Europe in the New Middle East: Opportunity or Exclusion (Oxford Studies in Democratization) 9780199647040, 0199647046

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OXFORD STUDIES IN DEMOCRATIZATION Series editor: Laurence Whitehead Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes will concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization processes that accompanied the decline and termination of the Cold War. The geographical focus of the series will primarily be Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES Democracy, Agency, and the State: Theory with Comparative Intent Guillermo O’Donnell Regime-Building: Democratization and International Administration Oisín Tansey Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy Larbi Sadiki Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico Jonathan A. Fox Regimes and Democracy in Latin America: Theories and Methods Edited by Gerardo L. Munck Democracy and Diversity: Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific Benjamin Reilly Democratic Accountability in Latin America: Edited by Scott Mainwaring and Christopher Weina Democratization: Theory and Experience Laurence Whitehead The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism Andreas Schedler The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia: The Dominance of Moral Ideologies Garry Rodan, Caroline Hughes Segmented Representation: Political Party Strategies in Unequal Democracies Juan Pablo Luna

Europe in the New Middle East Opportunity or Exclusion? Richard Youngs

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Richard Youngs 2014 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014941593 ISBN 978–0–19–964704–0 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents

1. Introduction: The Challenge of a New Middle East

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2. Five Analytical Narratives

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3. The Contours of a New Middle East

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4. Prior to the Upheavals

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5. Redemption: Helping Transitions

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6. Revisionist Reflex: Limiting Transitions

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7. The Fading Spectre of Radicalism?

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8. Syria, Iran, and Regional Upheavals

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9. The Libya Conflict

170

10. Economic and Energy Interests

185

11. The Israel–Palestine Conflict: Catalyst or Distraction?

202

12. Conclusions

217

Bibliography

231 243

Index

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1 Introduction The Challenge of a New Middle East

After 2010, a sustained period of political and social effervescence incrementally redrew the Middle East. The trail-clearing Tunisian revolt opened the door to a series of fundamental changes in the Arab world. Elements of democratization advanced in a number of states. Citizens’ chains of fear appeared to break. Unsurprisingly, the process of political change was far from smooth. At times the Arab spring threatened to subside into instability and polarization. For those states that reformed, democracy was forged in the shadow of many thousands of deaths. In others, a degree of backlash ensued. Authoritarianism resisted firmly in most of the Gulf, Algeria, Iraq, and Iran. To many, the tragic tumult in Egypt and Syria in the second half of 2013 risked leaving the early enthusiasm of the popular revolts mortally wounded. The Arab spring certainly did not produce linear, uniform democratic progress across the region; but it did usher in a ‘new’ Middle East in the form of more vibrant political debate, open contestation, and, in some places, violent conflict. In parallel to national-level political change, the strategic contours of the Middle East ebbed. The balance of power between Arab states shifted. As reform took contrasting turns in different states so it nourished regional rivalries and conversely opened the way to new alliances. Gulf states became markedly more engaged and influential in North Africa. A  more ebullient Egypt competed for influence with resource-laden Saudi Arabia. Sunni Gulf leaders, nervous of their own Shia populations, adopted a harder line against Tehran; this engendered much tension as the West explored a new rapprochement with Iran in the second half of 2013. Syria’s turmoil affected the balance between political factions in Lebanon. Turkey appeared to be one of the clearest beneficiaries of reform dynamics in the Middle East.

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Europe in the New Middle East

Regional politics became more Islamist. Half a dozen Islamist-led governments were elected. The region was beset by more intense tension and rivalry between Sunni and Shia, as well as between rising Salafi groups and more ‘mainstream’ forces centred on the various formations of the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, the popular legitimacy of new Arab regimes fed into a new phase in the Arab-Israeli conflict: the aftermath of the Arab spring presented challenges to Israel, while also sparking social pressure for better governance of the Palestinian Authority. As the Middle East’s stability was wrought asunder, so were the premises upon which European policy in the region was predicated. It is well known that the European Union (EU) played little direct part in stimulating the Arab world’s social uprisings. European governments had identified the need to encourage democratic change fifteen years before the Arab spring, when they crafted the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership in 1995. But the political will to follow though this reform-oriented vision proved limited in both European and Arab states. After the EU floundered in initial response to the Arab spring, it then had to reconsider some of the fundamental tenets of its strategic approach to the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). The EU’s absence from the initial flourishing of the Arab spring did not lessen the importance of the challenges presented by ongoing changes in the Middle East. Europe did not play a major role in fomenting the Arab awakening, but had to delineate new strategies for responding to the ongoing processes of reform. The shaping of a new Middle East impacted in significant ways on Europe’s own strategic and economic interests. The Arab awakening provided a positive antidote to the predictions that the post-Western world order would be dominated by less liberal, more authoritarian trends. But it also engendered new risks and uncertainties. This book assesses how the EU sought to deal with this mix of promise and peril after the start of the Arab spring; it also ponders what the longer-term impact of this policy response will be for the Union’s aim of foreign policy unity and leadership. The Arab awakening was of profound significance not only for the Middle East and North Africa, but also for the EU and for democracy’s credibility as a global human aspiration. At one level, it reaffirmed the universal relevance of the kinds of values that underpin the European project. After all, protesters were taking up precisely the kind of agenda to which the EU had committed itself in North Africa since 1995. It might have generated a further foreign policy success story, along the lines of the spread of democracy to southern Europe and then Eastern Europe. But, at least in the short run, the EU was taken by surprise. This book provides the first systematic and detached assessment of the strong and weaker aspects of the European response to the Arab spring. Clearly 2011 was not a good time to present the EU with yet one more existential challenge, but this timing was not the only reason for the 2

The Challenge of a New Middle East

inadequate response. Nor is the explanation reducible to disinterest, or to the fear that, under democratic conditions, Islamic currents of opinion would become more powerful. As we shall see, there were serious proposals under review that could have led to a more constructive response. Yet the essential nature of the Arab spring produced turmoil, divergent reactions, and contrasting outcomes that confronted European policymakers with acutely complex and cross-cutting challenges. Despite the disappointments that have arisen both with the MENA region and in the EU, the nuanced analysis of this volume provides elements for a potentially more constructive reading of how European influence might still be deployed over the longer term. It is from this balanced assessment that the book draws its thoughts on the longer-term ramifications of the 2010–14 period for European foreign policy cooperation and effectiveness.

The Book’s Aims Examining the way in which the relationship between Europe and the Middle East altered as a result of the Arab spring, the book unravels what the uprisings meant for Europe after 2010. It charts how the EU responded to changes within the Middle East and the impact of these changes on the European strategic interest calculus. The EU is understood in its broadest sense as the national policies of the member states alongside the common Union-level initiatives pursued through Brussels-based institutions; the relationship between these two policy levels is explored through the book. The book offers an account of EU policy in the three years following the beginning of the Arab spring. By early 2014, the direction of reform remained highly uncertain in a number of Arab states and it was self-evident that there had not been a smooth process of political opening across the region. However, a sufficient period of time had by then passed to assess the European response to the Middle East’s tumultuous changes. Against this unsettled background, the book addresses the following questions: To what extent did the EU change its policies towards the MENA region in the aftermath of the Arab spring? What impact did the changes in the MENA region have on European interests? What degree and kind of impact did European policies have on the emergence of the new Middle East? What factors were most relevant in explaining EU policy choices?

To answer these questions, the book provides a detailed assessment of EU policy responses to the Arab perturbations. It examines the positive ways in 3

Europe in the New Middle East

which the EU encouraged and prompted democratic reform in Arab states from late 2010. The other side of the policy ledger is then outlined, namely those aspects of EU policy that failed to offer pro-reform support or that even continued to militate against transition breakthroughs. Chapters then follow on how European interests evolved in the areas of counter-terrorism, commercial interests, and energy security. The book also provides separate studies of the Syrian, Libyan, and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts that endeavour to ascertain how EU policies and strategic interests played out in these acutely challenging environments. The book seeks to offer both a descriptive and analytical account. It offers a straightforward, empirically rich narrative of European responses to the Arab spring. But it also takes a step back from this account and asks whether changes occurred to the modes of governance that prevailed in relations between the EU and the Middle East—that is, it looks at how the Arab spring occasioned more structural changes in relations across the Mediterranean, beyond those specific initiatives the EU proffered in support of democratic reforms. The book suggests that five analytical narratives help us shed light on the evolution of EU policies in the Middle East. These outline the different types of underlying dynamics that characterize the relationship between Europe and the Middle East. The narratives point to five patterns of governance:  cooperative ‘Euro-Mediterranean’ decision-making between the EU and Middle Eastern countries; the export of EU governance rules to the MENA region; the role of linkages with non-state, civic actors; realist calculations of strategic self-interest; and a dovetailing of the EU’s presence with the influence of other, especially rising, powers. Each of these governance models plays some part in EU–MENA relations; and all altered in nature after 2010. Charting the balance between the five analytical logics helps direct our eye to much that is important in Europe’s policies in the Middle East. A  focus on the evolution of these contrasting governance dynamics helps us better identify precisely how EU policies responded to the emergence of a new Middle East; how the EU impacted the region and how changes in the region impacted Europe; as well as the variables that explain the strategies adopted by European governments. The book seeks to relate these issues to the overriding question of whether the birth of a reshaped Middle East represented an opportunity for the EU or a moment at which it risked being excluded from influence in the region. The book is informed by and contributes to ongoing academic debates in several areas. The Middle East is framed as a test case for debates over the cogency and effectiveness of EU foreign policy coordination. While from the late 1990s the southern Mediterranean was often seen as an arena in which foreign policy had been ‘Europeanized’ more than in most other regions, in 4

The Challenge of a New Middle East

the years prior to the Arab spring it symbolized an apparent entropy in the EU’s common foreign and security policy (CFSP). The book asks whether the new, post-2010 context re-energized Euro-Mediterranean relations and whether analytical explanations of EU policy need to evolve as a result. If studies of Euro-Mediterranean relations had reached something of a stagnant plateau prior to the Tunisian revolution, there is a need for the literature on EU foreign policy to keep pace with the epoch-making events witnessed since 2010. Coinciding with the exogenous shock of the Arab spring, events and trends within Europe itself impacted upon some of the core parameters of EU external strategy. Close scrutiny is warranted of how far the financial crisis, internal economic divisions, and relative decline affected the nature of the EU’s foreign policy identity. The book’s study of the Middle East speaks to these core EU debates. The book also sheds light on broader debates over the international dimensions of democratic change. By 2010 much pessimism had surfaced over the potential for international factors to continue playing a positive role in assisting democratization. For various reasons the legitimacy of Western democracy support seemed to be treading water, while the changing world order accorded greater influence to non-Western powers either hostile to or uneasy with standard democracy promotion. The genesis of the Arab revolts seemed to have little to do with the international community. The progression of events in the Middle East invited a revisiting of debates about the external influence over political reform. The book adds to this stream of academic literature by investigating how far changes in the MENA led European governments to reassess the relationship between strategic interests and political change in the Arab world. It also asks whether the revolts engendered qualitatively new EU strategies for encouraging political reform. Drawing from the case of evolving EU approaches to the new Middle East, the book ponders what can be learnt about the relationship between domestic political change and international variables.

Summary of Findings The book’s findings can be summarized around its four core research questions. First, much evidence demonstrates that after 2011 European policy became more reformist, in a measured and low-profile fashion. Many EU policies were upgraded in both quantitative and qualitative terms. The EU attempted to support reform processes in a more sensitive and effective fashion. It sought to chart a course between being abrasive and being apathetic to reformers’ aspirations. It became notably more ecumenical in regard to different visions of political reform and the central involvement of formerly 5

Europe in the New Middle East

excluded, Islamist actors. It was far more diligent in listening to local, Arab views on what forms of external support were most desired. A more flexible stance on neo-liberal economics took shape, mitigating one of the major erstwhile criticisms of European pressure in the southern Mediterranean. The uplifting effusion of the Arab rebellions helped to lift the crisis-afflicted EU at least a little from its own introspection. Second, the careful balancing of interests ensured that EU support for change remained less than far-reaching. Epochal change often met with relatively insipid European incrementalism. At times the EU seemed like a rabbit frozen in the headlights of unpredictable change. It did little to pre-empt reform. Rather, it was caught in the tailwinds of rebellion, dragged along reluctantly. In terms of advancing its own interests, the EU reacted to the Arab spring as a fluctuating mix of opportunity and risk. An uneasy co-existence of strategic logics persisted. This reflected the fact that the Arab awakening had no clear, unidirectional impact on core European interests. While genuine concerns emerged, the book rebuts the standard line that the Arab spring was a decisive repudiation of the West. Commercial, energy, counter-terrorist, and broader security interests were all subject to shifting and countervailing calculations. The Arab spring neither singularly advanced nor dramatically set back European interests. Varied strategic deliberation across countries and policy domains moulded a carefully calibrated set of European strategies. Third, the impact of European policies was generally limited, albeit not unimportant. Three years into the Arab spring, Europe’s presence did not exert quite the rebarbative influence that it had had for many decades. If anything, the EU moved from overestimating to underestimating its potential influence. Its policies did not significantly explain reform outcomes in the Middle East—either the advanced extension or constricted reach of political liberalization. European support was pusillanimous rather than determinant. European influence was a plant that took root only in very specific national conditions. The impact on outcomes was strongest in Libya, the pro-reform commitment least circumscribed in Tunisia. By 2014, the EU and other international actors had most tragically failed to have any tempering influence on Syria’s brutal conflict. Indeed, the tragic turn of events in the second half of 2013—with thousands of deaths at the hands of Egypt’s newly installed army-led government and from chemical attacks undertaken by the Syria regime—signalled a loss of European influence and commitment to the Middle East. For their general ambivalence, European policies continued to suffer strong criticism from civic actors in the region. The EU’s protestations that it did not seek to impose any course of domestic reforms were largely superfluous; few in the region believed this to be a realistic prospect, however strongly the Union might 6

The Challenge of a New Middle East

commit to a re-energized Middle East policy. To some degree this was a convenient cover for much cynical realpolitik. In some areas, European–Middle Eastern security networks still weaved a nefarious web, a minatory influence over change. Fourth, the five suggested governance dynamics each help to capture a part of the European response to the Arab spring. The book’s central spine is the claim that an eclectic combination of dynamics drove and explained European Middle East policy between the end of 2010 and early 2014. This conclusion contrasts with the tendency to test EU foreign policy through one particular analytical prism or to ask of it a single conceptual research hypothesis. Several policy initiatives breathed new life into the ethos of shared-polity Euro-Mediterranean governance. Others attempted to reinforce the approach of exporting EU rules and regulations to the MENA region. Harnessing the essential civic vitality of the Arab spring, European programmes also made a concerted attempt to broaden and deepen links with non-state social organizations; in this sense, features of cosmopolitan, citizen-centred governance dynamics were increasingly apparent. Notwithstanding these trends, however, member states gained greater control over Middle East policy as they calibrated their responses to the strategic uncertainties of the Arab spring. A logic of reloaded realpolitik became more apparent into 2012 and 2013. Rationalized interest-protecting readjustments were at least as evident as the dynamics of Europeanization, socialization, institutional dynamics, and reflexive normative identity. If to some extent the variations in EU policy across the region properly reflected local specificities, they were also explained by differentiated European strategic calculations. Optimism gave way to, arguably excessive, fatalism: by early 2014 many European diplomats and governments worried that the ‘new Middle East’ was essentially one of more brutally resistant regimes, married to acute sectarian instability that was by now in dire need of a very traditional form of containment. More broadly, Arab states’ external relations were to some extent de-Europeanized, although the EU retained perhaps more relevance than many observers had originally predicted. In short, the book argues that EU policy became more pluralist in nature, and more the product of varied trends in the MENA region than of an ‘inside-out’ projection of a particular Europeanized foreign policy identity. These four sets of observations are not exhaustive. They give a flavour of how far European policy altered after 2010, what influence these changes had on trends within the Middle East, and how the Arab spring affected European interests. They demonstrate the combination of analytical frameworks that is required to capture the conceptual evolution of European–Middle Eastern relations. From this eclectic mix of strategies and analytical dynamics, the inexorable end-point was a lower European profile in the Middle East. This 7

Europe in the New Middle East

was not necessarily an unhealthy development in itself, for either Arab or European states. Yet the long-term implications were far from being set in stone. A thin line ran between cynical and self-protecting indifference, on the one hand, and healthy, respectful distance on the other hand. Whether the scene was set for a period of more benign relations across the Mediterranean will only gradually become apparent.

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2 Five Analytical Narratives

This book assesses the role of the European Union (EU) in the emergence of a new Middle East and the impact of the remodelled region on European interests. Beyond the policy-oriented question of how the EU responded to change in the region, more analytical and deep-rooted issues arise related to the nature of governance structures that prevail in European relations with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. From its account of post-2010 policies, the book is concerned with uncovering how the emergence of a new Middle East affected EU–Middle East relations in a deeper, qualitative sense. What did the evolving substantive features of EU policies, and their interaction with events in the Middle East, tell us about the kind of factors which have driven and structured the relationship between the two regions? How have changes in the Middle East, and indeed within Europe, altered the types of governance dynamics that exist in EU–Middle East relations? To structure the analysis and scrutiny of EU policies since the beginning of the revolts in late 2010, an eclectic analytical framework is required. Five analytical dynamics capture the evolution of EU policy in and towards the region. Each of these describes a different pattern of governance. European policies have exhibited strands from each of these five models. The models are distinct but not mutually exclusive. A comprehensive, analytical explanation of EU policies from late 2010 to early 2014 requires delineating the precise combination of and balance between these five dynamics. The five analytical narratives suggested here are those of: EuroMediterranean collective governance; EU-driven external governance; civic-oriented cosmopolitan governance; government-instigated power politics; and de-Europeanized governance. These five are chosen on the basis of existing conceptual work on EU–Mediterranean relations, combined with broader international relations work highlighting emerging trends in cross-regional dynamics. The five narratives selected are not the only ones of relevance, but are held here to be those most useful to conceptualizing

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responses to the Arab spring. In combination, the five governance models help shed light on a range of analytical issues: the explanations that lie behind EU decisions; the contrasting types of foreign policy instruments deployed; the impact of the new Middle East on the qualitative forms of governance that infuse relations across the Mediterranean Sea; the degree of variation between policies in different parts of the region; and the EU’s degree of influence over events in the Arab world, including in comparison with other outside powers. The five narratives offer an ordering framework for the empirical assessment of EU policies that follows.

Euro-Mediterranean Governance The original vision of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), introduced in 1995, embodied the ambition to create an area of deeply integrated governance structures. The rationale was to cultivate areas of sectoral cooperation entwined deeply enough to breed an environment of shared problem-solving and loyalty. European relations with the southern Mediterranean would no longer be limited to a dynamic of rational choice interest maximization. And indeed, from the mid-1990s a dense network of committees took shape across an impressively broad range of policy areas. However, practical progress towards the goal of integrated governance was halting, in large measure scuppered by tensions over the Arab-Israeli conflict and divergences over fundamental political values. Yet from 2004 the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) renewed the objective of replicating de facto the spirit of enlargement, while the Union for the Mediterranean was predicated on the principle of co-ownership. Analytically this strand of Euro-Mediterranean relations was manifest in the aspiration to create elements of a common polity, not just cooperative policies. The concept of decentred governance helped reflect the aim of moving beyond a merely instrumental set of EU policies towards Arab states.1 This vision was inextricably entwined with a particular view that the EU was a uniquely multilateralist power, committed strongly to the principle of collective security, along with the unselfish provision of global public goods. EU foreign policy was widely seen as guided by the objective of inclusiveness, rather than the pursuit of interests through exclusion. The EU natur­ ally tended to seek the incorporation of other states into rules-based security

1   D. Bechev and K. Nicolaidis, ‘From policy to polity: can the EU’s special relationships with its “neighbourhood” be decentred?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 48/3, 2010: 475–500.

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and values communities.2 Many writers have contrasted what they see as the EU’s focus on community-building with the US’s instinctive quest to dominate others and amass power.3 A familiar claim is that the EU promotes democracy in the sense of inclusive processes of dialogue and consultation, in contradistinction to the US focus on the end-point of installing formal democratic institutions.4 The EMP was often seen as a prime example of joint community-building. All this presupposed the institutionalization of a significant degree of internal EU unity around the norm of cooperative rather than competitive bargaining.5 The explanatory force of policy-converging institutionalism within the EU was precursor to its applicability to relations between Europe and the Middle East. Even if it is realized that the concept of ‘normative power Europe’ does not provide a blanket explanation for EU foreign policy, the latter is still seen as generally drawn to normative ends and means of value-shaping persuasion and rules-based influence.6 Nonprescriptive and cooperative mediation rather than imposed democracy support are extolled as the EU’s rightful approach in the neighbourhood. 7 Prior to 2011, the philosophy of integrated Euro-Mediterranean governance remained well short of being realized. European commitment was insufficient, while southern Mediterranean resistance was resolute on the more sensitive political dimensions of the partnership. Apart from limitations with respect to member states of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), relations remained strikingly thin with Arab states in the Gulf, Iraq, and Iran. On the Arab side, governments resisted many areas of deeper cooperation. Relations with Israel remained far too fractious realistically to hope for a zone of shared governance structures. And on the European side, frustration with the paucity of progress pushed EU member states back towards prioritizing their traditional bilateral relations in the region. Whatever its other achievements, the EMP had not bred significantly new forms of governance by the eve of the Tunisian revolt.

2   J. McCormick, The European Superpower (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); M. Tèlo, Europe: A Civilian Power? European Union, Global Governance, World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 3   J. Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 297; T. R. Reid, The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (London:  Penguin, 2004); S. Haseler, Super-State:  The New Europe and its Challenge to America (London: I.B.Tauris, 2005), p. 139. 4   J. M. Ferry, ‘European integration and the European way’, in Mario Telò (ed.), The European Union and Global Governance (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 338. 5   D. Thomas (ed.), Making EU Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 6   T. Forsberg, ‘Normative power Europe, once again: a conceptual analysis of an ideal type’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 49/6, 2011: 1183–204. 7   K. Raik, ‘The EU and mass protests in the neighbourhood: models of normative (in)action’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 17/4, 2012: 553–76.

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This begged the question of how far post-2010 political changes in the MENA region opened the way for a more effective implementation of EuroMediterranean governance. Was there a commitment to deepening a strongly institutionalized pattern of cooperation across a large range of different policy areas? Did the EU and Arab states enhance the degree of shared problemsolving and decision-making? Did something akin to a Euro-Mediterranean polity take shape? Were Euro-Mediterranean institutional structures of sufficient depth to develop an identity autonomous from their member states, to set agendas and establish problem-solving legitimacy? If the years before 2011 saw member states drawn to bilateral modes of interaction with Arab states, did the revolts tighten unity between EU governments sufficiently to act as a base for more integrative styles of governance across the Mediterranean? A core question was how far the EU reclaimed its identity as an actor offering joint problem-solving and inclusive community-building with its international partners.

Exported Governance The analytical concept of external governance reflects a slightly different but equally important dynamic. Much of the EU’s international influence has derived from the transfer of its own rules and legal norms to other countries and organizations. This has been termed a form of institutionally rooted ‘external governance’ quite distinct from traditional concepts of power projection.8 External governance refers to the EU seeking to extend the territorial scope of its own rules and regulations as a rationalized strategy of influencing policy outcomes in third countries. As such, it portrays a novel form of external strategy beyond traditional understandings of foreign policy. It posits a fuzzy rather than absolute distinction between internal and external policies. While there is some overlap here with the notion of common Euro-Mediterranean governance, external governance envisions a more instrumental and immediate usage of the EU’s own processes for reasons of self-interest. While this governance model also points to deeply integrated and institutionalized forms of cooperation, the onus is on the EU exporting its own pre-existing norms rather than collective security as such. The dynamic is one of carefully rationalized institutional isomorphism; convergence occurs through a process of mimetism adopted by southern Mediterranean states. The focus in much conceptual analysis in the last decade has been

8   F. Schimmelfennig and U. Sedelmeier, ‘Governance by conditionality: EU rule transfer to the candidate countries of Central and Eastern Europe’, Journal of European Public Policy, 11, 2004: 669–87.

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on ascertaining the conditions under which non-EU states comply with EU rules and norms. Modes of external governance vary and can embody participatory networks, but in many sectors constitute decidedly hierarchical dynamics vis-à-vis non-EU states.9 The EU in this sense exerts functionalist power. Basing policy on extending its own rules is the EU’s form of power politics but one that still offers other states a share in the benefits of EU policies.10 The notion of ‘structural power’ similarly posits a form of EU influence over the domestic structures of other states deriving from its own rules and integration.11 Analysts applied this framework to the Mediterranean specifically. They argued that this was an area where the ‘institutional patterns’ that embody the EU’s own internal values were notably extended into the realm of foreign relations.12 Prior to 2010, some analysts argued that a significant degree of progress was made in the export of EU governance in the southern Mediterranean. A number of Arab states had begun to incorporate EU rules governing competition, environmental, health and safety, energy, and industrial policy. These moves may not have constituted democratization, and the manner of actually implementing EU rules may have remained subject to local specificities, but they did represent some degree of convergence in governance styles. And external governance strategies pursued at a relatively technocratic level enabled advances while paralysis reined at the level of high politics. Frank Schimmelfennig maintained that EU policy did have a political edge by supporting not democracy but ‘democratic governance’: transparency, accountability, and civic participation in technical areas of sectoral governance.13 Notwithstanding these advances, prior to the Arab revolts clear limitations remained to the scope of governance exported from the European Union. These limits were evident in the stalling of market integration and Arab governments’ increasing resistance to uploading large sections of the EU acquis. European governments themselves moved back towards prioritizing trad­ itional means of alliance-deepening rather than qualitatively new modes of

9   S. Lavenex and F. Schimmelfennig, ‘EU rules beyond EU borders: theorizing external governance in European politics’, Journal of European Public Policy, 16/6, 2011: 791–812. 10   J. Zielonka, ‘The EU as an international actor: unique or ordinary?’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 16, 2011: 281–301. 11   S. Keukalaire, ‘The European Union as a diplomatic actor: internal, traditional and structural diplomacy’, in W. Rees and M. Smith (eds.), The International Relations of the European Union (London: Sage, 2008). 12  M. E.  Smith and K. Weber, ‘Governance theories, regional integration and EU foreign policy’, in K. Weber, M. E.  Smith, and M. Baun (eds.), Governing Europe’s Neighbourhood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 13  F. Schimmelfennig, ‘How substantial is substance? Concluding reflections on the study of substance in EU democracy promotion’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 16/4, 2011: 727–34.

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governance. The Union for the Mediterranean seemed to signal a dilution of the external governance prism. Hence, a pertinent issue was how far political changes in the MENA states and in EU thinking sufficed to bring external governance dynamics further to the fore. Some analysts insisted that only the ‘governance’ model stood any chance of traction in influencing the Arab spring, in contrast to conditionality-based leverage or cosmopolitan civic-based networks.14 So, did changes in the Middle East indeed open up more scope successfully to export areas of the EU’s own governance rules? How far was this approach the leading edge of EU efforts to support democratic reform in the region? To what extent did the EU push for Arab states to incorporate such rules and regulations? What impact did this have on local reform dynamics? Did reformers welcome this governance approach or reject it as unduly Euro-centric? Was the EU still drawn to supporting technocratic governance reform as opposed to democracy proper? A demanding challenge was for the EU to ‘translate’ its external governance into far more fluid and proactive local contexts, as opposed to ‘diffuse’ its rules in a static, traditional sense.

Cosmopolitan Governance One strand of thinking about current trends in international relations emphasizes the rising role of civic actors. Many analysts insist that the abiding feature of the twenty-first century international system is that of people-centred governance gradually eclipsing more formalized, institutional dynamics. David Held has popularized the concept of ‘layered cosmopolitanism’ that foresees a form of governance based on global citizens rather than nations being the primary holders of rights. He posits a form of internationalism that ontologically gives priority to individuals rather than states or bureaucratic organizations.15 This chimes well with those who observe an emerging pattern of governance that is less state-centric and more predicated upon practical problem-solving coalitions between governments, companies, and social organizations. Policy ideas and dynamism today percolate from the bottom-up, the fluid power of localism overwhelming heavier, institutionalized forms of international cooperation.16 A common argument is that EU foreign policy has traditionally embodied such a spirit of cosmopolitanism. Analysts invariably suggest that member 14   S. Lavenex and F. Schimmelfennig, ‘EU democracy promotion in the neighbourhood: from leverage to governance?’, Democratization, 18/4, 2011: 885–909. 15   D. Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (Cambridge: Polity, 2010). 16   P. Khanna, How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (New York: Random House, 2011).

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states’ foreign policy positions have converged around identities based on common social and civic-rights values.17 The EU is said to exude a degree of civic-slanted cosmopolitanism in its external policies that already qualifies as ‘post-Westphalian’.18 It is argued that member states have felt the need to converge policies to the extent that these are based on social values that are constitutive of the EU integration project; any form of more rational institutionalism is unsatisfactory in seeking to explain EU foreign policies without any appeal to such norms.19 However, prior to 2010 the various civil society components of the EMP flattered to deceive. They were too elitist, too patchy to claim any significant credit for the upheavals. Arab regimes excelled in frustrating the participation of genuinely independent actors. European governments meekly accepted such barriers and reverted to more government-to-government approaches. Prior to 2011, EU policy in the Arab world was far more statecentric than organized around the priority status of individual agency and rights. It was far from cosmopolitan governance in action. A ritual critique by 2010 was that Western support for political reform was unduly top-down and insufficiently driven by the demands of local civic stakeholders. How far did this situation change after 2010? To what extent did postrevolts EU policy developments foster a shared community of values beyond the role of nation states? Apparently in line with such notions of cosmopolitan governance, most of the Arab revolts were above all bottom-up social protests. This invites consideration of how far citizen-centred notions of governance have come to feature in European–Middle Eastern relations. Was EU-fostered cosmopolitan governance the most appropriate response to the specificities of locally driven reform processes? A pre-eminence of cosmopolitan governance would involve full civil society involvement in policy frameworks, systematic inclusion and agendasetting roles in political dialogue covering democracy and human rights, and strong civic monitoring roles over European aid expenditure. Unlike the Euro-Mediterranean governance and external governance models, this would be less about formal institution-centred forms of integration than about the promotion of a citizen-focused ideational community predicated upon universal values. The notion of ideational transfrontierism leans some way towards constructivist frameworks. It would also recognize that 17  Selected examples of this strand of thinking include T. Christiansen and B. Tonra (eds.), Rethinking European Union Foreign Policy (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2004); S. Lucarelli and I. Manners (eds.), Values and Principles in European Union Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2006). 18   Quotes from I. Manners, ‘The normative ethics of the European Union’, International Affairs, 84/1, 45–60, 2008, p. 46, p. 60. 19   T. Risse, ‘Norms and all that: progress in research on EU foreign policy’, in D. Thomas (ed.), Making EU Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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effective civic and political rights require more of a focus on social and economic rights and equality too—the neglect of the latter long having been seen as a blind spot within concepts of liberal-cosmopolitan governance.20 An associated question under this model is how far EU support for reform took its lead from local, Arab input and demands. Such an approach fits with the finding that international support for democratic reform is effective where it is structured around an understanding of particular domestic trends and variables—a recipient more than merely donor-driven interpretation of democratization’s international dimensions.21 In this sense, the Arab revolts seemed to open the door to far greater EU influence in the region. A prevalent conclusion in studies of EU external policies is that norms have been taken up more successfully where recipient societies and political elites turn more notably towards such values. Although this verges on the tautological, it is generally agreed that the success of pro-reform support from outside depends on a prior favourable orientation of locals and active demand for external support. The MENA region was in this sense a hard case, compared to Eastern Europe for example, as many doubted whether local civil society demand existed for Western help. The pertinent post-2010 questions were whether this ambivalence diminished and demand for EU support from Arab civic leaders more clearly emerged; and whether the EU tailored its policies to these local demands.

Power Politics, Recast A contrasting possibility was that the Arab revolts encouraged European governments to tighten their control over foreign policy initiatives towards North Africa and the Middle East. Prior to the Arab upheavals, many analysts had suggested that realist dynamics were ascendant in European foreign policy. Far from surrendering power to a common, Europeanized, postmodern, and normative foreign policy, critics argued that member states had reverted to more traditional defence of their vital interests. It is germane to explore how far European governments were tempted further in this direction by the tumultuous remoulding of the Middle East. Rather than the Arab revolts ushering in new forms of cooperative governance across the Mediterranean, did they encourage European governments to claim a greater role to modulate their responses to this fluidity in a way that safeguarded their immediate interests? Were the key variables governments rather than  forms

  F. Fukuyama, ‘Dealing with inequality’, Journal of Democracy, 22/3, 2011: 82.   K. Stoner and M. McFaul (eds.), Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 20 21

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Five Analytical Narratives

of governance? Is a less Brussels-centric lens needed to explain post-2010 European actions in the Middle East? Some analysts certainly questioned how far the EU ever really matched up to its liberal power rhetoric. They doubted both the degree of norms-based unity between member states and the pro-democracy conviction present in European external relations as a whole. Realists insist that notwithstanding the liberal-normative rhetoric, structural features still push European governments towards zero-sum competition, between each other and with non-European states.22 Others have detected and lamented a declining commitment to the principles of liberal internationalism across the whole gamut of external relations, including trade, international finance, security, energy, development, and human rights policies. It often seemed as if European governments were ready to jettison support for the liberal world order in a rushed attempt to protect their interests in what was perceived to be a fast emerging zero-sum international order.23 From another angle, realist scholars argued that there was nothing in the Middle East that now provided strategic glue to bind member states together in common endeavour in the same way that the need to ‘balance’ the Soviet empire did in the Cold War.24 Attempts to employ quantitative data to explain EU tactics have concluded that there is no common Europeanization logic behind the EU’s choice of democracy promotion instruments, and that these vary with member states’ differing bilateral relations with recipient countries.25 The supposed self-regarding security rationale behind supporting democratic reform was not fully followed through in the MENA region prior to 2010. Much EU rhetoric insisted that backing political liberalization was the best means of quelling radicalization and dampening conflict in other parts of the world, as well as of guaranteeing peaceable relations between nation states and across cultures. In practice, support for democracy was not the central driving force of the EU’s security vision, but filled the spaces left by other strategic policies. The EU’s commitment to supporting democracy as part of its overarching security policies was passively aspirational rather than operationally constitutive of those strategies.26 Perhaps the most commonly heard opinion was that Euro-Mediterranean relations were dominated by a

22  A. Hyde-Price, European Security in the Twenty-first Century:  The Challenge of Multipolarity (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 112 and 180. 23  R. Youngs, The EU’s Role in Global Politics:  A  Retreat from Liberal Internationalism (London: Routledge, 2010). 24  S. Rosato, ‘Europe’s troubles:  power politics and the state of the European project’, International Security, 35/4, 2011: 45–86. 25   P. Kotzian, M. Knodt, and S. Urdze, ‘Instruments of the EU’s external democracy promotion’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 49/5, 2011: 995–1018. 26  R. Youngs, Security through democracy? Between aspiration and pretence, Fride working paper, 2010.

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neo-liberal economic philosophy moulded to European interests rather than genuine Arab needs. So, what of this script in the wake of the Arab revolts? In substantiation of this analytical narrative we might expect to see a form of power politics both reloaded and recast. In response to regime change in the MENA region, realism would propel a belated scramble on the part of European governments to ‘side with history’. While we would expect support for democracy to be forthcoming, it would be carefully calibrated to member states’ immediate security concerns. Policy initiatives would remain under member states’ tutelage, rather than control surrendered to EU initiatives based on integrative governance. Reform support might in many places remain superficial and opportunistic. Joint EU initiatives might be such as to reflect the power and interests of some member states, not normative convergence or cooperative bargaining.27 Analytically, the kind of framework deployed by English school theorists would resonate: the notion of states still being prime actors, in a context of evolving norms shared between them.28 Crucially, the geostrategic framework would expect external support for political change to be pitched at very different levels between Arab states: less friendly and unsalvageable regimes are likely to be more readily abandoned, stalwart allies protected, or at least treated more leniently. It is this kind of variation in EU policies in accordance with domestic political differences that suggests a qualification to the external governance framework.29 Where power politics predominate, we would above all expect to see European governments perusing the variation in reform-paths adopted by different Arab regimes since 2010 and carefully calculating how much and what type of reform to back in each case. There would be some support for reforms, but alongside the retention of alliance-building and stability-oriented security thinking, and even actions actively trying to limit the extent of reform against domestic popular will. Some analysts certainly predicted that new diversity and security uncertainty in the region would push the EU away from efforts to create a deeply integrated political space based on the notion of shared interests, and rather seek cooperation on a more pragmatic and instrumental basis.30 In methodological terms, EU policy choices would then be more of a dependent than independent variable, conditioned by domestic

27   A. Menon, ‘Security: a sceptical response to normative multilateralism’, in D. Thomas (ed.), Making EU Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 28   For a summary of which, see A. Hurrell, On Global Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 29  R. Youngs, ‘Democracy as external governance?’, Journal of European Public Policy, 16/6, 2009: 895–915. 30   N. Tocci, State (un)sustainability in the southern Mediterranean and scenarios to 2030: the EU’s response, MEDPRO Policy paper no. 1, August 2011, , p. 7.

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Five Analytical Narratives

variations within the Arab world more than they condition those same internal trends.31 A more radical slant within this same focus on self-interest is the perspective offered by critical theorists on democracy support. Gramscian accounts predict a degree and form of support for reforms that dovetails with economic self-interest. To maximize commercial interests, Western governments are said to support an unduly limited or liberal form of democracy, which serves to calm labour discontent without allowing fundamental market tenets to be questioned. Some critical thinkers insist that however much the EU stresses its concern for social democracy, justice, and reducing inequality, the democratic reform rhetoric is little more than a palatable dressing for pernicious neo-liberalism.32 At a sectoral level, for example, rule of law approaches through ENP instruments have been seen as unduly tailored towards EU interests.33 The challenge here is to chart whether, in response to the Arab revolts, the EU sought to foist a narrow liberal form of democracy that precluded locally driven reform rooted in traditional institutional forms. From this critical perspective, even governments’ talk of listening to distinctive forms of democracy was not a genuine pluralism but one that still sought to fit the non-European world into a European frame of reference.34 Does this critical perspective on democracy support help explain the EU’s post-2010 response to the Arab revolts? As change gathered pace, did the EU seek to mould it to its own very instrumental set of commercial interests in a way that distorted the political forms that emerged?

De-Europeanized Governance A fifth and final scenario stresses the decline in EU influence across North Africa and the Middle East. A governance pattern often observed in the past was that of a hub-and-spokes structure between individual Arab states and the European Union. The assumption has often been that many individual Arab states see the EU as their main external reference point and that they have prioritized this bilateral relation rather than ties with other Middle Eastern countries. This tallied with the implied logic of the concept of a ‘European neighbourhood’, a single EU hub linked by spokes to individual states around

31   F. Schimmelfennig, ‘How substantial is substance?’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 16/4, 2011. 32  M. Kurki, How the EU can adopt a new type of democracy support, Fride working paper, 2012. . 33  N. Wichmann, Rule of Law Promotion in the European Neighbourhood Policy (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010). 34   S. Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism (London: Zed, 2010).

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its periphery. Of course, in some cases US influence was pre-eminent, but Europe was generally seen as a key external interlocutor. Middle Eastern specialists invariably lamented the networks of structural dependencies left in place by departing colonial powers, suggesting that these were potent enough to compromise the effective exercise of sovereign power across the Arab world.35 Debates over European decline invite a consideration of how far this picture of supposed domination retains any validity. Of course, many accounts now make the familiar assumption that a post-Western global order is taking shape. We might expect this overarching restructuring of the international system to have had a concrete impact in the new Middle East. Instead of any revival of Euro-Mediterranean governance or stronger European civil society engagement, was the most notable trend after the 2010 revolts in fact that of diminishing EU presence in the Middle East? In some measure a scenario of de-Europeanized governance represents the inverse of the external governance model. Instead of measuring how far the MENA region incrementally aligned itself with EU rules and norms, the key trend would be the region’s turn towards non-Western outside powers. In the Middle East, the erstwhile focus on ‘compliance’—that has given the study of EU external policy an aura of public policy analysis—would be seen as increasingly outdated and incongruous against this shifting geopolitical backdrop. From 2010, the financial crisis certainly accelerated the general shift in power away from Europe. The euro crisis drastically undercut the EU’s international influence. Other powers repeatedly taunted that the EU could hardly hope to lay down strictures about good economic management when its own finances were in such a desperate condition. With budget cuts biting deep, European defence expenditure was cut and a majority of states also reduced development budgets. The crisis left some EU member states as recipients of IMF loans, a bitter irony not lost on countries in other regions of the world that suffered the organization’s structural adjustment requirements for many years.36 More positively for Europe, it might be asked whether political openings in the Middle East helped reverse the tilt towards the likes of China and put the purveyors of authoritarianism on the back foot. Even if this is the case, it might still be important to recognize that the field of democracy support is no longer quite so exclusively a Western one. Increasing attention has been paid to a set of non-Western ‘rising’ democracies’ potential as supporters of

35  R. Hinnebusch, The International Politics of the Middle East (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2004). 36   R. Youngs, The Uncertain Legacy of Crisis: European Foreign Policy Faces the Future (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2014).

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political reform. Countries such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa, South Korea, and Taiwan have developed a series of policies that they argue offer more effective support for political reform than Western powers. These countries see their own more recent transitions to democracy as having greater resonance in the developing world than the historical experiences of Europe or the US. They invariably reject what they see as the ‘interventionist’ ethos of Western democracy promotion. Instead, they argue that their distinctive initiatives are more welcome around the world, working more subtly behind the scenes, funding training and capacity-building programmes, and sponsoring exchanges based on their own reform experiences. Even if many view these claims with a degree of scepticism, it is widely agreed that democracy support now needs to be analysed from a more global rather than Western perspective.37

An Eclectic Model These five frameworks, as summarized in Table 2.1, are not mutually exclusive. The pertinent challenge is to ascertain the balance between them and determine which of the narratives represents the most notable leading edge Table 2.1  Summary of five governance models Governance model

Defining feature, differentia specifica

Expected policy outcomes, post-Arab spring

Euro-Med governance

Shared polity with joint decision-making Export of EU’s own rules

More inclusive Euro-Med polity and shared problem-solving between European and Arab states and EU institutions as MENA states reform. EU attempts to influence reforms in the south through more effort to export its rules and regulations. Increased uptake of these rules by Arab states. Deeper civic linkages and support as leading edge of European responses.

Exported governance Cosmopolitan governance New realpolitik

De-Europeanized governance

Non-state actors’ views and interests shape agenda Geostrategic calculation

Variation in reform support, calibrated by governments to perceived changes to strategic interests engendered by Arab spring. EU influence in decline Arab states seek out non-EU support and relative to other partnerships. EU crafts its responses to role of other powers powers and cooperates more with the latter.

37   T. Carothers and R. Youngs, Looking for help: will rising democracies become supporters of international democracy? Carnegie Endowment for International Democracy working paper, July 2011.

