point out that the political momentum faced
both by Tunisia and the EU and the limited duration of the negotiations
keeping up that momentum, contributed to reducing the perception of
asymmetry.
Interactions to agree on the EU financial assistance to Tunisia and finalise
the MEDA Programme led to different results in terms of the level of joint
ownership. The new financial framework substantially increased the amount
allocated for the Mediterranean region and for Tunisia, drawing on the
EU budget for the period 1995–1999. The MEDA regulation established
a unique framework covering all cooperation activities on a multi-annual
basis, replacing the previous system composed of financial and technical
protocols. While the structure of the five years plans remained very similar
to the past, the European Commission dedicated far more attention and
time to the programming phase. Moreover, the EU gave far more visi-
bility to the MEDA programme and its planning activities. This focus on
76 F. ZARDO
the programming phase was related to some of the institutional changes

occurred prior to the launch of the EMP described in Chapter 2. On the one
hand, the increasing number of cooperation areas covered by the Associa-
tion Agreement required more implementing regulations and more tech-
nical competencies. On the other hand, efficiency, coherence and trans-
parency became important legitimising principles for the EU, especially in
the realm of foreign policy. Therefore, after the launch of the EMP, the
EU was focused on making sure that the new decentralised structure for
the management of the external assistance would work, and that the EU
delegations’ new responsibilities would actually improve programme man-
agement.
Institutional changes and the prominence of the programming phase
in bilateral negotiations affected the level of joint ownership in at least
three ways. First, it changed the nature of the interactions between Tunisia
and the EU, since dialogue became more technical and required differ-
ent types of expertise. As reported by a Tunisian public official: ‘discus-
sions became sometimes hard to follow and to concretely contribute to,
because the EU system was new and we had new interlocutors’ (interview
11). This lack of understanding between the parts resulted in the Asso-
ciation Council’s meetings being dominated by technical dialogue rather
than dealing with political issues (EU–Tunisia Association Council 2003b,
unpublished document). Second, the Tunisian agency was limited by the
fact that, unlike the Financial Protocols regime, Southern Mediterranean
governments under MEDA were no longer legal parts of the agreement
(Holden 2005). Third, multi-annual programming and the efforts to coor-
dinate international donors’ activities involved the alignment of EU aid
cycles and programming processes with those of the Member States and of
other financial institutions rather than with the budgetary cycles of South-
ern Mediterranean countries. Even if in the Tunisian case this temporal mis-
alignment between the 9th and the 10th Development Plans and the NIP
was not wide (Ministère du Développement Economique 1997; unpub-
lished document 2002), it limited the requests for projects and programmes
put forward by Tunisia within the NIP, waiting for more domestic coordi-
nation. In this respect, several documents, such as the ex post evaluation
of the MEDA programme (ADE—Aide au Développement Economique
2003) and the minutes of the Association Council meetings (EU–Tunisia
Association Council 2000, 2003b, unpublished documents) raise the issue
of more Tunisian involvement in the programming phase and more flexi-
bility to replace or integrate planned cooperation activities and compensate
for the lack of coherence with local needs.
Overall, negotiations became a demanding and time-consuming exercise

even for the experienced and centralised Tunisian bureaucracy. As a conse-
quence, negotiations for the drafting and approval of the Strategy Paper,
the Indicative Programmes and the Annual Financial Plans were kept to
a minimum and some implementing documents were finalised mostly by
the European Commission and the Member States (interview 1, 2, 12).
Insufficient participation of Southern Mediterranean countries in aid pro-
gramming had been already reported in 1994 by the Economic and Social
Committee, which stated that ‘the insufficient degree of representation
of the intermediary bodies of the Mediterranean Partner Countries’ had
implied a ‘failure to recognise the real needs of locally-based firms operat-
ing in those countries’ (Economic and Social Committee 1995, 5). Lim-
ited ownership of the programming process became part of the Tunisian
political discourse and started being used to explain and justify the lack
of progress of some cooperation programmes or general deadlocks during
the implementation. Negotiations under the European Neighbourhood
Policy show that the joint ownership discourse became strategic for the
authoritarian regime not to advance on democratic reforms.
4.2 The ENP Action Plan and the Transformation

of Joint Ownership
Within the ENP, the Action Plans were intended to be the strategic doc-
uments reframing Euro-Mediterranean bilateral relations. The main goal
of the European Commission was to ensure stability and promote democ-
racy in the Neighbourhood through capacity building and by strengthen-
ing the countries’ governance system, following the approach used dur-
ing the accession process in 2004. Therefore, the strategy was focusing
on bilateral relations rather than on multilateral cooperation. From this
perspective, the ENP was not supposed to substitute the EMP but to com-
plement it and to appease some of the European concerns that Neigh-
bourhood countries were catalysing. On the one hand the need to cope
with the enlargement fatigue and its geopolitical challenges, and on the
other hand the internal pressure to increase the consistency and effective-
ness of the EU external action. As such, the Action Plans did not replace
the Association Agreements; neither were they legally binding agreements.
78 F. ZARDO
The EU defined them as operational documents specifying key coopera-

tion priorities in EU–third countries relations and offering incentives for
reform according to the conditionality mechanism of the enlargement pol-
icy (Smith 2004). Despite their supposedly technical nature, the Action
Plans can be considered the ENP history-making agreements, while the
ENPI implementing documents embody the policy-setting level.
As shown in Chapter 2, the imperatives of consistency and effectiveness
underlying the ENP accelerated the process of institutionalisation of EU-
Southern Mediterranean countries negotiations set-up in Barcelona under
the EMP. Moreover, the principle of joint ownership formally appeared as
a pillar of the Neighbourhood Policy both in the ENP Communication
and in the Strategy Papers.
EU-Tunisia ENP negotiations show interesting dynamics of transformation

of the joint ownership principle, in which the authoritarian upgrading that
Tunisia experienced in the early 2000s play an important role. The transfor-
mations involved not only the conceptualisation and strategic construction
of joint ownership as a discourse but also the level of joint ownership under
the ENP.
Joint Ownership as a Negotiation Tool

The late 1990s and the early 2000s in Tunisia were characterised by the
increased limitation of political liberalism and personal freedoms by the
regime, which transformed the country in one of the most authoritarian of
the Arab states (Murphy 1999; Hinnebusch 2015). In this context, joint
ownership started being used as a negotiation tool not to comply with the
EU demands for reforms in the realm of human rights, good governance
and democratic transformation or on other sensitive topics such as mobility
and migration. Interestingly, a clearer definition of this principle by the EU
in the ENP strategy paper occurred at the same time and made Ben Ali’s
opportunistic conceptual transformation possible. In fact, while the word
partnership disappeared from the title of the European strategy towards
the Neighbourhood and was associated in the ENP texts mainly to regional
cooperation, the Strategy Paper depicts the ENP as based on the principle
of joint ownership. This involves sharing with third countries the process
of dialogue, according to shared values and common interests. As formally
stated in the ENP strategy paper: ‘the EU does not seek to impose priorities
or conditions on its partners. The Action Plans depend, for their success, on
the clear recognition of mutual interests in addressing a set of priority issues.
There can be no question of asking partners to accept a pre-determined set
of priorities. These will be defined by common consent and will thus vary
from country to country. The endorsement of these plans by the highest
instance of the agreements in place will give added weight to the agreed
priorities for action. The ambition and the pace of development of the
EU’s relationship with each partner country will depend on its degree of
commitment to common values, as well as its will and capacity to implement
agreed priorities’ (European Commission 2004, 8).
Hence, the EU conceptualisation of joint ownership gave great rele-
vance to joint decision-making and changes at the procedural level trans-
formed the negotiations into ‘a project management exercise’ (interview
4, 5, 13). Depoliticisation contributed to advance some high-level dossiers
that would have otherwise come to a standstill such as in the area of fam-
ily reunification or agriculture, but the Tunisian case supports two main
claims. First, this approach facilitated the introduction of technical solu-
tions to solve political problems and led to vague terms of the Action
Plans, crippling the benchmarking at the basis of the ENP. The superficial
and inconsistent use of the notions of democracy and the rule of law, as
well as the lack of definitions of any of these concepts, point to the limits
of political dialogue and prevented the association of the objectives to key
monitoring criteria (Del Sarto and Schumacher 2005; Börzel 2010). Sec-
ond, depoliticised negotiations merely postponed the solution of political
conflicts to the implementation level, with direct impact on the level of
progress of the relationship.
The authoritarian regime strategically used the ENP negotiation system
and the joint ownership principle to resist cooperation while protecting
Tunisia’s image of bon élève of the EU. Ben Ali’s government exploited,
for instance, the possibility to create sub-committees as an additional arena
for technical dialogue among the parties to bury discussions on human
rights and governance reforms. This was done by postponing the meet-
ings, by claiming the lack of technical expertise to discuss with the EU on
equal footing or by diluting the formulation of specific objectives and indi-
cators. Hence, the formal launch of the working group on human rights
only occurred in 2007, although Article 5 of the Association Agreement
already envisaged its creation. Then, a political impasse interrupted the
meetings for one year already in 2009. As reported by one informant: ‘here
(in Tunisia), when a commission or a committee is created, it means that
80 F. ZARDO
the topic will get stuck. It is the best strategy to bury undesirable dossiers’
(interview 25). Similarly, Tunisia strategically raised the ownership issue
during the negotiations of ENPI programmes not to engage in mobility
and migration projects (priority 3) in the framework of the regional cross-
border ENPI Programme. After agreeing to cooperate on this topic during
the negotiations of the Action Plan despite diverging views, Tunisia with-
drew from the priority 3 of the ENPI regional programme on grounds
of lack of convergence. As stated in a footnote of the ENPI Programme
‘the definition phase of the Programme has underlined a specific position
of certain countries…who consider that these issues fall under the exclu-
sive competence of the central administrations. As a consequence, the par-
ticipation of actors coming from the eligible territories is not envisaged’
(European Commission 2008, 53). The joint ownership discourse became
for Tunisia a tool to compensate for perceived asymmetry during techni-
cal negotiations and not to deal with sensitive issues for the authoritarian
regime. The result was an attitude of waffling back and forth during the
bargain, before agreeing on diluted compromises.
Level of Joint Ownership Under the European Neighbourhood Policy

