Civilizational Populism and Migration Diplomacy: Tunisia, the European Union, and Italy 

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Abstract

Civilizational populists prioritize territorial sovereignty in their approach to migration. In instances of North-South inequality, however, transit countries may be incentivized to accede to ideologically unpalatable agreements. To understand how these compromises are legitimized, this paper analyses Tunisia’s negotiations with the European Union following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding in July 2023 that laid the foundations for cooperation over irregular migration. The deal faced challenges on both the Tunisian and EU sides. Tunisian president Kais Saied, a civilizational populist, chafed at perceived EU paternalism and threats to Tunisia’s sovereignty. The deal was also controversial within the EU due to the Saied regime’s human rights violations, which led to further scrutiny of the Tunisian government’s migration management practices. This article finds that Italy’s mediation, spearheaded by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, was successful in addressing these tensions. By positioning Italy as separate from EU paternalism through a shared framework informed by civilizational populism, Saied could justify engaging in positive-sum diplomacy with the Meloni government and symbolically dispel perceptions of diplomatic asymmetry.

Keywords: migration, European Union, Tunisia, populist foreign policy, Italy

By Helen L. Murphey*

Introduction

In April 2024, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met with Tunisian President Kais Saied for the fourth time in a year. The visit was presented as a success: the two leaders vowed to deepen cooperation, notably over migration, based on the principle of mutual benefit (Gasteli & Kaval, 2024). This successful outcome followed a tumultuous negotiation period with the European Union over a joint approach to migration governance, as some European Union members drew attention to Tunisia’s human rights record, and Saied reiterated his refusal to act as Europe’s border patrol (Dahmani, 2024). 

A closer examination of Italy’s role in facilitating EU-Tunisian cooperation over migration helps unpack how populists use foreign policy to preserve sovereignty and mount a symbolic defense of an embattled national identity. It is a truism that populists tend to pursue foreign policy programs that strengthen national sovereignty at the expense of greater long-term international cooperation. This pattern is particularly pronounced when authoritarian populists are driven by strong ethnonationalist concerns, resulting in a reticence to adopt policy positions that might benefit other nations or minority groups (Wajner et al., 2024: 1825). Many such ethnonationalist populist actors can be identified as civilizational populists (Morieson, 2023), a phenomenon referring to populists around the world who adopt a culturalized understanding of the ‘people’ as belonging to a civilizational heritage (Yilmaz & Morieson, 2022b). Such rhetoric allows for boundaries to be drawn between insiders and outsiders that imply a concern with race and demography while instead using the language of culture and civilizational continuity (Mandelc, 2025). This both draws on nationalist tropes while also transcending them through reference to a more grandiose imaginary (Brubaker, 2017: 1211). 

For such actors, migration forms a particularly potent issue. Not only is it is seen to threaten the ‘purity’ of the nation or region’s people, but it also is typically associated with the priorities of elites and their neoliberal economic project (Stewart, 2020: 1210). Indeed, civilizational populists’ construction of the ‘elite’ presents them as “culturally deracinated” and antagonistic to cultural and national specificity, in Brubaker’s framing (Brubaker, 2017: 1192). Migration thus combines populism’s tendency to differentiate itself from both global elites and their ideology of cosmopolitanism, as well as the “dangerous” foreigners who are often linked to crime and disorder (Taguieff, 1997: 20). Meloni herself has referred to migration as part of a “globalist” project to render Italy more economically and culturally vulnerable by depriving its citizenry of their natural identities (Kington, 2022). Yet civilizational populism – and its connections to race, religion, and ethnicity – also helps illuminate the logic of why some migrants may be more accepted than others. For example, while the Meloni regime has been critical of policies allowing for the intake of Middle Eastern and African migrants and refugees, it has been more welcoming towards Ukrainians fleeing the conflict.

In Tunisia, the issue of migration has been particularly salient under the Saied regime. Tunisia has long been a country of departure for migrants seeking to reach Europe, a pattern which accelerated after the economic and political instability following the Arab Spring. Yet while in the past, most migrants transiting from Tunisia to Europe have been of Tunisian origin, since 2023 Tunisia has become the largest point of departure for sub-Saharan African migrants embarking for Europe (Abderrahim, 2024). This has introduced new dynamics, including growing racist and anti-sub-Saharan African sentiments, that have been intensified by European policy favoring the externalization of migration governance. 

In referencing migration, Saied has used language typical of civilizational populism: he has presented mass sub-Saharan African migration as a demographic threat to Tunisian identity. Such rhetoric was civilizational rather than solely ethnonationalist: irregular migration, in his words, would transform Tunisia from a member of the Arab-Islamic community to “just another African country” (Al Jazeera, 2023). This statement drew on a long history of contestation within negotiations over Tunisia’s regional identity, as well as long-standing marginalization of the country’s Black population (Mzioudet, 2024). After Saied voiced these sentiments in an infamous and controversial speech, Tunisian police began escalating repression of migrants and punishing organizations that advocate on their behalf. 

Yet in addressing this issue, the Saied regime has had to balance competing priorities, indicating the complex and shifting power dynamics constraining populists’ agency in the foreign policy arena. The EU has been willing to offer much-needed financial support in exchange for Tunisian cooperation over migration governance. This dependency makes it difficult for Saied to adopt a classic civilizational populist positioning, in which sovereignty is performed through pure oppositionality (Dudlak, 2025: 629). In effect, however, more interceptions of migrant crossings at sea have led to increasing numbers of sub-Saharan Africans stranded in Tunisia, unable to work or obtain housing due to stricter government policies and further inflaming tensions with Tunisian citizens.

This article analyses the tensions at work in EU-Tunisian migration negotiations and their resolution through Italian mediation. Through analyzing official statements, politicians’ interviews with the press, media coverage, and debates within the European Union from the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding in 2023 to the development of European-Tunisian migration partnership throughout 2024-2025, it traces the narratives advanced by proponents and antagonists of the MoU about migration within Tunisia, Italy, and the European Union. This allows for populism to be analyzed as both a strategy and ideology, builds on studies that similarly approach populism – and its links to securitized imaginaries – using a qualitative narrative analytical method centering intertextuality (Löfflmann, 2024). 

This study offers theoretical insights linking populist foreign policy to ontological security. Ontological security suggests that states – as well as international bodies – strive for continuity of identity, even at the cost of instability in their foreign relations (Mitzen, 2006). Through analyzing the EU-Italy-Tunisia relationship, this article argues that Meloni’s intercession, fueled in part by shared civilizational populist values between Meloni and Saied, helped the Saied regime cooperate with Europe whilst avoiding the appearance of subservience to the European Union. In so doing, it preserved both the ontological security of the Saied regime and its prioritization of sovereignty, as well as that of the European Union, who could distance themselves from the human rights abuses attending the deal. 

This article suggests that unequal power dynamics between the European Union and Tunisia – and between member states within the European Union – are essential in understanding the Saied regime’s seeming erraticism during migration negotiations. Consequently, it advances that bilateral relations between populists can be improved through symbolically differentiating themselves from multilateral institutions – which, in turn, can further empower populists on the global stage.

(*) Helen L. Murphey is a Post Doctoral Scholar at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University. She earned a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews in 2023, where she was a Carnegie PhD Scholar. She has previously held an appointment as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Whitman College. She is a Research Associate at the Institute of Middle East, Central Asia and Caucasus Studies at the University of St Andrews and an Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Religion at the Ohio State University. Her research interests include populism, conspiracy theories, religious social movements and migration. Email: murphey.27@osu.edu | ORCID: 0000-0002-1504-3818

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