ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to discuss how the analysis of foreign policy – as a process that organises the international environment – can be applied to the study of regions. The main argument here is that if foreign policy analysis (FPA) is taken as a framework in which to study world politics, then regionalism can be taken as one level of analysis. Behind this focus lies an understanding of foreign policy as a discursive activity – in line with critical theoretical writings that show how empirical phenomena are constructed discursively.1 In the case of the EU’s Mediterranean policy, this involves processes of defining implicitly what the EU is and what the Mediterranean is. It is argued that foreign policy (as a discursive activity) is a process of othering, constructing the self and the ‘other’. In other words, when analysing foreign policy, analysts are not only concerned with the strategies devised to utilise a nation-state’s capabilities to achieve the goals its leaders set – but they are also in effect looking at constructions of identity.2