The conceptualisations and strategic use of joint ownership described
above, as well as the context in which the ENP was launched affected
the EU’s and Tunisia’s capacity to shape the content of the Action Plan
and the ENP related instruments and the perceptions of their agency.
The opening of the negotiations of the Action Plan in 2003 was not
surrounded by the same enthusiasm that characterised the Conference in
Barcelona (Gomez 2003; Bicchi 2007). On the one hand, there was no
clear link between the EMP and the ENP in terms of hierarchy and poten-
tial overlaps. On the other, the bilateral turn enshrined in the ENP was
barely welcome by the Southern Mediterranean countries because it could
have limited their negotiating power. Ben Ali’s Tunisia shared the same
concerns about embarking on the strategy. The government’s hesitation
when the negotiations started suggests that, compared to the momentum
characterising the EMP, political and economic circumstances were more
favourable to the EU than to Tunisia. The reluctance reflected the need
for the government to overcome internal dissent which started raising as
a consequence of the economic crisis (Camau 2008). In addition, it mir-
rored the necessity to reorganise the administration before embarking in
new negotiations with the EU. For instance, general directors from sec-
toral ministries joined the Tunisian delegation to balance the political and
diplomatic component.
As pointed out in Chapter 2, the EU had stronger motivations to change
its strategy towards the Mediterranean region. However, the proposal
included in the draft Action Plans was not clear enough in political terms
and the document submitted to Tunisia, as to the other Southern Mediter-
ranean countries, was more operational than political. According to the EU
Council’s conclusions: ‘the action plans should be comprehensive but at
the same time identify clearly a limited number of key priorities and offer
real incentives for reform’. The template was prepared according to the
enlargement experience, and its structure recalled the 31 working chapters
used during the accession process. This included 6 objectives, 79 priorities
to achieve short and medium-term results and hundreds of actions, each
of them fitting this hierarchical structure.
Tunisia did not welcome the depoliticisation characterising the launch of
the ENP, neither were its nature and goals completely understood by Ben
Ali’s government. Even if the Action Plan was not a new legal agreement
replacing the Association Agreement, Tunisian representatives referred to
it for long as the natural step ‘beyond the Association Agreement’. Dur-
ing an event organised in Brussels by the European Commission to illus-
trate the new policy, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdelwaheb
Abdallah publicly complained about the vagueness of the ENP political
objectives compared to the clear and strategic choice represented by the
Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (interview 33, 11).
Besides delaying the start of the negotiations, the misinterpretation of
the nature of the Action Plan by Tunisia impacted the negotiations in at least
two ways. On the one hand, it spread among the Tunisian élite a feeling of
limited Tunisian ownership. Not only were the process and the procedures
for joint decision-making too complex according to Abdallah’s speech
in Brussels, but the blurred ENP offer was perceived as a blank cheque
for Tunisia. On the other hand, Tunisia found itself ill-equipped with
regard to the technical competencies required to negotiate the Action Plan
(EU–Tunisia Association Council 2000, unpublished document). In fact,
it took some time to Ben Ali’s government to instruct Tunisian diplomats
and representatives during the negotiations and make sure that Tunisian
priorities could fit the new ENP framework (interview 6, 13, 24, 33).
‘Sometimes I could not fully understand if they [Tunisian technocrats] had
no clear political mandate or not enough knowledge of the policy area to
82 F. ZARDO
go further. But when they put on the table ideas beyond the bounds of pos-
sibility, I realised that it most cases it was more about capacity’ (interview
13).
The benchmarking approach characterising the ENP affected the
Tunisian agency and perceptions in a similar way. First, it was perceived
as interference in domestic politics, leading to immediate resistance to bar-
gaining over detailed indicators and deadlines. As a result, Tunisian repre-
sentatives opted for the strategy of watering down the EU proposals, rather
than trying to ground the priorities as much as possible on local needs, like
Jordan did (Del Sarto and Schumacher 2011). Rather than representing
the lowest common denominator, the compromises reached in the frame-
work of the Action Plan were the outcome of a ‘take it or leave it’ approach,
and did not also allow the EU to succeed in having good baselines to mon-
itor progress and apply conditionality. Second, it affected the capacity of
the Tunisian bureaucracy to interact with the EU on an equal basis since it
required even more staff dedicated to the monitoring activity.
Eventually, the practice of finalising the Action Plans of all the ENP
countries at the same time, drawing on the enlargement experience, became
a time-constraint for both the EU and Tunisia. On the EU side, it did not
leave much room for differentiating among Southern Mediterranean coun-
tries, nor for putting more pressure on the authoritarian regime to improve
human rights, democracy and good governance. On the Tunisian side, it
accelerated the consultations and did not strengthen the Tunisian feeling
of ownership of the process. In particular, it fostered regional competi-
tion with neighbouring Morocco, whose performances in the framework
of Euro-Mediterranean cooperation had always had a leverage effect on
Tunisia.
Negotiations on the ENP financial assistance demonstrate even better
the different understandings and level of ownership in EU–Tunisia inter-
actions. The ENPI was the dedicated instrument of the ENP aimed at
‘strengthening cooperation with those neighbours, on the basis of part-
nership and joint ownership and building on shared values of democracy
and respect for human rights’ starting from 2007 (Official Journal of the
European Union 2006, 1). ENPI would replace the MEDA and TACIS
programmes and other existing instruments such as the European Initia-
tive for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) from which Southern
Mediterranean countries and Tunisia among them, benefitted.
While the shift from the EMP to the ENP was characterised by a sub-
stantial depoliticisation of high-level talks, intra-European and EU–third
countries interactions to set-up the ENPI acquired political relevance.

According to the ENPI regulation, this was a policy-driven instrument that
should strictly operate in the framework of the existing bilateral agreements
between the EU and neighbouring countries, to ensure the implementa-
tion of the ENP Action Plans. The main mechanisms envisaged to reach
the objectives were exchanges of experience, long-term twinning arrange-
ments with the Member states or participation in EU programmes and
agencies. Preliminary discussions in the EU Council on the ENPI Reg-
ulation (Official Journal of the European Union 2006) began in October
2004 under the Dutch Presidency. The member states welcomed the gen-
eral scope of the ENPI proposed by the European Commission and its
structure. On the contrary, the European Parliament committee on devel-
opment (DEVE committee) put forward some concerns when examining
the package. These were related to the alleged more limited involvement of
the EP in the programming process and in determining the financial allo-
cations per country, as well as to the procedures for applying conditionality
and the level of support to civil society organisations in Neighbourhood
countries.
Time affected the final outcomes of the negotiations and the level of
joint ownership both within the EU and between the EU and Tunisia. Con-
cerning intra-EU divergences, the need to have the Regulation approved
by the end of 2006 and the programming process completed by early 2007,
before the TACIS programme formal expiry, led to a quicker compromise
and reduced the opportunities for dialogue among EU institutions (Can-
ciani 2007). The COREPER reached a political agreement on the ENPI
draft text in May 2005 and the European Commission solved the most
conflicting issue, namely the Member States’ request to clearly separate
the financial breakdown between the Eastern and Southern Neighbours,
through a declaration confirming that previous levels of assistance would
be the basis to determine the allocations per country.
The EU negotiated with Tunisia the following documents: the Strategy
Paper for Tunisia, the Multiannual Indicative Programme 2011–2013, the
Cross-Border Cooperation Programme 2007–2013 and the Annual Action
Programme. The pressure to respect the EU internal calendar impressively
accelerated the consultations, which were held during 2006, and both EU
and Tunisian officials referred to it as one of the main causes of the lack
of a shared programming process (interview 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 30). First
and foremost, a substantial part of bilateral talks was devoted to explain-
ing the ENP compared to the previous EMP framework, confirming that
84 F. ZARDO
discussions and conflicts that had not been purposefully tackled during the
high-level negotiations of the Action Plan were simply postponed to the
meso-level. Tunisian representatives of the Ministry of Development and
International Cooperation often reported to the EU Delegation on the
difficulties encountered in coordinating sectoral Ministries and the cen-
tral government (interview 13, 21, 22, 24, 35). The main challenge was
related to the shift from the EMP ‘aid logic’ to the ‘policy-driven logic’
of the ENP and its dynamics (interview 21, 23). Second, the agenda and
working documents were often forwarded to the Tunisian ministries very
late by the EU institutions and feedbacks were requested on short notice,
a practice that many Neighbourhood countries bewailed more than once
(interview 1, 2, 4, 6). Whether the use of time was an unintended con-
sequence of long intra-EU debates on the new financial instrument, or
the strategic exploitation by the EU to maximise its interests, the analysis
of EU–Tunisia negotiations shows that it reduced the possibility for the
small and heavily centralised Tunisian bureaucracy to put forward credible
proposals.
Even if the evidence provided so far points to the EU being more in con-
trol of the process and determining most of the negotiation outcomes, the
authoritarian regime also strategically exploited the ownership discourse
and the bargaining system to stop cooperation. In this respect, the level of
joint ownership under the ENP was higher than in the EMP framework.
The Tunisian refusal to be involved in cross-border cooperation (CBC)
projects dealing with migration and mobility illustrated above is a notable
example of Ben Ali eventually ‘owning’ the negotiation process. The CBC
component was a flagship ENPI programme, aimed at financing joint pro-
grammes between European and Southern Mediterranean regions. The
CBC objective was to bring a ‘radical simplification in procedures and sub-
stantial gains in efficiency’ (Canciani 2007, 149) by applying the approach
of the EU structural funds to external relations, based on partnership and
co-financing. The withdrawal of Tunisia and other Southern Mediterranean
countries from one of its dimensions brought to the fore the unsolved polit-
ical divergences during history-making negotiations and revealed that not
all the priorities listed in the Action Plans had been commonly agreed by
the parties.
4.3 Preliminary Conclusion

