The European Union’s public diplomacy towards the South Mediterranean: intercultural dialogue and power relations in the Euro–Mediterranean partnership

The aftermath of the Arab uprisings, the rise of Da’esh and the refugee crisis have placed the European Union’s interdependence with its southern neighbours on the spotlight, giving a renewed emphasis to the dialogue of cultures that forms part of the third basket of the Euro–Mediterranean Partnership. From a dialogical model of public diplomacy, this paper analyses the quality of the intercultural dialogue between the EU and the South Mediterranean employing the Anna Lindh Foundation as a case study. The overarching claim of this paper is that power is a social structure that resides in the dialogue itself and thus rejects the view that genuine dialogue needs to be power free. In order to empirically investigate this question, this paper employs Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis to study what spaces have been created for intercultural dialogue (strategies), and on what terms they have been defined (narratives).