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in EU policy responses. The analytical narratives can succinctly be phrased as competing hypotheses to guide the examination of post-revolts European policies, namely: – that the Arab spring opened the way towards a genuinely shared decision-making and cooperative security community in Euro-Mediterranean relations; – that the Arab spring reinvigorated the ‘external governance’ dimension of European policy, encouraging the EU more assertively to export its own rules and Arab states more enthusiastically to upload those norms; – that the Arab spring tilted EU policy towards support for civil society linkages, commensurate with the participatory nature of reform processes in the MENA region; – that the Arab spring led to European governments tightening control over policy responses and more carefully calibrating their support for reform to a heightened set of geostrategic concerns; – that the Arab spring combined with the Eurozone crisis weakened European influence in the MENA region and boosted the profile of competing powers. The empirical chapters that follow reveal a mixed set of trends. No single analytical narrative emerges as clearly pre-eminent from the evolution of EU policies since 2010. This is demonstrated in relation to EU support for political reform processes; the limits to such pro-democracy commitments; the EU’s pursuit of economic interests; evolving approaches to political Islam and European counter-terrorist strategies; EU involvement in violent conflict in Libya and Syria; and the way in which the Arab spring has affected EU policy towards the Israel–Palestine conflict. The book finds at least some evidence for all five narratives, but a compellingly overriding case for none. The EU’s response to the Arab spring was not clear cut, either in the degree of support it offered to partial change in the MENA region or the governance mechanisms that accounted for European policy changes. If anything, by early 2014, three years into the Arab spring, the most striking feature was probably the reassertion of a ‘power politics reloaded’ dynamic. The very conceptual ‘messiness’ of the Arab spring was reflected in a similarly uneasy mix of EU policy logics. As the book follows through the different strands of EU strategies, all five analytical narratives will be required to appreciate the complexity of the new Middle East and its sensitive nexus with the international community.

22

3 The Contours of a New Middle East

Before turning to European Union (EU) policies, it is necessary to outline the core features of the new Middle East. After years of apparent atrophy, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region sprung into life after 2010. The repeat cycle of received truths about the Middle East was replaced by multiple layers of fresh debates. Three years on from the Tunisian revolution, the new Middle East was still embryonic. The degree and direction of change remained uncertain. Winners and losers were still to be determined in many instances. The Arab spring elicited enthusiasm and preoccupation in equal measure. Adjustment seemed simultaneously to be for the better and for the worse. This chapter paints the broadest of outlines of how the changes should be interpreted. The purpose is not exhaustively to chronicle every last detail of domestic reform within each Arab state, but rather to set the scene for the book’s subsequent examination of European policies in the region. The chapter highlights the different political reform trajectories that Arab states took. It extracts from these contrasting country-level experiences a series of conceptual observations on the transition-related dynamics of Middle Eastern change. And, finally, the chapter suggests ways in which domestic political change reshuffled the deck of Middle Eastern geopolitics and regional power balances. The combination of reform variance and geopolitical change lays the ground for understanding why each of the five modes of governance outlined in the previous chapter is relevant to explaining post-Arab spring European policy in the Middle East.

Degrees of Reform The Arab awakening engendered wide variation in reform processes between different MENA states. The divergence between reform processes and regime types widened. In some countries, relatively unified opposition cohered to

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oust regimes; in others, a cosmetic process of reform merely took a few modest steps forward; in others, fracture and violence reined. While social protest took on more of a pan-Arab flavour than regimes’ previous, largely hollow talk of Arab unity had ever done,1 at the political level there was less of a regional spillover or domino effect than was witnessed in earlier waves of transition in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Variety increased not just in terms of the division between reformers and non-reformers, but also in the sense that non-reforming states were now less alike: some regimes had to hold back growing protest; others retained a greater degree of stability.2 It remained doubtful that the region was headed towards a singular, distinctive non-Western form of democracy. Compounding the complexity, the whole concept of ‘liberalism’ was invariably confused and conflated with free market economics, anti-religious sentiment, and Western hegemony. Four groups of states can be identified: those where incumbent regimes formally lost power; those where sitting regimes introduced some liberalizing reforms; those where meaningful reform failed to gain purchase; and those where violent conflict ensued against regimes. The latter category of conflict states is dealt with in two separate chapters on Syria and Libya respectively. Here, to set the context for our assessment of EU policies, the main features of the transition, reforming, and non-reforming categories are elucidated.

Regimes Ousted Progress in Tunisia was the most impressive of all states. A broadly partici­ pative process of consultation was quickly set in motion. Many institutions of the ancien régime were dissolved, including the chamber of deputies and the constitutional court; former members of government were banned from running in elections. The army quickly ceded day-to-day responsibility for order to the police. The granting of parity to female candidates in party lists took Tunisia ahead of most established democracies on gender equality. Even here, however, reformers expressed frustrations after President Bin Ali abandoned power. The interim government relied heavily on the use of decrees and appointed supportive regional governors. Economic problems mounted; and tourism and inward investment plummeted. Street protests persisted. Tensions grew between Tunis and the interior, where the protests had origin­ ally started. The security situation at the border with Libya became a major worry, with weapons flooding into Tunisia and giving more credence once again to those arguing that security should trump democracy.

  N. Brown, ‘Hope and change in the Middle East’, Foreign Policy, 18 May 2011.   M. Beck and S. Hüser, Political change in the Middle East: an attempt to analyse the Arab spring, German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg (GIGA) working papers, 2012. 1 2

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The Islamist Ennahda party emerged as the leading force, scoring a commanding victory in elections to the constitutional assembly held in October 2011. Liberals feared that Ennahda would use its control of this assembly for legislative changes. Ennahda formed a coalition administration with two secular parties to govern until the constitutional process was complete. Still, however, secular liberals were increasingly critical of Ennahda’s colonizing of state institutions with their own cadres and their undercutting of judicial independence. The national body set up to oversee freedom of information resigned in July 2012 in protest at the government’s reluctance to advance on this agenda, and the main journalists’ union called a strike in October 2012 against new restrictions on media freedom. More broadly, Tunisia’s unions emerged as the most forcible opponents to the government, charging the latter with reversing areas of political liberalization and often cutting across the development of stronger party activity. The new constitution was delayed, as members of the constituent assembly could not agree on a basic system of government. Opposition parties wanted a stronger president expressly to counterbalance the Ennahda prime minister. Many criticized Ennahda for prioritizing a programme of new laws more than its constitution-writing responsibility. The assassination of a prominent, leftist opposition leader in February 2013 unleashed protests, put the constitution-drafting process on hold, and led to a collapse of the government. Accusations flew that Ennahda had been complicit in the killing, in particular through its cooperation with hard-line Salafists. A  technocratic cabinet was appointed. In September 2013, Prime Minister Ali Larayedh stepped down; bowing to pressure from the opposition, Ennahda called new elections in order to keep a putative National Dialogue alive and all actors engaged in preparing the new constitution. Relations between Islamists and secularists remained factious; debates still raged about the ambivalent balance between universal human rights and Islamist values in the constitution. However, the consensual model of the constitutional assembly seemed to have fared better than other states’ more polarized politics. Politics was, of course, far more dramatic in Egypt, where the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) sought to control and shape the terms of its own retreat after Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. Through 2011 the army enhanced its own executive powers. While it formally retained a commitment to democratization, it piloted the transition in an increasingly opaque fashion. Many concluded that Egypt had suffered a soft coup, the army gaining power in return for pushing Mubarak out. They feared an encroaching ‘Mubarakism without Mubarak’. Over 10,000 people were sent to military tribunals in the months following Mubarak’s toppling. Extra-judicial killings dramatically increased in number. The SCAF seemed keen to extract itself from everyday politics but would not fully subordinate itself to a civilian 25

Europe in the New Middle East

administration. In a complex three-player game between the army, Islamists, and liberals, no single player was able to advance the agenda in their desired direction against the combination of the other two. Mounting frustration with SCAF restrictions and reform delays led to street protests and violent reprisals. As the dust cleared from these, Freedom and Justice (FJP), the political party of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), gained a clear victory in the first round of parliamentary elections. It was followed home by the Salafi al-Nour party in a strong second position. As a result of another bout of protests, presidential elections were brought forward to May 2012. The SCAF had opted for the route of completing a constitution before elections, but now the poll was held before the constitution had been finished, leaving it uncertain what people were actually voting for. However, the elections produced a major breakthrough. After days of high drama, while the SCAF withheld results in an effort to shoehorn in its own candidate, the MB’s Mohamed Morsi was declared victor. The SCAF handed power to the country’s first freely elected and civilian leader. Morsi sacked the senior SCAF leadership and reduced the army’s powers over parliament and the executive. While transition was back on track, divisions ran deep. The SCAF had suspended parliament before the elections; now there was the question of when new parliamentary polls would be held and whether the MB would regain its majority. The former regime personnel of the ‘deep state’ remained in place, deliberating on how far to accept the remit of the new president. Morsi appointed a largely technocratic government, with few party militants. One expert labelled the new Egypt an ‘officers’ republic’, as senior army officials in practice retained ‘guardianship’ over the deep state and economy as they had done under Mubarak.3 In a battle with these forces, Morsi availed himself of draconian, centralized powers. Liberals walked out of constitutional talks as religious clauses were discussed; ironically it was now the liberals who were not fully engaged in the democratic process. Morsi gave himself sweeping new powers over judicial review at the end of 2012. The constitution was then finalized in a matter of days and put quickly to the vote. The document centralized presidential powers and protected the army’s position. Liberals opposed the document, and polarization deepened after its approval. The MB insisted it would accept the full range of citizenship and minority rights; doubts remained among liberals that it would indeed do so in practice. The National Salvation Front formed in November 2012 to coalesce opposition forces; it decided to boycott parliamentary elections. Morsi initiated a national dialogue to bring the constitution’s opponents back on board through concessions. However, 3  Y. Sayigh, Above the state: the officers’ republic in Egypt, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace working paper, August 2012.

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The Contours of a New Middle East

after further lethal protests in early 2013, Morsi moved closer to the army, to the chagrin of protestors, who were now even less willing to accept the new constitution. Noted experts saw Egypt’s danger not so much in Islamist illiberalism as in a familiar ‘dominant party over-reach’ that had blighted transitions around the world.4 Indeed, in a dramatic turn around of alliances, it was the popular outrage at Morsi’s appropriation of new powers that pushed the army to oust the president and reassume control of the government in July 2013—a move that provided the most potent symbol of how far the Arab spring had struggled to meet initial expectations. Liberals were now strikingly supportive of the military intervention. The coup was the result of strong, democratic checks and balances not having been created prior to elections and the adoption of a new constitution. Salafists emerged as key players as they distanced themselves from the MB and engaged with the army. During the autumn of 2013 the army-controlled interim government gained in popularity, gradually tightened political space, and pushed the MB once more to the margins, using even more repressive violence than during the Mubarak years. Liberals in the interim cabinet began more strongly to criticize draconian security provisions and new laws restricting both the right of assembly and civil society support. The new constitution introduced at the end of 2013 gave increased powers to the army and elements of the judiciary that supported the coup, but reduced the role of parliament. Conversely, it removed restrictions on personal status rights introduced by the MB in the 2012 constitution and enhanced human and especially gender rights protection. It also banned religion-based political activity, to the detriment even of the Salafists who supported the military’s removal of Morsi. The document was approved in a referendum on 14 January. While elections were held in May 2014, they were not free and handed victory to army candidate General al-Sisi. Many observers feared a re-emergent spirit of authoritarianism had quashed the democratic revolution. While the new constitution contained formal advances in rights, critics noted that in practice the state was by now using less restrained repression. It remained uncertain whether Egypt was witnessing a reconstitution of the old authoritarianism or the painful embedding of a semi-competitive polity. Prominent human rights activists were arrested in December 2013. There was an increase in violent attacks, attributed to jihadists. Yemen was the other state in which the long-time authoritarian leader was ejected from power by the momentum of popular protests. Transition 4   T. Carothers and N. Brown, The real danger for Egyptian democracy, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace policy brief, 2010.

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here was also messy and partial. After President Saleh agreed to step down, a national unity government was sworn in in December 2011. Elections in February 2012 confirmed the consensus candidate Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi. A national dialogue conference then deliberated on detailed reform options; new fully competitive elections were slated for 2014. As 2012 progressed unrest gradually returned. Saleh’s family still wielded much power and frustrated deeper reform; the family retained control of the security forces and the long-time ruling party remained dominant in the parliament. Frustration rose especially among southern secessionists and youth movements, who complained that their voices were being excluded from the national dialogue. Yemen’s powerful tribes were unwilling to give up powers and autonomy to a national state apparatus. Two sources of instability persisted: southern separatists, still repressed by the north; and northern Shia Houthi rebels, widely perceived to be backed by Iran. It was not clear whether northern and southern rebels could unite to place greater pressure on a new administration still lacking in full democratic credentials. Yet the inclusive national dialogue, which successfully concluded in early 2014, attempted to deal with many clashing demands from southern secular secessionists, Islamists, and tribal leaders.

Modest, Incremental Reform In other countries, regimes held on to office, while committing to political liberalization. In Morocco, King Mohammed VI moved skilfully to introduce a package of constitutional reforms sufficient to head off large-scale protests. The changes limited the powers of the king. Most notably, they required him to select the prime minister from the largest party. While the new constitution offered important gains in democratic freedoms, serious limitations were apparent. The document was drawn up by experts appointed by the king. The fact that the constitution moved the king from being ‘sacred’ to ‘inviolable’ did not seem to embody a major diminution of his own sense of control over major political decisions. The king would still overrule the elected government on any decision he deemed to be ‘strategic’.5 He remained in charge of foreign policy and the security forces. The reforms did little to placate the extra-parliamentary opposition of the February 20 and the Islamist Justice and Charity movements. The regime increased repression against protestors. While Morocco presented itself as a successful reformer, on some issues it scored worse than other Arab states. The country’s social indicators were especially bad. The monarchy’s 5  M.  Ottaway, The new Moroccan constitution:  real change or more of the same?, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace working paper, June 2011.

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extensive control over the economy was increasingly a source of criticism. Economic modernization dynamics were not as powerful as in Tunisia or Egypt. The regime tightened its control over television broadcasts and the written media. Freedom of the press was decimated; press freedom scores were now worse than under Hassan II. Large numbers of protests were taking place every week by the end of 2011. Middle-class discontent was gathering steam. An opposition slogan insisted that the new reforms offered ‘better conditions of servitude, [but not] freedom from servitude’.6 The Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD) emerged victorious from elections in November 2011. Turnout was extremely low, reflecting apathy over the extent of reform. The king was obliged to appoint PJD leader Abdelillah Benkirane as prime minister. But the PJD itself did not seek farreaching reform, but rather a place within the status quo. The PJD pushed to reduce corruption; the palace pushed back to ensure this did not touch those close to its inner core. Voters were still deprived of real ideological choice between comprehensive and competing party manifestos. State control over Western Sahara remained a brake on reform, consuming resources and stifling free debate. Constant, second-order battles ensued with the palace as the government tested the limits of its power relative to the king. The February 20 movement lost support, many said for being overly confrontational: it sought a post-ideological identity, but its resonance in Moroccan politics lost traction. In the autumn of 2013, uncertainty returned to Morocco. The Istiqlal party withdrew from the governing coalition, influenced by events in Egypt, and the palace stepped up its criticism of the PJD. Justice and Charity returned to a more confrontational position, coordinating new protests—this after a period of inactivity following its withdrawal from the February 20 movement, the death of its leader Sheikh Yassine, and a wait-and-see interregnum towards the PJD government. In sum, Morocco hovered between real and cosmetic reform, between stability and underlying dissatisfaction with the system. The new constitution could now be used democratically, but in practice was not. In Jordan, King Abdullah backed a series of constitutional changes in the summer of 2011. These provided for independent electoral monitoring, protected core human rights, increased parliament’s autonomy, and reduced use of security courts. More concrete proposals were brought forward for a new party law to facilitate the establishment of autonomy of political parties. Yet discontent simmered. The long-standing fear among much of the population was of tension between tribal structures and Jordanians of Palestinian

  L. Lalami, ‘The Moroccan exception’, The Nation, 24 August 2011.

6

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descent. Palestinian-led protests increased the nervousness of many ‘east bank’ reformers. Meanwhile, the MB Islamist Action Front (IAF) rejected offers to join the government, arguing that far more profound reforms were required. The proposed reforms kept the king firmly in charge and Palestinians under-represented in the name of stability; Palestinian-origin Jordanians had only 17 seats in the 120-seat parliament, despite counting for nearly 60 per cent of the population. The proposed electoral reform did little to rectify this imbalance. The reforms did not open the way for a competitive party system in which the prime minister and ministers would gain their posts by virtue of winning a majority; they did not promise an elected prime minister. While the tribally oriented parliament was loath to countenance proportional representation for Jordanians of Palestinian origin, in 2011 a group of tribal leaders for the first time spoke out against the king for the slow pace of reform. A well-established pattern of Jordanian politics persisted:  new reforms were announced and then not followed through, blocked by parliament. For the first time, criticism was aimed at the king. The regime placed tighter restrictions on civil society, parties, and the press. In the summer of 2013 it introduced a law restricting internet freedoms. The central bank governor was fired when he sought to prevent a $1.4 billion grant from Saudi Arabia going into a separate fund to be distributed on the basis of political patronage. The king relied increasingly on his intelligence services. He was said to be more wary of reform in part because of a deepening link between the IAF and Hamas. The country’s biggest demonstration to date took place in the autumn of 2012 as the king stalled even further on reforms. Deepening economic recession fomented deeper discontent, even more explicitly aimed at the king himself. The king became more proactive in regional diplomacy in part to divert internal pressures for reform. A distinctive feature of debate in Jordan was that reformers themselves often argued that reform was a question of the king needing to break the logjam.7 In the excitement of the Arab spring, strikingly little attention was paid to Algeria. Here, outward stability masked an increasingly fractious and fragile state. In 2010 there were ten thousand demonstrations in Algeria, barely noticed by the outside world. The regime survived through distribution of hydrocarbon revenues and considerable amounts of Western military aid. In 2011 Algeria’s government increased public expenditure by 25 per cent. There were no mass protests, but localized unrest and rising youth unemployment. The emergency law was lifted, but the security services were then 7   For a detailed account of Jordanian reform, see International Crisis Group, Jordan: weathering the storm or risking reform, ICG report, 2012.

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given increased powers for counter-terrorist operations. The counter-terrorist agenda still dominated and kidnappings remained frequent. The repression of opposition gatherings increased in brutality. President Bouteflika promised constitutional change, but this was overseen and curtailed by the interior ministry. A more restrictive civil society law was introduced. The middle class hesitated. Frustration in Algeria originated more specifically from the poorest sectors of society, unlike in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Students and the press also spoke out against the regime, and a more vibrant political debate took shape. With Algeria run by the shadowy army-centred pouvoir, it was widely agreed that simply getting rid of Bouteflika would mean little. A key variable would be if younger and more reformist officers began to break ranks. The Berber issue complicated the reformist agenda and divided the opposition. The stage-managed victory of the ruling FLN in the May 2012 parliamentary elections was clearly inconsistent with the country’s underlying social dynamics. The fiftieth anniversary of Algeria’s independence in July 2012 was used by the regime to reinforce nationalist sentiment as a defence against reform. Algeria’s defence expenditure rose by a staggering 44 per cent in 2011, with equipment deployed in particular in the Kabyle region to dissuade protest.8 Lebanon enjoyed relatively open political and civic debate but remained a state divided by oligarchic confessional sects. While the Lebanese government formally remained committed to deepening the country’s degree of genuine democracy, in some dimensions political space tightened after 2010, as security agencies clamped down on protests and civil society organizations. Sunni protests against the appointment of a Hezbollah-backed government led by Najib Miqati in 2012 were brutally repressed. Divisions between pro- and anti-Syrian demonstrations militated against the emergence of a unified, bottom-up democracy movement. Each of Lebanon’s three powerblocks—Sunni, Shia, and Christian—continued to take an allotted share of power, without allowing much internal competition within their respective denomination. A prospective 2013 law threatened to make confessional voting even more absolute. Hezbollah’s refusal to cede control over security or accept electoral reform drove Miqati from office in March 2013. Into early 2014, Lebanon remained without a government. Elections were postponed. The ousting of the prime minister left Hezbollah’s de facto power stronger. Without elections or reform of the electoral law, politics now revolved even more strongly around interdenominational wheeling and dealing, within an increasingly fragmented political space. The underlying question was whether broader regional

  C. Spencer, ‘Algeria: out of synch?’, World Politics Review, June 2012.

8

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tensions, especially those emanating from Syria, now rendered Lebanon’s brittle internal settlement untenable.

Resistance to Reform In the Gulf region, authoritarianism remained largely undimmed.9 Saudi Arabia led the counter-revolution, reform impeded by the long-standing trinity of oil rents, loyal security forces, and an Islamist establishment aligned with and not against the regime. The fiercest protests in the Gulf erupted in the two states with least oil, Bahrain and Oman. The Gulf still had to resolve its citizenship issue; second and third generation migrant workers especially from India and Pakistan began to protest and agitate for rights. A  genuinely popular uprising of the masses in the Gulf would be that of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis, who in some cases represented over 90 per cent of the population and had little support on rights questions from the national populations. Another important dynamic was that tribal identities retained a presence on the Arabian peninsula but also evolved into less hierarchical structures. As subsidies failed entirely to quell discontent across the Gulf, regimes had to switch gradually to more draconian repression. Gulf regimes also succeeded in using a fear of Iran as a means to deflect pressure for reform. Gulf leaders talked enthusiastically about North Africa’s Arab spring in part to keep revolts away from the Gulf. Sectarianism weakened the preconditions for reform in the Gulf. Nervous Gulf regimes clamped down hard on MB affiliates, despite the latter having long been loyal. Some Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states removed citizenship rights from opposition members. Qatar was relatively untouched by the Arab spring, although the emir announced that two-thirds of the Shura council would be elected in 2013. A 60 per cent pay rise was given to public sector workers in Qatar to preempt any unrest. The emir’s decision to step down in 2013 and hand power to his son did nothing in itself to increase democratic freedom, although the symbolism of a healthy and popular ruler relinquishing power was significant. Political space contracted particularly in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where hard-line leaders in Abu Dhabi gained ascendancy over relatively more open strands in Dubai. Arrests increased. Elections were held to a Federal National Council, in the absence of any far-reaching reform. The UAE stamped down hard on small-scale initial protests, and civil society was not strong or organized enough to retain any momentum.

9   F. Gause, ‘Why Middle East studies missed the Arab spring: the myth of authoritarian stability’, Foreign Affairs, 90/4, 2011: 81–90.

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Human rights advocacy increased in Saudi Arabia in early 2011. The human rights discourse seemed to gain influence relative to an apparently waning ideological pull of Wahabism. Protestors argued that the often-evoked Saudi ‘tribal democracy’ was now out of touch with modern reality and reduced citizens to supplicants of royal favour. One group of activists announced the creation of the kingdom’s first political party; the regime gradually arrested prominent activists and the founders of the party. Protests fizzled out, obstructed by the security services. A clampdown on Saudi Shias followed, justified as a reaction to the revolts in Bahrain. Shia communities became far more actively organized in protest against the regime, although Sunni groups recoiled from allying in a common pro-democracy front.10 A $97 billion package aimed subsidies and benefits at the sectors engaged in protest, while also creating 60,000 new security posts; 2012 saw a record budget surplus thanks to rising oil prices. Delayed municipal elections took place with no advances in free political competition, and with women still excluded. Crucially, the most powerful sectors of the clerical establishment decided not to break ranks with the regime.11 Wahabi clerics shored up the regime against protests—the very opposite of the MB role elsewhere in the region. The hope in Saudi Arabia lay in the succession process: once the line of passing power from brother to brother ended, there would be fighting between different branches of the al-Saud family over which would take the throne, offering a potential opening for reform. However, hard-liner Prince Salman moved up the chain to be next in line for the throne, after the death of the two more reformist princes ahead of him in the succession. Saudi Arabia’s unemployment rate rose to an estimated 20 per cent, with 3 million out of 18 million citizens living in poverty. Remarkably, Saudi Arabia was set to become an oil importer within 25 years, potentially undoing the whole rentier foundations upon which political power rested.12 To maintain the level of new subsidies, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf regimes now needed extremely high oil prices well into the future. Bahrain was the one Gulf state where mass protests broke out and posed a serious challenge to the regime. These protests initially involved both Sunni and Shia. They then assumed a sectarian character, the majority Shia calling for the minority Sunni autocracy to be overthrown. Activists insisted the problem was not minority rule but the Al-Khalifa monopoly; Sunnis also signed reform petitions. Shia leaders accepted the need for constitutional guarantees for the Sunni minority. Saudi and UAE tanks rolled in to help quash the

10   T. Mathiesen, ‘A Saudi spring? The Shi’a protest movement in the Eastern Province 2011– 2012’, Middle East Journal, 66/4, 2012. 11   S. Lacroix, ‘Is Saudi Arabia immune?’, Journal of Democracy, 22/4, 2011: 48–59. 12   E. Farkhro, ‘The divided kingdom’, Sada Journal, 8 March 2012.

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protests. Many of those arrested were tortured. The government successfully mobilized the Sunni community. Thousands of protestors were subsequently dismissed from their jobs in government and government-owned companies. The regime convened a National Dialogue, but the Shia Al Wefaq soon pulled out, leaving the process bereft of any genuine reform potential. By 2014 the Dialogue was alive but still seeking to agree on points of procedure, and street protests rumbled on. Kuwait already enjoyed a lively parliament that often challenged the prime minister. Parliament became more active but could only veto government actions, leading to frequent suspensions of the legislature. In March 2011 demonstrations called for the prime minister to step aside because of incompetence; remarkably, the regime bowed to this pressure. After months of unrest, in December the emir disbanded parliament. Popular pressure led to early elections in February 2012; more seats went to the Hadas (MB) and Salafi parties, fewer to liberals and none to women. The new parliament was even more critical of the government. The government moved on corruption issues, but still refused to open up key ministerial posts to candidates from outside the ruling family. In June 2012 the emir suspended the new parliament. After a long stand-off that paralysed much decision-making and ended in an opposition boycott of elections, by 2013 Kuwait had a parliament without meaningful opposition forces. The court then dissolved the parliament in mid-2013, requiring new elections to be held once more. A new opposition coalition formed, promising to intensify criticism of the regime; however, the opposition remained divided, with many groups fretting at the rise of the MB. Criticism of the emir remained a red line; opposition parties were not mass movements; and restrictions on the media were tightened. Reforms did not advance in either Iran or Iraq on the back of the Arab spring. Indeed, Iraq moved back towards soft dictatorship and was on the verge of violent conflict. In the wake of US troop withdrawals, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki centralized power. The Shia majority leader made a power grab against rival Sunni and secular leaders, and retained his position through sectarian militia forces. Protests inspired by events in Egypt and Tunisia were met with a combination of repression and co-opting subsidies. Growing frustration among Sunnis drove a resurgence of sectarian polarization. Iraq’s central state institutions fractured ominously, sectarianism deepened across all social levels, and Sunni groups threatened a return to violent insurgency. Outside the Arab world, the Iranian regime instigated an incremental crackdown following protests inspired by the so-called Green Movement in 2009. Unnerved by this unrest and the Arab spring, it arrested the most prominent opposition leaders, broke up scores of demonstrations, tightened laws around NGOs, harassed several television stations and periodicals, blocked numerous 34

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websites, restricted the activities of religious and ethnic minorities, increased control over universities, and removed dozens of independent-minded lawyers. The clerical elite also moved to constrain President Ahmedinejad and his supporters, in an increasingly bitter feud between Iran’s two branches of government. Ironically, while the Green Movement was widely seen as a harbinger of the Arab protests, it struggled itself to retain any visibility in the face of this onslaught of regime repression. The victory of moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani in the June 2013 elections unexpectedly opened the possibility for more top-down reforms, although very much within the institutional parameters of the existing system. Ironically, after the potency of the Green Movement in 2009, when change came in 2013 it was less the result of a bottom-up tide of pressure than of an elite-generated opening of space. Iran experts pointed out that Rouhani remained a regime loyalist. Most state institutions remained in the hands of those appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. The president took a number of modest, reform-oriented steps, promising to introduce a charter of citizens’ rights, improve the position of women in Iranian society, boost media rights, and scale back the power of the secret services. Several prominent political prisoners were released. For a short time, the government lifted filters on social networking sites. Many Green reformers slowly re-entered the public sphere, speaking out in the press for the first time since 2009. However, Rouhani’s aim was to restore ‘mutual trust’ between the people and clergy, not to eclipse the latter. His vision was one of more practical technocracy rather than competitive politics as such. Some observed that Khamenei guided the elections towards Rouhani’s victory precisely because the latter was more of a regime insider than was Ahmedinejad. Reformists were largely passed over particularly for key cabinet posts. Talk of ‘deep opposition’ from reformers was counterbalanced by genuinely widespread concern over the Egyptian and Syrian scenarios of highly confrontational tactics engendering a violent backlash from the regime. Low-level protests and discontent among both Kurdish and Turkish/Azeri communities simmered. By early 2014, reform was back on the agenda in Iran, but in an extremely tentative manner.

Salient Features From these differentiated trajectories of reform, a number of conceptual observations can be drawn about how to explain and describe reform. These relate to the role of underlying structural change, economic reform, new forms of political agency, the durability of partial reform, and militaries’ different roles. It is this constellation of considerations that informs an 35

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assessment of the role played by international factors—the key variable to be explored as this book unfolds. A first question that arose was how to explain the awakening of Arab democratic movements. Just how far the academic debate had tilted against an expectation of democratic reform was shown by the fact that even the most brilliant political scientists were focused, as the protests exploded, on explaining the unlikelihood of reform. In hindsight, structural predictors of change could be identified. The preconditions for instability were known to exist, but analysts missed the trigger provided by approaching successions. Demographers had identified impending sociological change due to falling birth rates. Literacy rates had increased, while employment rates of this better educated young generation had fallen. Olivier Roy pointed out that change rested on deep-rooted sociological change, flowing from a fracturing of patriarchy, individualization, and loss of deference.13 In some states, a degree of political opening followed by a closing of this space was the sequencing that stirred anger against regimes. In Egypt and other states, economic but also political opening raised expectations, which compounded citizens’ frustration when such liberalization was reversed. In Tunisia, several years of growth were followed by a slump that left 50 per cent of graduates and 15 per cent of the total workforce jobless. In Egypt, several years of double-digit growth were followed by inflation, food price hikes, and subsidy removals. By 2010 two-thirds of Egyptians were living below the poverty line.14 It was widely felt prior to 2010 that economic liberalization had harmed the region. Many experts feared that economic opening militated against political opening, rather than acting as its precursor. The experience after 2010 suggested that the relationship between economic and political reform was not easy to read and varied between states. Egypt and Tunisia were the two countries where economic reforms had progressed furthest, giving some credence to the modernization logic. In some measure, the spill­ over to political reform occurred because economic liberalization had been badly implemented, not because it was a resounding success. The fact that privatization contracts went to political cronies angered large parts of the business community and drove them into the opposition camp.15 Incipient market reform raised expectations that were frustrated by regime nepotism. Economic reform introduced both a negative and positive logic: on the one hand, it deepened pockets of absolute poverty, driving the working class   O. Roy, ‘The transformation of the Arab world’, Journal of Democracy, 2012: 8.  E. Laipson (ed.), Seismic shift: understanding change in the Middle East, Washington, DC, Stimson Center, May 2011. 15   O. Dahi, ‘Understanding the political economy of the Arab revolts’, Middle East Report, Issue 259, 2011. 13 14

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to protest; on the other hand, it turned the more successful middle class towards non-material, political demands. Some of the countries that resisted economic opening most resolutely, such as Algeria, were those where regimes succeeded in preventing any decentralization of economic and political power. Some experts suggested that Gulf economies had undertaken significant enough diversification for new economic actors to have emerged, in a way that raised serious questions about the longevity of narrow rentier dynamics and that helped account for growing social discontent.16 In general, however, three years into the Arab spring the middle classes appeared too weak overall to act as democracy´s midwife to the same extent as in previous waves of transition; economic power was not yet sufficiently dispersed to drag political liberalization in its wake. Alternatively, there was also evidence for more social agency-based explan­ ations. In general, the Arab spring brought the analytical focus back to social mobilization, underplayed in democratization theories that more traditionally sought explanations in elite agency, class alliances, regime fractures, and structural conditions. In fact, the broader study of transitions also began to correct the elite and pact focus of work on democratization’s third wave and come to stress mass mobilization and new communication technology.17 Some argued that a key factor in the MENA region was coalition-building between leftists, nationalists, and Islamists attempted from the mid-2000s. While based on fragile, expedient dialogues rather than deep-rooted alliances, these efforts had begun to galvanize a confidence that regimes could no longer survive through divide and rule. They indicated that Islamists had accepted mainstream politics, while leftists and nationalists had accepted the essentially religious nature of Arab societies.18 In Egypt, a turning point was when even the Nasserists and Salafis joined the democrats. The shift in focus towards agency and away from structural theories became even more pronounced in light of the youth and other protests that emerged from these new alliances. Analysts had become obsessed with Islamists and thus missed this broader and younger mobilization. Of course, the role of new social media was seen as key to explaining the democratic breakthroughs, and why standard democratization frameworks, with their focus on organized civil society and the state, missed the awakening.19 The lead role was played not by organized civil society but ‘social 16 . G. Luciani (ed.), Resources Blessed:  Diversification and the Gulf Development Model (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2012). 17   K. Stoner and M. McFaul (eds.), Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 18   Arab Reform Initiative, What can we learn from coalition-building experiences?, ARI Paper 1, February 2011. 19   M. Pace and F. Cavatorta, ‘The Arab uprisings in theoretical perspective—an introduction’, Mediterranean Politics, 17/2, 2012: 125–38, p. 130.

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non-movements’, passive forms of non-obedience and oppositions that coalesced into protests.20 Some analysts interpreted this as a challenge to Western, liberal forms of civil society. However, initial celebrations that the Arab spring heralded a qualitatively new type of political process soon looked premature. Information communications technology (ICT) undoubtedly played a hugely important role in mobilizing protestors. But it became clear that ICT also helped regimes keep tabs on democratic protestors. Cyber-pessimism took root. The Moroccan palace flooded Facebook and Twitter with spoiler messages to disrupt the opposition movement. Even in Egypt, the archetype of the Facebook revolution, only a small percentage of the population was connected. Events subsequently suggested that democrats still needed traditional political agency. What helped in Cairo was that the Egyptian government’s decision to shut down the internet brought out many more protestors. Al Jazeera ultimately had more of an impact than Facebook: the Middle East had the lowest internet penetration of any region in the world, but its highest satellite usage. There was no internet use in Yemen and yet protests erupted there, rather than in the GCC states which were the most connected parts of the region. ICT use did not prevent youth from being squeezed out of post-transition scenarios, and many protestors remained strongly anti-politics. One view was that satellite channels were increasingly used as state tools by their respective host country regimes, offsetting the influence of social media networks. It was argued that the concept of critical and engaged democratic citizenship was still lacking across the region and that ongoing reforms to the education system still tended to limit rather than promote such a concept.21 Civic activists themselves admitted that revolutionary movements had no ideology and no centre; while this was an advantage in the moment of fervent uprising it later became a problem. The lack of unified leadership among the leading activists helped Islamists take power. The same organizational techniques that helped resist regimes arguably became a burden. Many groups found it difficult to move on to clarifying what ‘dignity’—the revolts’ mobilizing leitmotif—required in terms of concrete political and social reforms. Little attention was paid to political party-building compared to similar trajectories in other regions, because of the heavy focus on broader social movements and dynamics of protest. In most states parliaments remained weak in part because they were bypassed by informal politics.22 In sum, ICT could

20   A. Bayat, ‘Arab revolutions and the study of Middle Eastern societies’, International Journal of the Middle East, 43/3, 2011. 21   M. Faour and M. Muasher, Education for citizenship in the Arab world, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace working paper, October 2011. 22  E. Burke, Parliamentary reform after the Arab spring, Fride policy brief, 2012.

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best be seen as value neutral: its impact depended upon who used it most effectively and innovatively. The drama of the Arab revolutions demonstrated that democratization was driven in part by psychological factors, as actors switched sides when the weight of opinion snowballed in favour of protest. They demonstrated how precarious autocrats’ legitimacy often is, as many protests morphed seamlessly from relatively prosaic complaints about job losses into calls for wholesale regime change. Chance played its part. In Cairo protests initially called for reforms not regime change, but Mubarak’s stubborn reaction increased the stakes and engendered more far-reaching demands. In sum, it was the combination of factors that counted: the youth bulge; economic crisis and unemployment; the 50 per cent increase in food prices in 2011; the removal of welfare entitlements; cronyism; the shift in loyalties from more independent middle classes; information communication technologies; tactical regime errors; and individual trigger events.23 In a second phase of debate, the analytical attention shifted to the factors both helping and hindering a move from generalized social protest to consolidated institutional reform. A series of questions came to dominate political debate. There was general agreement that even the initial revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt amounted only to partial regime collapse.24 The speed of change was crucial. The region needed to avoid the shock treatment applied to Russia in the early 1990s; but too slow a transition would allow anti-reform elements time to regroup and complicate consolidation.25 Other more specific conundrums presented themselves. Of vital importance were the interrelated questions of partial reform and monarchical regimes. Prior to 2011, it was often noted that reform had progressed further in some of the region’s monarchies than in its republics. Monarchs, observers concurred, enjoyed a store of legitimacy and were able to introduce reforms while retaining their own position, unlike leaders in secular republics. This conclusion now looked incomplete. To some extent, events confirmed an old comparison from transitology, that monarchies accord more to the ‘pacted’ model of change, republics to ‘rupture’. Compare events in Morocco, Jordan, and the Gulf states to those in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Yet, while monarchies may have had more scope for pacted reform, they declined fully to take that opportunity. Republics reached their break point;

23   P. Aarts et al., From Resilience to Revolt: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2012); G Joffé, ‘The Arab spring in North Africa: origins and prospects’, The Journal of North African Studies, 16/4, 2011: 507–32. 24   T. Carothers, ‘Think again: Arab democracy’, Foreign Policy, March 2011; M. and D. Ottaway, ‘Of revolutions, regime change, and state collapse in the Arab world’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Commentary, February 2011. 25   P. Salem, ‘Islamist protests in Egypt question fate of Arab spring’, Al-Hayat, 4 August 2011.

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monarchs continued to believe they could stall on deep reform. At the risk of some simplification, it might be said that monarchies went from being in the vanguard of reform to being its laggards. It appeared that monarchies were still based on broader and thus more solid coalitions of support than were Arab republics. The highly circumspect nature of reform in Arab monarchies implied that a long-standing question was still pertinent in the new Middle East: were partially open systems more stable or more susceptible to incremental pressure for further reforms? As noted, prior to 2010 most analysts had reached the conclusion that ‘liberalized autocracies’ had become a stable regime type in themselves, not an interim political arrangement on the road to democracy. The Arab spring reopened debate on this question. All monarchs, from Sultan Qaboos in Oman to Mohammed VI in Morocco, followed the time-tested tactic of deflecting criticism on to their government ministers and away from the royal circle. The degree of social protest was greater now, however. Arguably, it could no longer be stated so categorically that monarchs’ legitimacy would suffice indefinitely to hold off pressure for deeper reform. It may be that rich Gulf monarchs were better able to perpetuate the model than Morocco or Jordan. But the debate over whether partial reform was stabilizing or simply motivated and facilitated agitation for deeper change certainly looked more complex after 2011. Even the richer states suffered from stifling bureaucracy that suffocated job creation; this was a problem that limited reform efforts did little to improve. Related to this, the militaries’ role differed notably between states, due to the different structures of authoritarian power. In Egypt and Tunisia, armed forces enjoyed some autonomy from the regime and backed the protestors; in Syria and Bahrain they were infused with the same sectarian identity as the regime and mostly stayed loyal; in Libya and Yemen there was a split between the general army and leaders’ personal security guard.26 That is, in countries where the military had some degree of professional autonomy, they did not shoot. The regimes that held out longest, with more violence, were those that held firmer political tutelage over the armed forces. Militaries were very different entities across different national contexts: the Tunisian army was very small, functioned at some distance from the regime, and was made up of conscripts who sided with ordinary people; the Egyptian army was overpower­ ing, half a million strong, and accounted for 4 per cent of GDP; in Bahrain the army was sectarian against Shias; the conflict in Libya derived from a powerful paramilitary presidential guard standing against a weak army.27 Algeria remained the country where military politics was most determinant.   Z. Barany, ‘The role of the military’, Journal of Democracy, 22/4, 2011: 24–35.   E. Soler, Security force and Arab revolts, Barcelona, CIDOB Opinion 107, 18 March 2011.

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Here, rivalry among different branches of the security forces might prove the factor that facilitated an eventual opening; conversely, President Bouteflika’s departure could easily strengthen military power rather than ushering in democracy. The core difference was between those security forces that saw themselves as defenders of the nation and those that saw themselves as defenders of a regime. The models of Indonesia and Turkey were influential reference points, to the extent that these allowed armed forces continuing privileges in return for accepting democratic rules of the game. It was against the background of these debates that it was universally agreed that domestic factors were overriding in explaining the Arab spring— both the reach and limits to political change. Indeed, the most common assumption was that the international dimension was now of more negative influence. The earlier democratization literature had come to see international support for democratic norms as part of the sustaining momentum of the third and fourth waves of democratization. In the post-2010 Middle East, democracy was tainted by Western prevarication.28 A common hunch was that the degree of either support or hindrance from international actors was not decisive in either a positive or negative direction. The academic community’s misdirected gaze impacted on how the external dimensions of change were understood. One much-quoted explanation was that authoritarianism fell in central and eastern Europe because of intensive external linkages with and an orientation towards the European Union; external leverage was invariably ineffective in the absence of such deep and multiple linkages, which were seen as lacking in the case of the Middle East.29 It was relatively quickly established that 1989 did not offer a close parallel. In some ways, Eastern European transitions provided a particularly bad comparison: the post-Soviet space included no monarchies or military regimes; the Arab spring had no equivalent of the ‘Moscow factor’. In some ways, the Middle East was more like sub-Saharan Africa, that two decades on from the first post-Cold War stirring of reform contained a mix of consolidated democracies, hybrid regimes, and failed autocratic states. Moreover, non-Western authoritarian states and ‘sovereigntist’ powers were now more powerful than in 1989, meaning that the international context appeared less favourable. Arab states had already implemented some economic liberalization, and protests were in part against the way in which this had been done; this was exactly the opposite to the pressure to move from a statist to market-based economic model that drove reform in eastern Europe.

28  M. Pace and F. Cavatorta, ‘The Arab uprisings in theoretical perspective’, Mediterranean Politics, 17/2, 2012: 129. 29   S. Levitsky and L. Way, ‘International linkages and democratization’, Journal of Democracy, 16/3, 2005: 20–34.

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Strategic Shifts Other scene-setting factors related to geopolitics. The new Middle East was not only reflected through changes within states, but also in shifting regional dynamics. The pattern of alliances and enmities evolved within the broader Middle East. Fragile balances of power were disturbed. Changes in political systems ushered in new regional dynamics. A key question was whether the Middle East shifted from being a stage where great power rivalry was carried out, to being a geostrategic actor in its own right. The geopolitical ramifications remained hard to decipher, but the key actors assumed that alliances would be redrawn and began positioning themselves for various eventualities. While the underlying balance of military power did not shift in any decisive fashion, other changes were potentially far-reaching. More intense power-politics rivalries emerged between the region’s medium-sized powers. Realist views were prominent on the changes. One highly respected expert observed a ‘rupture in the geostrategic equilibrium’ and ‘the return of conflictivity’, especially among ‘trans-border communities’.30 A similar judgement was that ‘a Cold War logic is back because the big powers are back’, this being seen as the dominant logic as powers scrapped over Iran, Syria, and the Gulf.31 New competition emerged between aspirant regional leaders, Turkey and Egypt. The US National Intelligence Council’s 2012 scenario-building exercise predicted that geopolitical tensions in the Middle East would worsen up to 2030.32 Internal divisions within states not only complicated reform efforts, but meant that domestic political changes had influenced regional dynamics and power balances.33 Shlomo Ben Ami even predicted that political change would lead to open conflicts over the redrawing of territorial boundaries across the region.34 Some saw populations pushing their governments to adopt more nationalist and bellicose foreign policy positions. One security concern was that regimes might show more determination to retain WMD programmes to deter attacks in a context of turbulence. One reason for nervousness over Syria’s revolts was the prospect of the regime deploying its chemical weapons capability—a fear tragically made real in the summer of 2013. Other seasoned Middle East watchers felt that conflict

30   L. Ammour, New security challenges in North Africa after the Arab spring, Geneva Centre for Security Policy policy brief, March 2012. 31  S. Casertano, The return of Cold War logic, . 32  National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds (Washington, DC: NIC, 2012), p. 58. 33   M. Asseburg and I. Werenfels, The toppling of Ben Ali: isolated development or first domino?, Berlin, SWP Commentary, February 2011. 34   S. Ben Ami, ‘Arab states of uncertainty’, Project Syndicate, 4 January 2013.