The chapter has shown that domestic constraints affected the way how
the EU and Tunisia conceptualised the partnership principle and how they
tried to pursue it during the relationship.
Under the EMP, Tunisia understood partnership and joint owner-
ship as the recognition by the EU of the economic disparities between
the parties. For the EU, an equal partnership could be achieved by
involving third countries more in policymaking through the institutionali-
sation of Euro-Mediterranean negotiations. Despite persisting asymmetry
and different understandings of the concept, EU–Tunisia interactions to
draft and sign the Association Agreement demonstrate that the nature of
the negotiation process and the quality of political dialogue allowed Tunisia
to put forward its own priorities and fostered a feeling of joint ownership.
Under the ENP, the EU formally defined joint ownership as joint
decision-making. It focused on creating new arena for dialogue and proce-
dures for cooperation and evaluated the level of joint ownership through
the lens of institutionalised participation. On the Tunisian side, the increas-
ingly authoritarian regime started using the joint ownership discourse as a
tool not to comply with the EU demands for reforms in the realm of human
rights, good governance and democratic transformation. These conceptu-
alisations partly increased the agency of both the EU and Tunisia dur-
ing the negotiations. For the EU, it allowed having the Action Plan and
ENPI documents quickly signed despite some Tunisian reluctance. For Ben
Ali’s regime, it increased its capacity to resist the EU pressure for demo-
cratic transformation. However, they affected the quality of the agreements
reached to the extent that they led to ‘take it or leave it’ approaches and
weak compromises in case of conflicting interests.
List of Interviews

2012.
2012.
Interview 3, Senior Expert, ENPI CBC Programme, Turin, 15 February
2012.
of Sweden to the European Union, Brussels, 6 May 2013.
86 F. ZARDO

1 October 2013.
1 October 2013.
Interview 13, EU Senior Official, European External Action Service, Tunis,
6 November 2013.
Interview 15, EU Senior Official, DG International Cooperation and
Development, Tunis, 6 November 2013.
Interview 18, Senior Public Official, Ministry of Trade, Tunis, 7 November
2013.
Interview 21, EU Senior Official, EEAS, Tunis, several interviews October
2013–March 2014.
2013–March 2014.
2013–March 2014.
2013–March 2014.
Interview 25, Diplomat, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of
Tunisia, Tunisia, 5 December 2014.
Tunisia, Tunisia, 14 March 2014.
Interview 30, Public Official, Ministry of Development and International
Cooperation, General Directorate for Bilateral Cooperation, 16 March
2014.
Interview 33, Senior Official, European Commission DG Trade, Brussels,
7 May 2014.
Interview 35, Former EU Official, Brussels, 19 June 2014.
Interview 39, EU Official, EEAS, Brussels, 18 June 2014.
Interview 40, Senior Official, Ministry of Development and International
Cooperation, General Directorate for Bilateral Cooperation, 20 October
2014.
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CHAPTER 5
Joint Ownership in Times of Transition
On March 2011, few months after Ben Ali’s getaway and the fall of the
authoritarian regime, the EU released its first response to the Arab uprisings
through the Communication ‘A Partnership for Democracy and Prosper-
ity with the Southern Mediterranean’. Two months and a half later, the
European Commission integrated it with a Communication targeting the
whole Neighbourhood and describing the new approach to ‘a changing
Neighbourhood’ (European Commission 2011d, 1). It took then four
years to the EU to finalise the revision of the ENP, which was preceded
by a public consultation with the Member States, partner governments,
EU institutions, international organisations, social partners, civil society,
business, think tanks, academia and members of the public who, accord-
ing to the European Commission, ‘largely confirm the need for change in
the ENP both in substance and in methodology’ (European Commission
2015a, 2). Scholars agree on the substantial continuity between the ENP
launched in 2004 and its review completed in 2015 (Peters 2012; Balfour
2012; Tömmel 2013; Noutcheva 2015). However, the policymaking pro-
cess and the political discourses accompanying the review of the ENP, both
within the EU and in Southern Mediterranean countries, show an interest-
ing focus on the partnership and joint ownership principles. The objectives
of strengthening ownership and building an equal partnership often appear
in the public speeches of European and Southern Mediterranean countries’
public officials, documents and interviews.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30799-8_5
92 F. ZARDO
Tunisia was the first country that the European Commission and the
High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy
(HR/VP) Catherine Ashton visited to present the new approach and a lot
of optimism surrounded the first talks after the upheavals (Peters 2012;
Schumacher 2015). Already in Tunis in 2011, the HR/VP announced the
EU’s readiness to ‘begin to look at moving forward with the advanced sta-
tus’ (European Commission 2011f, 2) and the EU expectation was that the
transition government could complete the negotiations. While an upgraded
agreement has not been signed yet at the time of writing since the negoti-
ations of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement are stalled,
during the transition and under the new government, the EU the parties
negotiated a new Action Plan framing the ‘Privileged Partnership’ (Euro-
pean Commission 2012b) in 2012, the operational documents for pro-
gramming and managing aid under the new European Neighbourhood
Instrument (ENI) in 2014 and a Declaration on a Mobility Partnership in
2013–2014.
This chapter analyses bargaining dynamics behind the signature of these
accords to show how the conceptualisation of joint ownership developed
after the uprisings, investigate the EU’s and Tunisia’s perceptions of the
relations and the extent to which the two parties succeeded in putting
forward their priorities.
5.1 Joint Ownership and Demands for Change

After the Uprisings
The political upheavals in the Southern Mediterranean countries raised
demands for change in bilateral relations both in Tunisia and within the EU
which affected the conceptualisation of joint ownership and its relevance
in the EU–Tunisia negotiations.
As described in Chapter 3, in Tunisia the transition government started
looking for more international partners and donors that could support
the country from a political and financial point of view, turning either to
the United States or to the Gulf countries besides the EU (Abderrahim
et al. 2017). At the same time, since the government was aware that the
EU would remain its closest partner, it increasingly sought to redefine
its power position vis-à-vis the EU and the other Maghreb countries. This
was done by regularly referring to the notion of partnership, ownership and
‘real integration’ (Réalités 2016, 33) of Tunisia in a Euro-Mediterranean
cooperation system. Rather than interpreting the EU–Tunisia partnership
as based on the recognition of economic and social disparities, like under
5 JOINT OWNERSHIP IN TIMES OF TRANSITION 93
Ben Ali’s regime at the launch of the EMP, the new government turned
its attention to the importance of considering domestic interests, assum-
ing equality between the parties (interview 25, 29, 40, 41). Therefore,
joint ownership was conceptualised as the country’s capacity to shape the
Privileged Partnership under the new ENP, according to its own needs,
timeline and will (Réalités 2016) and considering the new democratic tra-
jectory after the uprisings. From this perspective, the level of ownership
should be measured through the convergence between national policies
and EU–Tunisia cooperation priorities (Réalités 2016). Compared to the
past, this interpretation suggests a quest for a more active Tunisian role in
the negotiations, to avoid that ‘the partnership is imposed from one day to
another by Europe’ (interview 41).
Unlike the EMP phase, South–South cooperation was not an important
part of Tunisian discourses on the future of Euro-Mediterranean coop-
eration. However, many Southern Mediterranean countries and Tunisia
among them raised the lack of third countries’ ownership as one the main
pitfalls of the 2004 ENP, reaching a common position in the synthesis
report of the consultation launched by the European Commission before
the ENP review (interview 2). This was presented by the governments
of the ENP Arab countries during a ministerial conference held in Beirut
on the 24 and 25 of June 2015 and was summarised by the European
Commission in the 2015 Communication on the Review of the Euro-
pean Neighbourhood Policy. Ownership and differentiation, intended as
the capacity of the EU policy to reflect the aspirations and interests of each
partner figured together on top of the consultation’s results (European
Commission 2015a).
After an initially prudent wait-and-see phase (Börzel et al. 2015), the
European Union became self-critical about its previous policies towards the
region (Teti 2012), acknowledging that it had often privileged the pursuit
of its own security and economic interests over the stated objectives of
promoting democracy and fair economic integration. The uprisings raised
two main criticisms for the way the EU had managed its relations with
authoritarian regimes over time (Zardo and Cavatorta 2018). First, they
challenged the assumption that pursuing economic liberalisation would
lead to political reform. Second, and more important for this analysis, the
EU strategies in the Mediterranean had seemingly neither grasped local
dynamics nor included them in the overarching policy framework.
The launch of the consultation before the review of the ENP and the
nature of the questions raised confirm the EU’s attempt to take on and
94 F. ZARDO
tackle the criticisms. In particular, the EU realised that substantial efforts

