Since the Arab Spring, relations with North Africa have been of increasing interest to the Global North countries. The implementation of new economic policies in relation to new free trade agreements, financiarización and austerity policies, receive the political support of the Deauville Partnership.
The following policy paper will try to assess the role of the Deauville Partnership in making the North African region more dependent from Europe. It will describe that this partnership is part of the same neoliberal European strategy started in the 2000s with the first free trade agreements in the region, also exporting an austerity-like European economic policy and involving similar non-democratic methods that those used for example in the TTIP negotiations. Even though this project is affecting the MENA region as a whole, a closer analysis to single countries will be made. Namely Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. In order to achieve these goals different strategies are being pursed, such as deeper trade integration, enforcing a financialisation subordinate to European finance and imposing austerity policies. It will show that despite the official inclusive and sustainable growth purpose, more effort is actually spent in increasing the European geopolitical dominance in those countries.