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became more likely as Israel believed Iran to be weakened by the travails of Syrian leader Bashar Assad.35 The conflagration between Israel and Hamas in November 2012 left Hamas emboldened; after forcing Israel to back down from a ground invasion, Hamas’s stock rose against its Palestinian rival Fatah. Other experts argued that the significant change was that the region’s most fundamental cleavages were no longer those related to the Israel–Palestine issue.36 Changes in interstate power balances were overlain, and amplified, by sharper sectarian tension between Sunni and Shia communities. Much focus was on the regional impact of the Syrian conflict, with Sunni-Shia violence increasingly spreading across the border during 2012 and 2013. Sunni radicalization was the product of a fear of Shia pre-eminence. Sunni regimes used the spectre of a new Shia threat as justification for delays to reform. Crucial dilemmas arose from the way that Syria’s conflict compounded tensions inside Lebanon. Recriminations and attacks between Sunni and Shia communities intensified. The initial opposition movement against Bashar Assad began to isolate Hezbollah,37 Hezbollah was the most popular actor in the region after the war with Israel; now it was discredited. Shias felt defensive; many believed Hezbollah’s de facto dominance could not survive a change of regime in Damascus, threatening an unravelling of the precarious balance in domestic Lebanese politics. Sunni Islamists felt emboldened by regional Sunni ascendancy, and saw an opportunity to carve out more separate enclaves in the north of Lebanon and strike a new political settlement that enhanced their standing against Hezbollah. Notwithstanding Prime Minister Miqati’s official policy of ‘disassociation’ between Lebanon and the Syrian conflict, each side was suspected of supplying arms and other material to either opposition or government forces in Syria. The government’s reluctance to press the Assad regime provoked outrage from Sunni regimes across the region.38 In the absence of a strong Lebanese national government, only an uneasy stalemate held the peace between Shia and Sunni forces each fearing for their own fate in a prolonged region-wide conflict.39 Tensions intensified as Hezbollah extended its incursions into Syria in late 2013, helping the Assad regime gain an upper hand

  D. Gardner, ‘Seismic events will shape Middle East’, Financial Times, 27 December 2012.   C. Merlini and O. Roy, ‘Introduction’, in C. Merlini and O. Roy (eds.), Arab Society in Revolt: The West’s Mediterranean Challenge (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012), p. 9. 37   P. Salem, ‘A new balance of power if Syria shifts away from Iran’, The National, 9 December 2011. 38  E. Hokayem, ‘Syria and its neighbours’, Survival, 54/2, 2012:  7–14; J. Barnes-Dacey, Lebanon: containing the spillover from Syria, London, ECFR policy brief, 2012. 39   International Crisis Group, A precarious balancing act: Lebanon and the Syrian conflict, ICG report, November 2012. 35 36

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in the conflict—which in turn left Sunni communities in many parts of the region in a more defensive frame of mind. Many power-shifts revolved around Iran. Iran moved to compensate for the Syrian impasse by forming stronger relations with China, Russia, Central Asia, and Southern Caucasus states. While relations with Turkey became more strained, Turkish influence in the region was still better for Iran than erstwhile US hegemony.40 Iran’s ascendancy in Iraq also had ripple effects. Of course, in 2013 much debate centred on the impact that the election of a moderate president in Iran might have. Beyond the late-2013 historic thaw in relations between Washington and Tehran, and the prospect of a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme, President Rouhani’s impact on the region was unclear. The Iranian regime remained wedded to its ‘Shia alliances’ with Iraq and Syria. President Rouhani indicated some willingness to engage with the international community on the Syria conflict, but Iran still declined to remove its backing from Bashar Assad. New Western engagement with Iran made a regional security framework more necessary: Gulf states were nervous, while Sunni jihadist groups in both Iraq and Syria linked an intensification of their attacks to the new international rapprochement with Iran. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia expressed concerns over rising Shia influence in Iraq. Saudi Arabia became more broadly active and powerful after a number of post-9/11 years on the defensive. For the very reason that it felt threatened by the Arab spring, the country sought a more proactive regional role. It spent billions of dollars in both Oman and Bahrain to fend off protests. In rivalry to the MB, Wahabism was propelled from Saudi Arabia, deepening the network of Salafi movements across the region. Saudi Arabia wanted influence but was also aware of its limits; it consequently pushed Turkey to lead a Sunni bloc. The Saudi regime expressed concern that the West offered too much to Iran as a bargaining chip on the nuclear issue: it sought to cash in its Western alliances to deal more strongly with Iran, including through mobilizing the NATO Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. It protested that it rejected invitations to various BRIC-like forums (referring to the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, and China) in preference for its Western orientation, but that the West did not reciprocate. Its predicament was that it traded more with Asia but depended on the West for its security, as was the case with many states in the reshaped world order. Saudi organizations supported Salafi groups across the region as a means of weakening MB hegemony, but nervously sought to keep such status quo-challenging parties out of the Gulf. Differences also widened within the Gulf. Oman retained studied neutrality; Bahrain effectively became a Saudi protectorate; Abu Dhabi was most

  M. Laruelle, Iran’s regional quagmire, Fride policy brief, 2012.

40

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belligerently combative against Iran. Qatar spent money most aggressively, funding opposition and especially Salafi parties across the region—although the state’s partially new political elite slightly pulled back from such an activist foreign policy in late 2013. Competition between Saudi and Qatar intensified, as they funded different actors across the region. Some GCC states sought a degree of bandwagoning with Iran before 2010; several switched strategies after 2011. The GCC invited Morocco and Jordan to join the grouping partly in an effort to boost a ‘Sunni bloc’ for geostrategic reasons. That offer did not prosper, but talk remained of a common GCC aid fund in the two countries. There was even a degree of rapprochement between GCC states and Israel due to shared concerns over Iran. The main area of tension was between Qatar and the UAE, as the latter pursued measures to contain the international MB movement. Tensions extended to North Africa too. Reflecting internal power considerations, in mid-2012 Morocco pulled back from the UN-led process in Western Sahara, raising the prospect of regional tension. Algeria sided with Iran against Turkey in Syria. By 2013, violence and instability in Mali and across the Sahel region seemed to imply spillover tensions in North Africa; the conflict unleashed by jihadists in northern Mali threatened to draw in the country’s Arab neighbours and extend radical networks across the region’s porous borderlands. Indeed, by early 2014 violence and instability in this area seemed to have become one of the Arab spring’s most tangible offshoots. As a variation on this theme of shifting alliances, some analysts argued that the region’s newly dominant dynamic was the increasing sway of non-Western rising powers. In particular, they saw autocratic regimes such as China and Russia manoeuvring to drive wedges between opponents of reform and Western democracies. Political change in this way opened the region to the broader global rivalry between the West and ‘global authoritarians’. In fact, even new Arab democrats were drawn to China and other non-Western powers by the latter’s challenge to Western dominance.41 An apparently more benign trend was towards regional cooperation. Some suggested that political changes opened up more scope for some kind of cooperative security arrangement in the MENA. The notion of an OSCE equivalent (OSCE being the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) was more widely broached. Dialogue advanced on proposals for a nuclear-free Middle East. With Colonel Qaddafi’s ousting, the prospect of cooperation between Maghreb states became more tenable. The Tunisian

41   D. Brumberg and S. Heydemann, Global authoritarians and the Arab spring: new challenges for US diplomacy, The Changing Security Architecture in the Middle East, Issue 1, United States Institute for Peace, 2013.

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government invested notable effort to reawaken the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU). The first meeting of the AMU at the level of foreign minister officials took place in July 2012, to discuss Mali’s political crisis. Relations between Morocco and Algeria improved slightly, with ministers on both sides even talking of a possible opening of the border between the long-estranged neighbours. Other regional bodies also became more proactive. The Arab League remained beset by myriad shortcomings, but also adopted a higher profile, on the back of Egyptian re-engagement. The influence of the GCC as a group increased. While GCC states worried about the MB exporting revolution (with the exception of Qatar, where the regime’s impregnability led it to see the movement in a more relaxed light), they also hoped initially that the Morsi government would tighten Arab Sunni solidarity against Iran and Assad, and in favour of the Palestinians. A pragmatic evolution was witnessed in Arab states’ foreign policies. One view was that the major shift was that of a common transfer of power from all states to their populations; governments were now pressed by their people to deliver on economic growth in a way that required more pragmatic external policies and less posturing about regional power or anti-Western ‘Islamist foreign policies’.42 The main changes in Egyptian foreign policy were not towards Israel or Iran but a new focus on Africa, the BRICs, and Asia. FJP spokesmen tended to talk in terms of international relations being based on ‘civilizational’ dynamics, but presented a pragmatic line. In sum, diverse trends unfolded; as of early 2014, these left the MENA region without any single, strategic, organizing logic. Power rivalries sharpened and engendered more fractious jostling. However, realist readings risked underplaying the influence of other factors that overlay pure power politics. There was a mix of national, denominational, tribal, political, and ethnic cleavages. Curiously, power politics coexisted with what many in the region saw as a weakening sense of traditional national identity. Sunni–Shia confrontation was preoccupying, but often at least in part manufactured by regimes for their own self-serving goals. Many in the region insisted there was notable ‘contagion’ of reform dynamics across borders and growing contacts between reform movements from different states; this raised genuine hopes for a more cooperative set of regional dynamics. Yet it also remained uncertain whether any tangible cleavage would emerge between democratizing and non-democratizing states; by the beginning of 2014 this was not evident to any significant degree.

42   S. Ülgen, N. Brown, M. Ottaway, and P. Salem, Emerging order in the Middle East, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 2012, p. 11.

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Conclusion This constellation of geopolitical changes and domestic reform processes sets the context within which the EU had to refashion its Middle East policy. The chapter highlights how the EU was faced with the challenge of moulding its policies to a complex variation in domestic change. The notion of a singular Arab spring captured a spread of social protest and political upheaval, but implies a degree of uniformity that did not pertain in practice. The momentum for change rested on powerful combinations of factors; no single lead cause of political liberalization in Arab states could be convincingly identified. The challenge for outside actors was to appreciate that different dynamics led the push for change in different states—and that different factors were responsible for impeding democratization too. The Arab revolts corroborated many insights from previous analytical work on democratic transition; they inevitably involved many novel and updated dimensions too. This reinforced the point that external actors had no uncontested or entirely familiar templates to latch on to. Every region tends to believe its own reform processes to be unique; there was much in the Arab spring that echoed previous waves of change, and much that called for new directions in academic explanation. The chapter also suggests that the challenge for outside powers was not just related to dovetailing policies to domestic changes at the level of individual MENA nation states; it also entailed ascertaining how a more fluid regional geopolitics affected European interests and the potential for EU influence. After the beginning of the Arab revolts, alliances and power balances across the region began to shift. Their resting point remained difficult to predict by the start of 2014. This rendered a reshaping of European strategies more necessary and harder to achieve with success. It is this juxtaposition of reform and geopolitical challenges that the book proceeds to examine.

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4 Prior to the Upheavals

By common consent, the Arab revolts that began in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 took the EU and other international actors by surprise. The EuroMediterranean Partnership (EMP), conceived in 1995, set itself the aim of supporting democratic reform and fashioning a collective security community between Middle Eastern and European states. However, few could seriously claim that EU policies contributed in any direct sense to the protests that erupted during 2011. Indeed, by 2010 the EU’s Mediterranean policy had largely ground to a halt. The EMP’s tenth anniversary summit in 2005 was spurned by all but two Arab leaders. After 2004, the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) changed focus to bilateral action plans with individual Arab states. The superimposition of yet another initiative, a Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) in 2008, merely confused and deflated policy dynamism. The terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, Madrid in 2004, and London in 2005 led governments to reinforce their rhetorical commitment to press political liberalization as a means of attacking the root causes of radicalism. But in practice the policy pendulum gradually swung back to more traditional realpolitik, security cooperation, and defensive counterterrorist strategies. By way of a brief context-setter for the book’s assessment of post-2010 events, this chapter charts how the years preceding the Arab revolts saw the aspired template of shared Euro-Mediterranean governance struggle to gain traction. The model of external governance continued at a technical level in pursuit of specific EU interests, while the vibrancy of cosmopolitan governance plateaued at a disappointingly modest level. In the Arabian peninsula, the EU’s level and type of engagement was even less propitious in assisting reform or institutionalizing new forms of Euro–Arab governance. Many Gulf states gradually turned their attention away from Europe towards rising Asian markets.

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In broader terms, the years leading up to the Arab spring saw the EU’s strategic attention turn away from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The EU began to worry more about its global presence and the need to enhance relations with the rising powers, particularly in Asia. Asia was replete with opportunity; Arab states apparently stagnant. Relatively few investment opportunities had opened up to European investors in the Middle East; the spectre of terrorism linked to the region did not seem quite as pervasive by the end of the century’s first decade; and Russia had emerged as the thorniest challenge for energy security. In consequence, the MENA slipped down the list of EU foreign policy priorities. The EU had indeed been guilty of neglecting Asia’s importance; but it now risked taking its eye off the ball in its own immediate neighbourhood. It chose not to heed the warnings of growing instability in Arab states until it was extremely late in the game.

Containment The essential context for these trends was the dominant European concern with terrorism and radical Islam before 2011. Terrorist attacks and the perceived dangers of radicalization engendered something approaching a panicky, perceived existential crisis for European societies. Not only did governments tighten immigration rules and accept fewer asylum applications, they also introduced new integration programmes aimed at assimilating minorities’ cultural identities.1 Trends within Europe conditioned the nature of foreign policy approaches to counter-terrorism. Three major packages of EU counter-terrorist measures were introduced prior to 2011. These primarily strengthened law enforcement and monitoring measures, and handed the Europol organization new powers. Experts concurred that the focus on internal security trumped longer-term foreign policy deliberation.2 Tightened relations with Middle Eastern security forces suggested that the priority was to use traditional counter-terrorism cooperation to keep radicalism at bay. In the years after 9/11, European governments provided increased amounts of surveillance equipment and armaments to Arab regimes. Priority was accorded to border management; joint surveillance, through a putative European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur); police cooperation; southern commitment to reduce criminal trafficking; the so-called Mieux programme, set up in 2009 to help control sudden crisis-related surges in migratory flows; 1   S. Carrera, ‘Integration of immigrants versus social inclusion: a typology of integration programmes in the EU’, in T. Balzacq and S. Carrera (eds.), Security versus Freedom? A Challenge for Europe’s Future (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 88 and p. 91. 2   F. Turner, The internal-external security nexus: more coherence under Lisbon?, Paris, European Union Institute for Security Studies Occasional Paper 89, 2011.

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and voluntary return arrangements. Migration inflows declined dramatically and asylum acceptance rates tumbled to only 29 per cent.3 In 2010 fewer refugees were resettled in the whole of the EU than in Canada; fifteen times less than in the US.4 In 2005 a chapter on ‘Migration, social integration, justice and security’, was added to the Barcelona process. Entry and exit controls at EU borders were beefed up. Border management was brought into the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. New Rapid Border Interventions Teams were established. The EU’s borders agency, Frontex, was accorded more powers and a huge increase in funds. By 2009, two-thirds of the EU’s overall budget for ‘Freedom, Security and Justice’ was being spent on controlling migration.5 Frontex bludgeoned North African states into accepting new agreements on the return of migrants. For 2007–13, the EU allocated a huge budget of €1.82 billion for border control in the Mediterranean. In May 2009 an Italian– Libyan agreement was signed to facilitate further the return of migrants. Italy cut inflows of migrants from 37,000 in 2008 to 4,500 in 2010.6 The formation of the Algeria-based al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb led member states to tighten measures against migration pressures even further. The reactivated ‘5 plus 5’ initiative focused almost exclusively on a securitized approach to stemming migration. Meetings between defence ministers within this framework became one of the most active of the many cross-Mediterranean fora.7 In the Gulf, the basic orientation towards traditional security cooper­ ation nourished an even more evident, broader strategic realpolitik. In the late 2000s, the UK and France signed arms deals worth well over €10 billion with Gulf states. The British government pressed through a £40 billion deal for British Aerospace to supply Saudi Arabia with Eurofighter jets, despite this being subject to corruption allegations in the UK’s highest fraud court. France offered nuclear technology transfers across the region. It also moved a large military base from Africa to Abu Dhabi and cooperated with Saudi Arabia in drawing up its new security policy. In 2008 Spain agreed military cooperation with the UAE. Between 2000 and 2010 the MENA region received over half of UK arms sales. In 2010 the UK started the Friends of Yemen diplomatic coordination mechanism, which included a development

3   C. Clarke, The EU and migration: a call for action, Centre for European Reform Essay, November 2011, p. 9, p.14, and p. 23. 4   European Commission, Thematic programme ‘Cooperation with third countries in the areas of migration and asylum: 2011–2013 multi-annual strategy paper, Brussels. Figures from p. 25. 5   For figures, see European Communities, General Budget of the European Union for the Fiscal Year 2009, Brussels, p. 23. 6   The Economist, 12 March 2011: 33. 7   M. Collyer, ‘Emigration, immigration, and transit in the Maghreb:  externalization of EU policy?’, in Y. Zoubir and H. Amirah-Fernández (eds.), North Africa: Politics, Region, and the Limits of Transformation (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 161.

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and governance focus but in practice mainly tightened hard security cooperation. A controversial Saudi attack on the northern Houthi rebels in 2009, which caused over 1,000 deaths, was given direct logistical help from the US and France.8 The prominence of counter-terrorist concerns and nervousness over perceived radicalization ensured that direct European engagement with Islamist political movements in North Africa advanced little. Funding from European sources invariably excluded Islamist organizations. Mainstream Islamist parties in North Africa judged the range of EU initiatives in the region to be about containing rather than engaging Islamism. In some cases they spoke more approvingly of the engagement they enjoyed with US political foundations than that achieved with Europeans.9 The EU did little to defend Islamists’ basic political rights, but instead funded programmes designed to train ‘moderate’ imams. Critics saw this as an overly instrumental approach that artificially delinked the religious sphere from the underlying political conditions driving radicalization.

Falling Short This overarching security-dominated panorama was reflected in the specific way in which the EU’s institutional initiatives were implemented in North Africa and the Middle East prior to 2011. Compounding the stultifying impact of the EU’s approaches to security and migration, the policy instruments of the EMP also fell increasingly short of their promised galvanizing depth. The aspiration of creating a zone of joint Euro-Mediterranean governance was reflected in the initial setting up of a quite staggering array of institutionalized cooperation. Some analysts insisted that the EU had made great strides in fostering more transparent and accountable forms of governance at a sectoral level and that this ran with the grain of change in the region, despite the patent deterioration in core political freedoms.10 Diplomatically, however, the degree of pressure exerted on Arab regimes for them to implement either political or economic reforms was tepid, at most. Even where these regimes refused any degree of political liberalization or even became more repressive, the EU often held out the prospect of deeper, relatively unconditional engagement. 8   G. Hill and G. Nonneman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states: elite politics, street protests and regional diplomacy, Chatham House Briefing Paper, 2011, p. 13 and p. 17. 9  M. Emerson and R. Youngs (eds.), Political Islam and the European Neighbourhood Policy, Brussels, Centre for European Policy Studies, 2007. 10   S. Lavenex and F. Schimmelfennig, ‘EU rules beyond EU borders: theorizing external governance in European politics’, Journal of European Public Policy, 16/6, 2011: 791–812.

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The EU not only lacked the political will to apply conditionality, but also remained uncertain how to develop the indicators and benchmarks to determine what types of reform were to be rewarded and with what rewards.11 Overall amounts of European aid in support of modernization remained low. Funding under the European Neighbourhood Partnership Instrument (ENPI) increased incrementally but by the end of the decade still amounted to less than €5 per person in the southern Mediterranean. Up to 2010 the Commission claimed that around 10 per cent of ENPI funding was allocated to democratic governance projects, according to an extremely wide definition of the term. Other than in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, only France and Spain provided non-negligible bilateral aid programmes. By the end of the decade around 15 per cent of total European aid was going to Arab countries, a small increase from 2000. Of member states, only France still allocated significant amounts across the region, with Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Egypt, and Algeria all in its top-ten aid recipients at the end of the decade. Only one or two EMP states appeared in other member states’ top-ten recipients—with the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Egypt, and Morocco the most frequently ranked states. France was biggest donor by a large margin over other member states in North Africa. The US was the biggest donor in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan.12 Even as the Tunisian revolution erupted, the EU was negotiating an advanced status ENP accord with President Ben Ali. Indeed, the Commission praised the ‘impressive achievements’ of the Tunisian government in health, education, and gender equality. The Commission had stopped trying to channel funds directly to Tunisian NGOs because of obstacles imposed by the Tunisian authorities. On a visit to Tunisia in 2008 Nicolas Sarkozy asked gushingly: ‘What other country can boast of having advanced so much in half a century on the road to progress, on the road to tolerance and on the road to reason?’ Most member states declined contact with Tunisian opposition groups and NGOs, and meekly accepted the regime’s appropriation of resources supposedly destined to civil society. Moroccan human rights NGOs consulted by the Commission in 2007 slammed the EU for unquestioningly backing a cosmetic reform process in Morocco.13 Another comprehensive round of consultations concluded that Moroccan reformers (in the administration, parliament, judiciary, and civil

11   R. Del Sarto and T. Schumacher, ‘From Brussels with love: leverage, benchmarking, and the action plans with Jordan and Tunisia in the EU’s democratization policy’, Democratization, 18/4, 2011: 932–55. 12   Figures from the OECD online database, . 13  Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN), Human rights in the EU–Morocco Action Plan under the European Neighbourhood Policy, Brussels, 2007, p. 6.

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society) judged EU pressure for reform to have been virtually inexistent.14 The Commission’s 2008 ENP progress report on Morocco concurred that the action plan had made no positive impact on deepening reform in the country.15 Under an advanced status agreement the EU promised to lock on to and ensure implementation of the Moroccan government’s own reform commitments, in particular in relation to the recommendations of the Moroccan Truth Commission, the Instance Equité et Reconciliation (IER), the National Human Rights Strategy, and the National Equality Strategy. As these reform promises atrophied, so did the effectiveness of EU policy. The EU’s draft 2011–13 cooperation agreement for Libya spoke positively of the country’s ‘direct democracy’. France also enthusiastically engaged with Syria from 2008, welcoming Bashar Assad into the UfM. Algerian elections in April 2009 returned Abdelaziz Bouteflika for a third term with a reported 90 per cent of the vote. Power was increasingly centralized from the national assembly to the president. Control over the media was tightened; three French weekly newspapers were banned on the eve of election day. The EU made no serious effort to prevent the repeal of the term limit; issued only bland reactions to the elections; and offered Algeria increased security co­operation. Algeria itself rejected the EU’s offer of an ENP Action Plan. Critical focus on human rights was even more ineffectual in the Gulf. By mid-2008 several member states were arguing that the EU should dilute its human rights clause in order to help unblock EU–GCC trade and energy cooperation talks. The EU did not pursue formal dialogue with civil society organizations in the Gulf. The Commission dropped attempts at ‘decentralized’, civil society aid programmes in the Gulf after 2002, insisting that these were making no progress and were creating tension with regimes. Most accounts confirmed the finding that the EU tended to aim at fostering the preconditions to democratic change rather than directly to defend core political rights—with only some exceptions in places such as Ukraine and sub-Saharan Africa, but not in the Middle East.16 On the eve of the Arab spring, the depth of economic interpenetration also remained limited, an apparent indictment on fifteen years of the EMP, which had proclaimed market interdependence to be the basis of political, security, and social rapprochement. After increasing in the mid-2000s, after 2008 14  A. Khakee, Pragmatism rather than backlash: Moroccan perceptions of Western democracy promotion, Euromesco paper 73, November 2008. 15   Commission of the European Communities, Implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2007: sectoral progress report, SEC(2008) 403/3, April 2008. 16  R. Youngs, ‘Introduction:  idealism at bay’, in R. Youngs (ed.), The European Union and Democracy Promotion: A Global Critical Assessment (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); A. Wetzel and J. Orbie, ‘With map and compass on narrow paths and through shallow waters: discovering the substance of EU democracy promotion’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 16/5, 2011: 705–25.

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investment flows across the Mediterranean fell by a half.17 The goal of creating a Euro-Mediterranean free trade area was progressively delayed, if not effectively abandoned. The EMP had apparently made little headway in its declared aim to deepen intra-Arab economic integration. In 2010, Maghreb states still conducted 70 per cent of their trade with the EU, only 3 per cent with each other. Fifteen years of the EMP had done little to improve social and economic indicators in the region: in Tunisia, unemployment stood at 14 per cent; illiteracy rates were at 44 per cent in Morocco and 34 per cent in Egypt. In hydrocarbon-rich Algeria, 23 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line. Economic diversification had not proceeded far: oil and gas still accounted for 96 per cent of Algeria’s exports and 98 per cent of Libya’s exports to Europe. Enveloping all these different areas of policy was a major structural impediment: the EMP was increasingly infected by a worsening of the Arab–Israeli conflict. The attempt to elaborate a Euro-Mediterranean Charter on Peace and Stability failed. Even relatively technical forums were often cancelled or diluted because of tensions between Israel and Arab states. This familiar problem had appeared soon after the EMP’s inception; its gravity persisted into the 2000s and resisted all attempts at circumvention. No positive link was crafted between policy in North Africa and efforts to revive the Arab– Israeli peace process—despite this linkage supposedly being the EMP’s central rationale as a pan-Mediterranean initiative. The ENP offered an avenue to focus on bilateral relations with each individual Arab state, nominally unencumbered by the Palestine conflict. But while this unlocked a select number of areas for cooperation, it did little to rescue the stated aim of creating a zone of shared governance and collective security. The impotence of both European and North African states in the face of Israel’s invasion of Gaza in December 2008 sapped any broader momentum in Euro-Mediterranean relations.

On the Eve of Revolt By 2010, it was clear to many observers that subterranean change was afoot in the Arab world. As a number of Arab leaders aged, they began to set the stage for managed, quasi-dynastic successions. It became evident that the opaque passing of power from a generation of independence leaders to their less-respected heirs would engender immense popular anger. Change

17   G. Joffé, ‘European policy and the southern Mediterranean’, in Y. Zoubir and H. Amirah Fernández (eds.), North Africa: Politics, Region, and the Limits of Transformation (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 323.

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in Egypt did not appear out of nowhere. Writers from Egypt pointed out that the 2011 protests came on the back of a decade of intense mobilization amongst workers, students, youth, and professional associations which had elicited no attention or support from the West.18 Indeed, in 2010 there were 17,000 strikes across the country—a degree of unrest apparently not reflected in EU assessments. In Tunisia, feted as an economic success story, the EU apparently missed a growing series of low-level riots and protests after 2008.19 In all this period the EU evidently underplayed signs of growing instability at the local level and protest against regimes in North Africa.20 Amidst such impending tumult, the EU immersed itself in an almost surreal debate about the institutional structures of its own policies in North Africa and the Middle East. Some confusion already reigned over the compatibility between the EMP and the ENP: the ENP seemed to undercut the ambitious region-building goals of the EMP. Yet in 2008 President Nicolas Sarkozy launched a proposal for a new Union for the Mediterranean (UfM). This was originally conceived as a framework only for countries with a Mediterranean coast, which would engage in practical areas of joint cooperation in areas such as business development, transport and urban development, solar energy, de-pollution of the Mediterranean Sea, responses to natural and manmade disasters, and education. The stated aim was to free European–Arab relations from what the new French government saw as the stifling bureaucracy and immobility of the Commission-influenced EMP and ENP. The way in which Sarkozy was able to bulldoze the UfM into being suggested that most member states by now attached less priority to the Mediterranean. No member state was enthusiastic about the UfM; in private diplomats were scathing. Yet all member states pointed to far higher priorities, so were reluctant to expend political capital in obstructing the French proposal. Most surprisingly, Spain was largely passive in its acceptance, as the José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero government sought alliance with France on other European issues. German chancellor Angela Merkel eventually intervened to insist on some degree of Europeanization. The UfM became open to all EU member states and was officially folded into the framework of the Barcelona Process. However, this change did not counter the drift towards an intergovernmental focus. For many, the UfM signalled the demise of the EU external governance model, although this dimension would formally continue in parallel under the ENP.

  M. El-Ghobashy, ‘The praxis of the Egyptian revolution’, Middle East Report no. 258, 2011.   E. Murphy, ‘The Tunisian uprising and the precarious path to democracy’, Mediterranean Politics, 16/2, 2011: 300. 20  C. Spencer, North Africa:  the hidden risks to regional instability, Chatham House briefing paper, April 2009. 18

19

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Europe in the New Middle East

The UfM’s main virtue was that it was designed to liberate pragmatic cooperation from political differences. The French presented it as reflecting the same kind of functional approach that had inspired the early years of European integration. However, the UfM failed to gather any momentum due to differences related to the worsening Arab–Israeli conflict. Israel objected to the Arab League having a seat, then to a water initiative mentioning the Palestinian ‘Occupied Territories’. Then in 2010 the scheduled leaders’ summit had to be cancelled twice as Arab leaders refused to sit down with Israel’s foreign minister. Within a new UfM secretariat, the principle of joint decision-making was introduced, giving Arab regimes greater say in the distribution of resources. Such co-ownership was naturally welcomed in the south, but it was fashioned in a way that diluted any kind of defining strategic vision. In some ways the UfM offered the worst of two worlds: it was supposed to return policy to a spirit of regionalism, but of a more technocratic kind; in fact, it compromised the nimbleness of the ENP’s bilateralism, but did not deliver on its promised depoliticization. The result of these successive policy changes was endless discussion of a profoundly confusing and dizzying array of acronyms. The policy focus switched from EMP to ENP, then to UfM. Meanwhile, the External Action Service (EAS) was to be established under the Lisbon treaty, after a long and arduous process of internal Brussels haggling over diplomatic posts. Meanwhile tensions palpably deepened between France and other member states. All this remodelling appeared to blind European governments and EU institutions to the storm brewing within Arab societies.21 Some diplomats subsequently insisted that on the eve of the Arab revolts, the EU had positioned itself well in having established a dense network of partnerships with democratic reformers. Some insisted that in fact EU policies had succeeded, to the extent that European engagement in the region had helped embed basic rights standards. These standards dissuaded armies from firing on protestors and emboldened the political use of social networks. A  Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung initiative that gathered together bloggers from all over the region was widely cited as having had a very tangible impact. Low-level external support for civic and human rights organizations had helped sustain democrats. EIDHR projects in 2010 included support for parliamentary strengthening in Yemen; internet activism in Morocco; Tunisia’s main trades union and human rights NGOs such as the Tunisian League of Human Rights, the Association of Democrat Women, and Judges and Lawyers Associations; Lebanese NGOs pushing for electoral reform to break the country’s confession-based carve out of power; the Bahrain Centre 21   For an overview of the UfM’s genesis, see F. Bicchi, ‘The Union for the Mediterranean, or the changing context of Euro-Mediterranean relations’, Mediterranean Politics, 16/1, 2011: 3–19.

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for Human Rights; and the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation of Support to Human Rights Defenders.22 While the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions gave the impression that protestors did not need direct external backing, arguably international support had provided at least some organizations with the resilience and techniques they required to defeat their regimes. However, many of the most celebratory claims were far from convincing. The EU certainly did not see its funding as a contribution to the fomenting of insurrection. One EAS director admitted in early 2011 that the EU had simply assumed there was little demand for reform in the region. If the EU was a factor it was in the almost inadvertent sense that Europe’s own post-2008 recession choked off remittances that North African workers could send back home, and thus deepened the economic malaise in places such as Tunisia and Morocco. This was not quite the smooth manifestation of modernization theory that the EMP was designed to foster.

Conclusion An impressive range of cooperation was launched under the rubric of the EMP. Regular meetings and common initiatives commenced in almost every imaginable policy sphere: economic, social, cultural, environmental, and political. This certainly provided the foundations for a model of Euro-Mediterranean governance. Additionally, in a number of more technical areas southern Mediterranean states began to incorporate EU rules and regulations. This happened inter alia in the areas of environmental standards, competition rules, and procurement processes. As the EU stressed the centrality of such rules under both the EMP and ENP, the model of external governance came to occupy a central place in Euro-Mediterranean relations. However, such areas of progress were increasingly and comprehensively overshadowed by the trend in policy at a political security level. The EU talked the talk of backing political opening but without conviction; democracy support appeared to function at little more than a symbolic level, as a policy almost designed to fail. The EU operated in the comfort zone of ineffectual soft power. That security cooperation which occurred was in more of a status quo than transformational vein. The formally desired Euro-Mediterranean community proved unable to insulate itself from broader centripetal forces; terrorism and the Israel–Palestine conflict imbued EU–Middle East relations with a very different ethos.

22

 EuropeAid, EIDHR: Delivering on democracy, Brussels, 2011.

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The implications were far-reaching for the balance between the five analytical dynamics outlined in the previous chapter. There was increasingly little sign of the kind of decentred policy capable of building a common polity based on shared social goals and co-development, as opposed to formal institutional convergence. 23 Terminology was revealing: the switch from the Barcelona Process to an ENP raised eyebrows among Arab diplomats now invited to define themselves as being part of the EU’s ‘neighbourhood’. While Arab regimes signed up to many EU rules and regulations, they prevented the scope of ‘external governance’ from extending into policy areas that might compromise their own power. 24 Indeed, one problem with the accounts which insisted on the high-politics validity of the external governance logic was that it seemed to be in some of those states that had resisted the uptake of many such EU rules that political breakthrough occurred. In similar vein to the way that democracy theorists failed to predict the Arab spring, this kind of focus seemed to miss the socially galvanizing role played by democracy as opposed to technical governance improvements. Indeed, the vibrancy of genuinely cosmopolitan governance was tempered by the government orientation of many ostensible civil society initiatives, an increasingly state-centric spirit, and the limited degree to which EU programmes were driven by the demands of local civic stakeholders. As indicated above, at a number of levels European governments wrestled to regain control over the direction of policy across the Middle East. Domestic concerns over radicalism and migration imbued Euro-Mediterranean relations with an inward-out dynamic which sat uneasily with the outward-in logic that ostensibly saw regional collective security as a source of domestic stability. In the wake of terrorist attacks, a realist-style instrumentalism threaded its way into European positions on democracy support. In some ways, this reinforced the founding reform-as-antidote-to-radicalism philosophy; but it also made governments less trusting of EU-level or ‘shared governance’ incremental processes as a means of encouraging reform. And indeed, as European governments looked for more short-term security bulwarks, their actions began more fundamentally to challenge the ‘newer’ forms of governance that had begun to gestate. If this was the case in the Maghreb and Mashreq, it was an even more evident trend in the Arabian Peninsula, where EU-modelled forms of governance had not taken root anyway. Strikingly, on the eve of the Arab uprisings this situation had engendered a relatively

23   D. Bechev and K. Nicolaidis, ‘From policy to polity: can the EU’s special relationships with its “neighbourhood” be decentred?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 48/3, 2010: 475–500. 24  R. Youngs, ‘Democracy as external governance?’, Journal of European Public Policy, 16/6, 2009: 895–915.

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sanguine perspective among many European diplomats: radicalism and terrorism had not become as serious as many had feared and the EU began to turn its strategic gaze elsewhere. Events in Tunisia and Egypt were about to disabuse any notion that the EU’s policy of containment had successfully laid the basis for a sustainable Middle East strategy.

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5 Redemption Helping Transitions

The book’s assessment of European policies in the changing Middle East begins with two overview chapters: this first chronicles the ways in which the EU and member states reacted to support the Arab revolts and encourage political liberalization in reform-resistant countries; the next chapter reviews the limitations to such support. On the positive side of the ledger, after the Arab revolts began the EU exhibited a candid willingness to admit to the myopia of its previous strategies in the region and brought forward a plethora of new funds and initiatives more effectively to empower reformers. Incentives-based conditionality became a policy leitmotif and firmer diplomatic pressure was also exerted on certain issues. A more engaged, nuanced, and reflexive set of policies took shape. Amidst concerns over the general decline and torpor of European global power, the breadth and holism of EU policies in the Mediterranean compared favourably to those of other powers. High representative Catherine Ashton claimed in 2012 that the EU had done more than any other power to help ordinary citizens aspiring to better human rights across the Middle East.1 This chapter finds some evidence to suggest she was not entirely wrong. More analytically, several governance dynamics were relevant to capturing the multifaceted ways in which reform support was provided: the familiar frameworks of Euro-Mediterranean and external governance were at least partially reactivated; but other strands of policy approximated more closely to cosmopolitan governance or strategically guided member state geostrategy. At myriad levels, the EU did much to redeem its past reform-sapping misdemeanours.

 C. Ashton, The EU’s rights of passage, ECFR commentary, 9 July 2012.

1

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Redemption

Humility and Reassessment The EU’s conversion to democracy represented something of a ‘road to Damascus’ moment—almost literally. One policymaker referred to a spirit of ‘nineties nostalgia’: liberal optimism raised its head uncertainly from behind the parapet of several years of creeping doubt. The Economist noted a ‘giddiness at the abrupt turnaround in France’s policy on North Africa’.2 The outbreak of social protests in the Arab world certainly sufficed to divert some of the EU’s attention away from the rising powers and back to the neighbourhood. Standard European discourse came promptly to acknowledge the EU’s error in failing either to foresee or back democracy prior to 2010. Ministers queued up to insist that European interests would now be best served by generous support for political reform across the Arab world. In February 2011, enlargement commissioner Stefan Füle stated before the European Parliament, in one of the most eloquent statements of mea culpa, which was subsequently widely quoted: ‘We must show humility about the past. Europe was not vocal enough in defending human rights and local democratic forces in the region. Too many of us fell prey to the assumption that authoritarian regimes were a guarantee of stability in the region. . . . We know that the forces of change that have been unleashed will not produce stable political systems overnight. Yet, we must weather these risks without losing sight of our long-term common objective: a democratic, stable, prosperous and peaceful North Africa.’3 One EU ambassador later insisted that the EU supported fledgling democracy movements at this stage without any certainty that they would succeed beyond Tunisia and Egypt, and when a reversion to authoritarian control would leave European interests dangerously exposed. French diplomats suggested that the Arab spring was an opportunity to free democracy support from the association with imposed regime change. There followed a myriad of hastily concocted speeches and opinion articles, in which leaders, ministers, and commissioners promised help for the courageous reformers who were putting their lives on the line for democracy. Catherine Ashton’s first responses immediately promised more generous help to Arab reformers and a better targeting of EU assistance towards those fighting for rather than against democracy. The high representative talked about the need for the EU to switch from concepts of ‘old stability’ to ‘sustainable stability’. British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg made a widely relayed speech in which he urged the EU to forward an ‘enticing offer that lies between warm words and blank cheques at one extreme and full   The Economist, 26 March 2011, p. 36.  S. Fule, Recent events in North Africa, speech to Foreign Affairs Committee of European Parliament, 28 February 2011, speech reference 2011/130. 2 3

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EU membership at the other’. This spirit chimed with the coalition government’s publication of Britain’s first national security strategy, which placed its main stress on the need for UK security policy to join together all its resources to pre-empt the risks of instability.4 At the May 2011 G8 summit Prime Minister David Cameron warned that Britain would face a greater risk of terrorist attack if it did not support the Arab spring: ‘We should be in no doubt that if we get this wrong, if we fail to support these countries, we risk giving oxygen to the extremists who prey on the frustrations and aspirations of young people. . . .You would see, I believe, if we fail, more terrorism, more immigration and more instability coming from Europe’s southern border.’ The Foreign and Commonwealth Office stated that:  ‘The Arab Spring also matters to the prosperity and security of the UK: If it falters it will risk dangerous instability on Europe’s doorstep, collapse back into more authoritarian regimes, conflict and terrorism. The UK believes this support for the peoples of the Arab world lies at the heart of our national interest.’ The UK’s new ‘Building stability overseas’ strategy was in part driven by a commitment to support ‘legitimate institutions’, as a result of the Arab spring having reinforced the perception that these were key to stability.5 Some of the most ardent reform commitments and most audacious rhetoric came from the very leader who had previously sought to remove contentious high politics from Euro-Mediterranean relations, French president Nicolas Sarkozy. After French jets commenced bombing raids on Libya, he told the Brussels press corps that: ‘Every Arab ruler should understand that the reaction of the international community and of Europe will from this moment on each time be the same.’ In response to Osama Bin Laden’s death, Sarkozy proclaimed: ‘We must support the emergence of democracy in Arab countries with all our might. . . . This will be the best response to these fanatics who also feed on the absence of freedom of expression. . . . The Arab street that is calling for democracy and non-violence is the best news for democracies, and the worst for obscurantists. . . . The years of negative energy and frustrations accumulated by these youthful and pressured societies will disappear as democracy takes root, generating growth and economic progress.’6 Sarkozy summarized: ‘Stability can no longer be the alpha and omega of French diplomacy.’ Reassessments were also forthcoming from the traditionally even more cautious southern member states. Italian minister Franco Frattini advocated a Euro-Mediterranean ‘stability pact’, the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for North Africa, entailing enhanced contractual status for the region’s relationship with the European Union.7 In a later speech in April 2011 at the

4  Her Majesty’s Government, A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty, National Security Strategy, London, HMG, 2010. 5   Her Majesty’s Government, Building Stability Overseas Strategy, London, HMG, 2011. 6 7   L’Express, 3 May 2011.   Financial Times, 18 February 2011.

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International Institute for Strategic Studies, Frattini argued that: ‘Our security is closely linked with their freedoms and development. . . . if we open our markets, we help build greater security.’ In private too, it became commonplace for diplomats to refer to the Arab spring as a litmus test for the EU’s international credibility. One strategic risk became apparent:  once the push for change was unleashed, failure might be blamed on Western ambivalence and consequently increase antipathy among large swathes of Arab populations. A related worry expressed by diplomats was over new divisions emerging between Arab states, between reformers and non-reformers. This engendered some concern not to see the Gulf get entirely left behind in the wave of reform; if democratization was in train in some states, instability could easily follow from a complete absence of reform in other parts of the region. A partial and geographically circumscribed Arab awakening could presage a return to previous decades’ Arab infighting. Although it was routinely stressed that the revolutions were very much home-grown, high levels of expectation rested on European shoulders. One Egyptian expert perceived that ‘EU credibility in the Middle East is higher than that of the US’ and that Europe had been less hesitant than Washington in response to the Arab spring.8 Several European governments’ freezing of Mubarak’s assets was symbolically the most welcome step. European policy­ makers judged the US to be interested mainly in Egypt, parts of the Gulf, and Israel, rendering a pan-regional European strategy more necessary. Capturing both past omission and future potential, at the June 2011 EU Council Herman van Rompuy predicted: ‘There was an Arab spring without the EU, but without us there will be no Arab summer.’ By late 2011, officials in the External Action Service (EAS) began to work on a longer-term strategic vision that placed EU support for reform within a broader context. The aim was further to galvanize European engagement by giving greater precision to the ways in which deeper Arab reform would benefit EU geopolitical interests. Gradually there was an apparent commitment not just reactively to offer assistance for reform but to understand the changes occurring across the region as part of a more positive and committed EU geostrategy. William Hague stated in Bahrain at the end of 2012 that, ‘we should not view sectarian politics as the defining issue affecting the security of the region’, and opined that political participation was core to improving the region’s geopolitical stability.9 In the EAS and several member states, such as the UK, diplomatic structures were altered to facilitate this more geopolitical lens on democratic reform.