were needed ‘in the context of the ENP review to improve both the own-
ership of this policy by partner countries and to improve communication
of its objectives and results within the EU and in the partner countries’
(European Commission 2015b, 9). The questions addressed two related
dimensions, which recall the definition of joint ownership as convergence
of will and capacity to implement those wills (Aliboni et al. 2006): on the
one hand the interests and expectations of the ENP partners vis-à-vis the
new policy and on the other hand the tools and ‘more respectful ways
of working’ that could be used to accommodate those interests (Euro-
pean Commission 2015b, 9). In the final review of the ENP released in
2015, ‘improving the quality of political dialogue in the relevant high-level
meetings with partner countries, such as Association/Cooperation Coun-
cils’ (European Commission 2015a, 5), engaging with civil, economic and
social actors and selecting a smaller number of priorities stood out as main
solutions to grasp local needs and negotiate common objectives. A lot of
attention was, then, dedicated to the implementation tools, such as differ-
entiated progress reports to ‘develop a new style of assessment, focusing
specifically on meeting the goals agreed with partners’ (European Com-
mission 2015a, 5). According to some senior officials of the European
Commission and the Member States, the EU acknowledged that limited
reforms brought to the fore by the uprisings were mainly due to the lack of
political will, but also that the level of joint ownership was dependent on
how dialogue among the parties was conducted (interview 6, 15, 21, 24,
32). The improvements that were foreseen in the review of the ENP, how-
ever, involved more the implementation phase than the negotiation pro-
cess. This was in part related to the specific competencies of the European
Commission, which was the main actor in charge of the revision process
(interview 21), and in part to the limited intra-European dialogue after the
uprisings the and uneven involvement of the European institutions and the
Member States in preparing the EU response (interview 22, 23, 34).
5.2 Joint Ownership and Post-uprisings

Negotiations: The Road not Taken
The development of the EU response to the uprisings and the EU-Southern
Mediterranean countries’ dialogue on the nature of their future relations
started in 2011 and was completed at the end of 2015 with the approval by
the European Council of the review of the ENP. However, negotiations for
a new Action Plan had already started before the fall of Ben Ali’s regime,
according to the ENP timeline in place and the EU financial cycle. The fact
that most of the agreements framing EU–Tunisia relations after the upris-
ings had been discussed before the final review of the ENP is particularly
interesting for this analysis. Moreover, negotiations took place during the
Tunisian transition, which was characterised by an extremely volatile and
vulnerable political, economic and security context. From 2011 to 2018,
the EU and Tunisia agreed on the Action Plan under the Privileged Partner-
ship for 2013–2017, completed in 2012 (European Commission 2012b)
and approved by the Tunisian government in 2014, the implementation
documents of the new ENI and a Declaration on a Mobility Partnership
in 2014, followed by the launch of parallel negotiations for a visa facili-
tation agreement and a readmission agreement. The following paragraphs
examine the level of joint ownership during post-uprisings negotiations
and analyses the extent to which the re-conceptualisation of this principle
on both sides featured in EU–Tunisia interactions.
Level of Joint Ownership During the Negotiations

of the 2013–2017 Action Plan
In April 2014, after more than two years of internal political stalemate
concerning the constitutional process and the organisation of new presi-
dential elections, the Tunisian government led by the President Moncef
Marzouki1 eventually approved the Action Plan for 2013–2017.
The Action Plan was initially supposed to cover the period 2010–2015
and contribute to defining the nature and contents of an upgraded
relationship that the EU and Tunisia had started discussing in 2008
(EU–Tunisia Association Council 2012, unpublished document). The
uprisings partly interrupted a dialogue on the future of EU–Tunisia rela-
tions initiated under the authoritarian regime and characterised by strong
Tunisian entrepreneurship (Perkins 2014). During the EU–Tunisia Associ-
ation Council in 2008, Ben Ali’s government had expressed its willingness
to launch ‘a joint reflection within an ad hoc committee to fix the objectives
of a strengthened partnership’ (EU–Tunisia Association Council 2012,
unpublished document). This activism vis-à-vis the EU was motivated, on
1 Moncef Marzouki was elected as President of Tunisia by the Constituent Assembly in

December 2011 and covered this position until the election of Beji Caid Essebsi in December
2014.
96 F. ZARDO
the one hand, by the crisis that was affecting the Tunisian economy since
the mid-2000s and, on the other hand, by the regional competition with
Morocco. Indeed, Rabat and the EU had formally launched the process
towards the advanced status that same year (Martín 2009) and agreed an
ambitious roadmap to complete it as soon as possible (EU–Morocco Asso-
ciation Council 2008). Urged by these factors, Tunisia had submitted a
detailed proposal for the advanced status to the EU in March 2010, and
the EU had responded with a draft for the 2010–2015 Action Plan five
months later (interview 26).
The prudent and confused EU reaction to the uprisings did not help to
capitalise on the Tunisian entrepreneurship and to foster local ownership.
Indeed, the EU attitude in this context confirms the argument that the
uprisings and Ben Ali’s getaway took the EU institutions and the Member
States clearly by surprise (Börzel et al. 2015; Noutcheva 2015). At first,
Stefan Füle, Commissioner for the Enlargement and Neighbourhood pol-
icy, confirmed that the dialogue on upgraded EU–Tunisia relations would
continue, provided that the new government would commit to strength-
ening human rights and fundamental freedoms. Then, few months later,
Füle spokesman stated that the resumption of the negotiations was prema-
ture and that the EU would wait for more permanent authorities before
confirming its commitment towards an advanced status, in order to make
sure that Tunisia could ‘respect a range of criteria, which will enable us
to assess the appropriateness of these negotiations’ (European Commis-
sion, personal communication, 20 October 2013). Eventually, despite the
ongoing transition and following both internal and international pressure
(Colombo and Tocci 2012), bilateral talks restarted in early September
2011 (European Commission 2011e). The draft 2010–2015 Action Plan
and the preparatory dialogue conducted by Ben Ali between 2008 and
2010, therefore, served as a basis for the 2013–2017 Action Plan under
the Privileged Partnership. It took nine negotiation rounds to finally reach
the agreement in 2012 (European Commission 2012b, interview 6) and
have the document approved by the transition government in 2014.
Overall, the negotiation process and the final content of the Action Plan
indicate a low level of joint ownership. I argue that this is not only due
to the volatility and vulnerability of Tunisia after the uprisings but also to
a negotiation framework which, in a context of transition, strongly con-
strained the Tunisian capacity to identify and put forward its priorities and
the governments’ perceptions of its own possibilities during the bargain-
ing process. The analysis of EU–Tunisia interactions is particularly useful
to support this argument. In fact, compared to the lack of clarity of the first
EU–Tunisia Action Plan under the ENP (Del Sarto and Schumacher 2011),
the 2013–2017 agreement is far more detailed and, at first sight, target-
ing the country’s needs. To some extent, this is explained by the Tunisian
active engagement during the last years of the authoritarian regime, since
the Action Plan discussed in 2008–2010 remained the basis for the fol-
lowing negotiations. Moreover, as pointed out above when discussing the
conceptualisation of joint ownership, in the aftermath of the revolution the
Tunisian government was an active foreign policy actor, seeking to reposi-
tion the country vis-à-vis international donors and in the region. Nonethe-
less, a close comparison of the two Action Plans and of the parties’ choices
during the negotiations shows that, apart from the chapters on democracy,
rule of law and governance and on human and fundamental rights, that
were extensively deepened thanks to the fall of the regime, the other pillars
did not substantially change and that Tunisia did not introduce new coop-
eration priorities (European Commission 2012a, unpublished document).
This has been also confirmed by a number of EU officials inquired on this
subject, who emphasised the struggle of the Tunisian administration to fol-
low the negotiation process without interruption and political stalemates
(interview 22, 37, 39). While the Tunisian institutional system remained
stable, power repositioning among ministries changed and affected the
country’s capacity to exercise its agency. The ministries mostly involved
in the inter-institutional competition were the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
the Presidency, the Ministry of Development and International Cooper-
ation and the Ministry of the Interior (interview 27). On the EU side,
the continuity in everyday negotiation practices allowed compensating for
the weakening agency exercised by ‘a lot of actors, with little power’ in
EU–third countries interactions after the upheavals (Bicchi 2014, 320).
Power repositioning after the fall of the authoritarian regime and eco-
nomic vulnerability do not explain, alone, why Tunisia did not suc-
ceed in determining the final content of the Action Plan, using its post-
revolutionary success story as a trump card to challenge the EU. The
findings demonstrate that some of the negotiation practices, rules and
procedures introduced by the EU after 2011 to respond to the upris-
ings restrained the Tunisian capacity to bargain on an equal basis and
affected the perception of its relative power vis-à-vis the EU. In fact, the
first response to the Arab uprisings in 2011 and its focus on conditionality
through the ‘more for more’ principle (European Commission 2011d)
entailed some changes in the negotiation practices and tools to better
98 F. ZARDO
define monitoring benchmarks and improve the cooperation between the

