Eu Democracy Promotion And The Arab Spring

The author explores the practice and effects of the European Union's democracy promotion efforts vis-à-vis its authoritarian neighbours in the Middle East and North Africa. She argues that the same set of factors facilitated both international cooperation of authoritarian regimes on democracy promotion and their persistence during the Arab Spring.

The European Union and the Arab Spring: Promoting Democracy and Human Rights in the Middle East, edited by Joel Peters, analyzes the response of the European Union to recent uprisings in the Middle East. The past year has witnessed a wave of popular uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East which the Western media dubbed "the Arab Spring." Demanding greater freedoms, political reform, and human rights, the protesters swept away many of the region's authoritarian autocratic regimes. The events of the Arab Spring have been truly historic. They led to profound changes in the domestic order of Middle Eastern states and societies and impacted the international politics of the region. Additionally, these events necessitate a comprehensive reappraisal by the United States and most notably by the EU in their relations with the states and peoples of the region. This timely collection brings together nine leading authorities on European foreign policy and the Middle East, and investigates three central questions: What role did the European Union play in promoting democracy and human rights in the countries of North Africa and the Middle East? How did the EU respond to the uprisings of the Arab street? What challenges is Europe now facing in its relations with the region? Peters' The European Union and the Arab Spring is at the forefront of scholarship on this historic socio-political shift in the Middle East and its wider implications for the West.

This book explains why the EU is not a ‘normative actor’ in the Southern Mediterranean, and how and why EU democracy promotion fails. Drawing on a combination of discourse analysis of EU policy documents and evidence from opinion polls showing ‘what the people want’, the book shows EU policy fails because the EU promotes a conception of democracy which people do not share. Likewise, the EU’s strategies for economic development are misconceived because they do not reflect the people’s preferences for greater social justice and reducing inequalities. This double failure highlights a paradox of EU democracy promotion: while nominally emancipatory, it de facto undermines the very transitions to democracy and inclusive development it aims to pursue.

This volume presents essential aspects of Mediterranean politics to be reconsidered in the light of the Arab upheavals since 2010. The focal point of the book is the question in how far European-Mediterranean relations are challenged by the various developments. It explores the relationship between security and democracy within the Arab countries and in European-Mediterranean relations. The ambiguity between the promotion of democratic values and the preservation of common interests in cooperation in economic and security affairs is stirred up by changing political actors and new conflictual constellations inside the Arab countries. All these changes evoke new challenges for all areas of the European-Mediterranean cooperation. Thus, the volume assembles contributions from different angles on the re-formulation of the European Neighbourhood Policy as well as the Democracy Assistance towards the Southern Mediterranean. It discusses the major security issues of a cooperative security architecture, counter-terrorism action, migration control and security sector reform in order to explore the relevant challenges in the field. The contributions analyse the recent developments and challenges, provide critical insights into those fields and endeavour to provide some proposals for improving Mediterranean cooperation on democracy and security. This book was published as a special issue of Democracy and Security.

By examining a range of policy areas, this book aims to assess and qualify the claim that EU policies towards the Arab Mediterranean after the uprisings are predominantly marked by continuity with the past. This is attributed to the fact that the EU still acts with the aim of maximising its own security by preserving stability in the region. The book explores how security, stability and the link between them – the security-stability nexus – are better understood as the master frame shaping the EU’s approach towards the Southern Mediterranean and how this affects policy enactment. The book shows that the security-stability nexus has at least been reframed in the wake of the uprisings, but also that more change has occurred in the redefinition of the master frame than in its actual enactment. The framing and reframing of the security-stability nexus, before and after the Arab uprisings, depends on the policy area under consideration, the variety of actors involved, and the forms of their involvement. This is also crucially because of the different disposition towards the EU of prominent actors in Arab Mediterranean partner countries, which points towards the EU’s increasing difficulties to achieve its goals in its near abroad. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.

Democracy promotion is an established principle in US and EU foreign policies today, but how did it become so? This comparative study explores the promotion of democracy, focusing on exponents from emerging democracies alongside more established Western models, and investigates the impact of democratic interests on foreign policy.

New democracies are uniquely positioned to promote democratic values and have a competitive advantage in the global democracy assistance industry. This book examines the attempts of one group of young democracies, from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), to channel this pro-democracy agenda into both national and European foreign policy and development support. It looks at how CEE is ‘upstream’ changing the EU on crucial policy issues as part of the common foreign and security policy. Furthermore, it tracks the process whereby imported ideas and norms are recycled for further export ‘downstream’, and how these concepts are received in countries outside of the EU including the post-Soviet space, the Western Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa region and Central Asia. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of democratisation studies, European Union studies, comparative politics, international relations, international development, European politics, as well as area/regional studies.