8   K. Al-Anani, ‘Egypt and the EU in the post-Mubarak era’, in Bertelsmann Foundation, The Future of the Mediterranean, Europe in Dialogue, 2011/01, p. 40. 9   William Hague, speech to IISS Manama Dialogue, Bahrain, 8 December 2012.

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New Resources The new pro-reform spirit translated into new policy initiatives at the EU level and within member states’ national foreign policies. Gradually, policy initiatives took shape that injected real substance into the promises to support Arab reform. Even after the initial burst of excitement in 2011, these incrementally took on more solid, generous and comprehensive form. In March 2011 the Commission and high representative launched a joint proposal for ‘A partnership for democracy and shared prosperity in the southern Mediterranean’. This promised firmer support for reforms in general and familiar terms, but also floated a number of new concrete ideas: free elections as a precondition to enter the partnership; visa liberalization; a €26 million Civil Society Neighbourhood Facility; extension of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) mandate to the southern Mediterranean; deep and comprehensive free trade areas (DCFTAs); and less restrictive rules of origin for Arab states.10 In June 2011 a review of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) advanced many ideas a step further. The document promised for the neighbourhood states €1.2 billion over three years, on top of the existing €5.7 billion for 2011–13. Two-thirds of this supplement would go to the southern Mediterranean. These additional resources would come with firmer conditions attached. The document advocated the creation of a European Endowment for Democracy, to channel increased democracy funding. Extra European Investment Bank (EIB) credits were set at €1 billion. The extension of the EBRD mandate to the Middle East and North Africa was confirmed. The importance of Mobility Partnerships and visa facilitation in return for the control of illegal migration was reasserted. The new policy document effectively extended the format of the Eastern Partnership to southern states, sidelining the Union for the Mediterranean.11 The extra €1 billion was found by taking money from other areas—after resistance from some member states was overcome. The EU declared Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya as being in ‘crisis’ in order to free up a number of quick-release budget lines. EU officials insisted new money was ‘dug out from all corners’. Commission officials explained their reasoning: the main rationale of the revamped ENP was to use the urgency of the moment to press member states to iron out the inconsistencies in their policies and oblige them to deliver on things such as market opening, more bespoke individual country policies, and a long-promised paring down of the ludicrously large number of 10   Communication from the Commission and High Representative, A partnership for democracy and shared prosperity in the southern Mediterranean, COM(2011)200, 8 March 2011. 11   European Commission, A new response to a changing neighbourhood, Brussels, 2012.

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priorities included under each action plan. Commission officials insisted there would henceforth be a more critical assessment of progress made under the action plans each year, rather than a ‘waving through on an easy green light’ as had most commonly occurred up to that point. Civil society would be involved in these assessments to ensure the exercise would not simply be one of governments assessing themselves. A dual logic was elaborated so that positive and critical measures worked in tandem: wherever sanctions were used, support to civil society would simultaneously be increased. EAS representatives pushed behind the scenes for more ambitious responses still. The EU had been truer to its values in the east than the south; this must now change, they insisted. The EU must develop partnerships with societies not governments; consider some type of European Economic Area arrangement offering the same four core freedoms for Arab democracies; and ensure that the ENP changed from being a Commission-managed aid policy to a pro-reform framework also pursued at the political level. Several claimed to have learnt from the eastern neighbourhood that the aim of support for reforms should not be an institutional Europeanization of the region. At the May 2011 G8 summit President Sarkozy proposed a total G8 package of just over €40 billion: €20 billion from multilateral banks, outside the IMF; €3.5 billion from the EIB; and €20 billion from bilateral aid. France offered a €1 billion contribution. This support included immediate budgetary support, an intensification of support for small and medium-sized companies, and the development of infrastructural projects key to improving living conditions in deprived zones. The G8 promised another raft of funds in September 2011 and promised to speed up delivery of the aid that had not yet reached the region. EIB projects included a huge contribution to basic infrastructure, for projects such as the Cairo metro line. The EBRD began working in three states in the region in September 2012. A new G8 Transition Fund was launched in 2013, promoted by several EU member states. At the end of summer 2011 the Commission introduced its Spring programme—Support for Partnership, Reform and Inclusive Growth—with an allocation of €350 million. In its May 2012 report on progress made under the re-energized Neighbourhood policy, the EU claimed that €600 million of aid had already been diverted to reform objectives. The Commission alluded to a near doubling of funding for the cluster of Euro-Mediterranean initiatives such as Euromed Youth and the Erasmus support scheme for the Mediterranean.12 Nearly 800 extra Erasmus places were funded from the region for the 2011–12 academic year. The biggest shift in funds was into

12

  European Commission, Delivering on a new neighbourhood policy, Brussels, 2012.

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job creation and vocational training projects. In Algeria a €23 million youth employment programme was launched at the end of 2011. Per capita amounts for Mediterranean states moved further ahead of those for eastern neighbourhood countries. The Ukrainian government complained that money was still following a traditional security logic rather than focusing on the east where, it insisted, there was more scope for reforms. Additions to the European Neighbourhood Partnership Instrument (ENPI) for 2011–13 totalled €450 million for Egypt and €160 million for Tunisia. In 2012, the ENPI budget rose by 20 per cent, by far the biggest increase of any budget line.13 In 2011 a full third of the Instrument for Stability was spent in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, with a further increase of €60 million slated for 2012 and €70 million for 2013.14 A December 2012 EU communication on Maghrebi cooperation promised support for civil society, infrastructure, and technical governance linkages between North African states.15 The Civil Society Facility was nearly doubled to €45 million in 2012–13. By 2013, it had committed a total of €70 million across the whole neighbourhood. The EU set up task forces for several southern Mediterranean to unite different parts of the policy-making machinery, including the EAS, Commission, EIB, and EBRD. Spanish diplomat Bernadino León was named as special representative to coordinate this task force. He won agreement for the first task force meeting to be held in Tunis. This first meeting reconfirmed a notable list of deliverables: talks would commence for a new Privileged Partnership, with a commitment to reach a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA); €100  million would be released from the Spring programme; €57 million extra would be made available for urgent water projects; and a €60 million job creation project would be launched. The overall EU aid flow to Tunisia would be double what had originally been allocated for 2011, and there would be a 60 per cent increase in EIB lending. In November 2012 a task force was held with Egypt on a far larger scale and leading to sizeable funding increases. The meeting attracted 130 companies and four commissioners. The EU undertook to provide nearly €5 billion in the form of loans and grants for 2012–13, €300 million of which was new aid. It promised to double Egypt’s participation in the Erasmus Mundus and Tempus programmes. The special representative met civil society organizations, and the first formal forum of European and Egyptian civil society

 EUStat, EU budget 2012 in figures, Brussels, 2013.   European Commission, 2011 annual report on the Instrument for Stability, COM(2012)405, 2012. 15   European Commission and High Representative, Supporting closer cooperation and regional integration in the Maghreb, JOIN(2012)36, December 2012. 13 14

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organizations took place. Members of the European Parliament met politicians from Egypt’s upper house (the Shura Council) and the Constituent Assembly, tasked with drafting Egypt’s constitution. The EU insisted that not only had it released significant amounts of new support for Egypt but that this task force showed all the various political and economic policy levers being harnessed together. By 2013 a new action plan was ready to be signed with Lebanon, with a set of reform-focused priorities. These included efforts to encourage debate over electoral reform, long the obstacle to deeper democratic dynamics in Lebanon. Projects were designed to support civil society plans for alternative electoral systems and an independent electoral commission. A raft of rule of law projects advanced, along with a new human rights training initiative with Lebanese security services. The Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) spluttered back to life. It began to offer insurance cover for project investments in the region. After a new director finally started work in July 2011, there was talk of adding a political pillar to it. Officials pushed for a widened scope of projects. Insiders insisted that the UfM was ‘Europeanized’, as the northern presidency was now to be held by the EAS, with the Commission responsible in its areas of competence. Governments agreed to resume sectoral ministerial meetings in autumn 2013, after a five-year interregnum. Member states also pushed to get the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission working on rule of law reform in the Arab region. Aid remained split between donors in a relatively similar pattern: France and the Commission were the two main donors, with about a third each of total EU aid to the southern Mediterranean region; Spain and Germany were the only two other states who gave relatively meaningful amounts, albeit at some distance from France and the Commission. From 2011, several member states launched their own national initiatives. Northern states re-engaged; the moment of France’s unilateral instigation of the UfM in the face of other states’ disinterest appeared firmly transcended. Indeed, in part reflecting a desire to respond quickly, several member states emphasized progress through their own bilateral initiatives. For 2011, Germany allocated €30  million for supporting democratic change in the region. From 2012 it offered an additional €50 million per year, to be channelled into projects run as part of a Transformation Partnership. A  package of German support to Tunisia focused on vocational training, job creation, and educational and cultural cooperation. Projects included a jobs pact with a plethora of Tunisian ministries and private companies. The pact focused on modernizing training centres in the areas of tourism, renewable energies, metallurgy, and electronics. German officials pointed out that their original strategy of focusing overwhelmingly on Tunisia and 67

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Egypt was gradually broadened out as wider regional dynamics needed to be factored in. Spain offered a package of technical assistance in transitions, recognizing that this constituted a new approach for the country’s traditional caution over democracy support. The Spanish secretary of state for the European Union insisted that this reform agenda represented an opportunity for Spain, despite all the attendant risks. Moreover, Spanish officials often alluded to the pressure they felt from public opinion to help reformers. Spain began bringing young leaders to Madrid for training. In late 2011, the outgoing Socialist government agreed €352 million of credits to support democratic transition processes in the south of the Mediterranean. In 2013 the successor PP government allocated a small €5 million programme, called Masar, to fund civil society and administrative reforms in Arab states. By the end of 2011 the UK had allocated nearly £200 million (€260 million) for transition projects. A new Arab Partnership Fund amounted to £110 million (€145 million); of this, £40 million was for political participation and £70 million managed by the Department for International Development for economic reform. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) beefed up its ‘MENA cadre initiative’ created in November 2010; increased the number of diplomats in its MENA department by forty posts (a 50 per cent increase); and increased Arabic training. The British Council launched new programmes with youth and women. New media projects were launched, especially through the BBC World Trust. Public financial management was another priority area for UK funding, along with work on extending the Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative to Arab states. The new fund supported the Westminster Foundation for Democracy for party training. At the end of 2011 a newly elected Danish government renewed the country’s Arab Partnership Initiative. This was created in 2003 and ran at a low level for several years, dealing with cultural dialogue issues in the wake of the notorious Danish ‘cartoons crisis’. In 2012 it was allocated around €20 million; in 2011 €40 million; and in 2010 €60 million. The initiative expanded from its focus on Yemen, Jordan, and Morocco to include Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. The approach was to support partnerships between Danish and Arab organizations on a large range of issues, including political, social, and economic concerns. This was conceived as ostensibly mutually beneficial twinning as opposed to one-way capacity-building. By late 2011 around 450 Arab civic organizations had been supported in this way. Increasingly the initiative also paid for Nordic diplomats to be based in EU delegations across the Middle East, in order to provide awareness, expertise, and some momentum on democracy-related questions. In a similar vein, the Dutch government extended its well-respected Matra programme from Eastern and south-eastern Europe to the Arab region. In 2013, Germany, the Netherlands, and Lithuania backed the US State 68

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Department in funding a new German Marshall Fund initiative called the MENA Partnership for Democracy and Development, based in Tunis and working across North Africa. Central and East European states also launched an impressive number of new initiatives in the region, offering study tours, leadership training, the sharing of transition experiences, and several structured civil society partnerships.16 Additional amounts of support were not related specifically to the pressure for political openings but embraced a range of more general economic priorities. France, Germany, and Italy were most active in putting together debt relief packages, the most generous of which was granted to Egypt. Also in Egypt, France funded a new €80 million project providing microfinance for small businesses and local employment generation. Italy opened a microcredit line of €150 million in Tunisia to help young people develop small, artisanal, commercial activities. Italian diplomats running the country’s Middle East initiative argued that the revolts made bilateral relations with Arab states more important. These relations aimed to build on Italy’s lead trading position with Libya, Lebanon, and Syria. Even the ‘5 plus 5’ forum was seen as too leaden for this moment of crisis. If Italian foreign policy had left Mediterranean policy at a relatively low level of priority for several years, the country’s diplomats insisted that after 2010 capacities and diplomatic engagement strengthened notably.

Qualitative Improvement The EU not only offered increased quantities of funding and support for well-structured Euro-Mediterranean initiatives; it also sought to improve the qualitative impact of its programmes. In this vein, some authors detected a willingness to revisit some of the fundamental precepts of EU policies.17 To some extent, Western development agencies began to give a more political focus to their governance aid and deepened this trend in the wake of the Arab spring. This involved moving governance projects from a technical focus on the efficiency of policy-making supply to addressing underlying political reform. In mainstream development projects, the issues of accountability and popular oversight of state spending became a notable priority. Funding specifically for democracy and human rights projects increased. In this vein of delineating more sophisticated approaches, in September 16   K. Mikulova and B. Berti, From converts to missionaries: central and eastern European democracy assistance in the Arab world, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2013. 17   S. Panebianco, ‘Democratic turmoil in the MENA area: challenges for the EU as an external actor of democracy promotion’, in S. Panebianco and R. Rossi (eds.), Winds of Democratic Change in the Mediterranean (Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubettino, 2012), p. 162.

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2012 the European Commission and Catherine Ashton forwarded proposals for improving the EU’s support to transition countries, promising that this would be more ‘tailor-made, comprehensive and driven by the reform countries themselves’.18 Civil society was included both in the design of new action plans and in Commission aid programming. ENP diplomats insisted that to improve the attractiveness of its offers the EU become more flexible, offering partners the possibility of opting into a logic of rules alignment only in those sectors where they had an interest in doing so. They insisted the approach to external governance became much more flexible in response to recipients’ ambivalence, leaving the latter with the freedom to opt out of any areas of sectoral cooperation and to choose their own level of alignment with EU norms. Officials in the ministries of Arab states generally concurred that the EU opened itself up to far greater consultation when deciding on finding priorities. Familiar complaints of EU bureaucratic obstacles and delays persisted, but local officials frequently referred to a new European willingness to incorporate local views. In Lebanon, for example, this expressed itself in new projects designed to enhance state capacities for strategic planning—felt locally to be a serious deficiency in light of the country’s fractious and changing politics—and slightly less stress being placed on high-visibility individual infrastructure projects or the approximation of aspects such as environmental rules. In this context, officials saw EU support as a positive fillip to ensuring the continuity of administrative reform projects across changes of government. Those running the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) pointed out that rules were changed to release money within four weeks of the democratic breakthrough in Tunisia; to get money to Syria opposition activists on the ground through intermediary bodies; to allow funding of non-registered (and thus more independent) civic movements; and to lessen co-funding requirements (that obliged even small organizations to put up significant amounts of money to match any EU support). The EIDHR doubled allocations for Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and even planned projects in Iran. A new EU Communication in December 2011 entitled ‘Human rights and democracy at the heart of EU external action’ had a strong MENA focus and promised better unity, implementation, and coherence on human rights policies, and also created the post of human rights special representative. By mid-2012, the EU was promising a ‘single support framework’ to coalesce the myriad sources of its funding behind a reformist agenda.

  Global Europe, 4 October 2012.

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Diplomats focused on monitoring more strictly whether general development aid was helping or hindering reform efforts. The Commission’s Development directorate published an evaluation of ten years of aid to Tunisia and Egypt, on the back of which commitments were made to ensure that in the future aid did not militate against reform potential. The Commission was pushed further in this direction by a high profile European Parliament report on human rights support, published in June 2011.19 Top EU officials running the task forces recognized that Arab states welcomed the quick, new, bilateral support in addition to Commission aid, which was still built around longer-term funding timelines and approximation to bureaucratic rules. Officials in the EAS felt that most progress was made in fusing the Commission’s culture of aid programming more firmly onto the political dimensions of EU diplomacy. The EAS was empowered to give the UfM a much tighter political steer. Interdepartmental coordination committees were now far more structured and regular. Stefan Füle highlighted how much more systematically civil society was associated with EU policy dialogues and involved ‘in the preparation of our programmes and interventions’.20 EAS staff insisted that local, Arab civil society organizations were now brought into EU deliberations at an early stage. Resources directed at democracy covered a broad array. A common theme in such projects was on coalition-building: the EU stress was on consensus in constitutional processes in preference to quickly held competitive polls. Spain undertook many initiatives to share lessons from its transition experience in Arab states, stressing the inclusive nature of the Spanish process that enticed several initially wavering actors such as the Church, the military, and communists into the democratic camp. The EU stepped up work on helping the creation of small businesses in Gulf states, seen as the most effective means of weakening a culture of state dependency. Catherine Ashton made a particular push for more women’s rights funding. In the autumn of 2012 a €7 million project on the political and economic empowerment of women in the Southern Mediterranean was announced. The EU also funded a crisis response facility for the Arab League, to empower the latter’s regional political role. Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan activists were taken to observe several member states’ elections. Both the EU and US pushed the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to get more involved in the region, especially on electoral standards. In December 2011, a new €4 million Commission

19  European Parliament, Report on EU external policies in favour of democratisation, Rapporter: Veronique de Keyser, A7-0231/2011, June 2011. 20   S. Füle, One year after the Arab spring, Speech to the European Parliament, 24 January 2012.

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programme was launched on judicial reform, corruption, and human rights, first in Morocco and Tunisia, in addition to the Spring initiative. A new EU judicial reform programme also commenced in Lebanon. A ‘No disconnect strategy’ funded civil society organizations to defend themselves against electronic restrictions imposed by state authorities. The European Parliament beefed up its exchanges with Moroccan parliamentarians to focus more specifically on concrete implementation of reform promises under the advanced status agreement, with the stated aim of making meetings less abstract and more about effective monitoring. The Commission also funded a €5 million Council of Europe project in the southern Mediterranean, working in particular on constitutional reform. The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly offered ‘Partner for Democracy Status’ to the parliaments of Morocco and the Palestinian Authority. Sweden became the biggest funder of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. British diplomats in Morocco pointed to a series of ‘edgy’ or politically sensitive projects that sought to help civic organizations use the new constitution in a tangible manner to raise human rights and corruption issues in parliament. UK Arab Partnership Fund projects were selected by local embassies, and pushed through support for civil society projects not of regimes’ liking. Diplomats recognized that the partnership funded soft projects such as language training, but also increasingly political projects in the fields of media independence in election coverage, women’s rights, business independence from the state, and inclusive political dialogue. Also in Morocco, Spain’s development agency funded dozens of new projects around human rights and decentralization; member states tailored their initiatives here to the Spring programme, which embarked on several programmes designed to boost the parliament’s independence and power. Most reform funding was directed at Egypt and Tunisia. European diplomats concurred that the central hope was that funds deployed in these two countries would generate success stories capable of generating spillover reform momentum elsewhere in the Middle East. Officials invariably talked of the main focus being on Tunisia in the hope of creating a success that would serve as both justification of EU efforts to sceptical publics and as an inspirational reference point for other states. Democracy support to Tunisia was strikingly dense. The Commission used much of its €17 million quick impact package to shore up civil society organizations such as the Ligue Tunisienne des Driots de l’Homme.21 The EU played a role in enticing the interim Tunisian regime to sign the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court. The French development agency made

  Statement by Stefan Füle on the occasion of his trip to Tunisia, 31 March 2011, MEMO/11/213.

21

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a €185  million loan to support vocational training, SME start-ups, micro­ finance, and private equity investment. Two-thirds of Germany’s additional money went to Tunisia as a reward for reform. German projects included advisory services for NGOs and the constituent assembly from political foundations and the Max Planck Institute. The Foundation for International Legal Cooperation and the Hans Seidl Foundation collaborated with Tunisian authorities, lawyers’ associations, and probation officers in strengthening the rule of law. Further training was offered for Tunisian officials at an academy for good governance in Berlin. Media training for journalists, political parties, and civil society actors was forthcoming through the Berlin-based organization Media in Cooperation and Transition and the DW Akademie. In 2013 Germany supported further projects that linked German constitutional experts to their Tunisian counterparts. Polish diplomats insisted that they focused their efforts on transitional justice and armed forces accountability in Tunisia, after local groups pushed for these as priorities and not Poland’s originally offered projects. One Tunisian activist observed wryly that European help in the constitution drafting process was almost too extensive, to the extent that it led to a multiplicity of possible models being conveyed to the local drafters. In private, the senior Ennahda leadership professed satisfaction with European support and detected a greater EU willingness to follow a locally set agenda. A myriad of approaches was attempted in Egypt. France supported projects on transitional justice. German organizations set up the first protected space for reformers to meet, the Tahrir Lounge. The UK used its Arab Partnership Fund to support rule of law and coalition-building initiatives. The UK funded the Carter Centre to follow the parliamentary elections and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy to undertake basic party training for all parties; it had to put the latter project into abeyance when the parliament was dissolved. Several European donors increased support to ‘civil companies’ set up by democrats to circumvent the restrictive NGO law. The Dutch funded multi-party training organized by the Egyptian Democratic Academy. The EU delegation brought forward the 2012 allocation of the EIDHR for Egypt. The EU delegation in Cairo highlighted a number of more audacious democracy projects, which were said to go beyond purely ‘bureaucratic approaches’. While direct funding to parties was still not permitted, support was given through intermediary organizations to conduct non-partisan capacity-building for political society. Support for a Democracy Reporting International project aimed to educate voters on the democratic constitutional process. Germany’s Transformation Partnership in Egypt was updated in April to make €5.25 million available for the promotion of the democratization process and independent media, €8 million to boost youth employment, and €20 million for microfinancing measures to promote small and 73

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medium-sized enterprises. Egypt asked to accede to the Venice Commission, with a view to receiving technical support on constitutional reforms. A €2 million Instrument for Stability project focused on strengthening the electoral commission. Spain’s foreign minister visited Cairo in September 2012 to launch a project with Egyptian leaders regarding the lessons learned from Spain’s transition. Several member states ran projects in Lebanon on intercommunal dialogue, ‘coexistence’, and seeking to soften the biases of confessional education. A core concern was to strengthen state capacities to temper the influence of oligarchic confessional leaders; this was a local, context-driven specif­ icity distinct from state-constraining projects in places such as Egypt. The Commission was the largest donor, a standard €50 million yearly allocation increased by a €30 million top-up from the Spring fund in 2012 and 2013. Spring funds went to projects on electoral standards, judicial reform, and strengthening Lebanon’s welfare state provisions. Diplomats in Beirut were acutely aware that civil society support often went to organizations under the tutelage of factional interests, unwittingly widening confessional divisions; such support was redirected towards intercommunal bridge-building initiatives. Several member states increased support for the Lebanese armed forces on crowd control techniques and provided capacity-building to offset the growing influence of confessional-linked militia. They also brought in humanitarian advisors to improve the treatment and rights of the 300,000 refugees that had entered the country as a result of the Syrian conflict, this in the face of resistance from Hezbollah to any proper camps being opened to receive those displaced across the border (on the grounds that such camps could become a base for Sunni opposition to Bashar Assad). The Commission launched plans for a long-term development programme in the Bekka valley to supplement humanitarian relief from ECHO, the EU’s humanitarian office, and assist the sustained absorption of refugees. Some of the most challenging states also attracted reform support. In Yemen modest but meaningful amounts of money were granted for reform of the election committee, training parliamentarians and political parties, women’s rights, and reform of commercial and penal courts. Drawn from various budget lines, such support came to just under €50 million a year. Local interlocutors pointed to the way the EU ambassador used these ongoing projects in a proactive fashion to bolster reformist recipients of EU funds, and mediating between the regime, opposition, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Yemen received £53 million from the UK in 2010–11, and £26  million in 2011–12. French support focused on constitutional reforms, German activity on the national dialogue conference. In 2012, the Commission released an extra €40 million for Yemen, nearly half of which went to democracy-related projects. It committed to increasing 74

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this annual allocation even further from 2014. Officials saw Yemen as a success story, where an injection of funds had tangible influence in keeping at least a partial and managed transition on track. A particular European focus was to press for minority rights guarantees, member states keen to see formalized power-sharing between Yemen’s complex fabric of religious, tribal, and geographical groupings.

Conditionality, Incentives and Pressure for Reform Where regimes held on violently and sabotaged organized social demands for reform, the EU showed greater willingness to contemplate punitive measures. There were cases of general diplomatic pressure being applied, and a smaller number of cases where resistance to reform was deemed strong enough to invoke sanctions. The EU promised to develop a policy based on positive incentives for reform: the much-cited ‘more for more’ principle. Those states most committed to democratization would be rewarded most handsomely. By implication, others would lose resources. After internal battles between EU institutions, Spring funds went mainly to Tunisia (€90 million) and Egypt (€90 million), and only negligibly to non-reforming Algeria (€10 million). The Commission’s new funds were to be allocated in accordance with a scale of ‘regression-no progress-some progress-substantial progress’. A  group of member states, which included Sweden, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, and the Czech Republic, pushed hard for a far more robustly applied incentive-based approach. They sought to scrap the fixed proportion rules for funding between east and south, so that funds would be switched from, say, backward-sliding Ukraine to Tunisia. The most visible manifestation of the rewards-based approach was the offer of a Privileged Partnership to Tunisia in 2012. During 2013 some diplomats even talked of a status similar to that of European Free Trade Association states eventually being possible for Tunisia. In Morocco, behind the scenes, French and Spanish officials (and, indeed, apparently King Juan Carlos) were in close contact with the palace to advise on and nudge along the extent of reform under Morocco’s new constitution. At the end of 2011 the European Parliament vetoed a renewal of the EU– Morocco fishing accord with the argument that both Morocco and Madrid had ridden roughshod over the interests of the Saharawi. In Tunisia, the EU not only rewarded progress but was said to have exerted heavy pressure to convince the government to remove a proposed constitutional clause banning normalization with ‘Zionism’. Tunisia also demonstrated how pressure was most often aimed at consensus-building. In late 2013, the EU pressed 75

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Ennahda leaders hard to engage in a national dialogue, reportedly linking support for further IMF funds to the party’s willingness to step down and call new elections, in the name of getting competing actors signed up to a new democratic constitution. In Egypt, the SCAF regularly turned away European ministers because these increasingly pushed for an acceleration of reforms. The UK sought to link new offers to reining back the use of military tribunals. Language in ENP review documents was surprisingly explicit, the SCAF berated for having ‘fallen short of respect for basic human rights and democratic standards’.22 In protest against the clampdown on NGOs, MEPs cancelled a trip to Cairo. Insiders reported that the German ambassador protested more vigorously than his American counterpart when both US organizations and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung were ransacked. When several EU-funded organizations were hit by the NGO crackdown, and their European funds frozen in accounts, the EU protested. After rigorous dialogue, the presidential advisor on democratic transition indicated that the government would loosen the NGO law and that European help would now be sought more actively ‘to take on the deep state’. Egyptian human rights advocates in Cairo acknowledged firm support from European governments and the EAS in opposition to the regime’s 2013 plans for an even more draconian new NGO law, which would dramatically restrict the autonomy of civil society and prevent it from partnering with international organizations. The EU did not make any direct link to funding levels but applied conditionality in a more incentives-oriented way: money earmarked informally for Egypt under the Spring programme was held back or reallocated to Tunisia due to delays in and limits to the reform process. Nearly €700 million of EU macrofinancial assistance was held back by the absence of an IMF agreement, which was stipulated as a precondition. €75 million was held back even from the previous indicative programme. Problems were compounded by the lack of administrative capacity in the Egyptian state to present new projects. The EU pressured hard until the new government accepted police training from member states. The high-level Political and Security Committee even travelled to Cairo to press the SCAF to retreat from front-line politics. Germany postponed some aid to Egypt after President Morsi assumed powers over the judiciary. Into 2013 EU macroeconomic aid was still held up as the government prevaricated on implementing the IMF accord, and anyway failed to bring forward new projects that EBRD and EIB funds could support. In 2013, member states held back other tranches of Spring money while they waited to assess whether Morsi would adhere to a democratic course, especially in view of 22  European Commission, EU bolsters its support to reformers in its southern and eastern Neighbourhoods, information note, May 2012.

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approaching elections. An association council was planned only in February 2013, in part due to a lack of interest on Egypt’s part but also because more Commission directorates did not judge Egyptian ministries to be progressing at all on the technical aspects of cooperation. Ashton had a meeting with Morsi in April 2013 that was reported to have been difficult due to EU criticisms of human rights questions; indeed, the high representative’s visit had been delayed by a month due to European Parliament concerns over democratic backsliding. Member states refused to decouple €200 million of budget support from the IMF loan (which, unlike with macrofinancial aid, they were legally entitled to do) because of Morsi’s authoritarian turn and in particular the draconian new NGO law. Diplomats insisted that, by the time the Egyptian army reassumed control in July 2013, the EU had sent clear signals to Morsi that his actions had risked just such an outcome. Several member states wanted to see the Jordanian task force pushed back until after the status of the reform packages became clearer, and to have a less public forum than in Tunisia so that a ‘tougher message’ could be delivered. Jordan’s Spring allocation was deployed as a carrot to exert as much leverage as possible by announcing the total allocation of €70 million but only making available an initial amount of €30 million, with the rest contingent upon further reforms. Later in 2012 the EU became even firmer in holding back Spring money, angry that Jordan had retreated from reform promises after the task force meeting had been held. By 2013, the EU was explicitly offering Jordan less: plans for another task force were not forthcoming, prospective Spring allocations decreased, and diplomatic sympathy for the king in the upper echelons of the EAS wore thin. Several European diplomats in the Gulf insisted that reform projects were pushed to the extent of encountering increasing pushback from regimes in 2013. The EAS and then the European Parliament issued strongly worded statements regarding abuses in both Bahrain and the UAE in 2013; these were certainly noticed in the region, stirring heated debate between those in the Gulf who believed the criticism to be counterproductive to reformers’ precarious position and those welcoming such outside attention. When Dutch MPs briefly sought to prevent their royal family from visiting the Gulf in 2012 because of human rights concerns, this also engendered assertive responses. The UK created a Gulf Initiative in the summer of 2010; at the end of 2011 it promised to ‘adjust’ this initiative to put more pressure ‘on supporting long-term political and economic reform across Gulf states’.23 The UK pushed hard to launch projects in Kuwait on political corruption, effective opposition, and state administrative reform. The FCO committed 23   House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, British foreign policy and the ‘Arab spring’: the transition to democracy, October 2011, p. 46 and p. 61.

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to tightening export controls on arms sales to Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen. Sweden’s defence minister was forced to resign in March 2011 over leaked plans to fund an arms facility in Saudi Arabia, signalling that policies in the Gulf were also under pressure to adapt. In Bahrain the EU was criticized for a generally soft response to regime violence against democracy protestors, and member states insisted that they did exert pressure. The National Dialogue was organized under pressure from the US and Europeans. The UK insisted that in Bahrain it linked a continuation of cooperation to the opposition’s inclusion in the national dialogue on reform. In Yemen, pressure against President Saleh gradually strengthened as instability intensified during 2011. France was the first member state to say that it was ‘inevitable’ that Saleh would fall and to support change. The EU supported the power-sharing deal, negotiated by the GCC, under which Saleh stepped down and was granted immunity. Catherine Ashton argued this provided ‘the best chance for Yemen to address the economic, social and security challenges ahead’.24 A number of member states suspended aid to the Yemeni government as it blocked the deal. They also threatened asset freezes against the Saleh family. More subtle pressure was exerted through positive conditionality that formally linked trade and migration policies to democratic reform. As broader incentives, beyond the new resources directed at reform support, the EU committed to offering southern Mediterranean states more generous trade and migration deals. The EU offered a new trade deal to Tunisia within months of the revolution. In April 2011, the EU made it easier for Mediterranean states to export goods to the EU at preferential tariffs. Morocco was granted more generous access for agricultural goods, following a periodic update of its association agreement. This agreement reduced or removed 55 per cent of tariffs on Moroccan agricultural and fisheries products. Member state ambassadors paved the way for signing a convention on pan-Euro-Mediterranean rules of origin. In late 2011, the EU’s Global Adjustment Fund was equipped with a remit to compensate the agricultural sector for liberalization offered to southern Mediterranean states. Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco were offered DCFTA negotiations, in reward for reforms and as an incentive for fuller, genuine democratization. Officials from the Directorate-General for Trade claimed these mandates were agreed with record speed. They also argued that southern member states had set aside their reluctance on liberalization because they acknowledged that the historic importance of the juncture merited a generous EU response. The new agreements were to go well beyond existing free trade

  EUobserver, 28 April 2011.

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agreements, which covered only trade. The new mandates were close to what the EU was concluding with Ukraine. The aim was to move beyond existing Euro-Mediterranean association agreements which were the shallowest in the neighbourhood. The new agreements would move trade relations from WTO-minus to WTO-plus. There was not a huge amount to gain in terms of tariff reductions; the focus would be on creating more propitious conditions for investment. The challenge was to encourage better economic governance even though this was not necessarily governments’ priority in the south; and to make progress on more transparent economic governance without conflating this with the blanket export of its own norms. EU diplomats insisted that governance-related regulatory requirements were lighter than ten years previously and that the EU had moved away from the ‘heavy’ harmonization model applied in central and eastern Europe. In this way, the DCFTAs represented a more enticing incentive. Perhaps most appealingly for Arab states, the EU promised a series of Mobility Partnerships that would allow more legal migration into European for contract work. Frontex appointed a fundamental rights officer in late 2012, and a new Consultative Forum on Fundamental Rights was to give instructions to the organization’s management board on best practice in human rights. Several member states added to this at the bilateral level. The German foreign affairs ministry proposed a labour, mobility, and employment pact, pushing to get this agreed by the interior ministry. Italy set up a coordination office in Cairo for Egyptians wanting to travel to Italy for work and training, and for businesses wanting to hire them.

The EU and Other External Powers There were signs of the EU cooperating more systematically with other international actors in its response to the Arab spring. In 2012 a Quint forum was set up to coordinate reform support between the EU special representative, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the UK, together with representatives from Turkey and the US. The degree of new European support compared favourably with that offered by other actors, but neither was the EU overwhelmingly dominant in the magnitude of its resources. The EU’s special representative often commented that, despite much talk of rising powers, no other body could match the EU’s breadth of influence in terms of trade flows, aid donations, and diplomatic resources in the region. However, a somewhat less EU-centric approach did take shape. Senior EAS diplomats insisted they were fully apprised of the differences with Eastern Europe, and that the EU did not have ‘an exclusive relationship’ with the Arab world. 79

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The US pushed the EU much harder to take the lead international role in North Africa. The US did not treat the Arab spring as a priority. The Obama administration was preoccupied in particular with its ‘pivot to Asia’; the Arab awakening was a generally positive phenomenon to be supported, but its attendant complications rendered it a distraction from other challenges rather than an enthusiastically embraced positive opportunity. After the disastrous effects of the Bush years, the Obama team was almost hyper-reluctant to use the US’s full power in Middle Eastern affairs. It was widely felt that the US eschewed any leadership role and was concerned mainly to disengage; this left the curious situation of many Arab reformers actually pleading for more not less US involvement in the region.25 Department of Defense officials felt excluded from decision-making by the White House, and opined that the president was driven more by defensiveness against Republican opposition domestically than a coherent strategic vision for the Middle East. State Department diplomats lamented a lack of high-level political will to coordinate positions and initiatives with European partners. The US was careful not to disturb strategic alliances especially in the Gulf: no other power would come close to offering the security umbrella provided by the Pentagon in this region. A new US–GCC Strategic Cooperation Forum commenced in 2012; the US insisted on defence officials having primary roles in this initiative. 26 In fact, the US racked up a staggering stock of $92 billion worth of defence contracts with Saudi Arabia. The Arab spring actually tightened the US–Saudi relationship after this went through a rocky period in the mid-2000s. The US engaged with the Bahraini regime more resolutely than did European governments to quell its resort to repression; but ultimately, the presence of the Fifth Fleet was not to be endangered. Indeed, as tensions continued with Iran, the US was even less willing to put the fleet at risk by being strongly critical of the Bahraini government. Curiously, despite all the talk about Iran’s decline, the Iranian factor eclipsed the focus on Arab reform opportunities in US strategic deliberation—and much more so than was the case in the EU. Experts charged the Obama administration with subordinating the popular pressure for change to a highly geostrategic focus on two staples of American foreign policy: backing Israel and containing Iran.27 In many respects, EU initiatives were more comprehensive and less ambivalent than those of the US. The often-painted picture of the US backing democracy in far more missionary, idealistic, and heavy-handed fashion did

  S. Hamid, ‘Middle East lost’, Foreign Policy, 5 November 2012.  R. LeBaron, The United States and the Gulf states:  uncertain partners in a changing region, Atlantic Council issue brief, 2013, p. 5. 27   F. Gerges, Obama and the Middle East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 25 26

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not capture the main trends of post-2010 policies. Thomas Carothers pointed out that the Arab spring caught the Obama administration in a moment of uncertainty. The president had stepped back from a strong democracy policy, only then to raise expectations in his 2009 Cairo speech, which in turn generated little policy substance. The administration bridged the divide with a policy based on long-term consensus building, strikingly European in nature. The aim was to avoid getting out in front of domestic pressure, both for legitimacy-based reasons and in some places out of a desire for business-as-usual security. Obama only ‘partially revitalized’ the US commitment to democratic reform.28 Not unlike European initiatives, most US policies were oriented towards entrepreneurship and what were seen to be the supporting conditions of political change. Funding increases were, formally, similar to those of the EU. A Middle East Fast Response Fund took money from other budget lines. The Obama administration claimed to have found $1.5 billion for 2011–12 for the region. It requested $770 million for 2013 over five years for its Incentive Fund. The highest share of spending went to supporting the private sector, job creation schemes, and capacity-building for small and medium-sized enterprises.29 The State Department created a new Middle East Transitions Office; no European ministry initiated anything quite so structurally formal. Overall, however, the EU brought forward a wider range of new resources and initiatives than did the US. The US focused more selectively, especially on Egypt, but lacked the kind of pan-regional frameworks developed by the EU. By late 2013 the Incentive Fund was still not approved by Congress; the administration’s requested $770 million seemed to have little chance of being cleared. The Enterprise Funds had allocated only $300 million to Egypt and $100 million to Tunisia, and even these modest amounts were still not actually being disbursed. Under the Trade and Investment Partnership, even fairly limited proposals for investment liberalization had failed to advance. In southern Mediterranean states European trade was over four times US trade flows. Unlike the EU, the US did not offer any new free trade agreements in the region. The EU also came to press more assertively for sanctions in some instances than the US. For instance, the EU withdrew support from President Saleh more quickly and fully than the US did. The Obama administration was even more reluctant to impose punitive measures against Egypt than were European governments, either before or after the summer 2013 military

28   T. Carothers, Democracy policy under Obama: revitalization or retreat?, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012. 29   K. Archick and D. Mix, The United States and Europe: responding to change in the Middle East and North Africa, Congressional Research Service, June 2013.

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takeover (a comparison looked at in more detail in the next chapter). Only a limited degree of reform conditionality was evident, for example in the fact that Tunisia was made eligible for the Millennium Challenge Account. Amounts specifically for democracy aid were cut drastically in 2013, to a paltry $1  million for Egypt and $8  million for Tunisia. The US was set to reduce its overall MENA democracy assistance by $160 million in 2014. The Bush-era Middle East Partnership Initiative continued but was not dramatically scaled up. The Middle Eastern Transitions unit in the State Department was downgraded and folded into a regional bureau.30 General US support was offered to some reformist groups, but in most places in the region the US studiously eschewed any commitment to particular outcomes in terms of regime change.31 In general the Obama administration expressed what some US officials defined as a more cautious approach to that of European governments. One inside advisor to the administration recognized that the US was ‘still hedging’. There was much comment that Turkey was the principal ‘winner’ of the Arab spring, and its influence in the region was increasingly pre-eminent. Yet Turkey was no better prepared for the Arab spring than the EU. Ankara had to rather inelegantly make the change from ‘zero problems with neighbours’ to ‘zero problems with neighbouring peoples’, a tacit admission of the shortcomings of its pre-2011 policy.32 It appeared to make this move and gain legitimacy in a way that the EU did not. While Turkey was arguably more successful in rebranding itself, however, it did not have anything approaching the EU’s array of pro-reform instruments, civil society support, and twinning programmes. Still, one leading AKP politician reflected the ebullient mood in Ankara: ‘The EU is no longer an important actor in the region. The US is also absent. Erdogan is the missing leader.’ The AKP began building party-toparty links with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and others, along the lines of the European foundations and their sister party model. By 2013 Turkey had provided Egypt with $1 million in export credit and $1 billion in development grants. Foreign minister Davotoglu met the Bahraini opposition before Europeans showed much solidarity.33

30   D. Greenfield, A. Hawthorne, and R. Balfour, US and EU: lack of strategic vision, frustrated efforts towards the Arab transitions, Atlantic Council, 2013, p. 13. 31   R. Springborg, ‘The US response to the Arab uprising: leadership missing’, in R. Alcaro and M. Haubrich-Seco (eds.), Rethinking Western Policies in Light of the Arab Uprisings (Rome: IAI, 2012), p. 36. 32  N. Tocci, E. Maestri, S. Özel, and S. Güvenç, Ideational and material power in the Mediterranean: the role of Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council, Rome, IAI Mediterranean paper series, 2012, p. 15. 33   T. Piccone and E. Alinkoff, Rising Democracies and the Arab Awakening (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, January 2012).

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Yet many aspects of Turkish policy did not compare favourably with European initiatives. Turkey was ambivalent and low profile in Libya; it had to change tack quickly when it realized that Colonel Qaddafi could not be induced into reform and his regime saved. Turkey’s influence in the region was personalized in the image of the prime minister and foreign minister; their proactive role was not deeply institutionalized through the machinery of Turkish diplomacy. Indeed, the country’s diplomats worried about overstretch. One Egyptian liberal party leader likened Turkish diplomacy to ‘a Rolls Royce with a Fiat engine’. Turkish interlocutors themselves increasingly worried in private that expectations had come to exceed the country’s capacity for influence. One expert argued that a more modest measure of Turkish influence also flowed from recognition that Turkey was not an external actor like the EU but situated within the region, and thus a complicating part of the equation in border and ethnic challenges.34 Sinan Ülgen noted that Turkey was relevant to reform choices in some specific sectors, more than a wholesale model as such.35 The SCAF went to Ankara, but came back with the ‘lesson’ that those clauses in the Turkish constitution guaranteeing the military a political role were those to emulate. Turkey passed through an entire cycle of reactions: as the Arab spring broke it was allied with autocratic regimes; it then went out on a limb with several unilateral and bold moves in support of democratic reform; but by 2012 it had tacked back towards a more cautious position, reluctantly realizing the limits to its own influence and keener on cooperating on Arab reform initiatives with EU states again. This reflected a delicate balancing act for Turkey: insofar as its popularity was based on its not having intervened in the region as much as Western powers, the more it sought to influence events now the more its appeal and thus its influence would be compromised; its influence was based on not trying to influence so directly.36 Soft power had its limits: Arabs increasingly watched Turkish soap operas, but this did not automatically turn them into democrats. When Erdogan spoke in Cairo about the famed ‘Turkish model’ being one of secularism, the MB reaction was critical. Foreign minister Davutoglu’s early 2012 comments about Turkey ‘owning the Middle East’ stirred much resentment across the region. Turkish support for the Arab spring was an AKP design to back MB-type parties that were similar to itself; more a party-led strategy for, as the foreign secretary put it in 2013, ‘order-setting’ than a new Turkish statecraft 34   B. Yilmaz, ‘Turkey and the Arab spring: the revolutions in Turkey’s near abroad’, Harvard International Review, 6 January 2011. 35   S. Ülgen, From inspiration to aspiration: Turkey in the new Middle East, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 2011. 36   Z. Önis, ‘Turkey and the Arab spring: between ethics and self-interest’, Insight Turkey, 14/3, 2012: 1–19, p. 13.