European Commission and line Ministries (European Commission 2011a).
These goals explain the introduction of an operational matrix accompany-
ing the 2013–2017 Action Plan, indicating a more precise list of objectives,
actions and indicators. In order not to lose control of the negotiation pro-
cess, the Tunisian government entrusted the same experienced technocrats
in charge of EU–Tunisia dossiers under Ben Ali’s rule. While this choice
allowed Tunisia to participate more effectively, it also slowed down the
ongoing administrative reorganisation. As clarified by a Tunisian diplomat,
there was ‘no time to think of major changes in the administration, nego-
tiations are going on and we must follow’ (interview 27). However, the
administrative capacity did not allow Tunisia to actively participate in the
bilateral policymaking process as expected, since the transition government
had not yet identified and internally discussed clear political priorities. A
Tunisian diplomat highlights in particular that the EU underestimated the
complexity of the transition: ‘they [the EU] were so persuaded of the ade-
quacy of the approach that the domestic dimension was disregarded many
times. You cannot negotiate on commercial quota and the reform of the
penal code in the same way in a country like ours. Also, given the current
situation, it is at the same time useless (from the EU perspective) and hard
(for us) to determine specific and demanding conditions. We needed time
to reorganise the machinery’ (interview 27).
Hence, despite the Tunisian intention to play a more active role in the
drafting of the Action Plan, the government mainly succeeded in com-
menting on the EU proposals, either strengthening or weakening them
(interview 27, 40) rather than including new dimensions and activities.
This happened also in important areas of cooperation for Tunisia, such as
migration and mobility or agriculture (interview 22). There were, indeed,
some cases of full Tunisian initiative, but they mainly involved the man-
agement of the post-Ben Ali’s system, such as the recovery of funds of
the autocrat’s family (European Council 2012). This argument can be well
summarised by a comment of an EU official stating that the EU was ‘asking
them [Tunisia] to elaborate on political priorities that they did not have
yet’ (interview 21). The context in which the EU and Tunisia negotiated
after the fall of the regime was characterised by uncertainty, as preexisting
rules and procedures were not stable nor mutually recognised. As argued
by Luong in her analysis of post-Soviet transition (2002, 93), the conse-
quence of uncertainty is that all interactions among the relevant actors in
the transitional context become strategic and tend to be oriented toward
short-term rather than long-term distributional gains because ‘the potential

rate of change and high degree of uncertainty limit their ability to predict
far in advance’. The EU also sought to foster local ownership through
a ‘systematic and institutionalised involvement of Civil Society Organisa-
tions’ (European Commission 2011a, 4) but this could not be achieved
in the short aftermath of the revolution and affect the 2013–2017 Action
Plan. Indeed, the legacy of the authoritarian regime on the landscape of
civil society organisations was the limited capacity to ‘put forward specific
requests and make the most of the opportunity to participate to consulta-
tions’ (interview 21), and the meetings organised during the negotiations
of the Action Plan became empowerment opportunities.
Overall, the dynamics observed during the Action Plan negotiations
after 2011 confirm that routines and practices learned by Tunisia in the
past outlived the revolution and allowed the country not to lose complete
control of the bargaining process. Yet, political and economic vulnerability
affected the Tunisian perceptions of its capabilities to interact with the EU.
Moreover, in times of transition, some of the changes to the negotiation
process introduced by the EU to improve the ENP effectiveness and pro-
vide a quick response to the events unfolding in Southern Mediterranean
countries constrained the Tunisian agency.
Implementation Negotiations Matter: The European Neighbourhood

Instrument (2014–2016)
A comparative analysis of the ENTs package and the review of the ENP
released later in 2015 illustrates well how joint ownership plays out dur-
ing the implementation phase of cooperation policies. While the first
EU responses to the uprisings laid out in the 2011 Communications
did not introduce substantial changes (Teti 2012; Colombo and Tocci
2012; Börzel et al. 2015), the Regulation establishing the new financial
instrument of the ENP (European Council 2014b) and its management
tools suggest a clearer EU proposal to improve external assistance. Dur-
ing the formal presentation of the ENI package, the EU Commissioner
for Enlargement and Neighbourhood negotiations affirmed that the EU
would ‘focus support to our neighbours even more on our political and
policy agenda. It will allow for more differentiation and for giving incen-
tives for best performers who genuinely implement deep and sustainable
democracy, including respect for human rights, and agreed reform objec-
tives’ (ENPI info Centre 2013). In order to apply the ‘More for More’
100 F. ZARDO
incentive-based approach described in the 2011 Communication (Euro-

pean Commission 2011b), the EU sought to strengthen the effectiveness
of its financial support, particularly in the realm of democracy and human
rights. Therefore, the European Commission introduced a new program-
ming document for every ENP country called Single Support Framework
(SSF), that would include expected results, indicators and the level of fund-
ing broken down by priority.
The first SSF with Tunisia was approved in September 2014 follow-
ing the signature of a memorandum of understanding that assigned 300
million Euros to Tunisia for macro-financial assistance (European Council
2014a), and covered the period 2014–2015. At the time of the SSF nego-
tiations Tunisia had not yet defined some key policies, such as its industrial
or environmental policy, and some topics were still subject to harsh debate,
such as foreign policy orientations, gender issues, religion and territorial
disparities (European Commission 2014b). However, the transition gov-
ernment and the EU reached an agreement on a very detailed programme
of activities. Besides general and specific objectives, the SSF also consisted
of expected results, specific indicators and sources of verification, in that
recalling the logical framework used by the EU and international donors to
plan cooperation projects. This structure was applied to all the cooperation
priorities, including those which were still under discussion internally. On
the one hand, strengthened reporting and communication practices within
the EEAS allowed the EU to better grasp the domestic context and feature
them into the programming process (Bicchi 2014). The ex-ante evaluation
of the country situation carried out prior to the signature of the Memoran-
dum of Understanding was also used to draft a comprehensive document
(European Commission 2014a). On the other hand, however, both the
EU and Tunisia raised criticisms about the negotiation process not tak-
ing into account the context and being more in line with the EU internal
goals and timelines. A senior official from the European Commission, for
instance, noted that working documents were submitted very late to the
Tunisian government, leaving little room for internal discussion especially
in times of administrative change (interview 22). According to a Member
of the European Parliament, the first implementation phase of the ENI led
to very limited joint programming also with the Member States and other
donors (interview 34), a process that the European Parliament had tried
to make mandatory rather than suitable ‘whenever possible and relevant’
(European Council 2014b, 6).
In the specific chapter dealing with joint ownership, the 2015 Commu-
nication on the review of the Neighbourhood Policy highlights that imple-
mentation negotiations and tools under the ‘more for more’ approach did
not succeed in creating ‘a commitment to reform, where there is not the
political will’ (European Commission 2015a, 5) and in fostering the feel-
ing of partnership. The consultation with ENP countries and stakeholders
made clear that the reporting framework should focus on the goals agreed
with partners and ‘provide the basis for a political exchange of views in
the relevant high-level meetings with partner countries, such as Associa-
tion/Cooperation Councils’ (European Commission 2015a, 5). Although
at the time of writing there is not enough evidence that implementation
negotiations and tools have changed, the Communication envisages devel-
oping a new style of assessment and communication to address the ENP
partners’ request for more tailor-made, locally ownership more differenti-
ated partnerships (European Commission 2015a).
The Migration Dossier: The Litmus Test of Joint Ownership

In their book on the transformation of migratory dynamics in Tunisia after
the upheavals, Garelli and Tazzioli note that the fall of the authoritarian
regime has, among other changes, revolutionised the space of migration
(Garelli and Tazzioli 2016) and raised people’s expectations of freedom.
Ben Ali’s getaway brought the North-South and East-West development
gap back into the Tunisian public debate, and weakened border control
led to an increase in unauthorised departures from the Tunisian coasts to
Italy. On the EU side, the rising number of arrivals after 2011 politicised
the migration issue even further and put EU institutions under pressure
to respond to the challenge. The migration dossier is, therefore, a relevant
case to see how joint ownership played out during the negotiations in this
realm.
The analysis of the Action Plan’s negotiations proves that Tunisia tried
to bargain on the sections of the 2014 Action Plan related to migration
and mobility far more than in 2005. The parties exchanged many ver-
sions of the Action Plan Many between 2011 and 2013, and most of the
amendments introduced by the transition government involved the migra-
tion issues (European Commission, personal communication, 20 Octo-
ber 2013). Tunisia tried to strengthen the references to circular migration
and link its requests to concessions on the liberalisation of trade in ser-
vices, a conflicting area of cooperation that had largely been resisted by
102 F. ZARDO
the Southern Mediterranean countries. Tunisian economic vulnerability,

the level of politicisation of the topic and the EU diplomatic pressure to
show some progress in the field of external cooperation on migration to
the European public opinion mostly explain the limited results reached by
Tunisia. The EU did not accept the reference to the opening of a bilat-
eral dialogue on visa facilitation for Tunisian entrepreneurs in Article deal-
ing with trade in services requested by its counterparts. Moreover, despite
the Tunisian resistance (EU–Tunisia Association Council 2012, unpub-
lished document), the whole Article 25 of the Action Plan dealing with
migration eventually revolved around the negotiations of a Mobility Part-
nership and the cooperation measures required to advance this process.
This decision was particularly undesirable to the new government. For
some, closely connecting the ENP Action Plan with the Mobility Part-
nership meant linking the comprehensive EU assistance to the signature
of an EU–Tunisia Readmission Agreement, since the latter constitutes the
main goal of EU–third countries’ Mobility Partnership signed so far (inter-
view 8, 9, 28, 30). It also implied negotiating in a framework involving new
rules, procedures and practices compared to the well-known ENP structure
(interview 28, 31). Indeed, among other objectives, the Mobility Partner-
ship aims at establishing a ‘new long term cooperation framework, in line
with the global approach to migration and mobility and based on political
dialogue and cooperation, which will develop over time according to the
relations between Tunisia and the EU’ (European Union 2014, 6).
The first Tunisian interim government led by Beji Caïd Essebsi had
accepted to establish a dialogue on migration, mobility and security with
the EU on October 2011. However, following the elections of the Con-
stituent Assembly, the launch of the constitutional process and the follow-
ing political crisis that opened the so-called Dialogue National, this dossier
moved to the backburner (Zardo 2017). The Mobility Partnership was also
exposing the Tunisian government to the strong criticism of civil society
organisations who feared that the negotiation would lead to the signature
of a readmission agreement including both Tunisian and third-country cit-
izens (the so-called third-country nationals’ clause). While this clause is
pivotal for the EU to dissuade non-Tunisian migrants from undertaking
the journey to Europe through Tunisia, this is extremely controversial for
Tunisia and many other Southern Mediterranean transit states (European
Commission 2011c). Tunisia put forward the weakness of the Tunisian
institutional and legal framework to deal with the readmitted third-country
nationals, such as the lack of an official regularisation policy or of voluntary

