Normative and Technical Power at the EU-Moroccan Interface: The Islamization of the North as a Response to the Democratization of the South

Normative drives and ‘soft’ economic and technical power at the interface between Morocco and the European Union (EU) produce a flexible post-normative context in which substantive views of the ‘good’ are recomposed in function of more practical notions of the ‘useful’. Plural, decentred, and technical modes of power construction and projection become the norm.

Damagingly for the EU, the European normative drive is not deployed in coordination with practical projects of socio-economic development. In practice, such EU initiatives are not only entrenching some of the authoritarian tendencies of the Moroccan monarchy but they also fail to engage Islamist actors at the institutional and civil society levels. At the same time, Moroccan state and non-state actors have realized that the normative and technical tools of regional community building used by the EU are a double-edged sword. Europe’s current lack of normative and technical means to address the interaction between politics and religion in relation to Islam facilitates the externalization of the normative and technical power of Moroccan actors. Their activities can be seen as another form of regional community building by southern actors using the normative and technical resources that the EU lacks in the religious field.