Why does Tunisia become African only when Europe needs it to be?

Tunisia is an African country that has spent much of its modern political imagination looking north. That sounds like a question of identity. In reality, it is a question of power—and more precisely, a practice of domination through classification.

For decades, Tunisia has imagined its economic future through the Mediterranean: European markets, French education, tourism, and European investment. Africa has often appeared somewhere beyond the Sahara, associated with instability, migration, and security.

Europe, however, possesses its own geography of Tunisia—one that shifts depending on what Europe needs from it. When Brussels discusses trade, investment, and political cooperation, Tunisia is a Mediterranean neighbor. When Europe discusses migration, border control, Libya, or the Sahel, Tunisia becomes something else: an African frontier state.

This is not a mere contradiction. This is a deliberate mechanism of geopolitical subordination through classification. Europe does not need Tunisia to be culturally European; it needs Tunisia to be strategically African when African space becomes relevant to European security.

The economic relationship makes this asymmetry impossible to ignore, revealing a genuine policy cage. The European Commission identifies the EU as Tunisia’s largest trading partner. In 2025, the EU accounted for 59.5% of Tunisia’s total trade. Some 73.2% of Tunisian exports went to the EU, while 49.6% of imports came from the European market. The EU is also Tunisia’s largest foreign investor, holding 85% of the country’s foreign direct investment stock.

These figures do not merely describe a successful trading relationship; they reveal an extraordinary concentration of Tunisia’s external economic relations in Europe. When three-quarters of a country’s exports depend on one economic space, that relationship ceases to be mere commerce and becomes an instrument of control, shaping industrial priorities, investment decisions, and the political imagination of what is economically possible.

Europe consequently becomes not simply Tunisia’s largest market, but its economic horizon—where economic dependence transforms into geographical dependence. Africa becomes secondary, not because it is irrelevant, but because Tunisia has spent decades learning to imagine prosperity through a northern market. As Kwame Nkrumah warned in 1965, the most insidious form of domination is control through financial and structural instruments, not direct conquest.

The contradiction becomes sharper when migration enters the picture, exposing the biopolitics of European border management. The EU’s relationship with Tunisia increasingly includes border management, migration control, and the fight against migrant smuggling. European support has included equipment, training, and operational assistance to Tunisian security and coast guard structures.

From Brussels’ perspective, this is cooperation. From a geopolitical standpoint, it is the externalization of Europe’s borders. Europe is not merely helping Tunisia secure its own territory; it is moving part of Europe’s migration-control architecture southward, closer to the routes through which migrants attempt to reach European territory. This is the essence of extraterritorial sovereignty as described by Giorgio Agamben in 2005: the European state exercises its power over human bodies beyond its borders.

This changes the meaning of Tunisia’s geography. Tunisia is no longer simply a neighbor across the Mediterranean; it becomes part of a European security perimeter without becoming part of Europe itself. Tunisia consequently occupies a peculiar geopolitical position: its economic relationship with Europe is framed as partnership, while its position on migration is treated as strategic infrastructure. The Mediterranean neighbor becomes the African frontier.

Yet another geography is beginning to emerge—one that challenges the idea of Tunisia as merely Europe’s southern security buffer. In June 2026, AfCFTA Secretary-General Wamkele Mene visited Tunisia. The visit concluded with an agreed action plan aimed at deepening Tunisia’s trade across Africa.

This matters because it offers Tunisia a role fundamentally different from that assigned to it by the European migration agenda. The African Continental Free Trade Area offers Tunisia the possibility of becoming an economic actor within Africa, rather than a buffer between Europe and Africa. The African Development Bank is pursuing a similar regional logic. In June 2026, the Bank held consultations in Tunis for a new North Africa Regional Integration Strategy designed to deepen economic integration within North Africa and between North Africa and the wider African continent.

This is a radically different understanding of Africa. Africa is not merely the place from which Tunisia receives migrants, security risks, or instability. It is a market. It is a network of cities. It is a space for investment, industrial partnerships, logistics, technology, and political influence. The question is whether Tunisia will treat this geography as a strategy, or merely as an alternative whenever its relationship with Europe becomes difficult. There is a danger in treating Africa as a Plan B, because if Tunisian policymakers look south only when European markets become restrictive, African integration will remain a reaction rather than a strategy.

The choice is not Europe or Africa. Tunisia does not need to abandon its European relationship; its economic links with Europe are too deep, and its geography makes the Mediterranean an unavoidable part of its foreign policy. But Europe cannot be Tunisia’s only horizon.

The real choice is between being an object in someone else’s geography and becoming an actor in one’s own. If Tunisia is African only when Europe needs a border guard, its Africanness has been reduced to a function. If Tunisia discovers Africa only when it needs new markets, Africa becomes a fallback rather than a strategy.

Europe does not merely change Tunisia’s label; it confiscates Tunisia’s agency. By defining Tunisia as Mediterranean when it needs a market and African when it needs a buffer, Europe ensures that Tunisian sovereignty remains conditional—subject to the external power’s geopolitical needs. This is not partnership; it is strategic subordination. Africa is too often presented in European policy as a space from which problems arrive: migrants, instability, terrorism, trafficking, and energy insecurity. But Africa is also a political and economic project being built. The AfCFTA is an attempt to create a continental market; regional integration initiatives are attempting to connect North Africa more effectively with the rest of the continent.

Tunisia is already inside this geography. The question is whether it will remain inside it mainly as a recipient of European security policy, or whether it will begin to act as an African state pursuing its own economic and geopolitical interests. The problem, therefore, is not that Tunisia has forgotten that it is African. The problem is that Tunisia has not yet decided what being African is for—and has allowed external powers to determine when each geography is politically useful.