return programs, but also the potential economic and societal impact of
hosting an increasing number of migrants as central argument to resist the
EU pressure (Zardo and Abderrahim 2018).
In December 2013, the EU and Tunisia eventually signed the Declara-
tion on a Mobility Partnership, including a reference to a future readmission
agreement to be negotiated by the parties that will cover both Tunisian and
third countries’ nationals. The bargaining dynamics show a very low level
of joint ownership. Besides the general vulnerability of the country at the
time the dossier was discussed between 2012 and late 2013, the negotia-
tion structure played an important role in constraining the Tunisian agency.
Moreover, the context in which the negotiations were conducted and the
sensitivity of the issue also affected the Tunisian perception of its asymmetry
vis-à-vis the EU.
With regard to the negotiation structure and its effect on the Tunisian
agency, this was different from the one characterising ENP negotiations.
The EU diplomatic delegation visiting Tunis in November and Decem-
ber 2013 was not only formed by the European Commission but also by
some representatives of the Member States. This setting strengthened the
EU negotiation power since the common EU position was immediately
checked and approved ‘on-site’ rather than being re-discussed in Brussels
(interview 21, 22). Moreover, similarly to what has been previously argued
about the negotiations of the Action Plan, the introduction of a techni-
cal document called tableau de bord to be discussed in parallel with the
political declaration (European Union 2014), including a structured mon-
itoring framework, made the negotiations more complex for Tunisia, since
the government had not identified clear political priorities in this realm yet.
The tableau de bord was completed after the signature of the political decla-
ration (interview 21), but some Tunisian officials claim that this additional
exercise put the administration under significant pressure (interview 27,
30). This impact is common to other EU–third countries’ Mobility Part-
nership negotiations. Reslow in particular holds that: ‘When asked why the
negotiations regarding an EU MP with Senegal had failed, a Commission
representative told us: Because they were unable to provide their wish list;
either they didn’t want or they were unable to coordinate between them-
selves in the administration, because the whole thing requires a very good
coordination in the country’ (2012).
Concerning perceptions, a senior official from the Tunisian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs noted that the EU pressure to finalise the negotiations,
104 F. ZARDO
despite the political stalemate in the country, increased the feeling of being
treated on an unequal basis (interview 25). This was confirmed by another
representative of the transition government, claiming that the number of
contacts, both formal and informal, by the EU ‘put us extremely under
pressure, the only solution for us was to sign and move forward’ (interview
27). The debate on the Mobility Partnership, and the one on the readmis-
sion clause in particular channelled the Tunisian opposition to the EU’s
approach of externalising border control to third countries and to the lack
differentiation among the partners in the region unveiled by the uprisings.
This strongly affected the government’s perceptions of its agency during
the negotiations, irrespective of the real impact of a readmission agreement
signed with the EU (Zardo and Abderrahim 2018). In fact, as reported by
one interviewee, the number of migrants transiting through Tunisia to
reach Europe is still very low and ‘Tunisia’s experience when thousands of
refugees entered the country fleeing the conflict in Libya demonstrate that
migrants did not remain bottled up in Tunisia’ (interview 42).
The signature of the Mobility Partnership did not mean, however, that
the EU succeeded in bringing the migration dossier forward. In fact, after
three rounds of parallel negotiations on the EU–Tunisia readmission agree-
ment and the visa facilitation agreement at the beginning of 2019, the pro-
cesses have both reached a deadlock. The EU’s optimism characterising
the first talks in October 2016 was replaced by the acknowledgement that
talks have not ‘progressed as needed’ (European Commission 2017, 1).
Similarly, despite some EU concessions such as the decision of temporarily
removing the third-country nationals’ clause from the draft (Zardo and
Abderrahim 2018), the Tunisian side was dissatisfied with what was per-
ceived as highly asymmetric and ‘not so parallel’ negotiations. Altogether,
different expectations exacerbated by both the European and the Tunisian
crisis, and mutual mistrust generated by the lack of joint ownership of the
process, freezed bilateral dialogue within official negotiations and beyond.
5.3 Preliminary Conclusion

EU–Tunisia interactions after 2011 showed that the fall of the authoritarian
regime entailed a re-conceptualisation of joint ownership. The principle
became pivotal for both the EU and Tunisia, the former acknowledging
that its lack thereof had undermined the effectiveness of the ENP, the latter
conceiving it as a more active role in the negotiations. This attempt to
rethink Euro-Mediterranean relations after the uprisings did not, however,
result in more joint ownership of the negotiation outcomes. While it is true

that routines and practices learned by Tunisia in the past supported the
country’s agency in times of transition and administrative reconfiguration,
political and economic vulnerability constrained the Tunisian leverage on
the EU and affected the perceptions of its capabilities. Moreover, some new
negotiation practices and procedures introduced by the EU to strengthen
the ENP effectiveness proved to be beyond the administrative capabilities of
the post-authoritarian country, limiting its room of maneuver and capacity
to shape the final agreements. By focusing on the implementation phase
rather than on reinforcing and sharing political dialogue, the EU did not
resolve third countries’ criticisms of not adapting its external action to
the domestic contexts. On the contrary, this approach increased the gap
between planned cooperation activities and political will to support them.
Eventually, the analysis of the migration dossier confirmed the previous
findings and demonstrated the extent to which the lack of joint ownership
can undermine bilateral dialogue. Urged by the need to react to the ship-
wrecks in the Mediterranean that occurred between 2012 and 2015 and
lure by the volatility of the Tunisian transition, the EU increased its pres-
sure on Tunisia to secure the agreement on a Mobility Partnership and used
the negotiation framework to achieve its goals. While the conduct of the
negotiations led to the signature of the political declaration on December
2013, it also fostered the perception of unequal partnership, in this way
compromising also the development of the most recent negotiations of the
EU–Tunisia readmission and visa facilitation agreements.
List of Interviews

2012.
Interview 8, Representative of NGO, Tunis, 20 October 2013.
Interview 9, Political Activist, Nabeul, 25 October 2013.
Interview 15, EU Senior Official, DG International Cooperation and
Development, Tunis, 6 November 2013.
2013–March 2014.
2013–March 2014.
106 F. ZARDO

2013–March 2014.
2013–March 2014.
Tunisia, Tunisia, 5 December 2014.
2013–March 2014.
Interview 27, Senior Official, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic
of Tunisia, Tunisia, 14 March 2014.
Tunisia, Tunisia, 14 March 2014.
2014.
Interview 30, Public Official, Ministry of Development and International
2014.
Interview 31, Professor, Institut Méditerranéen de Recherche de Tunis,
Tunis 16 March 2014.
Interview 32, Senior Official, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France, Paris,
5 April 2014.
Interview 34, European Parliament Official, Brussels, 7 May 2014.
Interview 37, EU Senior Official, European Commission DG Migration
and Home Affairs, Brussels, 19 June 2014.
Interview 39, EU Official, EEAS, Brussels, 18 June 2014.
Cooperation, General Directorate for Bilateral Cooperation, 20 October
2014.
Interview 41, Diplomat, Embassy of Tunisia, Brussels, 24 February 2019.
Interview 42 Policy Officer, International Organisation for Migration,
Tunis, 8 November 2017.
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CHAPTER 6
Conclusion: Joint Ownership Is What

Actors Make of It
This chapter answers the book’s main questions and summarises its main
arguments. Moreover, it contextualises them further in the debate on the
EU’s external action, particularly in the Southern Neighbourhood. The
introductory chapter raised the following questions: how did the EU and
Tunisia conceptualise and pursue joint ownership throughout twenty years
of cooperation and under different policy frameworks from 1995 to 2015?
What are the implications of these conceptualisations for EU–Tunisia rela-
tions? How did the negotiation framework affect joint ownership in EU—
Tunisia relations?
Joint ownership is a concept that often figures in the public discourse
of the EU and other international actors. The 2004 Strategy Paper of the
European Neighbourhood Policy identifies joint ownership as a key prin-
ciple that ensures that cooperation with third countries is based on mutual
consent (European Commission 2004). Since then, the concept features in
many EU official statements and documents. At the same time, third coun-
tries also often raise the issue of joint ownership—or its lack thereof—in
order to criticise external interventions, resist international pressure or jus-
tify limited reform. Despite its discursive presence, however, the concept
has been defined and studied in a rather limited way. IR and develop-
ment studies have mainly used the term to study agency in international
relations, employing it to assess the capacity of recipient parties to exercise

