A distinctive feature of international relations today is that power is becoming more widely dispersed and low politics acquire more salience for scholars and policy-makers. Developments in Euro-Mediterranean politics and attempts at institutionalising the EMP are no exception. The latter, only a handful of years since its inception remains in limbo between a loose association of states and an internationalised regional regime. The question is whether the EMP can sustain itself for any length of time without becoming first a system of patterned behaviour, generating a notion of rules of the game to guide and structure international behaviour. From a linear projection of Euro-Mediterranean governance, the Partnership could evolve, in time, into a full-blown regional regime with an institutional life of its own. At present, however, and given the rather discomforting empirical developments in the process, no such entity has fully come into being, in terms of complying with the basic analytic tenet of rule-governed behaviour. On the other hand, the fascinating element in the evolving Partnership is that, from a dynamic macro-political perspective, it may well prove capable of instrumentalising the principles and norms embedded in the Barcelona Declaration and transform them into concrete rules of the game based on shared beliefs, standards of behaviour and, crucially, decision-making procedures for implementing collective choice. Keeping in mind Olsen’s point that ‘[w]righting rules for a large number of heterogeneous countries is no easy task] [82], especially with the view to making these rules fit the special conditions and particular situation of each country, implementation is central to the viability of regional regime-formation, for the latter process emphasises the need for institutionalisation and the development of an international co-operative culture among partner states and societies. For it is the combined effects of institutionalisation, in the sense of ‘learning one’s place in a larger order’ [83], and international culture, in terms of developing repertoires of shared understandings, that bring about a purposeful system of mutual governance. The idea here is to regularise a form of co-operation that, as Jervis notes, is more than the following of short-term self-interest (or power maximisation) [84].