Civil society in Euro-Mediterranean relations: what success of EU’s normative promotion?

The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, and the later ENP, were both born with the ambition to promote economic and political interests alongside the normative issues. The Union's aspiration was to set itself up as the regime's norm-sender to inculcate European practices and Europeanness in the Mediterranean space by ways of civil society actors. However, to date the record of progress is rather scant. This article will outline the main EU instruments which have been created to promote civil society action in Euro-Mediterranean relations as well as to contextualise the main reasons for their failure to achieve their purpose. Regime theory will be used to clarify some conceptual points of the Union's lack of success in civil society promotion in this area.