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30799-8_6
112 F. ZARDO
authority over cooperation policies and programmes (Boughton and Mour-

mouras 2002; Chesterman 2007; Carbone 2008) and, more generally, to
gauge non-European actors’ power or the lack thereof (Aliboni et al. 2006;
Johansson-Nogués 2011). Although none of these studies explicitly define
the object of ownership, actors can own ideas, processes, outcomes, or all
of these. International political economy has provided the most developed
definition of ownership, calling it ‘a willing assumption of responsibility
for an agreed program of policies … based on an understanding that the
program is achievable and is in the country’s own interest’ (Drazen 2002,
2) and using it to measure the effectiveness of external incentives in local
reforms. In a similar vein, EU studies have understood joint ownership as
joint agenda setting and discussed the potential incompatibility between
ownership and conditionality as external governance mechanisms in the
EU’s foreign policy (Holden 2005; Sedelmeier 2008; Börzel 2011). Inter-
estingly, all these analyses argue that joint ownership has increased since
the launch of the ENP, a claim that contradicts the main findings of IR and
development studies.
This puzzle is particularly visible in the analysis of Euro-Mediterranean
relations and EU–Tunisia relations in particular. As a matter of fact, schol-
arly debate after the 2011 uprisings has highlighted the gap between com-
mitments and results in terms of Tunisian compliance with EU reforms
(Hibou 1999; Holden 2005; Barbé et al. 2009; Cavatorta and Merone
2013) and pointed to agreements that are brief on political issues and ‘re-
flect the lack of a political process on the ground’ (Bicchi 2010, 214). In
this book, I addressed this knowledge gap by, first, discussing how actors
have conceptualised joint ownership over time and, then, by assessing the
concept throughout twenty years of cooperation (1995–2015).
Starting from what I assume is the privileged vantage point of negoti-
ations—a perspective neglected by scholars of Euro-Mediterranean rela-
tions—I traced and assessed joint ownership in EU–Tunisia relations.
Negotiation analysis proved useful for showing how and to what extent
the interests of both sides eventually featured in the policy outcomes. It
also showed what factors constrained or enabled both parties’ agency in
and perceptions of the relations. Theoretically, the findings validate insti-
tutionalist explanations of international relations, arguing that negotiation
rules, practices and procedures shape and inform human interactions, con-
strain or empower actors and shape their expectations about which options
they perceive are possible during the negotiations (Aspinwall and Schneider
2000; Bjurulf and Elgström 2004).
6 CONCLUSION: JOINT OWNERSHIP IS WHAT ACTORS MAKE OF IT 113
6.1 Conceptualising Joint Ownership: External

Factors, Domestic Constraints
and the Role of Perceptions
Scholars dealing with ownership, joint ownership, or local ownership have
mainly equated this concept to that of agency in international relations and
treated it as endogenously given. This approach, I argue, does not make
the best use of the explanatory potential of the concept and might lead to
contradictory understandings of Euro-Mediterranean power relations. In
order to take joint ownership seriously, one should consider both its mate-
rial and its ideational components. By describing the factors determining
the conceptualisation of the concept by the EU and Tunisia, I highlighted
its evolving nature and intersubjective dimension. From 1995 to 2015,
the EU and Tunisia defined joint ownership in different ways, which were
influenced not only by their vulnerabilities but also by their conceptions of
themselves and the other.
The launch of the Barcelona Process was driven by the EU’s attempt to
position itself in the global arena and the Mediterranean region was per-
ceived as the main source of insecurity and instability (Adler et al. 2006;
Bicchi 2007; Panebianco 2012). Partnership, rather than joint ownership,
was the main ordering principle at that time and was conceived as insti-
tutionalised political dialogue. According to this definition, for the EU,
‘regular political dialogue’ (Official Journal of the European Communities
1998, 2) would signal partnership and respect for mutual interests. This
explains why most EU efforts to design and implement the EMP were
devoted to creating and reinforcing ad hoc negotiation arenas and pro-
cedures. With the launch of the ENP, the EU formally shifted from the
concept of partnership to that of joint ownership. The European institu-
tions’ concerns with policy effectiveness and coherence, through which
the EU was seeking internal legitimisation, shaped the conceptualisation
of joint ownership as joint decision-making. Like in intra-European rela-
tions, common procedures, practices, rules and institutions were viewed
as tools to ensure cooperation. Third countries’ capacity to adapt to this
negotiation framework indicated the presence of joint ownership. In 1995,
the EU was trying to define its ‘self’ vis-à-vis the international community,
and in 2004, it was seeking internal legitimisation. After 2011, however, it
was concerned with reasserting its role as a democratising actor. Since the
upheavals revealed the ENP’s failure to understand and deal with politi-
cal dynamics in Southern Mediterranean countries, the definition of joint
114 F. ZARDO
ownership in the 2015 review of the ENP was based on improved political
dialogue, engagement with civil, economic and societal actors, and mon-
itoring progress in the field of democracy and human rights (European
Commission 2015).
For Tunisia, the 1990s had been characterised by the banning
of the principle of non-reciprocity in Euro-Mediterranean relations—as
a consequence of GATT negotiations—and by changing migratory rules
after the Schengen Agreement in 1985, potentially threatening the com-
munity of migrants living in European countries. These factors influenced
Tunisia’s perceptions of power in its relations with the EU and explain
why the government developed a strong narrative that linked the partner-
ship principle to the principles of co-development and solidarity (Mejdoub
1992). The Tunisian struggle to get the EU to recognise ‘the economic
and social disparities between the Community and Tunisia’ in the preamble
of the Association Agreement (Official Journal of the European Commu-
nities 1998, 2) exemplifies its conceptualisation of joint ownership under
the EMP. The authoritarian upgrading of the late 1990s and early 2000s
(Murphy 1999; Hinnebusch 2015) affected the Tunisian definition of joint
ownership in the framework of the ENP. In a context dominated by a
lack of political liberalism and limited personal freedom, joint ownership
became a strategic synonym for sovereignty and a tool to legitimate the
regime within the domestic and international environment while securing
financial support from international donors. The end of authoritarian rule
involved a third Tunisian conceptualisation of this principle. Rather than
interpreting it as the recognition of economic and social disparities, like in
the framework of the EMP, the transition government turned its attention
to the importance of considering domestic interests while acknowledging
equality between the parties. The Tunisian definition of joint ownership as
the capacity to shape the Privileged Partnership under the new ENP (Réal-
ités 2016) was strongly determined by the country’s understandings and
expectations of the democratic trajectory after the uprisings.
6.2 Assessing Joint Ownership: The Impact

of the Negotiation Framework
The book assessed joint ownership during the negotiations of the main
EU–Tunisia agreements between 1995 and 2015. I demonstrated that the
negotiation framework (which became increasingly institutionalised during
the period from the launch of the EMP to the review of the ENP) affected
actors’ ownership of the cooperative relation in different ways, depending

on the political subject (on the one hand, Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime
or the transition government and, on the other hand, the EU in times
of stability or crisis) and on the object of the negotiation (history-making
decisions or policy-setting agreements).
Under the EMP, when the institutionalisation and depoliticisation of
Euro-Mediterranean negotiations had just begun, interactions were more
balanced and allowed both actors to put forward their domestic priori-
ties. Disagreements were managed by involving the highest diplomatic and
political instances, a practice that was in line with Tunisian foreign pol-
icy practices. The broad scope of the Association Agreement required a
sufficient level of inter-institutional cooperation and coordination within
the Tunisian state, a challenge that Ben Ali tackled by establishing ad hoc
structures—such as the National Commission within the Presidency—and
by strengthening the existing administration according to negotiation tasks
and requirements. Therefore, a gradual technocratisation of the negotia-
tion process did not substantially undermine Tunisian ownership, since Ben
Ali’s bureaucratic apparatus was an expert at navigating the arcane politics
of Brussels and receptive to European procedures and practices. More-
over, the centralisation of power under the authoritarian regime ensured
the prompt reorganisation of tasks in order to comply with EU require-
ments. The joint ownership of the process and the fact that the Tunisian
requests accepted by the EU were in line with the country’s expectations,
both impacted on the government’s perception of the EMP as a balanced
relationship. The findings show that this perception was widespread even
if, in reality, the EU did not make many concessions (Tovias 1997; Cas-
sarino 1999). The negotiations of policy-setting documents show different
results, since the regime did not succeed in keeping control of the bargain-
ing process and some internal tensions emerged, such as those between the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Development and Inter-
national Cooperation. This affected both the Tunisian capacity to advance
the country’s priorities at this level of governance and the perception it had
of its power in the interaction.
In the context of authoritarian upgrading, the technocratisation and
depoliticisation of the negotiation process characterising the ENP strength-
ened the Tunisian ownership of the Action Plan and weakened the EU’s
capacity to advance its agenda in the realm of democracy, good governance
and human rights. These dynamics explained why the Action Plan agreed in
2005 was a vague agreement with very limited political substance (Börzel
116 F. ZARDO
2010; Del Sarto and Schumacher 2011). Scholarly explanations of the failed
EU approach in the Neighbourhood, however, had so far underestimated
the relevance of the negotiation process in determining these results and
had not put the concept of joint ownership in context. The practice of nego-
tiating divisive topics such as democracy and human rights in the technical
subcommittees—rather than keeping the discussion at the political level in
the Association Councils and Committees—enabled Tunisia to agree on
poor compromises on paper and then weaken the monitoring process by
haggling over the choice of indicators and benchmarks. Very similar results
have been observed during policy-setting negotiations between the EU and
Tunisia in the context of agreeing on the ENP programming documents.
EU–Tunisia negotiations after the uprisings evidence a very low level of
joint ownership. Economic and political vulnerability alone do not explain
limited Tunisian agency during the 2012–2014 negotiations of the Action
Plan under the new ENP, its implementation documents and the Mobility
Partnership. Moreover, they do not explain why, after agreeing on a con-
troversial Mobility Partnership, Tunisia succeeded in resisting EU pressure
to negotiate the Readmission Agreement and the Visa Facilitation Agree-
ment. The findings show that the negotiation structure played an important
role in constraining Tunisian agency and affecting perceptions of its power
vis-à-vis the EU. The transition government did not completely lose con-
trol of the bargaining process, thanks to the legacies of the past. However,
the continuity of the negotiations did not leave Tunisia enough time to
sufficiently reorganise the administration to ensure coordination (such as
between the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dur-
ing the negotiation of the Mobility Partnership) and set a clear political
agenda to put on the negotiation table later. Hence, despite its intention
to play a more active role in the drafting of the Action Plan, the govern-
ment mainly succeeded in commenting on the EU’s proposals rather than
including new dimensions and activities. This explains why the 2014 Action
Plan, the financial aid programming documents and the Mobility Partner-
ship are well structured and more detailed than in the past, but only partly
address the complexity of the Tunisian domestic context.
6.3 Implications for the Study