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per se. Turkey’s very political lens on democracy promotion had more of a US than European tenor. In interviews in Istanbul and Ankara, many Turks themselves questioned whether Turkey was the big winner: its trade had suffered with Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and Libya; it was affected by the ensuing instability more than EU states; it may have won prestige more than tangible gain. Moroccan reformers tended not to see Turkey as a model, the framework of monarchy standing opposed to the very republican trajectory of the Kemalist state. In a sense, the rise of Islamist parties in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere led to more questioning of the Turkish model, which all these parties criticized as being too rigidly secular. Growing concerns over the AKP’s own encroaching authoritarianism also appeared to dilute its positive influence over reformers. By 2013 the focus of much Turkish debate had shifted back to an appreciable democratic backsliding in Turkey itself; if Turkey was a model to the Arab world it was now as a hybrid mix of democracy and authoritarianism, not of entirely successful and linear democratization. Gulf states allocated significant resources to North Africa. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar promised to create a $10 billion fund at the G8 summit in Deauville. Gulf states promised funds well in excess of EU and US money, amounting to $18 billion to Egypt alone.37 The Islamic Development Bank released $1 billion of its allocation immediately after Egypt’s presidential elections. The African Development Bank gave $0.5 billion in loans to Tunisia, way in excess of anything from the EU. Qatar promised three times more to Tunisia than the EU put on the table in its ENP review. Qatar pushed the Middle East Development Bank, with other GCC states, to help democracy in North Africa, with funding in excess of that coming from the European development banks. Amounts committed under the G8 Deauville process suggested that regional development banks were now as prominent as Western organizations: the African Development Bank promised $7.6 billion, the Islamic Development Bank $5 billion, the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development $3.2 billion, and the Arab Monetary Fund $1.2 billion. Some in the region dismissed the generosity of new EIB credits, as these continued to be granted at more expensive rates than other development banks; an issue raised many times in negotiations but on which EU officials refused to move. However, much of the promised money from the Gulf did not materialize and when it did so was of dubious value for democratization. Indeed, in Tunisia and Egypt popular opposition to Gulf, and especially Qatari,

37   U. Dadush and M. Dunne, ‘European and American responses to the Arab spring: what’s the big idea?’, Washington Quarterly, 34/4, 2011: 131–45, p. 134.

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influence grew.38 Antipathy to Qatar grew among secular democrats, who saw its resources overly favouring the MB. GCC states still spent a tiny percentage on pro-reform projects in North Africa of what they spent domestically to stave off reform. Moreover, the GCC supported reforms in the Mediterranean as a directly instrumental attempt to install friendlier regimes, and to boost monarchies relative to republics.39 Qatar channelled $8 billion to Egypt to compensate for the lack of an IMF deal, in return it seemed for Morsi adopting a more critical position towards Bashar Assad in mid-2013. The UAE and Saudi Arabia then expressly backed the Egyptian army with $12 billion in credits after the summer 2013 coup. Oman got $10 billion from Saudi Arabia to quell protests. Saudi influence helped to ensure there was no deep regime change in Yemen. Gulf states promised well over $5 billion in aid and investment to Morocco; EU officials acknowledged that they were surprised by how far this seemed to undercut European leverage. EU diplomats in Morocco stressed how much Saudi Arabia and the UAE now mattered in a way they had not previously. Morocco obtained funding from these sources when the EU turned down projects. Saudi Arabia was keen to use such entry points to strengthen alliances against Iran. Jordan and Morocco were offered GCC membership, which they contemplated with the prospect of cash transfers and absence of any democratic conditionality. In Jordan, the EU was undercut by Saudi Arabia’s provision of $1 billion, given with no strings attached and thus able to cover the budget deficit. One reformist voice within the inner circle of the regime insisted: ‘even if the EU doubles its aid, from 70 million, this will have not have any effect, when put alongside income from other sources’. The EU’s image improved relative to that of other powers. China and Russia invested significant effort in increasing their presence in the Middle East in large part as a means to bolster their broader global strategic policies.40 Yet China had problems adapting: it saw the uprisings through a domestic lens of seeking to prevent any spillover, and felt uncomfortable with the rise of religious parties and with the notion of a values-driven agenda. In ­general,  it was mainly focused on Asian security questions and its more established resource-oriented partnerships in Africa.41 The popularity  of

38   E. Ragab, ‘A formative stage: relations between GCC and North African countries after the Arab spring’, in S. Colombo, K. Coates-Ulrichsen, S. Ghabra, S. Hamid, and E. Ragab, The GCC in the Mediterranean in light of the Arab spring, GMF-IAI, 2013. 39  S. Colombo, Unpacking the GCC’s response to the Arab spring, Shakara commentary 1, Rome, IAI, July 2012. 40   Reuters, 31 January 2012. 41   S. Breslin, China and the Arab awakening, ISPI Analysis, No 140, 2012. .

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the BRICs suffered among ordinary Arabs. Brazil and India refrained from pushing or criticizing the SCAF or offering support to Egyptian civil society. Brazil, India, and Indonesia were all more active with regard to democracy in their regions than in the Middle East, where they not only opposed action in Libya and Syria, and maintained relations with Iran, but also resisted suggestions that they should proactively help reformers across the region.42 Indonesia became slightly more active in offering advice and organizing transition-related forums. All these powers were silent on the repression in Bahrain. South Africa eschewed any role in the Middle East, feeling its niche to be in African development and governance reform. With six million Indians working in the Gulf, no criticism of the Bahraini regime was heard from Delhi. India offered electoral assistance across North Africa from 2011 but was very cautious in general. Reformers in the Middle East certainly welcomed small-scale initiatives for sharing experiences with Indians, Brazilians, and South Africans in matters such as constitution writing; they concurred that such help came without the problematic baggage associated with Western projects. But they judged such support to have been marginal and extremely limited in nature, and outweighed by the diplomatic neutrality of rising power governments. In sum, European policies after 2010 compared favourably to those of other outside powers. Moreover, European governments exhibited a greater willingness to cooperate with other powers. France assigned diplomats to coordinate with rising powers specifically to temper accusations of pernicious, hidden agendas behind European support. Talks opened with Qatar about joint development projects in North Africa. A core focus of European efforts was to cooperate with GCC states on developments in North Africa—the main issue on which Gulf states sought European coordination, diplomats in the Gulf noted. One GCC ambassador spoke of policy in Yemen as a ‘best practice’ of EU engagement: European governments listened to the GCC states and supported their lead role in Yemen. On a trip to Brazil in 2012, British foreign secretary William Hague singled out the need for European–Brazilian cooperation on the Arab spring. After the EU was not invited in for electoral observation in Egypt it funded a South African mission there instead. Turkey was invited into the Deauville process; the EU urged the so-called IBSA states (India, Brazil, and South Africa) to be brought in too. The office of the special representative to the Mediterranean sought to incorporate a Turkish diplomat. The EU was keen on looking at new multilateral forums for working with rising democracies, as the Community of Democracies was felt to have been relatively ineffective. 42   T. Piccone, Global swing states and the human rights and democracy order, Washington, DC, Brookings working paper, 2012.

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Conclusions This chapter has outlined the positive side of the European response to the Arab spring. A spirit of humility and self-criticism among officials took root. New funds were made available, and the way in which these were deployed drew on a wide range of lessons in how to render support more sensitive and effective. Several European governments backed up these new resources with critical diplomatic pressure as and where the momentum of reform stumbled. An approach predicated on positive conditionality appeared to gain traction, with not only specific reform support but the carrots of trade access and the freer movement of workers being offered. Although the Arab spring blossomed just as Europe was mired in the eurozone crisis and biting recession, in both quantitative and qualitative terms the EU’s renewed Middle East policy could be assessed positively relative to the efforts of other powers. Uncovering the empirical detail of new EU initiatives sheds light on the balance between the different governance dynamics suggested in Chapter 2. In the wake of the revolts, the EU failed to clarify a coherent governance style in its new policies. A battery of new initiatives was launched, some prioritizing bilateralism, others more regional in nature. Some were project-based, others linked to the overarching schema of the ENP. In a confused multiplicity of pre-existing EU policies, the new Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity seemed to add yet another layer, whose relationship to existing initiatives was unclear.43 Certainly the attempt to re-energize existing, institutionalized frameworks of cooperation represented some effort to revive the spirit of Euro-Mediterranean governance. To some degree, the Commission used the Arab spring to reassert its own position in running the ENP. The prism of external governance could explain several initiatives to have EU rules and regulations taken up more widely as a result of the Arab spring. However, this was not the most notable element of policy and was generally pursued with a lighter touch from 2011. Indeed, member states’ bilateral responses and new initiatives in some areas constituted the most dynamic strand of overall European responses. The salience of bilateral action plans became more central as a means through which to channel support. Power politics did indeed appear to have been recast; one mode of governance centred on member states’ conviction that high diplomacy was needed to engage in favour of democratization. More support was focused on the role played by civil society; it sought to widen the range of civic partners and foster links between Arab and

43   T. Schumacher, ‘The EU and the Arab Spring: between spectatorship and actorness’, Insight Turkey, 13/3, 2011: 107–19, p. 114.

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European civil societies. To some extent the EU showed greater finesse in moulding its policies to the specificities of national reform processes outlined in Chapter 3. Governments sought to engage private sectors as key elements to Euro-Mediterranean relations. Business involvement was probably the most significant aspect of the new EU-run task forces. Diplomats insisted that a less state-centric mode of cosmopolitan governance was a core pillar of the EU’s modified approach to the Middle East. The EU’s resources and other commitments made it a leading player in reform support. Indeed, no other actor provided quite the range of initiatives as the EU. At the same time, it was acutely felt that other actors now came into the market of reform support. Governance was not entirely de-Europeanized; however, the EU did begin to acknowledge the need to deploy its own initiatives in a way that was less isolated from broader international influences.

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6 Revisionist Reflex Limiting Transitions

Having provided evidence for a positive assessment of European responses to the Arab awakening, it is necessary to present the other side of the equation. This chapter unpacks the limits to EU support for reform processes in North Africa and the Middle East since 2011. It draws heavily on extensive conversations with policymakers over the last four years—in all major European capitals and nine Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states— that reveal how doubts persisted over the wisdom of supporting political liberalization. Traditional anti-reform perspectives on security interests did not change significantly in some parts of the region. Europe’s new resources and political will to exert pressure for reform were still subject to notable limits. The way in which democracy support was delivered failed to correct some core pre-2011 shortcomings. The facts offered in this less heartening side of the account tip the analytical lens in favour of a more realpolitik governance dynamic. The spirit of shared Euro-Mediterranean and cosmopolitan governance was often not apparent; the dynamics of external governance were too heavy and skewed to European interests to be warmly absorbed in the MENA region. In some crucial aspects, member-state governments sought to regain control over policies towards the Arab world so as to craft policies more tightly around the variability and uncertainty engendered by the revolts. Indeed, by early 2014 this dynamic was gaining ascendance as Arab states’ political trajectories became even more changeable, and this amplified the kind of geostrategic spillover effects delineated in Chapter 3.

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Reactive Caution Many statements and elements of EU policy exhibited an agnostic passivity. Often the line from Brussels and member capitals was that European support would be forthcoming if and when people rose up and succeeded in displacing authoritarian regimes, but that the EU was not especially committed to pre-empting such change. The EU might now be less concerned with actively saving autocratic regimes, but would not necessarily do much to make change more likely. The most often repeated line was that ‘we must be careful and hands-off, as demand has to come from within’—some officials often still doubting that such demand existed. While broadly welcoming the region’s political opening, European diplomats still spoke in terms of risk assessment and the need to temper uncertainty over a medium-term trajectory. A common line to emerge from conversations in the region was that the revolts had not fundamentally reversed the nervousness with which Europeans viewed the Arab world. Much uncertainty existed over how the Middle East’s new political configuration would affect the EU’s security and economic interests. Many in the EU still favoured a technocratic logic to reform after the Arab revolts, believing this to be necessary to minimize political turmoil and unfavourable impacts on European interests. In countries implementing limited, cosmetic reforms there was an echo of what Chris Patten famously said of the Balkans: ‘They pretend to reform; we pretend to believe them.’ Such ambivalence took shape in the midst of the Egyptian revolution. Catherine Ashton warned: ‘You must not expect any dramatic performances from me. We should not try to rush ahead of events . . . we have to address them as soon as they become reality.’1 In the following months it became clear that the high representative preferred to focus her efforts on long-term gradual change. Senior officials expressed concerns that the Commission and External Action Service (EAS) were increasingly behind fast-moving events on the ground. Then Spanish foreign minister Trinidad Jimenez responded to criticisms of her slow response by suggesting that to have acted earlier would have been ‘unacceptable interference’.2 Italian diplomats acknowledged that they saw the protests through a prism of crisis management risk-mitigation rather than as a civic-enhancement opportunity. British foreign secretary William Hague was known for his realist leanings and was dragged reluctantly into supporting the protests by the stinging criticism of his cabinet colleagues.3 One Portuguese diplomat admitted that Portugal had simply not responded  In Spiegel, reported in Global Europe, 17 February 2011. 3  , 10 February 2010.   The Economist, 12 March 2011, p. 38.

1 2

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to the security challenges presented by the Arab spring; introduced very few new initiatives to share democratic experience; and in its foreign policy remained focused far more on lusophone sub-Saharan African. Southern EU states complained that northern member states offered strictures but limited tangible support, less affected by spillover from the upheavals. EAS officials complained that member states were briefing about Ashton’s ‘poor performance’ in the Middle East to mask their own failure to follow through on pro-democracy commitments at the national level. After François Hollande assumed the presidency in France he restrengthened the Quai d’Orsay as a more important actor in the MENA, which returned French policy to a more cautious track. Stefan Füle bemoaned the lack of member state ‘buy-in’ to the upgraded European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) commitments. Interviews with policymakers revealed much frustration from within EU institutions. Many officials lamented that there was more focus on humility than on bold responses. They lamented how even such a historic moment of opportunity had failed to surmount obstacles to reforming many areas of EU policies. The EU was keen to avoid presenting itself as the driver of change; but the real danger was that it was caught behind the curve of change driven from within Arab states. One EAS diplomat acknowledged: ‘we have been caught on the back-foot again, finalising the EAS and the Lisbon treaty, like in the early 1990s in the Balkans when we were finalising Maastricht’. Even the EU’s well-respected ambassador to Morocco had to admit that by the end of 2011 the EU had still not convinced Arab citizens that it was ‘sincere’ in wanting to see democratic change.4 One advisor to the EU special representative admitted to widespread doubt that the acknowledgment of past failures had permeated far into Arab society and media. With many EAS staff having transferred from the Commission, old habits persisted: former opposition members noted uneasily that the officials who negotiated trade agreements and action plans with the governments of Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Qaddafi were still in place. The EAS’s democracy unit complained of being sidelined. The EU’s new democracy promotion strategy—the so-called agenda for action—agreed at the end of 2009 was not mobilized and was conspicuously absent from European policy responses to the Arab spring. EU officials argued in favour of slower elections; they still referred to elections with concern and the standard aphorism that ‘democracy is not just elections’, rather than with enthusiasm. Catching a gathering mood, one member state senior official observed that in the midst of the eurozone crisis ‘we have too little capacity’ and that the Arab spring was a challenge ‘for tomorrow not today’. Despite 4   E. Landaburu, ‘The EU can yet seize the opportunities of the Arab spring’, Europe’s World, 19, Autumn 2011: 118–22.

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being proposed by some member states, the idea of a Euro-Mediterranean regional development bank did not progress. Diplomats acknowledged that by early 2014 the Maghreb cooperation strategy document had produced little in the way of follow-up, with North African states remaining resistant to new initiatives. At this stage, one senior EAS official reflected on three years of EU response to the Arab spring by lamenting that: ‘we still have no quick instruments’. There was little apparent interest in using the UfM secretariat during the crises: it sat passively in Barcelona doing little. No Euro-Mediterranean summit took place after 2008. And yet member states’ governments could not agree either to ditch or fundamentally reform the UfM. Arab reformers were uniformly scathing of the organizations’ performance during the revolts. Despite spluttering back into life at the end of 2011, its engagement in the Arab spring remained extremely circumspect. Some UfM projects had to seek Gulf money because European private funds were not forthcoming. The Spanish view was still that the UfM was not particularly well designed but its location in Barcelona meant that the government had ‘to do something’ to keep it in existence. The Commission was not particularly keen to take over the northern presidency of the UfM; its officials saw member states dropping the latter in the Commission’s lap because they simply did not know what to do with it. In late 2013, UfM ministerial meetings recommenced but only in technical areas; there was still little interest in foreign minister meetings or leaders’ summits. Cooperation between the EU and Turkey on the Arab spring was poisoned by the accession impasse. Cyprus blocked several attempts to bring the Turkish foreign minister into council discussions on the revolts. Member states did not favour ideas to bring Turkey into new initiatives like the European Endowment for Democracy or the Civil Society Facility. One Turkish diplomat complained that when the EU talked of cooperating with Turkey in the MENA they still conceived of Turkey being ‘on the MENA not European side of the table’. Turkey’s idea of a regional economic block, pivoted around Ankara, gained some traction in the region; there was no attempt to coordinate this with the EU’s offer of individual action plans. Turkish foreign minister Davotolgu sought to coordinate positions on Arab spring issues in his bilateral meetings with Catherine Ashton; but a number of member states blocked proposals to include Turkey systematically in Political and Security Committee discussions on the region.

Reluctance to Pressure The ‘more for more’ dimension of EU policy was followed through in some cases, but to a relatively limited extent overall. While commitments to 92

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positive conditionality appeared in formal policy documents, many doubts remained over its practical implementation. When Germany suggested that 50 per cent of the European Neighbourhood Partnership Instrument (ENPI) be used for positive conditionality rewards, most member states feared this would reduce money to their preferred clients. After several trips to the region, Catherine Ashton stressed that it was necessary to talk about ‘mutual accountability’ rather than ‘positive conditionality’. Few people had a clear idea what this might mean. Asked what ‘differentiation’ meant, as included in the Shared Partnership for Democracy, one of the document’s senior authors replied:  ‘nothing:  we just had to say something’. Much of the pre-revolts divergence between northern and southern member states remained. In private, Spanish and Italian officials still expressed scepticism about conditionality: some differentiation might be appropriate, they cautioned, but the EU must not cherry-pick reformers. Danish diplomats running the country’s Arab Partnership Initiative emphasized that they still did ‘not agree on much’ with Spanish and French blandness in the Maghreb, and indeed for this reason felt the need to boost their own bilateral programme of reform support. Even northern liberal states interpreted ‘more for more’ somewhat disingenuously, as even countries such as Algeria were defined as reforming. A majority of EU states argued against removing funds from non-reformers. The idea also met resistance within the Commission, where officials with a development background argued that cutbacks would imperil long-term relationships. The EU was encouraged to pull back as it became clear that even the most reformist states like Tunisia did not welcome the, in their view, paternalistic tone of the ‘more for more’ policy; even though, somewhat contradictorily, the same states also complained they were not rewarded enough for their reforms. The symbolism of ownership became a constant issue in the authorship of every joint declaration and the genesis of project plans: the southern Mediterranean refrain was that any cooperation must now follow an Arab not a European design. The most reformist states did not receive the most generous aid allocations. In 2011, Morocco and the Palestinian Territories were the highest recipients of ENPI funds, including eastern countries.5 Member states could not agree a checklist of criteria for determining reward-based funding allocations. When Catherine Ashton reported to the European Parliament on the ‘more for more’ strategy in 2012 she adumbrated some clear red lines: this principle would not interrupt civil society contacts or reform programmes; non-reformers would not have resources taken away; and security concerns would not be disadvantaged. Officials from the UK development ministry 5  European Commission, Joint Staff Working Document, Implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2011: Statistical Annex, SWD(2012) 122 final, p. 35.

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were still minded to argue that Arab citizens may not really want democracy as opposed to ‘better governance, that may or may not involve democracy’, and that therefore conditionality should only focus on agreeing standards for the better use of development resources. Commission officials in charge of development funds in the region concurred that conditionality should give more priority to inclusive growth than democracy. A long-standing distinction between human rights and democracy persisted: officials suggested that the EU was happy with using pressure to ‘promote’ human rights but only with more vaguely and softly ‘supporting’ democracy. Attempts to enshrine a more critical approach within a European Consensus on Democracy did not advance far after the Arab spring. Tunisian democrats complained that the ENP failed to accelerate after the country’s revolution. They criticized the EU for still thinking in ‘pre-revolutionary mode’ and in terms of an advanced status agreement being its primary tool. This might be a useful instrument over the long term but was behind the pace of immediate challenges. Moreover, Tunisian activists frequently pointed out that such advanced status was already ‘debased’ by virtue of having been given to still-authoritarian Morocco, so could not be sold as a reward for democratic revolution. Moreover, by late 2013, Tunisia’s advanced status was anyway still outstanding. Tunisians wanted deeper support from the EU on a bilateral basis, not a vague regional strategy. A commonly heard line in Tunisia was that the EU was insufficiently aware of the dangers of a counter-coup. More generally, the EU failed to provide the incentives sufficient to make positive conditionality effective. The often-heard complaint from new governments was that the EU refused to impose conditionality on previous autocratic regimes, but now threatened to use it against newly democratic governments. The EU struggled to wield instruments tough and extensive enough to influence elites’ choices in the short term. Where aid was a small percentage of GDP, even tripling the offer was not seen as capable of having much influence. Beyond Tunisia too, the offer of advanced status agreements had little impact, having already been granted to non-reforming states, as mentioned above.6 Membership of the European Union was not even remotely considered as a possible long-term incentive. There was no pressure for such a perspective from many Arab states; nevertheless, the patent non-availability of the membership option drew a clear line in the sand in terms of how much the EU was willing to offer in return for democratic reform. When presidential candidate Amr Moussa raised the notion

6   A. Driss, ‘Tunisia and the EU’, in Bertelsmann Foundation, The Future of the Mediterranean, Europe in Dialogue, 2011/01, p. 78.

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of ‘virtual EU membership’ in his 2012 campaign it was widely seen to have been a vote-loser among Egyptians. If ‘more for more’ remained partial, the ‘less for less’ side of the policy equation was applied even more selectively. Italian diplomats were unequivocal: ‘we do not believe in less for less; we should support even partial reform’. Beyond Syria, the EU was reluctant to impose punitive sanctions. Jordan moved towards an advanced status accord even as it reneged on reform commitments. One UK ambassador argued that sanctions should target only a very small number of people, to split the elite. Dutch representatives asked why no ‘less for less’ reductions were ever seriously contemplated. Locals dismissed the prospect of targeted EU travel bans as ‘laughable’, as most elites travelled elsewhere now and had already moved their assets out of Europe. Diplomats in many member states felt they had to sign up to conditionality for symbolic reasons but doubted this had much potential to elicit desired responses. The only way to make leverage work would be to adopt an indirect, legislative route of restricting EU companies doing business with repressive regimes. Member states were not willing to contemplate such measures. Many EU diplomats pointed out that little pressure could be brought to bear on minority rights issues for fear that this would be attacked in the region as Europe ‘backing the Christians’. The director of Reporters without Frontiers admonished the EU for doing little to protect journalists involved in many of the Arab protests. One high-profile blogger lamented that European governments were lagging behind in protecting rights groups from new forms of state repression. Younger activists tended to complain more about the lack of European pressure on regimes than of outside intervention (although both views emerged from any conversation with groups of Arab democrats). Arab reformers insisted that all this tepidness had ‘reversed the direction of flow’ in human rights discourses and mobilization between the West and Middle East.7 It was now the human rights groups in Tunisia and Egypt that spoke out more assertively than the EU against government abuses in Gulf states. Diplomatic pressure in the Gulf was the most circumspect. The 2011 EU– Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) joint council communiqué was not the normal ten pages listing areas of agreement and cooperation, but a terse single page mostly referring to the values of sovereignty and non-interference. After the Adenauer-Stiftung was ejected from UAE, European governments erred more on the side of caution in their public statements. Many reformers in the region certainly expressed the view that outside support and pressure were unlikely to help their cause. Others berated the West for a lack of solidarity; one insisted that the EU failed to understand how much subterranean

  S. Mokhtari, ‘The new politics of human rights in the Middle East’, Foreign Policy, Fall 2012.

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change was afoot in the Gulf and suggested that:  ‘the EU has missed the momentum’. The EU’s commitment to conclude the free trade agreement (FTA) with the GCC decreased and few member states were interested in pushing for an EU–GCC strategic partnership, according to officials in the Gulf. Proposals did not prosper to revive the pre-2004 plans for an EU–Gulf civil society forum. In efforts to take forward an EU–GCC joint action programme, diplomats in the region noted that the EU’s interest in the Gulf was not fully reciprocated by Gulf interest in deeper relations with Europe. One GCC ambassador caught the mood, suggesting that the EU’s long-standing approach of trying to sell its integration model to the GCC had to change and the EU now had to learn from the GCC’s more flexible model of integration. Across the Gulf, UK diplomats tended still to doubt the value of supplanting national with EU policy frameworks. The UK insisted on excluding the Gulf from the remit of the new special representative for the Arab spring on the grounds that the factors at play there were fundamentally different from those in the Maghreb and Mashrek. Other member states read this as implying that the UK was not keen on seeing unpredictable change in its Gulf allies. The British role in Oman was perceived by Omanis to be entirely based on support of the person of the sultan, a post the UK effectively invented. Power was highly concentrated, with the sultan himself occupying all major ministerial portfolios and refusing to contemplate succession plans; yet the UK did not press even for a limited dispersal of some powers. A UK minister­ ial visit to Oman in February 2013 brought gushing praise for the sultan and new strategic cooperation. The EU suggested to the GCC that a human rights dialogue was now more necessary but did little to counter Gulf resistance to this idea or push any specific reforms—with the exception of women’s voting in municipal elections in Saudi Arabia. Asked about the absence of reform in Saudi Arabia, European diplomats’ responses seemed to come from an agreed script: different countries must find their own route to reform and pressing on human rights would be counterproductive. European officials summarized the general approach in the Gulf: we have to work to cajole reform from within. Experts suggested that continuing Western patronage was a more potent explanation of the paucity of reform in Arab monarchies than any cultural or institutional differences with reforming republics.8 Much new local-level mobilization took shape in the Gulf, but based on a bottom-up, leaderless youth and volunteer activism that did not appear on donor radar screens. Protests erupted again in the summer of 2013 in Saudi Arabia, leading to further arrests. The European response was muted. In general, US diplomats tended to meet with activists

  G. Gause and S. Yom ‘Resilient royals’, Journal of Democracy, 23/4, 2012: 74–88.

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more than European governments did. European governments did not exert critical pressure on Saudi Arabia for its active support of the Egyptian army’s coup in June 2013, even though Saudi money did much to undercut Western efforts to get the Egyptian transition back on track. Despite raising concerns, member states continued security and commercial cooperation with Bahrain in the aftermath of the democracy uprising. The British ambassador who met opposition leaders early in the protests in Bahrain was moved to Oman to smooth waters. Bahraini officials noted that the UK then played a cautious mediating role between the regime and opposition, and was far less confrontational than the US. The UK voted against a proposed UN resolution criticizing the Bahraini government. Some European embassies wound down cooperation with the Bahraini opposition, reflecting a fear that the legacy of the Arab spring might be to unleash a wave of Shia hostility across the region.9 Bahrain’s national dialogue did not include most of the genuine opposition factions, and ground to a halt again in summer 2013. UK diplomats based in Kuwait admitted that their policies did not change after the beginning of the Arab spring. Kuwait was regarded as a model for democratization, with a powerful, elected parliament. The UK insisted it already worked with Kuwait on human rights initiatives as much as was required; no pressure was seen as necessary. Locals commented that much of the UK’s welcome, pro-reform work sat uneasily with a new 2013 contract for British companies to sell internet surveillance technology to the Kuwaiti regime. Nordic states retained a focus on human rights, but representatives of countries such as Spain acknowledged that their concerns were commercial. Members of the Kuwait Society for Human Rights complained strongly at the insipidness of EU and US pressure for reform. Beyond the Gulf, in the case of ‘partial reformers’ the EU struggled to devise policy responses that went beyond uncritical acceptance of what looked to many like increasingly cosmetic political liberalization. Morocco was not only the highest regional recipient of Commission aid, but also the first Arab state to be granted a bilateral summit with the EU, in March 2010. It received the largest increase in French aid in 2012, from €300 million to €500 million. Spain pushed for a hike in Commission aid to Morocco prior to any additional reform commitments. Indeed, the Spanish foreign minister, Trinidad Jimenez, stated boldly that Morocco was unlike other Arab states because it had completed its democratization process—even before the palace introduced its own package of reforms. Officials admitted that Morocco remained ahead of Tunisia in benefiting from EU ‘rewards’—being 9   Brookings Doha Centre and Fride, Toward a strategic partnership? The EU and the GCC in a revolutionary Middle East, event briefing, January 2013.

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the first to open Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements (DCFTA) and Mobility Partnership talks, for instance—because it was administratively better prepared to demand such advances, even though its democratic reforms were more limited. Catherine Ashton and Stefan Füle welcomed King Mohammed VI’s reform vows as ‘a clear commitment to democracy’ and said the EU would support such ‘far-reaching reforms’. Nicolas Sarkozy and the Spanish government also rushed to congratulate the king and categorized the move as significant democratization. Mariano Rajoy made his first foreign trip as Spanish prime minister to Morocco in January 2012 and congratulated the regime for being in the ‘vanguard’ of reform, with no mention of growing human rights concerns and journalist detentions. European reactions showed no sympathy with the opinions of the February 20 and Justice and Charity movements that the new constitution actually reinforced the power of the king. February 20 leaders in Rabat lamented bitterly in private that they received little European support after the repression and deaths they suffered at the hands of the regime. Member states admitted they were not keen to criticize the regime in a way that could help February 20. By 2012, French diplomats opined, in positive vein, that the February 20 movement was ‘dead’. French diplomats formally insisted that they were not willing to follow the US lead in engaging with the Justice and Charity opposition movement. Moroccan activists complained that the king had actually increased his powers under the new constitution—moving, for example, from the pure symbolism of being commander of the faithful to having concrete control over religious–political relations—and that in consequence EU policy could be categorized as ‘more for less’. A Moroccan paper fed into the ENP review proposed a ‘Pact for shared prosperity and solidarity’, excising the word ‘democracy’. Large French IT companies worked with the Moroccan regime to suppress protestors’ social communications technology. As criticisms intensified within Morocco over the reform process, in 2012 the EU negotiated an upgraded advanced status action plan with the regime. The line from diplomats in Rabat was that the king moved quickly on reform in partnership with French and Spanish advisors, against his own inner circle. Rumour had it that some officials even asked the French embassy not to be quite so effusively pro-palace. Within internal EU debates, southern member states blocked all northern European attempts to convey a message that reforms were not being implemented. In May 2013 Spain and France blocked a US human rights initiative for the Western Sahara, with support from the UK and other northern states. This was despite growing numbers of protests in Western Sahara over human rights abuses and the regime’s refusal to implement promises to create independent and locally empowered bodies to protect rights. When the Spanish king visited Morocco in July 2013 with 98

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nine ministers, the entourage apparently explicitly excluded human rights from the agenda.10 The PP declined to confront the Moroccan regime on the Western Saharan question, as it had done in its previous spell in office in the early 2000s.11 Even as Algeria stalled on reform and tightened restrictions on NGOs and foreign funding, no critical European reaction was forthcoming. When Algeria announced very limited reforms, Alain Juppé congratulated President Bouteflika for this process: ‘all of this is following the right direction’.12 France maintained this vague and uncritical tone during Juppé’s official visit to Algeria in June 2011, which avoided any specific mention of growing protests. The French government was wary of pressing for change, in part for fear of rocking the boat ahead of 2012’s fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence. In 2012 a new French–Algerian programme of economic cooperation was launched. Italian diplomats also revealed that they were increasingly circumspect in their dealings with Algeria. In May 2011, Commissioner Stefan Füle praised the Algerian government for lifting a state of emergency and pledging reforms, and announced the creation of a committee for political dialogue between Algeria and the EU. The Commission admitted that after Algeria was granted budget support without conditions, the EU effectively ceded leverage. The EU sent twelve observers to the decidedly unfree May 2012 Algerian elections but made only light criticisms. Spain in particular pressed for a favourable judgement on the polls. Arab democrats saw the EU’s passive stance on Algeria’s elections as a significant dent in its claim to be supporting reform across the whole region. After the elections, the EU and Algeria opened negotiations for an ENP action plan. The EU was keen to take advantage of a rather nervous Algerian regime’s willingness finally to accept the offer of such an accord. A new EU–Algeria Scientific and Technological Agreement was signed and €172 million of Commission aid allocated for sustainable development and cultural projects. One EU ambassador summarized: ‘We are just waiting to see what happens when Bouteflika goes.’ In 2012 Spain relaunched high-level diplomatic forums with both Algeria and Morocco.13 The new Spanish People’s Party administration followed a traditional pattern of tilting back towards being pro-Algerian, in contradistinction to the outgoing Socialist government. Catherine Ashton visited Algiers in November 2012 to lobby for tougher action against Islamists in northern Mali, declining   El Pais, 16 July 2013.  A. Boukabrs, Western Sahara, back to square one, Fride policy brief, 2013. 12  . 13   Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y Cooperación, 2012 Un año de legislatura en política exterior, Madrid, 2012, p. 18. 10 11

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to mention the absence of any reform process within Algeria itself; three new cooperation agreements were signed covering culture, education, and transport. By 2013, Algeria’s interest in continuing with Action Plan negotiations had all but evaporated, as Commission drafts remained unanswered. Talks effectively stalled as President Boutleflika foreclosed critical debate ahead of his winning a fourth term in the elections of April 2014. The focus was back on security cooperation with select member states. As outlined in the next chapter, such counter-terrorism cooperation with Algiers across the Sahel further curtailed the European human rights focus in Algeria. Notwithstanding the array of reform-oriented projects in Lebanon, European governments were keen to maintain the relative stability of the status quo. Diplomats in Beirut talked of their efforts to rein back the Sunni community from opening the Pandora’s box of denominational power-rebalancing, as some in this community felt buoyed by the plight of the Assad regime into a possible challenge to Hezbollah’s armed dominance. As electoral reform options were debated in 2013, European governments stressed pointedly that they did not press for a proportional system that would fundamentally change the quota-based division of political positions in the country. One diplomat in Lebanon summarized:  ‘We have become disappointed with reform. Now our priorities are stability, stability and then stability.’ Germany, Italy, and Spain all scaled down aid to Lebanon; France worked mainly through loans not grants. Human rights groups in Beirut attested to a mixed view of EU policy. France was widely judged to have become the most influential diplomatic player and most balanced in intersectarian mediation. European projects were welcomed for working on second-order reforms in a nuanced fashion. Local groups also noted that European states and the EU delegation strenuously stayed out of high-level political issues; this suggested to local activists that the EU still worked with an assumption that tensions could be contained with very minor, relatively apolitical reforms. EU rule of law projects in Lebanon ended up funding sectarian civil society organizations and selected as their official government partner a state body widely seen by locals as far too weak to reform intrasectarian oligarchic power structures. By 2013, support for deeper reform was subordinate to deliberations over how far the EU should move towards a tougher line on Hezbollah, in light of the latter’s international activities (see Chapter 7).

Egyptian Challenges More detail regarding the case of Egypt demonstrates particularly well European reticence to attempt critical pressure for reform. During the early 100

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2011 protests, European governments were careful not to get out ahead of the reforms being offered by the regime. While member states called for the people’s grievances to be addressed, it cannot be claimed that the EU played any active role in ensuring that President Mubarak did eventually step down. This move was driven by the sheer size of protests in combination with steps taken by the military to contain instability. If any external pressure was in play at that specific moment it came from President Obama more than from any European leader. The EU pointed out that it had funded many of the protestors in the decade preceding the revolt. However, more than any Western training of activists, the key factor was the mistakes made by the regime; the latter initially could have quelled the revolt. Indeed European governments tried to advise Mubarak on how to make tactical changes to save his regime. The water cannon used to push back protesters were imported from Germany. In the aftermath of Mubarak’s departure, the EU was supportive of the process set in train by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). It refrained from criticizing military decisions. This was despite democratic groups lamenting that the military council was moving ahead with a referendum, elections, and a new constitution as quickly as possible in order to consolidate its own position. The European Parliament and Stefan Füle both lamented that the EU was too supportive of the pre-eminent role retained by the army. Several states offered quickly to help with elections and send observers, but did not press in the face of Egyptian refusal to accept external monitoring. The interim regime resisted most democracy aid and retained the Mubarak-era law restricting foreign funding. Egyptian activists complained that the EU appeared blind to how far the emergent political parties were used as political vehicles by key Mubarak-era personalities. The majority of European embassies remained reluctant to press critically on the issues of concern to protestors:  the growing use of military tribunals, increased numbers of detainees, limits on freedom of expression, and supra-constitutional principles being used to ring-fence military privileges. Reformers were angry at the lack of EU pressure on all these issues. European officials most commonly expressed relatively sanguine views that the SCAF was genuinely trying to hand over power in a fair and stable way. Few embassies were able to establish significant direct links with the SCAF to raise concerns. Those that offered to share lessons from other transitions with the SCAF were rebuffed. In general, European governments supported the notion of a long and gradual transition; even as they began to fear that stasis might be the more potent driver of instability, they judged their ability to influence the transition to be negligible. The impression was of European marginality. Diplomats in Cairo lamented that Egyptian government officials remained ‘unconvinced that we really 101

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mean it [our commitment to reform]’. One ambassador set the parameters of caution: ‘We can only begin nibbling slightly at the military’s privileges after two democratic governments [have been completed].’ As violence raged at the end of 2011, one Egyptian human rights leader railed: ‘International pleas for calm are meaningless.’ The EU was so concerned not to be seen as ‘interfering’ or ‘taking sides’ in the three-way stand-off between the military, Islamists, and liberals that its inaction was seen as emboldening the repression. One Cairo-based diplomat acknowledged that European power was extremely limited; in particular only the US had access to or any sway at all over the SCAF. Officials based in the Egyptian capital did not believe there was much value in pressing for a reduction in military powers. When the SCAF refused to invite EU election observers for the presidential polls in May 2012, no direct European riposte followed. While the German government protested at the 2012 raid on the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, it decided to continue aid. The effect was that other European NGOs were reluctant to open new initiatives in Egypt. One Egyptian arrested in the raid on foreign NGOs lamented that Western powers had done nothing to react as the intimidation on such groups had tightened in incremental fashion over the previous months, and as activists had warned the US and European embassies that their situation was likely to get more difficult. The German government was admonished by these secular campaigners for trying to ‘cut a deal’ with the intelligence services to have the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung excluded from the court case in return for Berlin’s tolerance of the old security regime. Conversations with young Egyptian activists unfailingly elicited an angry interpretation of Western policy: the EU and US had backed a rushed and partial transition to curry favour with the military and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Egyptian NGOs felt that EU influence decreased as the increasingly nationalist army leadership cared less about its image than Mubarak had about his; they were also angry at the weakness of the EU response to the intensified repression of NGOs as this extended into 2013. One international NGO complained that ministries even rejected anything labelled as ‘training’ because of sensitivity over the notion that Egypt could learn from a programme coming from outside. In response to a June 2013 court of auditors report, the Commission acknowledged that after 2011 obstacles to civil society and reform initiatives being deployed productively in Egypt if anything increased.14 Despite democracy’s bumpy progress, European diplomats in Cairo generally insisted that Egypt had done enough by late 2012 to qualify

14

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  Reported in the Financial Times, 18 June 2013.

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for positive rewards and that funds should not be withheld by setting the bar of conditionality too high. The EU’s standard line urged ‘inclusive dialogue’ rather than unequivocal support for core, liberal, democratic rights to be respected. Moreover, an eagerness to ‘get onside’ with the MB produced a positive attitude towards elections being held prior to a new constitution—this sowing the seeds for the MB to embed its own power without consensual rules of the game having been agreed. The judgement was that the MB was justified in ‘taking on’ still authoritarian parts of the deep state, although its attempted purge of the judiciary and other similar steps clearly went too far towards an attempt to take control of that same state. The new draconian NGO law was driven forward by the security state apparatus, in league with the MB. Indeed, three years on from Mubarak, this security machinery had re-established the old Faustian bargain of cooperating on Israeli security in return for the West staying out of Egyptian domestic affairs. As outlined in Chapter 5, the EU began to exert some pressure as President Morsi adopted a less open style of leadership; yet the tangible measures adopted in response to this creeping quasi-authoritarian presidentialism were, in practice, relatively light. A battle broke out at the November 2012 EU–Egypt task force over a civil society dialogue. The Egyptian government sought to limit civil society debate to economic issues and disputed with EU officials which civil society representatives should be invited. EU diplomats reported that they stood firm and successfully insisted that a meeting with civil society representatives took place. But Egyptian civil society representatives expressed anger that the EU ‘sold out’ and allowed the Egyptian authorities to control the agenda. While policymakers insisted that the €5 billion offered during the task force was not without conditions, the EU declined to make a mechanical correlation between disbursements and internal political developments. A test arose when President Morsi appropriated powers in the very week after the task force. Diplomats insisted that in private the high representative and other senior officials were frequently on the phone pressing Morsi to retract, and that they used the leverage of the just-held task force. However, the formal EU reaction was light, reflecting a fear of being accused of being prejudiced against the MB. The responses from Catherine Ashton and member states to the referendum on Egypt’s new constitution were strikingly guarded, all stressing the need for ‘dialogue and consensus’. A fierce Egyptian backlash ensued against even these very cautiously worded EU statements. Into 2013, the release of most EU money was still held up by the Egyptian government’s refusal to accept the conditions of an IMF accord; of course, this conditionality was economic, not related to democracy and human rights conditions.

