Introduction: Europe in the world?

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book highlights the tension between the ideal Europe of policy statements and proclaimed European values’ and European Union (EU) practices: Political, geopolitical, and economic. It offers a geopolitical analysis of the various Mediterranean-building’ initiatives that, over the years, have attempted to symbolically, territorially and institutionally construct a Mediterranean region’ as a space for EU action, from the Association Agreements of the 1960s, to the Barcelona Process, to the Union for the Mediterranean launched in the summer of 2008. The book examines how EU development policy acts to transfer the modus operandi of the EU’s system of political-economic organization to European external relations and thus determine the structure of the international system, as well as the ways and modes of interaction for different actors in it’. It describes the number of key characteristics to the new E.