of Euro-Mediterranean Relations
In his 1997 analysis of third countries’ attitudes towards the Euro-
Mediterranean Partnership, Joffé contended that when the EU initiated
the Barcelona Process, Southern Mediterranean states felt that little effort
was ‘expended on trying to understand the region and its problems in its
own terms and that, instead, a European perspective was applied to analy-
sis which fundamentally distorted both the prescription and the prognosis’
(Joffé 1997, 21). Since then, scholarship has provided different explana-
tions for the EU’s lack of understanding of the reality on the ground. How-
ever, as argued by Schumacher in his introduction to the Handbook on the
European Neighbourhood Policy (Schumacher 2017), a substantial part
of the academic debate has focused on the EU, disregarding the agency of
third countries in producing or affecting policy design or policy outcomes.
In this respect, he joins the widespread call for a de-centred approach to
the study of the EU’s external relations, so as to bring actors ‘other than
the EU’ back into the analysis (Onar and Nicolaïdis 2013; Keuleers et al.
2016). I described how the gap between commitments to cooperation
and results develops during the negotiation process, the extent to which
the negotiation framework increases incompatibility between ‘the prescrip-
tions and the prognosis’ (Joffé 1997, 21), and the role of third countries
in this dynamic. Therefore, the first implication of the book is that a focus
on negotiations and practices contributes to future research endeavours in
this direction. It makes it possible to blur the ‘donor-recipient’ dichotomy
without excluding the European counterpart by default.
A second implication pertains to the level of analysis to be adopted in the
study of EU–Neighbourhood relations. The book demonstrated that, from
1995 to 2015, the EU concentrated on, and gave prominence to, negoti-
ations of policy-setting documents rather than of strategic, history-making
decisions. Struggles over conflicting political priorities in EU–Neighbour-
hood relations occur during post-agreement negotiations, and third coun-
tries may react to depoliticisation in different ways. Hence, scholars should
pay more attention to the full range of negotiations taking place beyond
‘grand bargains’.
The last useful lesson is that future research on partnership and own-
ership should consider their intersubjective dimensions. The book showed
how interactions shaped joint ownership not only because they changed the
distribution of power but also because they changed actors’ perceptions of
themselves and of other international players.
118 F. ZARDO
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Index
A Bourguiba, Habib, 7, 40, 42–47, 49,

Action Plan, 11, 25, 26, 30, 51, 60, 65, 54, 58, 59
66, 77–85, 92, 95–99, 101–103,
115, 116
Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), 43, 44, C
48, 59 Conditionality, 1, 5, 8, 21, 22, 25–28,
Association Agreement, 8, 11, 50, 51, 30, 31, 50, 78, 82, 83, 97, 112
65–68, 70–77, 79, 81, 85, 114,
115
Asymmetry, 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 22, 32, 40, D
52, 57, 70, 71, 75, 80, 85, 103 Decision-making, 4, 5, 20, 21, 73, 79,
Authoritarian regime, 8, 27, 52, 53, 85, 113
56–58, 73, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, Depoliticisation, 11, 72, 79, 81, 82,
91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 104, 115 115, 117
B E
Barcelona Process, 7, 23, 65, 66, 113, Enlargement, 1, 23–25, 27, 31, 51, 77,
116 78, 81, 82, 96
Ben Ali, 8, 9, 11, 40, 46–54, 56, 58, European Neighbourhood and
60, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72, 73, 78–81, Partnership Instrument (ENPI),
84, 85, 91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 101, 27, 30, 52, 65, 78, 80, 82–85, 99
115 European Neighbourhood Instrument
Beylic/Beys, 6, 39, 41 (ENI), 30, 52, 92, 95, 99, 100
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 121
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30799-8
122 INDEX
I N
Institutionalist, 3, 5, 10, 18, 32, 112 Negotiation arena, 24, 113
P
L Privileged Partnership, 8, 60, 92, 93,
Lisbon Treaty, 24 95, 96, 114
T
M Transition government, 58, 59, 92, 96,
MEDA programme, 20, 51, 65, 69, 98, 100, 101, 104, 114–116
72, 75, 76
Migration, 9, 10, 28, 29, 48, 49, 60,
66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 78, 80, 84, 98, U
101, 102, 104, 105 Uprisings, 1, 2, 7, 8, 11, 27–30, 32,
Mobility Partnership, 11, 28, 102–105, 40, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59, 60, 91–97,
116 99, 104, 112, 114, 116

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THE EUROPEAN UNION IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Knud Erik Jørgensen

More information about this series at

ISSN 2662-5911 ISSN 2662-592X (electronic)

Cover credit: Image Source/Getty Images

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Rosita Di Peri, Stefania

1 Introduction: Joint Ownership in Euro-Mediterranean

2 Joint Ownership and Euro-Mediterranean Negotiations 17

3 Zooming in on EU–Tunisia Relations Across the 2011

4 Joint Ownership Under the Authoritarian Rule 65

5 Joint Ownership in Times of Transition 91

6 Conclusion: Joint Ownership Is What Actors Make of It 111

CEE Central and Eastern European

Fig. 3.1 Composition of the political groups in the Tunisian

Table 3.1 MEDA financial allocation per country 51

Introduction: Joint Ownership

1 EU documents alternate joint ownership and co-ownership in their official documents.

© The Author(s) 2020 1

EU as a means for achieving ‘partnership in its wished-for meaning’ (Attinà

As suggested by Boughton and Mourmouras (2002), an operational

1.1 The Explanatory Potential of the Concept

compensate for asymmetric relations and ensure effective cooperative rela-

to the potential incompatibility between ownership and conditionality as

1.2 Setting the Context: EU–Tunisia Relations

(Hibou 1999). However, the peaceful outcomes of a difficult transition—

The historical roots of EU–Tunisia relations described above make the

1.3 Structure of the Book

Following this introduction, Chapter 2 explains why and how negoti-

Neighbourhood Policy in Perspective (pp. 206–222). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave

Drazen, A. (2002). Conditionality and Ownership in IMF Lending: A Political

Grimaud, N. (1995). La spécificité Tunisienne en question. Politique Étrangère,

Schimmelfennig, F. (2005a, March 31–April 2). European Neighborhood Policy:

Joint Ownership and Euro-Mediterranean

© The Author(s) 2020 17

2.1 Euro-Mediterranean Negotiations Under

level. Ministries can, to a limited extent, delegate decision-making powers

architecture, complemented by monitoring and reporting activities to cope

Euro-Mediterranean interactions and discourses. Consistency in its exter-

2.2 Euro-Mediterranean Negotiations Under

devoted to bargaining on thresholds and baseline indicators. The conse-

of common guidelines, the definition of indicators and benchmarks and

2.3 Euro-Mediterranean Negotiations After

challenged the theoretical assumption that pursuing economic liberalisa-

the EU’s response and realpolitik dominating Euro-Mediterranean policy-

Concerning changes at the level of norms and practices in Euro-

2.4 Conclusion: Agency and Perceptions

The chapter described the development of Euro-Mediterranean negotia-

fact, a redistribution of power occurred in most Southern Mediterranean

Interview 1, Senior Expert, ENPI CBC Programme, Barcelona, 3 February

Avery, G. (2004). The Enlargement Negotiations. In F. Cameron (Ed.), The Future

Schimmelfennig, F., & Sedelmeier, U. (2004). Governance by Conditionality:

(pp. 193–220). Berlin: Springer. Available online: http://link.springer.com/

Zooming in on EU–Tunisia Relations Across

© The Author(s) 2020 39

3.1 Tunisia and Europe Between Vulnerability

Ahmad Bey believed that he could relieve the discomforting sensation of

Tunisian Identity and Europe: Historical Legacies and Tunisian-ness

Economic and Regional Constraints in the Making of Bourguiba’s

3.2 Ben Ali’s Model

promote the country as an ‘open for business’ environment (Hinnebusch

Table 3.1 MEDA

Source Author’s elaboration based on Evaluation Reports of the MEDA

Table 3.2 Financial

limitation of domestic freedom all shaped Tunisian perceptions of the inter-

CEE Central and Eastern European

Fig. 3.1 Composition of the political groups in the Tunisian

Table 3.1 MEDA financial allocation per country 51