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Several democratic organizations judged the EU too soft on Morsi’s tough containment of riots in January 2013. Despite strong European criticism of the new NGO law drawn up in 2013, cooperation proceeded largely unaffected. Germany released €172 million in development aid to Egypt in April 2013; this was after a brief four-month postponement during which the government had said it would reflect on the political situation—and concerns over creeping executive control were apparently not found to be serious enough to put in doubt the new aid. Many international organizations, including several German Stiftungen, stepped back even further from following through on their plans for new activities because of stricter civil society restrictions.15 German diplomats acknowledged that Egypt was simply too strategically important to abandon. When Angela Merkel pressed Morsi to ease repression of the foundations when the latter visited Berlin in 2013 as quid pro quo for the new aid package, the president promised more openness but immediately advanced on the new NGO law. The German reaction to the sentencing of over forty NGO workers in June 2013 was tough precisely because of this understanding given by Morsi that the Stiftungen would be given more legal certainty under a cultural cooperation protocol. While frustration had grown with Morsi, EU ministers strongly criticized the military’s intervention in the summer of 2013. However, little tangible change in European policies was forthcoming. Ministers and the high representative avoided the term ‘coup’ in part at the behest of the US. The EU decided not to suspend any aid, although this had negligible practical consequences as most funding was already in abeyance. Only a small minority of states supported any consideration of holding back aid allocations or other forms of cooperation. Denmark suspended a small number of projects in August 2013. The fact that aid was already held up by the absence of an IMF deal in effect saved the EU from having to make a decision on whether the military intervention in itself merited a reduction in funds. Because of conditions already in place, only €16 million had been released in 2013 when the coup occurred. The EU sought to bring forward packets of aid for non-governmental actors while the bulk of mainstream economic support remained frozen. In its only punitive measure, the EU decided to revoke export licences for some military equipment. By the end of 2013, the EU was just beginning seriously to debate whether or not to proceed with its various funding sources in Egypt, a question on which member states were divided.16 By March 2014 debate was

 M. Elagati, Foreign funding in Egypt after the revolution, Fride working paper, April 2013, p. 6.   E. Burke, Running into the sand? The EU’s faltering response to the Arab spring, London, Centre for European Reform, Essay, December 2013, p. 8. 15 16

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ongoing over the possibility of formally diverting around 100 million euros of funds from Egypt to humanitarian aid in Syria. The EU’s main focus was on mediation. Senior officials insisted they ‘did not back one side over another’, but did press the army behind the scenes to shorten the period before new elections.17 By late July 2013 the EU special representative was mooting the possibility of the EU offering good offices for a framework of dialogue between the different political sides in Egypt, apparently following interest from the MB in such a European role. However, the army soon quashed this prospective role, as it hardened its repression of MB members and introduced authoritarian security measures. When the UK co-chaired the G8’s Forum on the Future meeting with Egypt in Cairo on 16–17 December, it made no attempt to get the Egyptian government to allow independent civil society organizations to participate and was silent on the repression of human rights activists occurring that very week—in a sad parody of the Forum’s reformist credentials when first set up in 2004.18 By way of comparison, it was significant to note that the US also appeared to have little sway in Egypt in the three years after the revolution. One senior US official acknowledged that the Obama administration had declined to impose conditionality on Egypt at the level of detailed aspects of the reform process—although it used its leverage to rein back any temptation the SCAF may have had to shoot protestors and declare a new military junta, especially at the precarious moment in late 2011 when violence returned with a vengeance to Cairo’s streets. The US backed off initial intentions to attach reform-related conditions to its new aid allocations to Egypt. It stepped back from an insistence that a new aid package would not be cleared with the army. The Obama administration declined to attach any formal democracy-related conditions to its decision to continue military aid, although behind the scenes it was said to have used this as leverage to convince the SCAF not to distort the 2012 election results. Portions of aid to Egypt were ring-fenced for backing border control operations in the Sinai.19 In broad terms, the US veered further than the EU towards uncritical acceptance of President Morsi’s quasi-authoritarian steps in 2013. The US Congress raised doubts over such unconditional support to Egypt, in particular rejecting the administration’s request for increased funds after demonstrators attacked the US embassy in Cairo in September. After intense internal debate, the State Department concluded that leverage would be lost if relations were severed in response to these attacks or the raid on US NGOs.

  European Voice, 10 July 2013.   M. Dunne and A. Hawthorne, ‘Whatever happened to the Forum on the Future’, Foreign Policy, 23 December 2013. 19   F. Gerges, Obama and the Middle East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 173. 17 18

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Secretary of state John Kerry exercised a waiver that released aid to Egypt held up by the Congress only shortly after the sentencing of NGO workers (including fourteen Americans) by the Egyptian court. After the army retook power, the Obama administration worked behind the scenes to build agreement between the army and MB, but elicited accusations of imbalance from both sides. The US eventually moved quietly to hold back most new development aid in October 2013, in line with the legal requirement to cut funding after a coup; however, military training and counter-terrorism programmes continued, and the administration also drafted new formal language that would remove this obligation. Turkey also struggled to fashion a coherent response. It condemned the coup more unambiguously than either the US or EU, with Prime Minister Erdogan reportedly working behind the scenes to encourage the MB to stand firm in insisting on Morsi’s reinstatement. Yet Turkey’s general reformist zeal diminished after Morsi’s ousting—and as Syria’s moderate opposition forces suffered defeats at the same time. Erdogan was the leader most critical of the Egyptian coup; but Turkey began to feel more isolated and cautious, especially in light of rebukes from Gulf states over its explicit support for the MB. The African Union responded more decisively than the EU or US, suspending Egypt’s membership.

Money: Drops in the Ocean While European funding increased, critics dismissed it as nowhere near matching the magnitude of the MENA region’s challenges. Spain and France lobbied hardest for more funds, but their aim was to divert existing EU funds from east to south; neither committed sizeable new sums out of their own national budgets. French aid to Morocco fell from €543 million in 2011 to €173 million in 2013. Spain may have lobbied hard for greater EU attention to the Mediterranean, but its own resources were in freefall: the country’s foreign affairs budget plummeted 12 per cent over 2010–11, with €800 million sliced off its development aid budget. Spain reduced aid to all North African states, and a number of Spanish technical cooperation offices were closed across the MENA region. In 2012, Spain’s new conservative government cut the €85 million annual allocation to Morocco to virtually nothing. The local embassy had to refuse Moroccan requests for security training because the Guardia Civil had no money even to pay flights out to Rabat. The PP government’s focus on winning commercial contracts in Latin America saw a diversion of resources away from the Mediterranean. Italy made funds available for Libya but did not increase allocations elsewhere in the region. Due to budgetary limitations, France and Spain drew down their troop deployments 106

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to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon II mission in southern Lebanon; Italy planned a similar move.20 The magnitude of funding reached nothing like the scale of funds transferred to either southern or Eastern Europe in the wake of their transitions, where in each case several percentage points were added to GDP through EU payments. By 2013, 12 per cent of Commission aid was going to the MENA region, not more than before the Arab spring. Behind the headline figure of an additional €1 billion coming from the ENP policy, some reports pointed out that actual new money was really €250 million a year, and that split across sixteen countries this represented a drop in the ocean alongside the billions that the revolutions cost in lost production. In many Arab states the number of TAIEX twinning projects actually decreased—Jordan, Morocco, and the Palestinian Territories were the only exceptions to see small increases in the number of such initiatives. Education exchanges continued at an extremely modest level: in 2011 260 Israeli researchers were funded for mobility schemes into Europe, while no Arab state received more than twenty such awards—a negligible level compared to other regions.21 Even for soft ‘socialization’-type projects, countries like Saudi Arabia were hardly in hock to EU resources. While the EU dithered over supporting educational exchanges, King Abdullah launched the world’s most lavishly financed scholarship scheme, each year paying for 130,000 young Saudis to attend university in the West.22 European universities did not move to establish the kind of presence enjoyed by their US counterparts in the Gulf. Proposals to use EU cohesion funds for Arab states were resisted by many member states. German diplomats still urged more resources to flow to the east rather than to the south. Arab interlocutors in the region uniformly rubbished the Deauville commitments as a smokescreen that masked the failure of G8 governments to commit significant new funds themselves. By 2013 few European Bank for Reconstruction and Development disbursements were still actually being spent on the ground. Far larger aid increases were granted to the Sahel. The Commission granted Mali and Niger nearly €0.5 billion each for 2011–13; Mali then gained $3 billion in international support in 2013—figures well in excess of new aid to MENA states, especially in per capita terms. Member states rejected the Commission’s bid for increased funds for the neighbourhood in the 2014–20 budget, refusing to authorize any real-term expansion in aid for this period.

20   G. Bonvicini, A. Carati, A. Colombo, R. Matarazzo, and S. Silvestri, Italian foreign policy in 2010: continuity, reform and challenges 150 years after national unity, IAI 11/06, May 2011, p. 9. 21  European Commission, Joint Staff Working Document, Implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2011: Statistical Annex, SWD(2012) 122 final, p. 72 and p. 76. 22   C. Clary and M. Karlin, ‘Saudi Arabia’s reform gamble’, Survival, 53/5, 2011: 15–20, p. 17.

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A plurality of member states offered modest increases in their bilateral aid programmes in the region in 2012, but funds remained of limited magnitude. Germany offered a small aid increase to Egypt, but other member states decreased funding to the post-Mubarak government. When the Dutch government reduced its number of priority aid countries in 2012 only Yemen and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) were left as beneficiaries of mainstream bilateral aid programmes in the Arab world. The UK’s offer of £110 million was described dryly by the Financial Times as ‘a figure not greatly in excess of the biggest bank bonuses in the City of London’.23 The UK’s Arab Partnership Fund actually spent only £6  million on political reform in 2011. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office insisted that it deliberately kept aid amounts so small out of concern over perceptions of undue interference.24 Of Arab recipients only the West Bank and Gaza appeared in the top twenty recipients of UK aid (in twentieth place) and others received negligible amounts of support; in 2012 Egypt got only half what it received in Mubarak’s last year in power. The UK allocated Afghanistan twice what it gave the whole of the MENA region after the Arab spring. Sweden’s aid was also limited; in 2011–12 it gave only €5 million to Egypt and €7 million to Tunisia—although in both cases most of the aid went for political reform.25 The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) was widely seen amongst Arab civil society as too slow to get funds to organizations needing immediate assistance. For 2011 the EIDHR budget was to be divided between sixty-four states rather than prioritizing the Middle East. The Instrument for Stability (IfS) was the quickest source of funds, able to release money within six weeks, and was used to support advisors on election preparations in Tunisia. However, IfS officials were themselves extremely cautious, not wanting the mechanism to gain high visibility; by spring 2011 only €2 million had been committed for pilot projects in each of Tunisia and Egypt, but other requests beyond this amount were rejected. With democracy funds managed by DevCo, the Commission’s development directorate, diplomats in the External Action Service complained of a familiar lack of coherence between political aims and funding procedures. The European Endowment for Democracy did not get off the ground until well into 2013, and began operations with a modest budget and without support from any of the five largest member states. One Jordanian ambassador complained that Jordan had received no new support by late 2011, only a slight frontloading of its current ENPI allocation.

  Financial Times, 27 May 2011, p. 3.   UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, British foreign policy and the Arab spring, July 2012, ch. 4, para. 86. 25   For aid figures, see . 23

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One of its key ambassadors remonstrated that the EU had ‘over-promised’ the number of incentives in return for reform. One Moroccan ambassador opined of the ENP that: ‘The more we try for European values, the less the EU responds!’ Another ambassador dismissed the level of EU help so far as:  ‘ridiculous. . . . We are desperate, but we don’t find Europe has answers even for itself.’ Egypt was the most scathing of limits to EU resources. The country received €150 million a year from the Commission; the EU rebuffed the SCAF’s call for this to be quadrupled. Egypt paid Europe $1 billion a year in debt repayments, demeaning the amount of aid on offer.26 Of course, it was also the case that governments in these states were hardly willing to deepen reforms to access a deeper level of European cooperation. A frequently heard complaint from the region was that the EU also failed to change the qualitative, not merely quantitative, nature of its reform support. Officials admitted that the Spring programme was more a top-up of existing funding than a qualitatively new departure in how money was spent. The shift to more political governance aid exhibited severe limitations. The new concern with ‘best fit’ rather than ideal political models in some places led to a downscaling of reform ambition. And the reduction of development budgets went hand in hand with the search for quantifiable impacts of the reduced amount of money spent, so as to justify aid in a time of austerity, in a way that sat uneasily with the less quantifiable benefits of governance support.27 Diplomats acknowledged that in practice civil society actors were consulted only very peremptorily and selectively in the drawing up of new action plans. Several member states would not allow a completely independent civil society forum to be set up in the southern Mediterranean as in the eastern neighbourhood. Much support was still channelled through the oxymoronic RONGOs (royal NGOs), FLANGOs (first lady NGOs), and GONGOs (governmental NGOs) that proliferated. Arab activists argued that the EU needed to change its partners, not just to throw more money at the region. One of Egypt’s most prominent activists complained that the EU had not fully appreciated the explosion of popular discontent in the country, as it had shifted largely to a government-to-government basis for cooperating with the new MB administration. In conversations with civil society organizations across the region a common criticism emerged: the EU was seen as genuine in its new help for reformers, but also as too ready to welcome ‘faux reform’ and ‘pseudo-democracy’. Central and East European states’ initiatives were

26   A. Dworkin, D. Korski, and N. Witney, Egypt’s hybrid revolution: a bolder EU approach, ECFR policy brief, April 2011, p. 7. 27   T. Carothers and D. Gramont, Aiding governance in developing countries: progress amid uncertainties, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2011.

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numerous but not generously funded; they were often criticized from within the region for being based on transition templates that resonated little in the Middle East. One EU diplomat pondered: ‘We have wonderful instruments but nobody wants them.’ Another recognized that, ‘we are still instrument-driven rather than demand-driven’. One senior member of the EU political and security committee suggested that with limited resources the EU could act mainly as a platform to bring on board other donors and players. One foreign ministry Middle East director argued that ‘the EU cannot measure its level of engagement now by the level of funds—we haven’t got many!’ Arab states complained at the lack of funds but also, and not entirely consistently, insisted they could not be ‘bought off’ with mere monetary rewards; rather they were looking for the EU to treat them as ‘strategic equals’. European influence was undercut by the perception universally held across the Arab world that the EU failed to do this. As the Moroccan ambassador to the EU pointed out: ‘what we most want in terms of incentives and rewards is an idea of what strategic vision and partnership you can offer’. Cooperation with a muchchanged Arab League was seen as the route to achieving this more strategically focused approach. Leading figures in the EAS recognized that the EU did little to upgrade efforts in the Gulf, merely hoping to persuade the Arab League to engage in joint sectoral cooperation. Across the Gulf, EU member states offered low-key human rights funding only, while channelling resources towards infrastructure and development projects. No new EU political reform projects commenced in the Gulf after 2011. The UK supported little more than a small pilot project on judicial reform in Bahrain and Oman. No EIDHR projects were funded in the Gulf. No new funding supported the Bahraini opposition. In Jordan, EU funding remained in limbo during the whole of 2011. Jordan’s national indicative programme for 2011–13 allocated 20 per cent of its funds for democratic reform.28 However, development projects progressed on a basis of ‘business as usual’, according to local European officials. Budget support remained paramount, while development projects were decided on the basis of requests from the government. Diplomats recognized that they struggled to reach out beyond the traditional range of RONGOs; the organizers of Jordan’s social protests were disinclined to organize themselves into formally registered NGOs, which made EU support difficult. Morocco’s national indicative programme for 2011–13 allocated the majority of its funds for ‘governance’ and ‘institutional support’, but democracy

28  European Commission, Joint Staff Working Document, Implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2011: Statistical Annex, SWD(2012) 122 final, p. 51.

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was not mentioned.29 The EU struggled to engage with the constellation of cell-like groups linked to the February 20 movement. One of their leaders in Rabat criticized European donors for being reluctant to fund flexibly organized local groups rather than the same elitist NGOs that, in the eyes of a new generation of protestors, lacked legitimacy. As one European diplomat in Rabat admitted, little funding went to NGOs that were not seen in favourable light by the palace. The amounts of European aid forthcoming in the immediate aftermath of the Tunisian revolution were relatively limited. Italy released €5 million and Spain provided a credit line for €300 million worth of loans, rather than grants. The UK’s extra €1 million was the same cost as a single bombing sortie in Libya. The Commission’s allocation of €257 million for 2011–13 was boosted by another €140 million: €5 million extra for democracy, €54 million for the economy. The EU ambassador to Tunisia argued that the EU’s role should be confined mainly to technical governance issues such as customs, tax reform, and administrative law along the lines of EU rules.30 One trainer lamented that by 2012 party training was being reduced in Tunisia just when it was most needed as the country struggled to solidify its party system. Some insiders worried that the EU was overlooking the persistent problems that beset Tunisia’s transition because of their desire to have an exemplary success story for their own policies. Yemen was not eligible for any of the new ENP initiatives or resources introduced in 20ll. By early 2012 only a limited €25 million of additional aid had been allocated, nearly exclusively for humanitarian relief. The Friends of Yemen group was created in 2010 due to security concerns and retained this focus into 2012. Security support continued despite the security forces being controlled by the Saleh family and allies. EU officials tended to think that establishing a task force for Yemen was simply beyond the EU’s capacities and that the focus should remain on North Africa, despite the country’s acute security challenges. European states played a secondary, supporting role to a GCC leadership that piloted an extremely gradual and partial reform process.

Markets: Limited Openings In the region, the EU’s trade offers were not seen as generous. The EU was not willing to offer trade preferences of the kind previously offered in the Balkans

29  European Commission, Joint Staff Working Document, Implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2011: Statistical Annex, SWD(2012) 122 final, p. 60. 30   A. Koetsenruijter, ‘Tunisia and the EU: what now?’, New Europe, 930, 10 April 2011.

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and some Eastern European states, namely non-reciprocal unrestricted access. The EU did not offer a customs union of the kind it operated with Turkey. Commission trade directorate (DG Trade) officials argued that Arab states were too poor for a customs union. They also fretted that if one were offered to the Mediterranean then the EU would be pressured by other regions for similar deals. The trade accord negotiated with democracy-backsliding Ukraine during 2011 went beyond anything on offer in the southern Mediterranean. A reform of the EU’s Generalised System of Preferences took trade benefits away from Morocco. The new agricultural accords were those that the EU had started negotiating in 2008, as it was obliged to do under the terms of association agreements, but which had never concluded, to Arab states’ increasing chagrin. The agricultural accord with Morocco was, regional observers highlighted, more favourable to EU food exports into Morocco than to Moroccan exports into Europe. Spanish, French, and Italian officials were still sceptical of market opening. They insisted this would not have any major impact and that it was more important to push Arab states to give access to EU services investment. One Spanish official expressed the general impatience with those states pressing for liberalization: ‘Arab states won’t get democracy by exporting tomatoes.’ Spain’s ambivalence on trade liberalization contrasted with its assertive pressure on Morocco to accept a renewed fishing accord strongly to the benefit of Spanish, not Moroccan, vessels. French policymakers reacted angrily to suggestions that France should open its agricultural markets at the behest of pressure from northern states that did not compete with southern Mediterranean produce. With the unsentimental clarity of a firm defence of short-term national interests, one French ambassador railed: ‘I will not open my agricultural markets to help the Arabs, because it costs us more to do so than those like the UK who keep telling us to liberalize.’ Germany declined to use its increased leverage over economic policy in the EU to unblock trade liberalization with the Mediterranean. Organizations such as the IMF judged the scale of European trade and aid offers to North African states to be comfortably outweighed by the negative effects of the EU’s own crisis on the region. Tunisians complained that they had not been given an upgraded and access-boosting agricultural accord similar to the one agreed with Morocco. The Moroccans themselves were still not entirely happy, demanding fully free access and facilitation measures even for the most sensitive products—insisting this was vital if the EU were to follow through on its promise of ‘positive incentives’. Mediterranean states’ balance of trade in agriculture with the EU continued on its progressively more negative trajectory of the last two decades. Jordan was rebuffed in its request for full cumulation in EU rules of origin. It also failed to push the EU forward in liberalizing trade in services, after a scoping study stood gathering dust 112

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in Brussels. And a Jordanian proposal for an immediate, bilateral customs union got even shorter shrift from the Commission’s trade directorate. The DCFTA mandates were berated as not generous: rules of origin were still restrictive; the precautionary principle on health and safety, under which the EU imposed restrictions even where scientific evidence was not conclusive (unlike other trading partners) was still a huge obstacle for the south; and despite the Lisbon treaty giving the EU competence over foreign investment, member states still had a myriad of bilateral investment protection treaties in the region, militating against rapid progress on liberalization at a European level.31 Policymakers insisted on asserting safeguards against ‘distortions to European markets’. Moreover, DCFTAs were not really a reward, as they were opened with Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia, and Egypt—not all reforming states. The idea of a pan-regional Euro-Mediterranean free trade area was no longer seen as realistic. The bilateral route was now pursued, as a more limited objective. Talks on DCFTA mandates moved painstakingly slowly. Trade officials admitted in private that the EU had oversold what could be offered and how quickly. Of the four DCFTAs formally on offer, the Council only mandated the Commission to begin negotiations with Morocco at the end of 2012, two years into the Arab spring; the talks with Rabat duly began in March 2013. Egypt was not ready for serious negotiation over a DCFTA, as the shifting political scenario proved too chaotic to negotiate and the economic situation unpropitious. Talks with Algeria stalled, as the latter insisted on greater flexibility in tariff reductions across a swathe of product sectors up to 2020. The EU–GCC free trade talks suspended in 2008 did not recommence: the Arab spring did not provide a sufficient prompt for this accord to be concluded, after a record twenty years of negotiation. DCFTA talks were heavily loaded with secondary EU aims of foisting technical regulatory standards on southern Mediterranean states in areas unrelated to political transition. Negotiations consequently atrophied, with MENA states complaining that they had been deprived of quick improvements in access to European markets, due to this heavily bureaucratic approach of across-the-board harmonization around an EU acquis that few in the region saw as beneficial to political liberalization.32 Indeed, new provisions pertained mainly to regulatory harmonization. Trade policy was the sphere most clearly seen through the prism of EU rules export. Officials defined the aim as being to ‘identify how far these countries are from us’. Complaints from the southern Mediterranean grew more vociferous that the EU’s insistence

  Notre Europe, Trade policy in the EU’s neighbourhood, Paris, 2012.   N. Witney and A. Dworkin, A power audit of EU-North African relations, London, European Council on Foreign Relations, 2012, pp. 32–3. 31

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on ‘harmonization’ merely added to the regulatory burden and made deeper integration more difficult across the Mediterranean. A  Commission-run expert group feared that external governance was increasingly seen in the region as having a repellent rather than integrative effect.33 Because the EU failed to focus on a core number of priorities capable of improving the really important aspects of economic governance, many reform-minded interlocutors in the region worried that any trade openings were set to benefit reform-resistant elites. Unlike the EU, the US offered completely (or in some cases virtually complete) free access for agricultural goods through its FTAs with Bahrain, the OPTs, Jordan, Morocco, and Oman.34 A new US Trade and Investment Partnership Initiative compared favourably with European offers. The US provided $2 billion extra for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and a new Trade and Investment Partnership Initiative. The OPIC allocated $2 billion for private sector development. At the end of 2011, the Moroccan ambassador to the EU argued that it was too late for a regional Euro-Mediterranean customs union precisely because this would be rendered impossible by the trade agreement with the US.

Mobility: Deception The Arab revolts quite obviously caused most EU member states to focus on controlling migration flows. Post-revolts policy in this area was marked by an essential continuity. Member states sought to retake control over migration policies. Huge flows of migrants did not materialize; indeed, this fear was the Arab spring’s dog that didn’t bark. Migration flows from North Africa into the EU fluctuated but remained at relatively low levels. They spiked briefly in 2011 before falling to an extremely low level in 2012, and then rising slightly to just over 30,000 in 2013.35 As of 2012, polls suggested that the Arab spring had neither hugely increased nor diminished the numbers of citizens intending to emigrate from North Africa.36 The region’s youth bulge peaked just prior to the Arab revolts. Yet the ostensible incentive of freer mobility for

33  European Commission, Euro-Med 2030:  long-term challenges for the Mediterranean Union, Report of an Expert Group, 2011, p. 87 and p. 99. 34   U. Dadush and M. Dunne, ‘European and American responses to the Arab spring: what’s the big idea?’, Washington Quarterly, 34/4 (2011): 131–45, p. 141 35   Financial Times, 28 October 2013 36  P. Fargues, ‘Demography, migration and revolt in the southern Mediterranean’, in C. Merlini and O. Roy (eds.), Arab Society in Revolt: the West’s Mediterranean Challenge (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012), p. 41.

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North African workers into Europe was outweighed by stricter controls on migration. After the country’s revolution, EU cooperation with Tunisia on migration control was more extensive than any support for democracy. Indeed, this was formalized under an EU–Tunisia Migration Cooperation Agenda. The temporary surge in migrants even caused member states to add new qualifications to Schengen treaty principles of free movement within Europe itself. Joint Operation Hermes kicked quickly into action, working with Europol to help Italy stem migration. Frontex gradually extended the scope and time frame of its mission on the island of Lampedusa. In its first two months the mission spent €2.6 million and was granted a €5 million emergency fund to draw on. Somewhat incongruously, the beefing up of Frontex was even named as a priority in the proposed Partnership for Democracy. The Italian government tried to renew its bilateral readmission agreement with the interim Tunisian administration, but even a €300  million sweetener could not assuage Tunisian anger at what was judged to be Italy’s lack of solidarity. Italy even proposed military intervention to stop the boats laden with migrants leaving Tunisia. At the end of 2012, Italy also pushed the new Libyan government for stricter commitments on reducing migrant flows as part of its continuing support to Libya. Many commented on the apparently exaggerated and confused nature of this reaction. Schengen found itself under pressure because of just 25,000 Tunisians. Germany had taken in half a million refugees from the Balkans in the 1990s. Far more migrants from Libya went to Egypt and Tunisia than to Europe. More North African migrants were now going to emerging powers. It was telling that in sub-Saharan Africa the EU had a partnership for ‘mobility and employment’, but in the Mediterranean one for ‘mobility and security’. A confusion was evident between asylum and migration; MENA accounted for nearly 20 per cent of political refugees to the EU but only 3 per cent of its migrants. The real issue should have been that of asylum rules. EU states did not agree to increases in refugee acceptances. Reports that the Dutch government was privileging asylum requests from Egyptian Copts was controversial in the region as it fed perceptions that the EU was more concerned with defending Christians than with human rights per se. Most of the focus was still on tightening access. Member states agreed to pump new resources into Frontex in 2012, and to allow it to lease its own equipment, giving it operational freedom to deploy military helicopters and patrol boats. The European border surveillance system (Eurosur) proposed by the Commission in 2008 and the ‘border fund’ for building up border guards were enhanced and progressed in their implementation phases. Some member states pressed for a fully fledged EU border guard. In 2011 EU governments narrowed down the Council of Europe’s remit over human 115

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rights issues in migrant returns.37 A systematic stakeholder consultation on the Global Approach to Migration carried out in 2010–11 revealed that the two main areas that member states most wanted to see boosted were border control and the return of illegal migrants (this was despite recognizing the Commission’s own research findings that most irregular migrants did not enter the EU through clandestine border crossings but rather through overstaying work visas and other routes that reflect internal bureaucratic failings).38 A May 2011 Commission communication advocated a new series of dialogues on a balanced approach. Its narrative was largely focused on the new risk factors deriving from the Arab spring and talked of increasing Frontex’s powers; boosting Eurosur’s capacities; appointing an EU anti-trafficking coordinator; a stricter returns policy; and an entry–exit control system. However, the document also recognized that the EU needed to deliver more in terms of offering access for workers from Arab states and protection for political refugees; indeed, it advocated quick conclusion of visa facilitation agreements and Mobility Partnerships with Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt. Nearly €0.5 billion—well in excess of funding specifically for democracy—was made available during 2011 under the External Border, Return, and European Refugee Funds to help southern member states deal with the crisis.39 Most initiatives under the EU’s new Sahel Strategy (see Chapter  7) were concerned with migration and border control. Frontex operations were extended into Senegal and Mauritania. The EU was seen as pushing its new ‘Neighbours of the Neighbours’ concept principally as a means of externalizing border controls further from European borders. Such pre-border surveillance was legally challenged for contravening the rights of people on the move. Revival of the 5 + 5 forum reflected the migration focus. Ironically, southern member states were now sending more workers to Northern Europe than they were receiving Arab workers. Still, Spanish officials admitted that they did not feel ready for mobility partnerships to go ahead. Morocco played on European fears heavily, with a constant retort of: if you press us to reform, the migration floodgates will open. The result of all these concerns was that by 2014 the promised Mobility Partnerships were still at an early stage of discussion. The only tangible progress was with Morocco, which agreed in March 2013 the principle of

37   C. Clarke, The EU and migration: a call for action, Centre for European Reform essay, November 2011, p. 36. 38  European Commission, Summary of stakeholder responses to the public consultation on the Global Approach to Migration, July 2011, p. 14. 39  European Commission, A dialogue for migration, mobility and security with the southern Mediterranean countries, Brussels, COM(2011) 292, 2011; European Commission, Communication on Migration, COM(2011) 248, 2011.

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accepting a readmission agreement as a first step to opening negotiations on a Mobility Partnership. Tunisia finally signed its Mobility Partnership in March 2014. Egypt had not even expressed an interest in exploratory dialogue. Only one meeting had been held by 2013 on the partnerships in Cairo:  the focus was on a DG Home presentation of new controls and stiffer digital visa requirements, exactly the opposite of what the Egyptians believed the partnerships were supposed to be about. Mobility Partnerships were interpreted as a framework mainly for increasingly conditionality on Arab states to prevent migrants leaving their shores and for justifying member states’ increasing ‘push-back’ of people crossing the Mediterranean. Concerns were increasingly raised over the degree of extraterritoriality at the heart of EU policy.40 Member states’ linking of police cooperation and border control to their own bilateral readmission accords with Arab states undercut the supposed EU Global Approach. These tensions intensified in response to the tragedy in which over 200 people drowned trying to reach Lampedusa in October 2013. The Commission proposed boosting Frontex capabilities for search and rescue and bringing forward Eurosur’s inception. Southern member states then blocked an expansion of Commission powers to help in rescue operations in the Mediterranean, afraid that this competence would cut across national controls of migration. After the tragedy the focus was on deeper cooperation with Arab governments to stop small boats leaving port, rather than sharing the burden of receiving asylum seekers among all EU member states.41 One senior policymaker was candid: mobility partnerships were designed in practice to limit mobility. Under the mobility scheme, member states retained the right to set quotes for workers and set these at very low levels. The granting of a Blue Card was made conditional on the applicant earning a salary of 1.5 times the average wage of the country of destination. Mediterranean states were rebuffed in their demand for visa liberalization, and were not even offered a more modest programme of visa facilitation, leaving them lagging behind the Balkans, Eastern Partnership states, and even Russia. In 2011, EU states granted Ukraine over 1 million short stay visas and Belarus over half a million; Morocco got the most of such visas among Arab states at only 300,000, while Egypt received a paltry 100,000.42 Of course, the relationship between immigration policies and democratic reforms was not a direct one. European governments might argue that there was no contradiction between a commitment to support human rights on 40   L. den Hertog, Two boats in the Mediterranean and their encounter with Europe’s policies towards people on the move, Centre for European Policy Studies working paper 48, July 2012. 41   EUobserver, 26 October 2013. 42  European Commission, Joint staff working document, implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2011: statistical annex, SWD(2012) 122 final, p. 33.

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the one hand, and a desire to reduce migration on the other. However, immigration and asylum policies undercut both their leverage and credibility in many parts of the Middle East. In North Africa, most diplomats saw the EU as utterly contradicting its own human security discourse, turning migrants into criminals rather than seeking to protect their personal security. Some pointed to an apparent paradox: with political systems opening up and the human rights situation improving, there should be less need for migration away from the southern Mediterranean. Yet, more generous migration provisions were important for Arab states as a shock absorber for their fragile economies. Remittances mattered: they accounted for nearly 5 per cent of Moroccan GDP. One former interior minister acknowledged that the new Mobility Partnerships were far too limited to make a significant impact and that they needed to include more help for IT and vocational training, and recognition of a wide range of qualifications.43

Geopolitical Calculation Driving all these limits to Europe’s support for democratic reform was a thread of geostrategic reflection. The geostrategic spillover from varied reform processes—outlined in Chapter 3—weighed heavily. In terms of the EU’s basic strategic outlook, a striking degree of caution persisted. While democratic change was supported in a generic sense, there was much disquiet over the impact on more specific EU alliances and objectives. One Middle East director noted that, ‘We still lack of overarching strategy for what we want from the region.’ Quai d’Orsay diplomats acknowledged the absence of such ‘grand strategy’ thinking, and indeed a general resistance to the notion that France should aim to have such an overarching plan. Reflecting a common view of people from the region, one North African summarized the roots of European caution: ‘In 1989 Western Europe was the clear winner. In 2011 it is not: it has lost its dictators.’ This was backed up by EU officials in their explanation of the caution in EU responses. One senior EAS official recognized that the revolts marked the completion of the process of ‘Arabs’ independence from us’ rather than their looking for European support in any primary sense. In the words of one eastern European politician: ‘There is no Moscow for us to help them get away from in the south.’ Indeed, the positions of many of central and Eastern Europe’s erstwhile champions of democracy were surprisingly downbeat. Reviewing the state of play a year on from the Tunisian protests, one central European

 Clarke, The EU and migration, Centre for European Reform essay, November 2011, p. 11.

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minister complained that the EU reaction had been naive: the EU had failed to recognize how the Arab spring was undermining European influence. One high-ranking Baltic official argued that support for democracy needed to be more ‘balanced’ than in central and Eastern Europe as the benefit of reforms was less certain. A frequently heard line held that the EU started from a much lower base of influence than in any other set of transitions, and more of a negative image that Europe must first correct to convince Arabs of its genuine intent. Another EAS spokesman described the modest change in perspective thus: the EU shifted to support reform but still had to make a more fundamental shift from conceiving the future in terms of ‘defensive interests’ to ‘positive interests’; democracy proponents in the EU ‘need to be aware of counter examples where democracy leads to negative outcomes’. One senior Italian diplomat coordinating his country’s Middle East policies captured something of this balance: ‘It is not that we are especially focused on democracy, simply that we are now less afraid of it; we have maintained relations with Middle Eastern states through different regime types.’ In fact, it took some time before the EU began assessing systematically how the varied depth of reform across Arab countries might intensify regional tensions. Observers pointed to the way that differing degrees of change in the region would magnify well-known rivalries. Yet this did not seem to give a fillip to pro-reform geostrategic reasoning. While the Arab spring deepened sectarian cleavages, regimes also stoked up such divisions both to protect themselves from opposition and from further regional ambitions. Some experts berated the EU for being too indulgent of the regimes’ narrative that reforms should be limited because sectarian tension threatened minority rights.44 One particularly high-ranking EAS diplomat acknowledged that the EU struggled to assess changes to diplomatic alliances within the region and the impact such changes would have on European interests. Transition support was built into a select number of bilateral initiatives, but there was little discernible effort to make reform the pillar of a pan-regional security framework. Diplomats lamented that the EU as such still had no security dialogue with the MENA, this being undertaken only through NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) in a way that failed to touch meaningfully upon reform issues. NATO’s ICI turned out to be irrele­ vant to reining back repressive security forces in the Gulf. EU–Arab League summits produced nothing in the way of concrete, operational cooperation on the region’s broad geostrategic challenges. Italy loosely floated the notion

44

 B. Mikail, Sectarianism after the Arab spring: an exaggerated spectre, Fride policy brief, 2012.

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of resurrecting the early 1990s Conference on Security and Cooperation in the Mediterranean proposal—to ensure that efforts transcended the technocratic confines of Euro-Mediterranean relations and brought the Gulf and US into a comprehensive security forum—but the idea did not prosper. Indeed, Italian foreign policy failed to take any lead after initial suggestions it would do so, suffering from a combination of the euro crisis and the country being shunted from the top table internationally.45 The reform-ambivalent approach to security was most notable in the Gulf. In this region, security was still seen principally through the lens of maintaining defence deals and military cooperation. The absence of pressure on Gulf states reflected a stability-oriented strategic perspective. In the words of one EU diplomat: ‘the equation of values and interests coinciding is still different in the Gulf’. EU–GCC security cooperation deepened in relation to events in Yemen, piracy, arms control, and the scheduled talks on a Middle East nuclear free zone. In 2012, the EU further deepened strategic dialogue with the GCC on Iran, Palestine, and Syria—even if it did not follow through on the European Parliament’s call for a formal Strategic Partnership. Catherine Ashton and her team made a significant effort to boost diplomatic engagement with GCC states on regional challenges, in what they insisted amounted to a more preferential strategic relationship; this apparently bought into Gulf regimes’ discourse that the Arab spring was a highly positive event taking place outside the GCC and having little pertinence to domestic politics in the Arabian Peninsula. The UK upgraded its Two Kingdoms Dialogue with Saudi Arabia to the status of a formal bilateral strategic partnership. The House of Commons Committee on Arms Exports Controls criticized the UK government for issuing an increased total of 288 licences for arms sales to Saudi Arabia in the first year of the Arab spring, along with ninety-seven to Bahrain.46 Evidence collected at a parliamentary hearing showed that the prime minister’s visit to Kuwait was seen in the region as symbolic of a continuity in the ‘bad old ways’ as he lectured on the importance of human rights trailed by a delegation of arms companies (even if the government pointed out that it revoked a record 158 licences in 2011).47 The UK signed a new security pact with Bahrain in October 2012 and beefed up its support for the Kuwaiti Military Staff College. UK officials insisted that before London relinquished national action in favour of a more Europeanized framework in the Gulf, the EU would need to become

45  A.  Colombo and E.  Greco, L’Italia e la trasformazione dello scenario internazionale, IAI Documenti 12/03, April 2012. 46   Financial Times, 13 July 2012. 47   UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, British foreign policy and the Arab spring, July 2012, ch. 4, para. 76.

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‘more concrete and geopolitical’, not just keep issuing lists of generic good intentions. Some observers suggested that the extent of the UK’s increased military presence in the region almost took it back to an ‘east of Suez’ doctrine: an upgraded airbase in the UAE; enhanced cooperation with the Emirates; the Royal Navy’s increased use of facilities in Bahrain; and a beefed up presence in Jordan. This was driven in part by a desire to assist the US’s pivot to Asia by demonstrating UK utility to Washington—albeit perhaps raising expectations beyond what Britain could actually deliver in terms of security protection for the region.48 In December 2013 the UAE rebuffed the UK when it decided not to proceed with a planned BAE Typhoon contract. Gulf-based activists complained that backing for post-transition democracy-building in Tunisia and Egypt was pursued as an ‘easy option’ and masked increased geostrategic support for Gulf regimes. European governments relied on the UAE and Qatar for help in Libya. Catherine Ashton spoke warmly of Qatar’s modernization reforms and importance as a Western ally. Spanish diplomats opined that geostrategy prevented the EU from applying a reform logic to the Gulf. The interlinkage of Gulf and Spanish royal families weighed heavily, as did recently struck defence cooperation deals between Spain and the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Dutch diplomats in the region ventured that ‘the Arab spring won’t float [here]’. The French government signed several new defence accords with Gulf regimes. Qatar came to buy four-fifths of its defence equipment from France. In 2011, the Merkel government effectively loosened restrictions on arms sales that were introduced under Gerhard Schröder in 2000. In July 2011 Germany agreed to sell 200 tanks to Saudi Arabia—despite Saudi tanks having just gone into Bahrain to quell pro-democracy protests. In 2012, Germany also negotiated sizeable new weapons sales to Egypt and Algeria, even involving big ticket items such as warships, submarines, and more tanks—again, talks were held at the very moments when heavy security force repression was being carried out in these two countries. Germany used increased arms exports as a strategic tool, to enable allies in a context where it remained unwilling to become a stronger security actor itself. If the traditional defence-oriented approach to stability was most conspicuous in the Gulf, neither was it absent elsewhere. While European frustration grew with the lack of progress in Jordan, diplomats acknowledged that governments were inclined to be supportive of the king’s regional diplomacy. Instability in Syria rendered stability all the more crucial in Jordan. The king’s reaching out to Hamas was given quiet encouragement. The UK had several dozen security officials embedded with Jordanian security forces. 48   G. Stansfield and S. Kelly, A return to east of Suez? UK military deployment to the Gulf, London, RUSI working paper, April 2013.

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One European ambassador in Amman worried that any focus on reform was blocked by the bigger member states. Even experts close to the royal court expressed private concern that the West was looking too favourably at the king’s regional diplomatic role and not enough at the brittleness of Jordan’s underlying domestic dynamics. Another royal confidant said:  ‘I am even embarrassed that the EU is so gushing in our praise.’ The EU also reined back pressure on Jordan due to Israel’s concerns, as tensions flared in the Occupied Territories in the autumn of 2012. Diplomats acknowledged that the temporary holding back of around €40 million of a second tranche of Spring funds was of little concern to the Jordanian regime, recently in receipt of several billion dollars of Saudi money. With security in mind, the main EU member state donors also increased levels of support. Geostrategy was increasingly pre-eminent in Lebanon too. Member states pressed the Miqati government to adopt its policy of ‘disassociation’ from the Syria conflict. The concern was not so much with deepening democratic reform as with persuading leaders in the Sunni, Shia, and Christian camps to adhere to power-sharing deals rather than trying to enhance their own respective positions against the background of regional geopolitical fluidity. Diplomats in Beirut argued that this policy helped give Lebanon a greater degree of resilience than many had expected when the Syria conflict erupted. Various European post-Assad planning exercises hinged around this template of limited reforms within a stability-oriented context of balanced denominational inclusion. European states were generally reluctant to adopt any punitive measures on Hezbollah as preserving stability inside Lebanon became even more imperative; with Salafi groups engaging in unsettling violence, Hezbollah now even appeared something of a calming influence. Yet into 2013 concerns grew over the movement’s continuing dominance. Hezbollah forced Miqati from office in April 2013 and evidence pointed to its involvement in a 2012 bombing in Bulgaria and planning operations in Cyprus. Balancing these intricate calculations over stability, in May 2013 the EU placed Hezbollah on its terrorist list, partly because of evidence of its involvement in Syria—a remarkable shift in policy, especially on the part of French diplomacy. On the last day of 2013, Saudi Arabia gave the Lebanese armed forces $3 billion to buy French military equipment to help in the fight against Syrian and Hezbollah activities, after the killing of another prominent Sunni politician in Beirut.49 In Morocco, the king was still seen as the country’s one unifying factor; it was he who had succeeded in quelling protest. He was judged to have reacted in a sufficiently far-reaching manner; the issue was whether the political

  Financial Times, 31 December 2013.

49

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class followed through. Some member states increasingly argued that cosmetic reform no longer sufficed for stability. Crucially, top EU diplomats recognized in private that such a passive line in Morocco would compound the risk of longer-term instability. But the more cautious southern European line prevailed. Opposition figures thought European states failed to see how easily reforms could be reversed and how in practice power was still held by the king’s group of advisors. The Western Sahara conflict militated against European pro-reform support. France blocked new initiatives in the UN Security Council on Western Sahara, to prevent Morocco having any obligation to negotiate concessions in the contested territory. In opposition Spain’s People’s Party advocated a referendum on the Western Sahara, but then after winning power reverted to a firmly pro-Moroccan line, concerned about instability and migration.

Conclusion The failings of European policies expounded in this chapter by no means entirely eclipse the positive sides to post-2011 EU support for Arab reforms. But they do suggest the need for a qualified overall assessment of Europe’s contribution to the continuing momentum of the Arab spring. Caution stemmed from uncertainty over the strategic impact of reform processes; the best way to incentivize agents of change; and the strength of local demand for external support. European policies were modestly upgraded but not fundamentally redesigned in a way that was fully commensurate with the momentous changes afoot. Critics charged the EU with having failed to find a qualitatively different or more politicized strategy to match the qualitative shift and politicization witnessed in Middle Eastern dynamics.50 The EU strove to coordinate with other powers, but to a relatively limited degree; it failed fully to seize the altered international context within which the Arab spring unfolded. Structural impoverishment was compounded by political choice: while the eurozone crisis undoubtedly drained the EU of resources, the relative investment of a then-poorer Europe in early 1990s Eastern Europe was far greater than anything offered to those endeavouring to keep the Arab revolts alive. The negative side of the policy equation shines the conceptual light most brightly on a governance dynamic of reloaded realpolitik. EU-Mediterranean governance was subject to notable limitations, both in terms of new or

50  R. Boserup and F. Tassinari, ‘The return of Arab politics and Europe’s chance to engage anew’, Mediterranean Politics, 17/1, 2012: 97–103.

