Author: Adrian Smith.

This paper examines the role of macro-regional integration in the European Union's interactions with its ‘southern neighbours’ within the context of the aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring’. It focuses on attempts to deepen trade liberalisation and create a new institutional architecture as a state-mediated project of macro-regional political-economic integration. Drawing on interviews with key institutional actors, policymakers and strategists, the paper examines the Tunisian case to highlight how the interests of international states and fractions of EU capital are being forged through new institutional and policy architectures in the Euro-Mediterranean region. The paper extends geographical research on the EU's relations with its neighbourhood and political science research on ‘Europeanisation’, both of which have primarily focused on the geo-political dynamics of macro-regional integration, on geo-political imaginations of the region and on the ‘normative power’ of the EU. It does so by examining the ways in which the EU is attempting to externalise its economic space beyond its borders through the negotiation of Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements and Agreements on Conformity and Acceptance of industrial products. It also highlights the contested nature of this process in relation to the complex politics of transformation in the southern Mediterranean. In doing so, the paper contributes to understanding of the reconfiguration of border spaces by exploring the tensions between the frontiers of capital accumulation and political-juridical boundaries.