Europe and the Maghreb: rule-makers and rule-takers

Europe increasingly describes North Africa as a community of partners bound together by history, geography, prosperity, and shared interests. In fact, Brussels speaks so often of a “near neighborhood” when looking south. Rome, for instance, promotes the Mattei Plan as a new model for North-South cooperation. Paris, on the other hand, insists it has learned the lessons of its declining influence across Africa. Today, green transition initiatives, infrastructure corridors, migration agreements, and investment packages are all presented as evidence of an “equalizing” relationship.

On careful examination, however, what Europe actually means is far less transformative. Priorities have evolved; European interests have not. Energy security has replaced oil dependence. Hydrogen has replaced hydrocarbons as the preferred commodity of the future. Migration containment has become as strategically important as military basing once was. Financial conditionality has gradually displaced direct political control. In short, neocolonial paternalism may have seemingly vanished, but the architecture governing the relationship still places Brussels in the position of rule-maker and North Africa in the position of rule-taker.

Take trade, for instance. EU-Africa trade exceeded roughly €355 billion ($404 billion) in 2024. European imports amounted to about €189.5 billion, while exports reached €165.2 billion. Composition matters here far more than volume. More than half of Europe’s imports from Africa consisted of mineral fuels and raw materials, while over one-third of exports heading south were machinery, transport equipment, and manufactured goods. It is an exchange that still follows a pattern that survived decolonization remarkably well: Africa exports resources; Europe exports value.

North Africa sits squarely within this enduring model.

Export openness across the region has remained around 28 percent of gross domestic product for years, while imports hover near 32 percent. Industrial upgrading has progressed slowly despite decades of association agreements and promises of integration. European manufacturers gain privileged access to regional consumers, while Maghreb producers remain largely confined to lower-value assembly work, agricultural quotas, and commodity production.

Market access remains carefully calibrated to preserve European competitiveness. Full participation in the EU Common Market remains permanently out of reach. Deep regulatory convergence is encouraged whenever it benefits European firms, yet meaningful commercial reciprocity never enters serious discussion. Morocco even suspended negotiations over a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area after recognizing that harmonizing regulations without receiving corresponding market access would impose European production standards on Moroccan firms while leaving European producers firmly advantaged.

Economic integration, therefore, starts to resemble selective integration. Europe retains an open door to North African markets while producers in the latter encounter quotas, cumbersome requirements, seasonal restrictions, and convoluted regulatory barriers precisely where higher-value exports might emerge.

Agriculture demonstrates this imbalance vividly because Europe regularly praises Mediterranean food security partnerships, yet tariff quotas and technical restrictions continue limiting North African agricultural exports. European consumers enjoy inexpensive imports whenever convenient, while North African producers remain prevented from climbing higher up European supply chains.

Looking ahead, green energy now risks reproducing precisely the same dynamic under cleaner branding.

Europe’s hydrogen strategy seeks to import roughly 10 million tons of renewable hydrogen to decarbonize heavy industry. North Africa possesses abundant sunshine, extensive land, and proximity to European markets, making the region indispensable to those ambitions. Brussels has therefore elevated projects such as the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy and Clean Tech Cooperation initiative, targeting investment approaching €25 billion by 2035.

Unfortunately, headline figures conceal where benefits ultimately accrue.

About 89 percent of planned green hydrogen pipeline capacity across North Africa has been configured primarily for exports rather than domestic industrial use. Export-oriented hydrogen systems require roughly three times the capital expenditure needed for grids focused on local electrification. Moreover, water consumption in the world’s most water-stressed region is also at risk. Hydrogen production relies heavily upon desalination, with export-focused systems consuming as much as four times more water than strategies centered upon domestic energy needs.

Amplifying that dynamic even further is North Africa’s unaddressed climate vulnerabilities. The region faces an estimated climate adaptation financing gap approaching $89.3 billion — roughly equal to the nominal GDPs of Tunisia and Mauritania combined. Meanwhile, cumulative European adaptation financing directed toward Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt amounted to only about €67 million across an entire decade.

Priorities have evolved; European interests have not. 

Hafed Al-Ghwell

Should this lopsided “partnership” endure, even energy sovereignty will gradually give way to energy subcontracting, especially when questions surrounding ownership arise.

Put differently, European firms finance electrolyzers. European utilities negotiate long-term offtake agreements. European industrial consumers determine demand. European regulators define certification standards. Local governments provide land, water, permits, infrastructure, and political stability, while assuming environmental burdens that will persist long after individual contracts expire.

Hydrogen begins resembling natural gas with different chemistry.

So, how exactly does Europe accomplish this?

Take Italy’s Mattei Plan, for instance. Rome’s latest overture shows how development rhetoric frequently masks strategic calculation.

Italy advertises about €5.5 billion over several years devoted to agriculture, health, education, water, and energy projects across Africa in a presentation suggesting an ambitious partnership. Scale suggests something considerably smaller.

The Italian energy giant ENI alone plans investments approaching €26 billion across Egypt, Libya, and Algeria over roughly four years. Energy extraction, therefore, exceeds development financing several times over. Some would argue that Algeria supplying more than 40 percent of Italy’s imported gas within participating countries justifies the difference. It does, however, make Italy’s energy security the unmistakable foundation beneath this development language.

French repositioning in Africa also reflects the same thinking in its careful repositioning on the continent after losing influence within former colonial strongholds across the Sahel and West Africa. France’s Nairobi summit promised equality, investment, and renewal targeting familiar strategic priorities from defense to investments commitments targeting security cooperation, and even access to critical minerals.

The EU’s Global Gateway similarly promises around €150 billion for Africa by 2027, yet much of the headline figure consists of repackaged financing instruments, guarantees, and private-sector expectations rather than substantial new public investment.

Every major European initiative promises departure from historical patterns. Every major initiative nevertheless revolves around familiar European priorities: securing energy, reducing migration, protecting supply chains, expanding markets, and limiting geopolitical competitors. Language has modernized faster than underlying incentives.

Equal partnership requires reciprocal market access, locally owned industrialization, domestic energy security before export commitments, financing that strengthens productive capacity rather than dependency, and migration cooperation respecting sovereignty instead of outsourcing political liabilities. Instead, Europe purchases stability, imports resources, externalizes difficult political questions, and celebrates cooperation while preserving structural advantages accumulated across decades.

In Brussels’ parlance, North Africa is a near neighborhood of strategic importance. However, when the deals are done and memoranda of understanding are signed, North Africa is still very much Europe’s most useful periphery.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center in Washington and senior fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. X: @HafedAlGhwell