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revived EU initiatives and Arab keenness to embrace such a mode of governance. Civic-focused cosmopolitan governance was supported, but both EU and Arab governments strove to keep a controlling hold on such initiatives. In terms of impact, EU-centred modes of governance struggled to gain traction. EU offers were of circumscribed reach and not commonly well attuned to domestic preferences in Arab states. Relative to other explanatory variables, they exerted modest influence over domestic actors’ policy choices. Realist dynamics lay behind limits to reform support and the way in which particular templates of change were favoured. The EU still treated the Mediterranean as something to protect itself against, as opposed to a positively shared space.51 For many new democrats in the MENA region, the whole terminology of ‘neighbourhood’ was redolent of ‘spheres of influence’ thinking that the EU had ostensibly rejected. The EU only partially took on board a key lesson from the past, namely that external actors should eschew preferential backing for particular states and make more effort to encourage pan-regional security dialogue. Curiously, what many saw optimistically as a qualitatively new form of politics in the Middle East nourished some long-standing and familiar features of European strategic policies.

51  R. Balfour, The Arab spring, the changing Mediterranean, and the EU: tools as a substitute for strategy? European Policy Centre policy brief, June 2011, p. 4.

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Two opposed interpretations emerged of how the Arab spring related to the more specific trends of political Islam. The negative fear was that democratization in the Middle East and the subsequent rise of Islamist parties represented a new security threat to Europe. The contrasting, positive hope was that political openings would bring political Islam into the peaceful mainstream and ensure a process of deradicalization. To optimists, the Arab spring marked the end of an era in which Western relations with the Middle East were dominated by the fear of terrorism. Many hoped it would return European countries to a more tolerant multiculturalism; but some feared precipitous change would make governments and security forces even more nervous about the spread of radicalism. Prior to 2010 European governments argued that radicalization within both Europe and the Middle East justified tight measures of surveillance and apprehension. With political change afoot in the Middle East, did the concerns over security threats grow or diminish? This chapter finds that to some degree the emergence of a new Middle East decreased the reliance on draconian security measures and relaxed EU approaches towards political Islam. However, it also points to the vestiges of a more containment-based approach towards Islamists, and Sunni–Shia tensions more specifically—an approach that was part of the Arab spring’s faltering momentum by early 2014. While the intensification of al-Qaeda activities in the Sahel was the result of a power vacuum in Mali and not directly a product of the Arab spring per se, it was a trend compounded by spillover effects from the Libyan conflict and in turn rebounded on EU policies in Algeria and elsewhere. This and other heightened security concerns appeared to reinject traditional counter-terrorism logic back into EU strategy from early 2013. In general, a dual-track bifurcation of EU policies towards the perceived challenge of radicalization reflected an uneasy combination of different governance dynamics.

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Islamization The Arab awakening led to the rise of Islamist parties and movements. In Morocco, the Party of Justice and Development won parliamentary elections. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and Salafist parties garnered a commanding majority in legislative elections, before an MB candidate went on to win the presidency. In Tunisia, the Ennahda party got down to the business of leading a coalition government. And in Lebanon a Hezbollah-sympathetic administration took office. While there was frequent talk of the ‘Turkish model’, the Arab world set out on a course very different from Kemalist state-secularism by recognizing Islam as a source of law in new constitutions. For Olivier Roy the Arab spring demonstrated that Islam no longer proposed radical alternatives in terms of political models, just more conservative morals.1 Most Islamists seemed to fit the description of ‘conservatives’ and were quite the antithesis of ‘radicals’. It was, of course, routinely stressed that Islamists were not in the vanguard of democracy protests. A common view was that Islam was likely to be influential in the wake of the Arab spring but would not be quite the pre-eminent or determinant issue it had been painted as over the previous decade. 2011 was not 1979. It was true that the Iranian revolution did not turn radical and conservative until after the shah’s fall, leading many to warn that a similar turn could still follow in countries like Tunisia and Egypt. But in Arab states the 2011 revolutions erupted at the end of a decade-long process of moderation of Islamist parties. Arab society had become more tolerant and more questioning of religious authority—more important trends than the rise of Islamist parties per se. Islam had risen as a form of cultural identity rather than a series of formal, illiberal sharia-based laws.2 Support for religious parties increased in reflection of a certain political, more than purely pious religious identity. The Arab barometer survey showed that during the 2000s Arab opinion became more ‘liberal’, in the sense of being more supportive of religious and racial divergence and less welcoming of religious figures making decisions about individual rights, even as support for Islamist political parties rose.3 The determining factor would be how this reconfigured form of religiosity unfolded in political terms. Contrasting views on political Islam came under scrutiny as Islamist parties gained ascendancy. Reform movements and processes were built around distinctive national agendas, not a pan-regional movement. Differences between countries and the various branches of Islam deepened. In Libya   O. Roy, ‘This is not an Islamic revolution’, New Statesman, 14 February 2011.   C. Merlini and O. Roy, ‘Introduction’, in C. Merlini and O. Roy (eds.), Arab Society in Revolt: the West’s Mediterranean Challenge (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012). 3   M. Tessler, A. Jamal, and M. Robbins, ‘New findings on Arabs and democracy’, Journal of Democracy, 23/4, 2012: 95–7. 1 2

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erstwhile al-Qaeda operatives cooperated with the West in pursuit of democracy. In Saudi Arabia conservative Wahabbis condemned the democratic wave. Ennahda explicitly declined to introduce sharia rules into the Tunisian constitution or to rescind liberal laws on the status of women; debates revolved more around Ennahda’s preference for a parliamentary system and secularists’ push for a presidential model—familiar reform options, not distinct Islamist models. As significant as the rise of Islamists was the loss of MB hegemony within the Islamist spectrum. Developments in Egypt but also elsewhere suggested that the pertinent issue was not so much that of a binary distinction between ‘moderate’ and violent groups, but rather the emergence of Salafist purists. Very conservative Salafist groups gained support fast in Egypt, and to a lesser extent in other states. Salafis rose even in Tunisia, pushing out secular professors from several universities, for example. Moroccan Salafists both gained in support and tentatively joined the mainstream political process.4 Salafists participated in parliament in Kuwait and Bahrain; in the former they agitated for democracy, in the latter they self-interestedly allied with a Sunni resistance to political liberalization.5 Salafism was still far from monolithic, embracing various currents. For at least some of its strands, the idea of a politically engaged Salafism continued to be a contradiction in terms. Yet in some ways, Salafis were actually more open and democratic in their methods and internal structures than the MB, and gained much support because of this.6 Alliances shifted in complex ways. Many Egyptians initially suspected coordination between the Salafists and the SCAF, the latter looking for an ally to undermine the MB. The MB stated a preference to form an alliance with secular parties rather than the Salafists. The MB–Salafi divide was in part a middle-class/working-class cleavage. MB spokesmen presented a picture of their mediating between liberals and Salafists and now being the party trying to provide consensus. Arguably, the element of risk was not so much that Islamists would take power as what would happen when they had to engage in day-to-day politics and lost their aura of purity. This embodied a potential tension for Islamists:  how they developed as parties of government but also retained their identity as broader social movements concerned with issues of personal piety. The MB’s core concern was with justice, the word that appeared in the names of the various party affiliates across the region; democracy was seen as a mean to this end. This raised high levels of expectation with regard to

  M. Masbah, Moving towards political participation, Berlin, SWP Comments, 2013.   S. Monroe, ‘Salafis in parliament: democratic attitudes and party politics in the Gulf’, Middle East Journal, 66/3, 2012: 409–24. 6   O. Roy, ‘The transformation of the Arab world’, Journal of Democracy, 23/4, 2012: 9. 4 5

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what new Islamist governments could deliver in terms of social and economic gains. It remained to be seen whether this would make their appeal more durable or more dependent on tangible results. The MB’s ejection from power in Egypt suggested a steep climb lay ahead. Most experts of political Islam were sanguine over the question of what these trends meant for European interests. The majority downplayed the risk of violent radicalism. Fawaz Gerges argued that al-Qaeda was effectively weakened to the point of being unoperational even before Osama bin Laden’s death in 2011. The organization had lost support not only amongst Muslim populations but also amongst other Jihadist groups. Its core membership had declined from 4,000 to around 300 operatives. The Taliban had turned against it. In Algeria, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI) had lost local sympathy. Ennahda explicitly sought Western support against AQMI. In Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was given hospitality by tribes, but their patience wore thin as the Saleh regime teetered on the brink and traditional leaders looked to striking power-sharing deals for the future. Local affiliates carried out sporadic attacks, but these did not result from a central command and control directed towards a systematic strategy of violence. Most attacks were now carried out by lone individuals who had radicalized themselves and then offered their services to al-Qaeda; as many of these now came from the West as from the Middle East. In Gerges’s view, the Arab spring was simply another nail in al-Qaeda’s coffin.7 Islamist parties stirred a degree of nationalism to undergird their moral agenda, but did not adopt policies obviously harmful to Western interests. The MB was critical of Bashar Assad and far less intent on fomenting radical opposition groups in Syria than were Gulf regimes. And the Egyptian MB set itself up as mediator over Palestine rather than seeking to fan this dispute over national self-determination with any religious fervour. Other formerly violent groups such as Gamaa Islamiya saw the attraction of participating in more open national political processes. Most analysts concurred that over the previous decade Arab attitudes towards the West were the product of political exclusion and perceived injustice more than religiously sanctioned radicalism. The risk derived less from Islamist governments directly challenging or threatening Western interests than from their igniting tensions within their own societies that would spill over into a general instability prejudicial to European concerns. Others opined that the trends were more complex and at least in part, less comforting. Some experts doubted that the MB’s somewhat sudden participation and prominence in the mainstream political process had served to

  F. Gerges, The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

7

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moderate its more radical and violent wing.8 Some argued that political liberalization had even benefited radicals and posed new risks to Western interests, rendering a return to state-to-state counter-terrorist cooperation the only sustainable path forwards.9 They cautioned that in the wake of the Arab revolts, AQMI grew stronger, especially into the latter half of 2013. Most of its fifty core operatives were based in Algeria as an offshoot of the former Armed Islamic Group (GIA), sustaining themselves with ransoms and criminal activity. Many experts cautioned that more radical strains of Islam were not definitively defeated. Their regional franchises were simply of a more independent nature in the perpetrating of local level violence. The divide widened between locally rooted radical actions and a supposed global jihad. Radical groups were ahead of the international community in shifting their strategies constantly from a focus on the US, then to Europe, then to Iraq, then to Afghanistan, and now to local regional operations. Some experts feared this actually worsened the plight for Western governments, as violence was now more unpredictable and fragmented. The Arab spring heightened concerns in Yemen and Algeria, while also producing new links to Nigerian jihadists.10 Militant attacks multiplied in Yemen in late 2013. Jihadist subgroups even gained support in the ostensible success story, Tunisia. Counter-terrorist (CT) experts noted that security forces were increasingly focused on internal dissent and less minded to engage in counter-terrorism cooperation.11 Of course, by 2013 dramatic events in the Sahel seemed to corroborate such concerns. AQMI launched operations into the Sahel during 2012, targeting French citizens and interests due to the new legislation restricting use of the veil in France. It also turned to large-scale bombings, especially in Algiers. But it was the spillover from the conflict in Libya that reawakened the most acute fears over its activities. AQMI took advantage of the chaos in Libya to buy up large quantities of arms. The organization vowed to fight NATO in Libya and threatened sustained attacks in France and Spain. It was when it then teamed up with Ansar al Din jihadists in the north of Mali, taking over a rebellion initiated by the secular nationalist Tuaregs, when these moved out of Libya, that concerns intensified. The links were compounded by contacts between jihadists in the south of Algeria and Islamists in Mali. When French forces consequently intervened in Mali in January 2013, AQMI took and killed a large group of hostages at an oil and gas installation in Algeria. 8   See, for example, a summary of such views in ‘Urge to purge? Egypt’s Brotherhood represents serious challenge to inclusion-moderation theory’, Democracy Digest, 15 May 2013, ; also A. Pargeter, The Muslim Brotherhood: From Opposition to Power, 2nd edition (London: Saqi Books, 2013). 9   S. Jones, ‘The mirage of the Arab spring’, Foreign Affairs, 92/1, 2013: 55–64. 10  M. Mohamedou, The rise and fall of al Queda, Geneva Papers 3, 2012. 11  D. Byman, Denying terrorist safe havens, 5 December 2011, Evidence to House Committee on Homeland Security, , p. 7.

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While this book does not concern itself with the Sahel conflicts per se, it was evident that political change in North Africa had set in motion a chain of events that rebounded from Mali and other countries to engender new terrorist challenges in key Arab states.

Engagement and Cooperation: the New Normal? Europe’s policy response to these trends appeared to be far-reaching. Western countries apparently came to embrace the rise of Islamist parties more easily than did many secular democrats in the region. There was evidence that European governments adjusted to the changed circumstances after 2010 by engaging more systematically with mainstream Islamist parties. New instructions that diplomats needed to engage more fully with Islamists were sent out from Brussels. The French government promised a ‘privileged dialogue with moderate Islam’.12 The formal line from the British foreign office was: ‘We firmly believe that a failure to support reform on the basis that it may lead to governments less well disposed towards the UK will only exacerbate existing problems in the region and damage our long-term interests.’13 The EU ambassador in Rabat opined that the Justice and Development Party (PJD) was not at all problematic for the West; the party merely sought a moralization of public life, not a more hostile foreign policy towards Europe. The EU had to ensure the PJD government succeeded or support would seep back towards more radical groups. Political channels were also opened to the Islamist Action Front (IAF) in Jordan. European diplomats recognized that they could hardly not engage with the IAF when the Jordanian royal court was itself reaching out to the organization. Low-profile and unpublicized initiatives such as the Nyon Process and the Group of the Likeminded took on a new life, providing a space for regular dialogue with key Islamist figures. The EU reaction to Ennahda’s victory in the 2011 Tunisian elections was fulsome in its praise and congratulations to the party. Catherine Ashton put in a personal call to the Ennahda leadership. One senior Ennahda representative enthused that the new government could actually have better relations with Europe than the previous regime as it would help develop and thus stabilize Tunisia. His line was: ‘We do not want an Islamist model of democracy as such but one that works for Tunisia. . . . it is completely illogical that people in Europe think that Ennahda leaders who have been exiled 20 years in Europe have a Taliban model in their head.’

  Le Figaro, 12 October 2011.   House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, British foreign policy and the ‘Arab spring’: the transition to democracy, October 2011, p. 54. 12 13

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Engagement with the MB in Egypt soon became so routine and mainstream that other parts of the political spectrum complained of favouritism. Liberal Egyptian NGO representatives were critical of the MB for being too accommodating with the West, and even complained about the EU now ‘favouring’ the Islamists. They complained that secularists were not allowed into the Nyon process, at the behest of Islamists. As liberals pushed harder for deeper democratic reform they perceived the EU to be more in line with the MB’s conservative approach to the SCAF-controlled regime. One liberal activist railed: ‘worldwide Islamists support Islamists in Egypt, but worldwide liberals do not support liberals here’. Liberals accused the EU of being ‘afraid to say no to Morsi’ and of having ‘left us cornered’. Many secularists seemed to believe that the US and European governments had negotiated a deal with the SCAF to ‘allow’ the MB to win the elections in return for not challenging the army’s privileges. In a reversal of previous views, many liberals revealed that they welcomed southern EU member states’ policies because they were less pro-MB. In these debates the EU did not suffer quite the opprobrium aimed at the US. Liberals charged the MB with receiving direct US support; the MB accused the US of preferentially funding the liberals; facts were murky on both sides of the argument. European governments remained somewhat outside the fray of this argument; indeed at least some surveys showed that the EU was generally perceived to have a slightly more neutral and thus welcome approach to funding, having been less aggressive than some US organizations that took out adverts to attract reformers to apply for funds.14 Nevertheless, some more assertive Egyptian human rights activists still charged the EU with having become too starry-eyed about Islamists and failing to recognize that the MB was sidelining ‘liberal Muslims’. Some had sympathy with the SCAF’s suspension of parliament because the MB was using extra-legal means of assuming control over the state, which they criticized the EU for failing to tackle. In the Gulf, many liberal voices even accused Europe and the US of now supporting the MB to hold back genuine democracy and retain broadly pro-Western stability—a startling irony given the pre-Arab spring history of the region. Conservative critics within Europe also argued that the West had been cowed into indulgence and oversensitivity to Islamists, and blinded to this by the MB’s faux moderation. Cairo-based diplomats were sanguine about what (ultimately, short-lived) MB rule implied for European interests. The MB’s foreign policy would be less nationalist as, unlike the SCAF, it did not need to compensate for its lack of domestic credibility. Liberals and leftists had if anything become 14   M. Elagati, Foreign funding in Egypt after the revolution, Fride working paper, April 2013, pp. 8–9.

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more nationalist than the Brotherhood. While President Obama would not declare if he still defined Egypt as an ally, Morsi had no hesitation in defining the US in such terms. The new president kept some distance from Hamas. In fact, Egypt was amazingly quiet on foreign policy given the scale of its regional challenges. The MB eagerly sought Western support because of the rise of GCC states and their support for Salafists. The MB in Egypt was even reported to have asked European states for security assistance.15 The West was widely perceived to be offering preferential support to the Sunni MB network as a new strategy for containing Iran.16 The MB also debated the idea of some kind of formal link with the European People’s Party. While engagement with Islam became a broadly accepted strand of EU policy, it was one beset by ambivalence and entrenched reticence. Critics argued that Western actors mainstreamed engagement with the MB family of organizations but did so with a focus on their narrow definition of religious terms, misunderstanding the essentially cultural turn that Islamic identity had taken.17 One EU participant of internal discussions over a supposed ‘new policy on Islam’ revealed that the preference was for very minor steps. When Catherine Ashton suggested the EU might need to reassess its no-contact rule with Hamas, she did not win support from member states. Most member states wanted to keep dialogue with Islamists covert, even as these became bona fide participants in electoral politics. They commonly argued that European governments should not be seen to be mediating with Islamists, as only Arab organizations could do this without a counter-productive backlash. European governments also wanted to select very carefully which Islamists to engage with; interlocutors from the region routinely slammed this partial approach as out of tune with the fast-changing spectrum of political groups bubbling in lively and unpredictable fashion across the region. Within internal EU discussions, the Dutch government often expressed the strongest caution over rapprochement with Islamists. It explicitly focused on a range of rights questions that were most controversial in the region: defending Christian minorities, gay rights, and the freedom to ‘defame’ religion.18 France continued a more draconian and less liberal approach to domestic terrorism than the UK, with a read-over to external strategy.19 Insiders noted that the French government also became increasingly militant in its secularism, objecting to mentions of ‘freedom of religion’ in many formal EU documents   Financial Times, 19 July 2012.  G. Abdo, The new sectarianism:  the Arab uprisings and the rebirth of the Shia-Sunni divide, Brookings Saban Center Analysis paper 29, 2013, pp. 4–5. 17   A central theme in the various contributions to Merlini and Roy, Arab Society in Revolt. 18   The Netherlands Foreign Ministry, Responsible for freedom: human rights in foreign policy, The Hague, 2011. 19   F. Foley, Countering Terrorism in Britain and France, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 15 16

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and EU-Mediterranean communiqués. The Spanish foreign minister let slip after the Algerian elections how relieved he was that the Islamists had not won. Senior External Action Service (EAS) diplomats commonly argued that the EU should stay well clear of all religious issues in the region. Within the Nyon process, Islamists criticized the EU for what they saw as a far too passive ‘wait and see’ approach to political change. One foreign minister worried: ‘we still have not really understood what is happening because we do not appreciate the religious dimension [in the revolts]’. One particularly well-placed EAS official lamented in 2012 that ‘we are still not talking to the right people’. One EU official in Cairo admitted that Europeans still had little precise idea of what was going on inside the MB, as contacts were unduly sporadic. MB representatives complained in private that they still perceived the EU to be supporting the army and other ‘elements of repression’ against the Islamists in Egypt. It was only when the MB entered government that the European reticence for engagement dissolved somewhat. UK ministers openly admitted that the new, more accepting policy towards moderate Islamists was ‘cautious and step by step’. Prime Minister David Cameron declined to meet an MB representative when he visited Cairo in February 2012, which was interpreted as a snub.20 One influential member state ambassador revealed that many in the EU were not entirely convinced of the MB’s claim that it was now the ‘reasonable’ and stabilizing mediator between liberals and Salafis. Even greater uncertainty percolated into EU policies after the army ejected Morsi from power. Internal European differences emerged over the implications of the military coup for security interests. Some in Europe saw the army’s intervention as a potential trigger for renewed radicalization of Islamists. Al-Qaeda threatened reprisals against the new government. Others saw the army as moving helpfully to sever the MB’s growing links to jihadists and a welcome reversion to strong-hand security. Some noted that Tamarod, the grass roots pro-democracy movement, pushed for an end to the peace treaty with Israel. The army promised to rein in militants in the Sinai, which Morsi had failed to do. Indeed, more generally European diplomats frequently spoke of strong armed forces powers being needed within new constitutions to provide guarantees against Islamist coups. They sought to encourage the formation of coalition governments, also as a restraining mechanism on Islamist parties. Minority rights emerged as an area of difference between the EU and Islamist governments; concerns rose over the region heading towards a form of democracy with abridged individual rights. Many assistance projects still

20

  House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, British foreign policy, para. 146

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aimed to help secularists ‘level the field’ relative to Islamists. Officials recognized that European projects funded many of the secular protest leaders, who then won few votes in elections. Often, the form of Islam supported was of an ultra-safe, regime-sanctioned variety and such religious parties were pressed into democracy-denying accommodations. In Egypt, the international community supported efforts to reconstitute the formal al-Azhar religious apparatus as a safe, state-sponsored counterweight to the MB.21 In Bahrain, Al Wefaq was pressured by European governments and the US to participate in a government-controlled national dialogue, despite this cosmetic exercise according the Islamists, holding 60 per cent of voters’ support, only five out of 350 seats. The UK engaged with Islamists with only a ‘no violence’ precondition, but its diplomats saw member states as increasingly split on this issue and the EU’s preconditions to dialogue as overly restrictive, reflecting the bottom line imposed by the most cautious member states. A specific issue on which ambivalence prevailed was how to react to the Salafists’ rise. While European officials undoubtedly became more comfortable in talking to MB groups and offshoots, they held back much more than the US did from new engagement with the Salafists. Many European officials felt that the SCAF was correct to exclude the hard-line Salafist candidate from the presidential elections—even if in general, the EU favoured integration of the Salafists. Diplomats were generally cautious about formalized contact with Salafists, citing both the latter’s positions and also difficulties in determining which factions actually to engage with. Limited engagement was forthcoming with Salafists in part because their structures were embryonic and because they did not need money as they were funded from the Gulf. German officials admitted they were curious about yet reluctant to talk to the Salafists, and that they were unsure exactly whom they should talk to in these movements. Officials quite expressly did not see the rise of the Salafists coming as they focused almost exclusively on the MB mainstream. Some EU dialogue initiatives and support programmes took an indirect approach of seeking to get MB and Salafists together to establish common ground rules. In Egypt, engagement with Salafists commenced as Al Nour had parliamentarians, rather than through separate formal dialogues on a specific party basis. Salafist politicians themselves were not entirely dismissive of the EU. In private, the Al Nour co-founder insisted he eagerly wanted contact with the EU on community-level development issues and through the task force mechanism—significant, even if such claims were perhaps somewhat tailored for a Western interviewer. In mid-2013, European officials intimated that they were contemplating new dialogue beyond the PJD in Morocco as 21  N. Brown, Post-revolutionary al-Azhar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, working paper, September 2011, p. 13.

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the rise of Salafis became evident there too. A group of Egyptian Salafists visited the European Parliament for dialogue. These were tentative signs of change within a still-anxious approach. In the region, European positions were still perceived as less than fully genuine. A popular view in Egypt was that the US and Europeans turned against Mubarak only after reaching a deal with senior army officials that they would retain a tight control and especially uphold the country’s peace treaty with Israel. One MB leader highlighted the mixed perceptions held in his party about Europe’s role: ‘EU states have made an effort with us but if they are not now clearer on the SCAF’s hijacking of the transition the impression will be that nothing has changed.’ The party still felt unfairly vilified by Europeans. The MB was criticized for going back on its insistence that it would not field a presidential candidate; but this was only because the SCAF, supported by the international community, prevented the MB-majority parliament from functioning. Movement members complained that the EU still accused the MB of stirring tensions with Christians, when it was the ministry of the interior orchestrating attacks on Copts to discredit the MB. One disappointment from the MB’s perspective was that the EU kept discussion of Egypt out of the UN Human Rights Council because governments were still nervous about the MB. While Catherine Ashton expressly made a point of retaining contact with MB leaders after the July 2013 coup, the party saw European governments as complicit in the army’s subsequent squeeze on their key personnel and operations. Even in its apparently most innocuous form of the Ennahda government in Tunisia, European support was still perceived as grudging and EU views on political Islam behind the curve. One Ennahda politician railed: ‘you call us Islamists, not us [that is, this is not how we define ourselves]!’ Party representatives constantly complained at having their human rights credentials questioned when over half their sitting MPs were women, a share well in excess of anything in Europe. Much French funding for Tunisia was directed at suppressing Ennahda’s popularity. Foreign minister Alain Juppé was notably begrudging in accepting the Ennahda election victory. European cooperation with Islamists paled alongside the funds the Islamists received from the Gulf. This was an area of policy where Western influence was clearly displaced. Saudi Arabia and Qatar channeled huge amounts of funds to Islamist groups across North Africa. A common view among European diplomats was that the Salafists’ rise from almost nowhere was in part because they were sponsored from the Gulf; a link requiring much caution on the part of the West. One liberal-secular Tahrir protestor lamented:  ‘the MB is getting hundreds of millions from the Gulf; we are getting nothing but scepticism from the West’. Tunisian activists also complained that the Salafists’ rise was a direct result of their having received 135

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so much core funding from the Gulf. MB representatives pointed out that they developed far deeper party-to-party links in Turkey than through any initiatives offered by European party foundations. The Turkish AKP developed more contacts with mainstream MB groups, funding several organizations such as the OIC, Islamic World League, Fiqh Muslim Congress, and the International Union of Muslim Scholars.

Counter-terrorism in Limbo If European cooperation with mainstream Islamist parties became less problematic, the Arab spring’s impact on more specific counter-terrorism policies was harder to read. Much CT planning remained replete with uncertainty. Invited to comment on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, EU CT coordinator Giles de Kerchove struck a balance:  while the Arab uprisings demonstrated that extreme jihadist ideology had little resonance with the general population of the Middle East and North Africa, the changes posed risks, too. Looted weaponry in countries like Libya could fall into the hands of extremist groups; prisoners released in some countries included jihadist fighters; and the dismantling of security services in former dictatorships created a dangerous vacuum. If the Arab spring failed to live up to what was now an extremely high level of expectation, this would ‘lead to some disappointment where Al Qaeda’s rhetoric might be attractive again’. Kerchove worried that the process of political change represented a ‘huge opportunity for al-Qaeda to re-energize’.22 Europol statements expressed concern that radicals were benefiting from the wave of new communications technology across the Middle East. In Europol’s view, the Arab spring was a ‘huge opportunity for terrorists’.23 Europol officials feared that operatives were beginning to hide themselves within waves of migrants heading into Europe, using the general instability to gain access to European territory undetected. Europol statements revealed much internal preoccupation: while the revolts marginalized al-Qaeda and weakened the appeal of its violent rejection of national political participation, they also dramatically raised citizens’ demands to unrealistic levels; if these were unmet then radicalization would be likely to increase markedly across the region.24

  Global Europe, 6 September 2011.  Europol, Counter-terrorism working group conclusions, 2011. 24   L. Vidino, The impact of the Aran awakening on Muslim radicalisation in Europe: a preliminary assessment, Real Instituto Elcano, ARI 120/2011. 22

23

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Indeed, initial reactions were far from reassuring. In the UK, the chief of defence staff set alarm bells ringing when he suggested that the Arab Spring uprisings heightened the possibility of Islamist unrest in Britain.25 UK foreign office minister John Burt defended the need to work with shadowy regimes because the links were still tightening between radicals in the Arab world and in the UK. In particular, the UK was reliant still on information from Saudi Arabia. The British government opened an enquiry into the treatment of returned detainees but retained a firm vigilance over internal radicalization.26 The UK’s intelligence services defined key al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen as an increased danger and top-priority strategic threat.27 CT officials in Brussels reported a range of concerns over the short-term impact of political change: the release of prisoners; dashed expectations; state collapse in places such as Libya and Yemen. Member state CT diplomats admitted to being nervous about the short-term costs of the Arab spring, even if the negative potential had not yet assumed tangible form. They were still uncertain how, in the words of one diplomat, ‘the dice will fall’ in terms of the implications for CT. East Africa and right-wing extremism were both higher-risk threats now than the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region; but Salafists could still be potential ‘gateways’ to radical violence. Clear responses were rendered more difficult by the lack of coordination between member states, Europol, Frontex, the Situation Centre, and other parts of the EU decision-making machinery. In 2012 the EU spend on ‘Freedom, security and justice’ rose by 16 per cent, suggesting that the Arab spring had engendered much security concern and not only optimistic hope in better EU–Mediterranean relations.28 Even as the Arab spring passed beyond its initial phases, officials stressed that they were ‘still at an early stage of reflection’ over the impact on CT policies. One Council CT expert reported that policymakers’ thinking was that the trigger for radicalization lay not in poverty but alienation and individual psychological factors. European security services did not immediately see potential democratization in the Middle East as a possible contribution to deradicalization in Europe. There was general agreement that young Muslims in Europe were not strongly connected to or driven by events in the Arab states of their parents’ or grandparents’ birth. Where they did engage it was most often to protest at European governments’ reluctance to support democratically elected Islamist governments. Tunisian migrants in

  EU Business, 15 December 2011.   Speech to Westminster Forum, 13 September 2011, . 27  Gerges, The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda, p. 147. 28  EUStat, The EU budget 2012 in figures, Brussels, 2013. 25 26

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France pushed the French government particularly hard to change its position towards Tunisia’s democratic revolution. Funds devoted to internal security programmes did not dramatically decrease. The emergence of a new Middle East did little to lessen European governments’ effort to mould common ‘national identity’ programmes as supposed antidotes to radicalism. Shortly after the first Arab revolts, UK prime minister David Cameron launched a new drive to target non-violent ‘extremist’ views through a tighter values-based British identity. European states had not infiltrated agents into al-Qaeda or indeed non-violent Islamist groups in the way they had in the Soviet Union: by their own admission, intelligence agencies were almost blind to the internal political evolution of these organizations as the Arab spring began. Indeed, the British security service had been so badly discredited by the mistaken use of intelligence in the decision to invade Iraq that it had retrenched dramatically across the region. Overall, CT officials reported that the Arab spring’s impacts were seen as deriving primarily from indirect knock-on effects. Primarily, this related to al-Qaeda using power vacuums in North Africa to provide more help to Boko Harem in Nigeria and then to a cluster of local jihadists in northern Mali. Changes in approach were subtle: European officials insisted that, while member states may have been cautious in pressing regimes for political change, they had become more cautious in conniving with those still-autocratic regimes in the surveillance of Islamist dissidents based in Europe. Member states claimed to be more risk averse than previously, if only from a fear of being caught cooperating with regimes subsequently targeted by popular protests. Officials recognized that this bred a degree of inconsistency in EU positions: member states still pressed Arab regimes to provide security more robustly but now condemned them more strongly when they did so. In Europe there was certainly more of an effort to ‘desecuritize’ the strategy taken towards political Islam than was evident within US policy. Fawaz Gerges criticized the US’s ‘national security complex’ for maintaining an exaggerated and over-securitized focus on counter-terrorism that had done little more than provide oxygen to an ailing al-Qaeda. He argued that the US converted what should have been seen as a minor security irritant into an existential threat, according al-Qaeda and its offshoots far more importance than they enjoyed in Muslim countries. President Obama did little to revise the direction of policy set by the Bush administration, even as the Arab spring progressed. The US’s annual intelligence budget stood at $80 billion by the end of 2011, double its 2001 level, and nearly double US overseas development assistance. Scores of new governmental bodies were created that worked to sustain a focus on ‘defeating al-Qaeda’. In March 2011, just as President Bouteflika was stamping out democracy protests, the US and Algeria launched a new CT partnership. Despite the Arab spring, the Obama 138

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administration continued beefing up the ‘national security state’, opening a plethora of new cases against US Muslim groups for links with supposed ‘radicals’ in the Middle East.29 One recently retired US ambassador revealed how acute tensions became between Washington and the Gulf states over the latter’s support for Salafist organizations across the region.30 The contrast between US and European approaches widened into late 2013:  attacks on US diplomats in Libya and Tunisia ensured that the US moved much further back to a CT prism than did the EU. This trend was compounded by the US’s increased use of drone attacks in Yemen.31 Many elements of European responses certainly consisted of a more dialogue- and prevention-based approach to CT than these US strategies. Denmark, closely aligned with the US ‘war on terror’ for many years, explicitly announced a ‘desecuritisation of Islam’ within its foreign policy response to the Arab spring.32 The EU drew up a human rights action plan for the external Freedom, Security, and Justice agenda, while Frontex introduced its own human rights commitments and employed a fundamental rights officer.33 Experts observed that the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) strand of Union policymaking was increasingly divorced from CT strategy: the EU increasingly eschewed a securitization of counter-terrorism efforts, and no CT experts were included in a whole range of CSDP initiatives such as training and operational capacity-building missions.34 Member states pushed the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy and its Rabat Memorandum that focused on issues of judicial cooperation and rule of law in security. They also supported the creation of a Civilian Security Training Academy in Tunisia. Many diplomats were critical of the link being made to migration: there was no evidence that al-Qaeda had used illegal migration as a means to infiltrate Europe, not least since it had conscripts who were already legally resident in Europe. Officials claimed to favour a more indirect approach: more dialogue with Islamists but without attaching a CT label that would devalue

29  Gerges, The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda; N. Farnia, ‘Shoring up the National Security State’, Middle East Report, Issue 259, 2011. 30  R. LeBaron, The United States and the Gulf states:  uncertain partners in a changing region, Atlantic Council, Issue brief, 2013, p. 3. 31   D. Greenfield, A. Hawthorne, and R. Balfour, US and EU: lack of strategic vision, frustrated efforts towards the Arab transitions, Atlantic Council, 2013. 32   R. Boserup, ‘The Arab spring and Denmark’s promotion of democracy in the Arab world’, in Danish Institute for International Studies, Danish foreign policy yearbook 2012, Copenhagen, DIIS, p. 97. 33   S. Wolff, ‘The Arab revolts: reconsidering EU–US strategies for freedom, security and justice’, in P. Pawlak, The EU–US security and justice agenda in action (Paris: EU Institute for Security Studies, 2011). 34   J. Argomaniz, ‘A rhetorical spill-over? Exploring the link between EU CSDP and the external dimension of Counter-terrorism’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 17/2, 2012: 35–52.

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such initiatives. British officials reported that they began more activities on ‘upstream’ work in the MENA region to address problems before ‘Prevent’ programmes were needed so much within the UK itself. The Prevent strand of British policies now spent £12 million a year on activities overseas, working specifically where it identified a tangible threat to the UK. As a top tier of terrorists was taken out across the region, Prevent dimensions became more apposite to deflecting a next generation from filling the gaps. The Prevent programme began tentatively working on security reform with the Egyptian army after the revolution, sensing an opportunity for more effective counterradicalization cooperation. Notwithstanding such cooperative foresight, however, parts of the European CT community continued to view North Africa and the Middle East through a similar hard security lens. The EU Internal Security Strategy dominated policy and led in some domains to a convergence with the US Homeland Security focus. New governments were judged at least in part on whether they were willing to cooperate on addressing European counter-terrorist objectives and breaking the networks between European and Middle Eastern radical groups. Several European states provided increased security cooperation to Yemen’s new government as al-Qaeda attacks rocked the country. Indeed, member states expressly ignored the EU’s own code of conduct on arms sales to shore up the new Yemini transitional government against al-Qaeda operations.35 Launching operations to rescue hostages in 2010 and 2011, French ministers still insisted there was a major risk of terrorism and that France was ‘at war with AQMI’.36 Foreign minister Laurent Fabius proclaimed that jihadists in North Africa had France as ‘their main enemy’ and that this justified a tough security intervention.37 The controversy surrounding the UK government’s attempts to extradite a Jordanian radical suggested the limits to the human rights strand of policy: the UK increased its support to the very Jordanian military that the European Court of Human Rights damned as using torture. Reflecting a legacy of restrictive approaches, the EAS was subject to legal challenges to its placing of some suspects on the terrorist list. Officials defended the continuing traditional-style CT cooperation with Algeria: a lack of reform here was seen as unlikely to spur radicalism due to the memories of the 1990s, they opined. CT policies still conflated violent and non-violent radicalization; non-violent radicals tended to be more pro-democracy and the failure 35  T. Schumacher, ‘Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Yemen’, in J. Peters (ed.), The European Union and the Arab Spring:  Promoting Democracy and Human Rights in the Middle East (Plymouth: Lexington, 2012), p. 121. 36   M. Mohamodou, The many faces of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, GCSP Policy Paper 15, May 2011. 37   Global Europe, 13 July 2012.

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to support space for the peaceful expression of radical views increased the probability of non-violent radicals progressing onto violent activities.38 The EU had a formal CT strategy in place and updated, just prior to the Arab spring, the so-called Stockholm programme. It was striking how little this contributed to EU responses to the emergence of a reshaped Middle East. A 2011 House of Lords enquiry found that the Stockholm programme tilted strongly towards the ‘S’ of the freedom, security, and justice (FSJ) trinity.39 After the Lisbon treaty gave new EU competence for internal security, the Political and Security Committee (PSC) met for the first time with interior ministry representatives (COSI) to discuss the Arab spring’s impact on internal CT challenges. Officials in the FSJ directorate perceived the Arab spring as a short-term risk more than opportunity. Their tone was strikingly different from that of their colleagues managing the Neighbourhood Policy. Some capacities were enhanced. Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) staff were posted to delegations to work on CT with EAS diplomats—a beefing up of such capacity was forthcoming in particular in the Gulf and the Maghreb. The Joint Situation Centre was charged with feeding more systematic reports from third countries into member states’ internal security policy deliberations. Europol’s regular Terrorism Situation and Trend reports were charged with informing more operationally on the link between external and internal threats. The Commission proposed an EU radicalization-awareness network (RAN) from 2012. In general, however, CT officials admitted that the Stockholm programme did not become highly relevant to operational policy. The Commission worked mainly through its action plan on internal security and the internal–external link remained nebulous and imprecise, far from being given a prompt by the Arab spring. For example, no strategy emerged for using diasporas to make networks between Europe and the Middle East of more positive value. The Atlas network of European special forces moved up a gear; joint training and sharing under this forum was mainly on defensive matters. The EU’s December 2012 paper on Maghreb cooperation proposed support for antiterrorism through regular contacts between EU military experts and local counterparts, as well as technical security advice. However, concrete results were widely seen as limited. UK officials opined that the RAN network was ‘not doing much’. The Instrument for Stability’s commitment to fund CT projects outside Europe was followed through only to a very limited extent.40 Policymakers in the EU’s Directorate General Home admitted that it proved difficult to induce Arab states to align on CT norms outside the rubric of

  J. Bartlett, J. Birdwell, and M. King, The Edge of Violence (London: Demos, 2011).   House of Lords EU Committee, The EU internal security strategy, May 2011. 40   House of Lords EU Committee, The EU internal security strategy, p. 59. 38 39

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enlargement. Even those states such as Jordan presenting themselves as reformist moderate regimes keen on security cooperation resisted formal approximation with EU procedures.

