Testing EU Mediterranean Policy in a Time of War
In 2025, the European Union developed an ambitious policy agenda for its southern Mediterreanean neighbourhood. In October, the New Pact for the Mediterranean was adopted, the most comprehensive renewal of Euro-Mediterranean relations in thirty years. In February 2026, NATO deepened its undersea security agenda in the region, and the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) entered its definitive phase. At the same time, migration governance remained central to the EU’s Mediterranean strategy through the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, which seeks to combine external partnerships with stronger border and asylum management from June 2026. Taken together, these initiatives reflected a growing recognition in European policy that the Mediterranean is rapidly re-emerging as a strategic geopolitical space economically, environmentally, demographically, and in terms of security rather than a peripheral neighbourhood.
Three frameworks for the Southern Neighbourhood
The policy frameworks governing the EU’s relationship with its southern Mediterranean neighborhood are all three under simultaneous stress.
The Pact for the Mediterranean adopted in October 2025 covers all ten southern neighbourhood partners: Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, and Tunisia. Built on three pillars, i.e., people and human development, sustainable economic integration, and security and migration management. The Pact represents the EU’s most ambitious attempt to frame the southern neighbourhood as a space of shared prosperity. Its Action Plan was due in the first quarter of 2026 and its flagship economic initiative, the Trans-Mediterranean Energy and Clean Tech Cooperation Initiative (T-MED), was designed to connect North Africa’s renewable energy capacity with European efforts to diversify away from Russian dependency.
Running in parallel, the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, adopted in June 2024 and set to become fully operational on 12 June 2026, represents the most significant reform of European asylum and migration law in decades. It introduces mandatory solidarity mechanisms, border screening procedures, accelerated returns, and a legal framework for designating “safe countries of origin”. In December 2025, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia were included on the EU’s first common list of “safe countries of origin”, a decision that was already contested on human rights grounds before the current regional escalation.
Finally, CBAM, which entered its definitive phase on 1 January 2026, imposes carbon costs on imports of steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, electricity, and hydrogen from non-EU countries. For North African and Levantine exporters, including Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey, this means new financial obligations on goods entering the EU market, requiring investment in emissions monitoring and industrial transformation.
Regional Crisis: War, Displacement, Energy disruption
Each of these frameworks assumed a stable neighbourhood capable of functioning as a partner in governance, trade, and migration management. However, on 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran, targeting its leadership, military infrastructure, and nuclear programme in an operation aimed explicitly at regime change. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, triggering an immediate regional war. In Lebanon, Israeli airstrikes resumed since March 2, following Hezbollah’s response for the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader. As of March 6, more than 96,000 people have been forced to flee their homes within Lebanon according to the Lebanese Government and The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Cross-border movements into Syria are already underway, with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) warning that figures are projected to rise further. Lebanon is a named partner in the Pact for the Mediterranean and a participating country in PRIMA, the EU’s flagship research cooperation programme with the southern neighbourhood.
The broader regional displacement dynamic is already placing pressure on neighbouring countries that serve as both transit and destination points for people fleeing conflict. Egypt, a key Pact partner and designated as a safe country of origin under the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, is now operating in a neighbourhood at war; as are the migration routes the Pact was designed to manage.
Not to mention that under CBAM, North African exporters are now navigating simultaneously new carbon border costs on EU-bound exports, rising energy costs from Hormuz disruption, degraded investment conditions across the region, and the expectation that they will transition to cleaner industrial processes under T-MED.
Since the start of the conflict, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil supply normally flows, was severely disrupted, with only a few commercial vessels transiting, after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned that Western‑linked and allied ships attempting to pass could be attacked. Energy supply chains are already affecting the same routes that NATO’s undersea security agenda and T-MED were designed to protect and develop. As a result, European natural gas prices rose sharply, rising over 60% within the first week, amid concerns about Middle East supply and regional escalation.
Euro-Mediterranean Policy in a Time of War
The Pact for the Mediterranean, the Migration Pact, and CBAM are built on a vision of the Mediterranean as a space of cooperation and shared interests. Butas conflict spreads across the region, this vision is being tested in real time, raising questions about whether EU Mediterranean policy can function effectively when the neighbourhood is at a war shaped by internal conflicts and external interventions.
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