Deepening Challenges: Lebanon, Sahel In Lebanon differences existed over how to deal with Hezbollah. The Netherlands and the UK had no contact with the Shia movement. Diplomats from other member states actually increased their interactions in an attempt to reassure Hezbollah moderates that European pressure on Bashar Assad was not an anti-Shia policy that would soon extend itself into Lebanon. Several donors cooperated directly with two Hezbollah-controlled ministries on the implementation of cooperation projects. Some diplomats in Beirut professed to be more concerned with Saudi-backed Sunni conservatism than the supposed ‘Shia arc’ of resistance. After suspected Hezbollah involvement in a 2012 bombing in Bulgaria, the EU resisted Israeli and US pressure to put the organization onto its list of terrorist entities. The EU’s €0.5 billion of aid to help Lebanon manage the flow of refugees from Syria was also seen as an investment in the country’s fragile internal stability. Yet, in mid-2013 the European line hardened on Hezbollah, reflecting the feeling that the latter was on a back foot domestically and seeking more international activity. As mentioned in Chapter  6, a majority of member states advocated a less cooperative engagement. In May 2013 they supported a proposal to place Hezbollah on the EU list of terrorist organizations. This represented a notable step for those member states that had argued in favour of retaining a dialogue with the Shia movement. By this stage, Hezbollah’s open activities in Syria were felt to require a response. However, in June 2013 Italy once again blocked the proposal. Several member states remained concerned over the possible domestic implications for security within Lebanon itself. The multiple domino effects of the Arab spring had curiously and almost counter-intuitively brought Hezbollah back into the orbit of a highly securitized European CT strategy. After a further round of internal debate, in July 2013 the EU finally put Hezbollah’s military wing on its list of terrorist organizations. The group’s actions in Syria appeared to have swayed the more doubtful member states, although formally the reason given related to the bus bombing in Bulgaria and the arrest of an operative in Cyprus. The move was, however, carefully presented as having no bearing on the EU’s policy within Lebanon itself. Hezbollah’s fund-raising and operations in Europe would be curtailed, but its political wing would still be part of the inclusive political dialogue fostered by the EU inside Lebanon. The decision did little to address the main 142

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problem of Hezbollah gaining strength relative to an increasingly hollow Lebanese state, lumbering on without a government and few independent institutions. As became dramatically apparent in 2013, in the wake of the Arab spring the most operational theatre of CT shifted southwards to the Sahel. In 2012, the EU introduced a new Sahel Strategy. The Commission allocated €150 million to fund this. The new strategy was presented as holistic and development-oriented, but was clearly driven by a security dynamic. Generous increases in funding were allocated to Niger and Mauritania for CT cooperation. Various projects were launched, including for a Sahelian Security College. A small security sector training CSDP mission was deployed in Niger. An EU special representative for the Sahel was appointed in March 2013. These steps were too tentative and slow to prevent jihadists gaining ground, leading to France’s decision to send in 2,000 troops in January 2013. In May 2013, Mali won $3 billion in aid, mainly from European donors, with the Commission pledging a full $0.5 billion—amounts indicating that the security situation in the Sahel now seemed more urgent than support for the broader process of change in Arab states. This book does not cover the Sahel itself, a core international issue in its own right by 2013; but it is of relevance that there was a link between the growing conflict there and EU policy towards North African states. An involvement in Mali was an outgrowth of EU policy in North Africa, rendered necessary by the region’s porous borderlands. In this sense, the main implication for Middle East policy was that the EU sought deeper cooperation with North African regimes in addressing Sahelian challenges. EU defence ministers met their Maghreb counterparts in December 2011 to devise cooperative measures in the Sahel. At the end of 2013 the EU began updating the Sahel Strategy. A declared priority was to strengthen the Sahel–Maghreb link and to converge Sahel strategy with ENP instruments. Governance aspects were to be enhanced through stronger ‘state-building contracts’. The aim was to move from a very specific focus on counter-insurgency in Northern Mali to a far more general counter-radicalization strategy across the region, linking northern Nigeria and Niger. In particular, member states sought ever-tighter coordination with Algerian forces, especially after the aforementioned hostage incident in January 2013. French ministers were particularly insistent that Algeria was needed as an ally in addressing the crisis in Mali, and combating the rise of radicalism across the Sahel more generally. On his visit to Algiers in July 2012, foreign minister Laurent Fabius pressed his Algerian counterpart to deploy security forces more heavily and directly into the Sahel. François Hollande attached priority to rebuilding relations with Algeria, including through unprecedented apologies for colonial abuses and a state visit in December 2012. Algeria agreed 143

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not to oppose a UN-mandated force and to share intelligence information, in return for Western states adhering to a policy of not interfering in its own domestic matters.41 Far from holding the Algerian pouvoir back from heavy-handed tactics, France seemed to be actively encouraging them.42 The US, Germany, and the UK all commenced new structured security partnerships with Algeria, and in particular its intelligence services known for their unique inroads into AQMI.43 The situation was held to justify a new €10 billion German defence deal with Algeria.44 In the aftermath of the January 2013 hostage crisis and Mali intervention, European governments were even more circumspect in their dealing with the Algerian regime. Algeria provided security training and equipment to Mali and Niger, as militants launched attacks into Algeria. US security cooperation with Algeria was even more unconditional; under the rubric of a beefed-up Pan-Sahel Initiative, the US coordinated an operation with 25,000 Algerian security personnel.45 US officials admitted that they also softened the human rights focus with Algeria in the shadow of the hostage crisis. In short, the precarious vacuum of the Sahel reinforced a traditionally cast CT focus in European policy towards North Africa. While Algeria tried to reassert itself as mediator to the conflict, its traditionally uncompromising stance on Islamists meant that many of the regional actors saw it as more of a problem than a solution. Many felt that the military intervention in Mali signalled a return to a robust French policy of containing and defeating Islamists rather than seeking to include rebels in inclusive and democratic political settlements. There were reports of generalized human rights abuses carried out by the Malian military on the back of the offensive, the latter being used as a pretext for a broader clampdown on regime opponents. The EU training mission and French programmes worked with the hard-line heads of the military responsible for Mali’s 2012 coup. There were criticisms that France handed over quickly to African troops to back up a government of questionable legitimacy without addressing the root causes of the conflict. French officials rejected the charge, insisting that they pressed hard for elections in July 2013; much of the new European aid was made conditional upon these polls. Yet some member states complained that they were more sympathetic towards Tuareg self-determination that French policy seemed designed to curtail. And the

  S. Denison, The EU, Algeria and the Northern Mali question, ECFR policy memo, 2012.   C. Spencer, ‘Algeria: out of synch?’, World Politics Review, 25 July 2012. 43   A. Boukahrs, The paranoid neighbour: Algeria and the conflict in Mali, Carnegie working paper, 2012, pp. 12–13. 44   H. Darbouche and S. Denison, A ‘reset’ with Algeria: the Russia to the EU’s south, ECFR policy brief, December 2011. 45   C. Spencer, Algeria: out of synch?’, p. 5. 41

42

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general tenor of Islamist containment was not lost on Arab governments. As a result of the security focus in the Sahel, al-Qaida and other groups moved back into the Maghreb; here they formed opportunistic links with radical groups still excluded from inclusive political processes—something that had not been pre-empted in Western strategies in North Africa.46

Conclusion After the Arab spring, European governments did not see the MENA region quite so pre-eminently through the prism of radicalism and counter-terrorism. They inched towards a long-overdue normalization of relations with mainstream Islamist parties. It was astutely pointed out that European multiculturalism increasingly wove its way into EU foreign policy, encouraging a more balanced form of engagement in the MENA region.47 Yet uncertainty infused the EU’s policies, especially those most specifically in the field of counter-terrorism. The EU did not fully comply with its own rhetorical assertions that political inclusion was the best antidote to radicalism. Much focus was on dialogue with MB affiliates, but other parts of a fluid spectrum of Islamist organizations remained beyond some member states’ purview. CT policies remained in uneasy limbo, with European governments apparently unsure whether the Arab spring represented more of an opportunity or threat to ongoing de- and counter-radicalization efforts—and indeed over whether counter-reform pushbacks by 2013 were beneficial or disquieting. There was still much fretting over whether Islamist-led governments would be pro- or anti-Western; this distracted attention from what should have been the real concern over Islamists’ rise engendering polarization and a power vacuum within the Middle East itself. By 2013 mounting turmoil in the Sahel infected North Africa in a way that tilted EU policies back towards a supposedly jettisoned form of containment-based security cooperation. The broadening range of interlocutors included within the EU’s dialogue with civil and political society undoubtedly constituted a fillip to the dynamic of cosmopolitan governance. The EU’s reluctance fully to engage with Islamist actors had for a long time represented the most significant constraint on bottom-up civic dynamics across the Mediterranean. In the wake of the Arab revolts, this was no longer quite so much the Achilles heel of Europe’s Middle East policy. Some new engagement with Islamists was undertaken through a framework of Euro-Mediterranean governance;

  A. Boukahrs, AQIM: creeping back into the Maghreb, Fride policy brief, 2013.   C. Hill, The National Interest in Question: Foreign Policy in Multicultural Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 46 47

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formal EU-level initiatives enshrining such dialogue were one dimension that breathed some new life into the listless Barcelona Process. However, much new policy was conducted by member states bilaterally, in a tentative and covert fashion, reflecting acute sensitivities over core security interests. The carefully calibrated changes to CT strategies and Islamist engagement— a more reformist bent, but pursued selectively—represented one part of the reloaded realpolitik dynamic. As in other areas, the external governance approach met with serious resistance. Wyn Rees argued that EU attempts to externalize internal security policies were not successful prior to 2011, with Arab states reluctant to cooperate to the full extent sought by the Union.48 There was little step-change after 2011. This was one policy area where a trend of de-Europeanized governance appeared to be highly pertinent: the EU was too equivocal to exert any determinant influence over the way that Islamist identities unfolded. Europe was not the primary reference point for Islamist parties and some remained hesitant in their engagement with the EU. But this trend should not be exaggerated: Islamists’ rise did not mark a major turning away from Europe. Many Islamists remained more interested in deeper cooperation with Europeans than Europeans were with them. In sum, as in other areas of policy, a combination of governance dynamics was evident. This reflected the EU’s efforts to square a familiar circle, genuinely seeing benefit in moving to encourage Islamist parties’ inclusion and de-securitize strategies towards the Middle East, but without rupturing cooperation with traditional security interlocutors or overlooking safeguards against the future path that Islamist governments might take. The depth of contestation across the Middle East rendered such a two-horse strategy increasingly difficult to maintain.

48   W. Rees, ‘The external face of internal security’, in C. Hill and M. Smith (eds.), International Relations and the European Union, second edition (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 241–2.

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8 Syria, Iran, and Regional Upheavals

In Syria, the Arab spring took on its most violent and tragic form. Here, anti-regime demonstrations that began in early 2011 did not produce quick change but were a prelude to brutal civil conflict. With the scales tipping decisively in favour of neither opposition nor regime, bloody impasse ensued. In reacting to Syria’s indecisive set of domestic vectors, European governments seemingly tried every policy combination on the spectrum from broad-ranging sanctions and overt support for opposition groups through to pragmatic compromise with the Bashar Assad regime. But without military intervention nothing seemed capable of dislodging Syria’s desperate ruling circle. The erstwhile attempt to include Syria within the realm of Euro-Mediterranean governance gave way to policy steps driven by the strategic calculations of a core group of engaged member states. European governments worked to multilateralize the international governance of the Syrian crisis, albeit with modest success. The cosmopolitanism of cross-border links with democracy activists was politicized by the competing national and regional agendas of Syria’s respective opposition movements. And the ever more apparent regional spillover of the conflict caused tortuous strategic balancing, being motive for both more caution and more decisiveness in Syria. A nebulous strategic hope that Assad’s travails would constrain Iran was partially counteracted by an interest in seeing pragmatism and stability in Tehran facilitate negotiations on the country’s nuclear programme. Such complex regional geopolitics helped explain why the EU made little effort to extend its post-Arab spring focus on political reform to either Iran or Iraq; whether this would change in the wake of President Rouhani’s election in Iran remained unclear by the start of 2014. By late 2013 Assad had recovered ground against the rebels, including through the use of chemical weapons, and EU unity looked increasingly shallow. In the shadow of 120,000 deaths the influence of all international actors stood dispiritingly compromised; thin traces of idealism infused some European positions, but alongside

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an increasingly high-order geopolitical scramble that sought to divert allengulfing regional turmoil.

Syria Erupts At the beginning of 2011 the EU was still aiming to finalize and implement an association agreement with Syria, even as protests rocked Tunisia and Egypt. Although Syria was the only Barcelona process partner not to have signed its association agreement, it was included in European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) aid programmes and signed a national indicative programme for 2011– 13 providing for funding allocations. The €210  million annual allocation made the EU the largest donor to the country. Some support was provided to civil society, but nearly exclusively through quasi-governmental bodies such as the Syrian Trust for Development and a raft of other organizations under the tutelage of Bashar Assad’s wife—the much-commented upon ‘First Lady NGOs’ so prominent in Syria. Municipal administrative modernization was another flagship programme under development in 2011. France was starting a big health care project in Damascus in the spring of 2011. As Assad cracked down on protests, in May 2011 the EU suspended existing aid projects and those in the pipeline. In a first round of selective sanctions, it also suspended talks on the association agreement. Notwithstanding these measures, at this stage most EU diplomats still saw Assad as the potential ‘reformer’ to be cajoled, not ostracized. Syria did not have the same large and demanding middle class as in Egypt, nor the same mass of impoverished and organized working class.1 Observers compared the delay in harsher measures with their almost immediate deployment in the Libya case. Catherine Ashton called only for an ‘inclusive national dialogue’. Gradually, however, as the Syrian regime engaged in ever more desperate tactics, European pressure ratcheted up. The UK and France led pressure for a UN resolution admonishing Syria in June 2011. Governments concluded that Bashar had lost his legitimacy to rule. Even doubters such as Italy decided to support sanctions. By July 2011 Germany and France had established direct links with the Syrian opposition, both inside and outside the country. Tighter sanctions were imposed on Syria after a weekend of bloodshed in Hama at the end of July. In a mark of its exasperation with Bashar, the EU agreed oil sanctions in the early autumn. Unlike the US’s slightly earlier support for this measure, Europe’s signing up to such sanctions had real bite, given that the bloc bought

  International Crisis Group, Conflict risk alert: Syria’s tipping point, November 2011.

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95 per cent of Syria’s oil exports. Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands were still taking Syrian crude into their refineries. Shell was the largest investor in the country, and Total was also heavily engaged. By late summer 2011, Bashar was making a number of apparent compromises, lifting travel bans on many opposition figures and promising multi-party politics. Even those EU member states that had previously called for dialogue between the regime and opposition forces now believed that such concessions were insufficient to bring Assad back into the game. While the tougher measures did seem to have an impact on the regime, the measures appeared too late to affect a negotiated regime-saving exit. Spain rowed back from attempts at a rapprochement. The EU rejected an Arab League plan to save the regime until 2014, despite some self-styled ‘neutral’ figures in Syria urging the West to support this face-saving deal. A last-minute hitch occurred when Italy insisted on existing contracts being fulfilled before oil sanctions kicked in. Italy and Germany were the largest two importers, each taking one-third of Syrian oil. This delayed application of the oil embargo. However, a further tightening of sanctions against Syria was agreed in early September. This included a ban on investments in the oil sector and on delivering bank notes and coins made in Europe. The subsequent seventh round of measures targeted six firms and two individuals directly linked to the regime. A regime-controlled television station was included under the measures, along with two telecommunications firms and three companies supplying goods to the military. Turkey adopted similar sanctions at the end of September 2011. European governments pushed with increasing resolve for the UN Security Council to sanction Syria, through asset freezes and an arms embargo. Russia and China blocked their efforts. The sanctions also had to combat the fact that Syria was largely self-sufficient in food. Another challenge was that fragmentation of the Syrian opposition militated against united social mobilization. European governments had declined to work with most of these opposition figures prior to 2011 and had done little in the preceding decade to help build stable alliances amongst the different groups. Their engagement with opposition groups in 2011 began from an extremely low base. In an apparent shift of position, the EU reacted relatively favourably to a new November 2011 deal struck with the regime by the Arab League. Catherine Ashton and other European leaders issued statements welcoming the deal as a potentially positive step forward. This stood in contrast to the US’s dismissal of the accord. One member of the EU Political and Security Committee summarized prevailing opinion: the Arab League deal was not ideal but was ‘the best game in town’. It plotted a path to elections, even while giving breathing space to the regime. Another EU official recognized 149

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that the main strategy was to encourage the Arab League to play a more assertive role. The EU was worried about stability and revenge being taken against Alawites after the fall of the regime but also about a destabilizing backlash if Assad did not go. Many diplomats doubted that an army so identified with the minority Alawite sect would acquiesce to a negotiated withdrawal or be able to position itself to play the role of national guarantor as in Egypt. Yet several further rounds of tighter sanctions followed. Sanctions banned oil imports, but did not prevent European companies continuing to operate in and offer extraction-related technical services to Syria. In October 2011, Siemens signed a €305 million deal with the regime to expand a power station.2 In November the EU suspended loans from the European Investment Bank, which was still running seventeen projects in Syria worth over €1 billion. By now EU member states had virtually no contact with local officials, and limited aid went through UN bodies. In December the EU banned the sale of surveillance software to Syria after embarrassing revelations that this was being supplied to the Assad regime by a number of European companies. Most significantly, new Arab League sanctions were imposed at the end of November, and only Lebanon and Yemen voted against Syria’s expulsion from the regional body. European sanctions were tightened only in an incremental fashion. Some member states voted against a ban on commercial flight services, ostensibly in case an evacuation of European citizens became necessary. Greece, Italy, and Spain opposed a ban on phosphate imports and raised concerns over the extent of sanctions against the Syrian central bank, arguing that too much of a squeeze on credit would effectively disable all trade and vital supplies to the population. Despite these exclusions, in their entirety of incremental accretion during 2011, the EU’s sanctions against Syria were unprecedented in their breadth; it was seen as highly significant that such a sanctions-adverse actor adopted such an extensive range of punitive measures interrupting aid, financial transactions, oil sales, arms and dual-use exports, regime members’ travel, and exchanges of a range of luxury goods, as well as freezing government assets.3 Decisions on diplomatic links were not entirely coordinated. Italy withdrew its ambassador without consulting others. France, the UK, Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands then decided to call back their envoys for

2   H. Wimmen, ‘The Syrians are on their own’, Sada Arab Reform Bulletin, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2011. 3  C. Portela, The EU’s sanctions against Syria:  conflict management by other means, Egmont Institute, Security policy brief 38, September 2012.

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consultations. Germany did not fill the post left vacant after its ambassador moved to another post. Poland retained a presence and hosted US interests after Washington closed its embassy. Gulf states also decided to withdraw their ambassadors. In contrast, the External Action Service (EAS) kept the EU head of mission in situ. EU diplomats in Damascus insisted that the opposition wanted them to stay. EU mission representatives remained more ambivalent than member states about a change of regime, warning that ‘the alternative would be just as bad’ and that ‘we still cannot be sure that a majority is against Assad’. They also expressed a concern over the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was better organized than other opposition forces and likely to gain from the regime’s fall. Few in the EU thought military intervention was a feasible option. Policymakers habitually referred to concerns that the regime’s violent removal would stir up Shia resentment in Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan, and complicate the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Unlike in Libya, Russia, China, and India all blocked UN involvement and more broadly condemned Western measures against Assad—with Indonesia a notable exception. And of course a major consideration was that Iran was likely to defend the regime, whose survival was so pivotal to its own regional influence. Russia sent an aircraft carrier to Syria to discourage any Western thoughts of intervention. Mindful of all these factors, many in Europe still judged that regime reform was preferable to regime removal. The main opposition coordinating body, the Syrian National Council (SNC), was critical of such reluctance and pressed the international community to change its focus to one of ‘protecting civilians’. Turkey was increasingly seen as the most likely provider of safe havens at the border; Prime Minister Erdogan talked of Syria representing a NATO Article 5 issue for Turkey. But Ankara too gradually stepped back from any willingness to deploy militarily to protect humanitarian corridors. France expressed support for humanitarian corridors and a no-fly zone to get aid in and to protect civilians, but still did not see military intervention as being necessary to achieve such a goal. The safe havens idea slipped from the agenda as it became evident there was no will to police these militarily and that the main killing was now not taking place in the south, where such havens would be delineated. More Syrian opposition figures now began to admonish the international community’s lack of willingness to contemplate such action. By the end of 2011 more than 5,000 civilians had been killed, 80,000 detained, and 15,000 forced to flee as refugees, leading the opposition to draw more direct parallels with Libya. Opposition representatives were, in private, even more scathing about the lack of support from non-Western democracies.

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From Negotiations to Outrage If the first phase of the conflict in 2011 had focused debate on sanctions, in the first half of 2012 the policy pendulum swung back to attempts at negotiation with the regime. In February 2012 European efforts were set back when Russia and China vetoed a UN resolution. In the wake of this vote, more attention was given to Russia’s role in mediating with the regime. Reflecting a certain turn in prevailing opinion, the International Crisis Group at this stage proclaimed that sanctions were having a counter-productive effect and that the priority was rather to engage Russia to reach a negotiated settlement based on an interim unity government, protection for minorities against the Sunni majority, reform of the security forces, and demobilization of armed rebels. It accused the West of being unwilling to compromise with Assad because it sought to use Syria for a proxy battle against Iran.4 France sought to form an EU-Arab group on Syria. This approximately morphed into the wider Friends of Syria group that met regularly from mid-2012. European governments broadly concurred from this point that Russian acquiescence was probably necessary to any new steps capable of being accepted by the regime. As the revolt dragged on inconclusively, so the EU position appeared to swing back to a more nuanced position. Germany was most positive about the Russian position. By early 2012, EU policy was to back an Arab League mission into Syria and efforts to influence the regime with a negotiated exit for Assad. After this failed, hope was invested in Kofi Annan’s UN-mandated mission and six-point plan, which sought to reach agreement on steps towards unity before any mention of Assad leaving office. The six points stressed the need for violence to cease and for more humanitarian relief but spoke in only unspecific terms of a political transition. The EU’s support for the Annan plan implied a new line: European governments appeared to revert to talking about a possible deal that would keep the regime in place in some form. They urged both sides of the conflict to support the Annan plan. Some European diplomats talked of pressing the opposition into dialogue without the precondition of Assad’s departure and of a need for some regime elements to remain in place. Growing concern over the MB gaining power compounded moves in this direction. The UK and US mooted a joint plan offering clemency to Assad. Russian officials were even frustrated that the West was exaggerating in its assumption that Bashar would agree to whatever solution was acceptable to Moscow. It was striking that EU officials in Damascus did everything possible to retain engagement. They succeeded in ensuring that projects were suspended, 4   International Crisis Group, Now or never: a negotiated transition for Syria, Policy briefing 32, March 2012, p. 2.

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not definitively cancelled, with promises of resumption clearly signposted in the event of violence ceasing. They kept open channels to some civic organizations close to the regime, mainly through the prism of UN Development Programme operations. They appealed to governments not explicitly to call for Assad’s removal: their priority was to retain leverage with the regime. As the EU seemed to move back to a position in mid-2012 that supported the more minimal requirements of the Annan plan, local EU officials wondered whether it was too late for the EU to regain leverage with the regime. Significantly, Turkish positions remained less accommodating. The change in Turkish policy had been the most remarkable. From Syria being the exemplar of the ‘zero problems’ policy—from the Erdogan and Assad families holidaying together—now Turkey was the only country explicitly pushing for regime change even despite the Annan plan. While EU states’ language softened to give the Annan plan a chance, Turkey’s did not. Some opined that Turkey had sidelined itself as the links it had built up with the regime were cut, and it was now Russia that was the key to mediating with the regime. Conversely, SNC spokespersons were still critical of Turkey for fence-sitting and being unwilling to take the firm steps against the regime or in defence of the opposition that it had originally intimated at. Beyond the diplomatic talks and sanctions, European governments struggled with the question of how best to provide material support for the opposition. As 2012 progressed, opposition politics became more complex and dominated much debate. Relations between the principal organizations— the SNC, the Syrian Transitional Council, the Free Syrian Army (FSA)—were notoriously fractious. The growing fear was that the weakness of both regime and opposition would ensure a long and violent impasse and the prospect of ‘Lebanization’. Different parts of the opposition focused on controlling certain parcels of territory, intensifying the prospect of fragmentation. The FSA started out protecting civic protestors, but drifted into more guerrilla attacks on the army, with little central command. Kurds remained disconnected from the opposition, seeking an autonomous region as in northern Iraq, a prospect fiercely opposed by Turkey. Some tribes began taking a clearer stance against Assad, forming more of a nationalist bloc against the jihadist alternative. Christians were more reticent to come out against Assad. The National Coordination Committee was more locally based than the SNC, but was seen by many as too secular-leftist in nature to command wide support. Opposition figures were angered by the perception that the Shia minority needed protecting now from an ascendant Sunni majority; they insisted the regime was more of a family mafia under which Alawites also suffered repression. Against the background of these bewildering rivalries, the EU sought to support general capacity-building. European funds played a significant role 153

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in keeping the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights running in London. The EU also worked closely with Syria’s neighbouring countries and proposed a Commission ‘special [funding] measure’ to reserve €23 million of ENPI funds to support Syrian civil society as well as refugees and affected populations in adjoining countries. The respected organization Search for Common Ground was supported to mediate between different communities at a very local level. The UK named an envoy to the opposition and offered basic organizational support for democratic groups out of its interministerial conflict resolution initiative. The Syrian regime reputedly asked the Dutch and Norwegian governments to support initiatives on intercommunal dialogue. Turkey asked for more help from the EU to manage refugees fleeing Syria and underwrite the costs of camps within Turkish borders. Turkey and France started cooperating as the SNC’s two firmest supporters. Turkey hosted both the SNC and the FSA. France had recognized the SNC at the end of 2011. Syrian opposition members met Spanish ministers in Madrid. In private, many Syrian writers and activists expressed fury that France had inserted Paris-based intellectuals into key positions in the SNC, when these figures had little political acumen or local support but were seen as staunchly secular and moderate on Israel. The April 2012 meeting of the Friends of Syria recognized the SNC as ‘a’ but not ‘the’ representative of the Syrian people. The SNC was appointed as the channel for funding from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. This amounted to $100 million, to pay salaries and other expenses, including of the FSA. Much other Saudi and Qatari money to Syria went to conservative Salafi groups. The EU sponsored a meeting of Syrian opposition groups in Brussels in June 2012, with the aim of fostering greater unity and coordination among them. Activists close to the SNC expressed anger that European governments were pushing so hard for them to form a joint platform with other opposition groups, arguing that this demand ran counter to a democratic spirit of pluralism and policy alternatives. European governments did not openly agree to arm the opposition. It was reported that by February 2012 some EU policymakers were talking about the possibility of arming the SNC.5 However, most member states argued that arming the opposition would turn the population against outside support. Most doubted that the FSA was a credible threat. In part, the reticence formally to supply arms was out of a fear of these getting into the hands of jihadist radicals. In contrast, GCC states were willing to arm the opposition. There was widespread agreement that the best combination of policies was to keep tightening sanctions; get Russia on board; avoid arming the rebels;

  EUobserver, 7 February 2012.

5

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and start offering the SNC help to prepare for ‘the day after’ Assad.6 There was still no clear local message: the SNC wanted more assertive European backing, others in the local coordination committees were more ambivalent about international involvement. Despite efforts to accord the regime some room for manoeuvre, by the summer of 2012 diplomatic efforts seemed to have hit the buffers. In February, constitutional changes formally introduced a multi-party system and ended the Baath party monopoly; but it became apparent that in practice, nothing changed. Doubts grew that the ‘Yemen option’ would be feasible, as so few in the regime were willing to negotiate. Al-Qaeda moved into Syria and was responsible for increasingly violent bomb attacks. Opposition dynamics were Islamizing. There were few signs of the army fracturing; while most senior officers and the presidential guard were Alawites and the rank and file were Sunnis, the security forces’ role remained very different to Tunisia or Egypt. Yet, there was a growing fear that the military may take control even if the regime as such fell; a putsch was increasingly likely, as Bashar’s support base narrowed to the family clan. Observers feared that if the state collapsed before the regime, the conflict would become a regional one and cease to be so contained. The EU had little success in influencing the regime, but also struggled to persuade the SNC to engage with parts of the regime in drawing up a concrete transition plan. The international community was clearly losing influence over the FSA, as the latter expressed its frustration with the forlorn political process by engaging in ever more unrestrained military tactics, allegedly using kidnappings and torture against regime members. The pendulum once more swung back to a tougher line as outrage grew at the violence meted out by the regime. Pressure was ratcheted up after massacres in Houla and other cities during the summer of 2012. A number of member states expelled ambassadors, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Bulgaria—although this was not a completely common EU move. The Syrian ambassador was not expelled from Brussels, as the EAS still wanted to maintain its office in Damascus. In July a meeting of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the P5) agreed a text again calling for a transition government but without stipulating that Assad must step down. Bilaterally, though, the diplomatic language sharpened. François Hollande pronounced: ‘Military intervention is not excluded, provided it is carried out under the auspices of international law, namely a Security Council resolution.’7 In June, British foreign minister William Hague likened the situation to Bosnia in the mid-1990s

6   M. Asseburg and H. Wimmen, The violent power struggle in Syria, Berlin, SWP Comments 50, March 2012. 7   Global Europe, 29 May 2012.

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and wondered aloud whether the international community should not now put all options on the table. One French diplomat noted that, ‘we are facing increasing public criticism and pressure for our lack of action in Syria’. The French foreign ministry began bringing ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) language into its discourse. One French advisor warned that the real risk of instability was if the regime survived and lashed out both internally and across the region, while the MB radicalized in frustration. France advocated a Chapter Seven UN resolution to facilitate sanctions against the regime if it failed to pull troops back as agreed under the Annan plan; Russia and China vetoed the idea. The UK and French militaries were said to be ‘ready to go’ in implementing the humanitarian corridors option, on R2P grounds. A sixteenth round of sanctions was agreed at the end of June. There were disagreements over the impact of sanctions. Opposition representatives complained that sanctions were introduced in such an incremental manner that the regime was easily able to adjust its commercial flows towards non-Western suppliers. The business community did not turn entirely against the regime, even though sanctions were biting, basic supplies drying up, and commerce grinding to a halt.8 Yet some experts insisted that sanctions were obliging the regime’s broader networks of supporters held to it by ties of patronage to reassess their position.9 The hope was that the regime’s security forces would begin to defect as sanctions deprived Assad of cash to pay salaries. Ericsson and some German companies were allegedly still helping the Syrian regime monitor the opposition; the SNC was angry that governments did not impose firmer sanctions to prevent them from doing so. It remained unclear just how much support Iran was pumping in to counteract the effect of sanctions; some independent voices doubted that the Iranian regime would do much to save Assad, given the depth of its own internal problems. Even as the violence became uglier, Europe still did not benefit from widespread support from other powers. This was not only the case with Russia and China. Brazil and India criticized the Friends of Syria group as being too impatient, and accused the West of strategic opportunism in being keener to weaken Iran than support a genuinely bottom-up momentum for change. In international meetings, it was notable that Syrian opposition figures were increasingly angry not just with China and Russia but also Brazil and India for their lack of support and constant carping against Western support. An IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) mission to Syria produced nothing and was used by the regime as propaganda.

  Asseburg and Wimmen, The violent power struggle in Syria, p. 2.   F. Gerges, ‘The Syrian regime is not a house of glass’, The Guardian, 26 July 2012.

8 9

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Elusive Endgame? By the end of 2012 officers were beginning to defect from the army and the regime’s repression was becoming even more brutal. These trends strained the unity between EU member states and with the United States. The US muttered that it now saw little point in continuing with the UN process. European governments generally saw more merit in retaining some form of UN mandate. As a battle for Aleppo took on frightening and tragic levels of violence, increasing divisions were evident between member states on the tactical question of whether to focus exclusively on the rebels or continue efforts at mediation. The French government was attracted to the option of backing a unity team headed by defectors from the regime. French intelligence services were instrumental in engineering the defection of several senior members of the regime. The UK was more sceptical about the feasibility of shaping a unity administration that would hold together and be broadly acceptable. These contrasting readings tipped over into differences in the way that support was provided to the opposition. Several European governments changed tack to support Syrian rebels in situ rather than the SNC. One aim of this was to counteract the increasing flows of Gulf money to support Syrian Salafis. Much UK aid was now redirected to the FSA and local committees rather than being distributed through the SNC. By the end of 2012 several EU member states, and especially the UK and France, were inching towards more active support for rebel groups. The UK began contacts with operational commanders on the ground. France retained a degree of preferential support for the SNC. However, in September, France also launched a €5 million initiative to support five revolutionary councils in running municipal functions such as health and sanitation, trying to correct the perception that French support was too oriented towards exiled figures.10 French development aid began to flow into liberated areas. Several member states undertook initiatives mediating between Syrian parties. Several strands of the opposition got together under the auspices of a ‘Day After Project’, supported by the German government amongst several donors; this group stressed the need for planning activities to move up several gears before Assad’s ousting and the importance of agreeing non-ethnic, individual-based concepts of citizenship.11 Germany offered help for parts of the opposition to draw up a Syrian Marshall Plan, using its post-war experience as a model.

  Global Europe, 7 September 2012.  SWP, The Day After Project, the day after: supporting a democratic transition in Syria, Berlin, SWP Commentaries, August 2012. 10 11

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However, opposition representatives increasingly expressed anger that Western passivity had left the door open for Gulf states to favour Salafi groups with arms. Kurdish representatives were equally angry that Turkey had been given carte blanche to ostracize Kurdish groups. Conversely, Syrian MB spokesmen complained that they were still unduly shunned by European governments. There were still few politicians willing to contemplate military intervention. Another critique from opposition members was that the requirement for ‘unity’ was too onerous, and holding back useful support to local-level Syria organizations and local councils that could serve as the basis for democratic capacity-building. As the regime lost presence in many areas, local committees began to organize for the provision of services; these were the bodies that, many argued, most merited external support. A key problem here was that the EU continued to channel humanitarian aid through government channels. Syrian interlocutors increasingly talked of the negative impact of differences between member states over the SNC and whom to support within the opposition. European governments were less operationally implicated than the US or Turkey, both of whom were said by now to have agents working with rebels on operational matters on the ground inside Syria. One Syrian SNC activist complained that European states were now relying on local coordination committees but that these were no more representative than the much maligned ‘exile’ groups; they were made up mainly of journalists and academics not strongly linked to the population and not very operational. Many insiders insisted that the really legitimate anti-Assad power was now the MB, but few in Europe were willing to prioritize support for its activities. An apparent turning point was a reorganization of the opposition at a meeting in Doha in November 2012. A  new National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces was formed to incorporate a wider range of groups than the SNC. The MB gained power within this initiative. The aim was to give local opposition councils the legitimacy to bring fighters under their authority. Revolutionary councils from fourteen Syrian provinces were granted a representative in the new body. A Revolutionary Military Council was set up to oversee the splintered fighting forces, funnel both lethal and non-lethal military aid to the rebels, and unite the various factions of the FSA. The opposition now argued that they had met Western demands for unity and that this should unlock the supply of anti-aircraft missiles. EU and US reactions were favourable, although caution persisted over the provision of military equipment. US diplomats insisted on a low profile. The US’s stated aim was to help local bodies cover the services that the regime was no longer able to provide. In contrast, France moved unilaterally to recognize the new grouping. European support for the new opposition coalition became firmer, but there remained concerns over sectors still outside this 158

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new force that needed to be brought into any post-regime settlement. The UK and Italy followed France in recognizing the new opposition coalition. When in early 2013 the UN urged a negotiated interim government, going back to the parameters of the Annan plan, European support was tepid. François Hollande explicitly called for Assad’s removal prior to any negotiated accord, a clear change of position from the June agreement. The heads of the French and British military commands worked with their counterparts from Turkey, Qatar, and the UAE in drawing up plans to provide military training to the rebels and to support them with air and naval power. The EU delegation in Damascus was forced de facto to cease functioning at the end of 2012 due to the security situation. Only the Czech Republic retained any representation in the Syrian capital, rendering contact with the regime increasingly tenuous. The EU now invested effort to convince Kurdish representatives to join the National Coalition; their increasingly frequent clashes with the FSA caused problematic policy calculations for the international community. By 2013 there was fierce debate among EU institutions over the politicization of humanitarian aid. Most member states expressed frustration with the insistence of ECHO (the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office) that this huge slice of aid went directly to the regime, in accordance with standard principles of political neutrality. These governments favoured channelling at least some of the large humanitarian budget through the coordination body set up by the opposition National Coalition to manage outside support. European diplomats reasoned that there was now a considerable amount of external support available, but that the problem lay in knowing how and where to deploy this funding. At the end of February the EU amended its sanctions regime to enable a wider range of non-lethal support and technical assistance for the protection of civilians. It approved plans for the UK to provide ‘security and civilian-military’ trainers, although many member states complained that this was a step too far towards favouring the rebels in their armed action. The UK joined with the US to promise additional support in order to entice the SNC to talks in London at the end of February. Britain and France went further than the United States by promising battlefield equipment such as armoured vehicles, night-vision devices, and body armour; they would now be able to train fighters even if not actually directly engage in lethal activity. On the back of these incremental steps in loosening conditions for supporting the rebels, France and the UK pushed for the arms embargo to be lifted at the end of May 2013. They argued that the embargo was now causing rather than preventing further death. French officials argued that a negotiated settlement was no longer possible. Catherine Ashton retorted that UN mediation should still be given a chance. ECHO representatives protested that loosening the embargo complicated their humanitarian access. Other 159

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member states were not in favour of lifting the arms embargo—although this was set to lapse in May if the UK and France voted against its renewal. Diplomats acknowledged that only a limited amount of ‘post-Assad’ planning had been undertaken by spring 2013, beyond a few generic dialogue forums on economic reconstruction, especially within the rubric of the Friends of Syria group. A modest number of small-scale, behind-the-scenes civil society projects were funded to explore the prospects of building denominational alliances and enticing some regime-linked officials into a new, democratic order. Cooperation was also more practical. By mid-2013, several European donors were actively helping rebel-held areas organize services and arrange local elected bodies. The progress in basic governance at this level was an impressive testament to Syrian citizens’ resilience in the midst of such brutal conflict.

Regime Reprieve Even after discovering that the regime used chemical weapons in April 2013, European states and the US remained reluctant to intervene. Conversely, the rumoured use of a chemical weapon by a jihadist rebel group engendered tension between the French and UK governments on the one hand, and those of Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia on the other. Moreover, the conflict was by now regionalizing to a greater extent. There were reports of state-backed Turkish brigades fighting Syria government forces. Turkey was widely judged to have lost any neutrality in a new regional dynamic of fiercer Sunni–Shia antipathy. Turkish forces cooperated with Salafi groups against Syrian Kurds; more positively, Erdogan’s 2013 peace deal with the PKK was itself related to the regional situation. Iranian and Hezbollah forces present in Syria multiplied into the tens of thousands. Yet, European governments were still not willing to intervene. The US and Russia put the June 2012 P5 accord back on the table. France offered to make a link between this peace deal and any lifting of the arms embargo, to assuage those member states still against shipping lethal supplies to the rebels. European unity broke down over the question of whether to lift the arms embargo. The UK and France ensured this lapsed at the end of May, but agreed not to ship any weapons until after the meeting scheduled once again to discuss a negotiated accord. The majority of member states opposed arms sales even more strongly by now on the grounds that these might reach the hands of those radical groups clearly gaining ascendancy. By summer 2013 the conflict was more undeniably taking on a regional dimension and Bashar’s forces began retaking positions on the ground. While this reinforced the Franco-British push for stronger involvement, the US and some other EU 160

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member states seemed to draw the opposite conclusion, namely that deeper Western involvement now looked even more inadvisable as the regional complexities deepened. Despite the lengthy debate over the embargo, the UK decided in July 2013 not to supply arms to the rebels, on the grounds that the regime was now stronger. The dynamics of the conflict shifted in the latter half of 2013. The regime was suspected of escalating its use of chemical weapons in August in the killing of over 1,000 people in a rebel-held Damascus suburb. After weeks of back-and-forth uncertainty over a possible military strike against the regime, the net effect was to leave European influence much diminished. The US’s threat to launch a military attack split member states. Only the UK, France, and Denmark indicated that they would participate in an attack without a UN resolution. In contrast, even after these attacks, Catherine Ashton’s response was to call for mediation and for the Geneva process of governmentopposition dialogue to be reconvened. The German government adopted a similarly cautious line. Of course, the UK parliament then blocked David Cameron’s desire to intervene in support of the US. French president François Hollande took an equally forward-leaning position, also to be reined back by French parliamentary and public caution. The goalposts moved once again when Russia and the United States together negotiated a deal under which the Assad regime agreed to a UN mission that would deactivate its chemical weapons. European nations were excluded from the diplomacy between Washington and Moscow that defined a precarious way forward. A number of member states increased humanitarian aid at this stage and the EU focused on pushing for better access to be granted to emergency relief. In late 2013 the EU agreed a new strategy, ‘Towards a comprehensive approach to the Syria crisis’, under whose rubric a €400 million aid package was made available.12 The idea was to extend to the EU’s incipient ‘comprehensive approach’ to conflict resolution, operational mainly in Africa, to the Levant. However, when the dust settled from the intense global focus on Syria after the chemical attacks, the EU and European governments held an even weaker purchase on the underlying politics of the conflict. Some diplomats complained that the gathering crisis in Ukraine diverted ministers’ attention from Syria. The Geneva process was to be reconvened in January 2014, and there was new talk of a political solution once again being on the agenda. Opposition groups were pushed by the chemical weapons accord into an even firmer rejection of any deal under which Assad retained power. A series of al-Qaeda offshoots ratcheted up their actions in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, including 12  European Commission and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Towards a Comprehensive Approach to the Syria Crisis, JOIN(2013) 22, Brussels, 2013.

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the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) and the Army of Islam. A new opposition group, the Coalition of Political Forces and Parties inside Syria, was formed in October 2013; this complicated European dealings with the National Coalition. Indeed, Syrian opposition groups were now spending more time fighting each other than fighting the regime. In December 2013, the UK and US suspended aid to the rebels after the Islamic Front, a new grouping of six jihadist groups, attacked an FSA base. By the end of 2013, an increasing number of FSA fighters were disillusioned enough to lay down their arms and seek amnesty deals with the regime.13 The two most powerful opposition groups were now ISIS and the Islamist Front. Western efforts had switched to considering how far these might be brought into the Geneva peace talks.14 The effect of these complex internal opposition rivalries was to leave another dent in European strategies to influence change.

A Regional Cauldron The conflict inside Syria increasingly had ramifications at a regional level. In consequence, it obliged the EU to reflect on its broader regional strategy. The regional shockwaves were myriad. Assad’s sponsorship of violent attacks against Lebanese Sunni increased. There was a need to bolster stability in Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon the longer Syria’s bloodletting continued. Tensions were compounded by different degrees of outside backing for and antipathy towards the MB in Syria. Some feared that Assad was likely to lash out at Israel the longer he stayed in power. As mentioned, Turkey sought to prevent the Syrian Kurds gaining too much autonomy and power. Concerns increased about Syria’s chemical weapons finding their way across borders.15 Syrian rebels’ kidnapping of Iranian ‘pilgrims’ in mid-2012 was the biggest step towards the conflict spreading to the region; although, while Turkey stepped back from its diplomatic alliance with Iran, trade between the two countries increased dramatically as EU sanctions were tightened during 2012. Longer term, proxy war loomed between Iran-backed Shias fighting on after regime collapse and a Saudi-backed new Sunni government. By mid2013, most observers and practitioners feared regional conflagration. Such ominous regional fallout was generally cited as a reason explaining Europe’s holding back from stronger pressure on or intervention against the Assad regime. This was certainly the case for much of 2011 and 2012.

14   Financial Times, 20 December 2013.   Financial Times, 29 December 2013.  M. Clarke (ed.), A collision course for intervention, London, RUSI Syria crisis briefing, July 2012. 13 15

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Gradually, however, the regionally focused calculations became more complicated and in some eyes even inverted: the longevity of violence encouraged some to wonder whether intervention would be needed to prevent regional spillover. The UK sent a naval frigate to evacuate nationals but also to be prepared for regional spillovers. Some diplomats increasingly suggested that a stabilization force would be necessary after regime collapse to contain the reach of instability. Such accumulating fears were not of sufficient weight, however, to tilt the scales in favour of more decisive efforts to quell the violence. They prompted the UK and France into pushing to lift the arms embargo, but seemed to make some other member states even more hesitant over deeper European commitment—especially after the accord on chemical weapons in the autumn of 2013. Chapter 6 outlined the way in which regional factors pushed the EU towards a policy of status quo caution in Lebanon, as it wished to avoid any particular part of the political spectrum losing influence in the country’s quota-divided internal power balance.16 In Iran, the policy calculations were even more strained. Gulf states very openly sought to use the prospect of change in Syria to weaken Iran. Saudi Arabia saw the broader regional game through the prism of its own Shia minority. Qatar placed very instrumental conditions on the aid it provided to the Syrian opposition, wishing to ensure that a replacement regime maintained clear distance from Tehran. European governments certainly also hoped that Assad’s fall would have as its by-product an unravelling of the nexus of power between Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. One Syrian SNC activist accused European governments of declining to intervene because they were entirely comfortable with the conflict continuing, as this progressively sapped Iran of regional power. Moderate Iranian interlocutors certainly felt that the EU saw Iran’s weakening power as helpful in pressing it to be more flexible on the nuclear dossier. They argued that Tehran could have helped mediate with Assad but that the West treated the issue as a power game to chasten Iran, forcing the latter to defend its strategic position. This drove Iran closer to Russia, with even greater hostility to the West. It also forced Iran to utilize its influence in Iraq to push the latter into a more pro­ active regional role as a Shia ally. More broadly, however, European governments were not entirely keen to harness events in Syria to stir instability in Iran. The complex balance was between aims in Syria and the objective of enticing Iran into a deal on its nuclear programme. The EU’s priority was to keep Iran engaged in talks on its uranium enrichment. After the EU tightened sanctions in response to intensified enrichment activity, Catherine Ashton succeeded in luring Iran back 16   See also J. Barnes-Dacey, Lebanon: containing the spillover from Syria, London, ECFR policy brief, 2012.

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to the table in April 2012, together with the US, Russia, and China, in addition to the UK, France, and Germany, under her coordination. The last thing EAS diplomats wanted at this juncture was to see a dramatic weakening of Iran’s regional position, which would prove destabilizing and stoke nationalist reactions. The preference for pragmatic engagement continued even after the regime orchestrated an attack on the British embassy in Tehran. While the EU worked with the GCC and North African states on the Iran question, it was not clear these actors shared a vision of Iran’s long-term role in regional security. European governments were more accepting of the eventual need for regional arrangements that accorded Iran a prominent place. The stated hope of many European diplomats was that a post-Assad regime could act as a bridge to Tehran rather than the Iran–Syria relationship becoming a source of tension. This pointed in favour of Syrian security and state bodies retaining some continuity of capacity; it was hoped that a pacted transition would prevent Iran feeling highly threatened and thus veering in an even less conciliatory direction. Moreover, some Syrians still based in Damascus criticized as simplistic the Western view that a strong ‘Shia nexus’ existed; they argued that Iran was not nearly as oriented towards solidarity with the Assad regime as many in Europe assumed and that this reinforced the case for pragmatism. Conversely, Arab Shia democracy activists were not entirely enthusiastic about taking a lead from Iran, a prospect that sat uneasily with their pressure for self-determination.17 With this concern for strategic balance in mind, the EU also declined any notable attempt to entrap Iran within the broader process of democratic uprisings. While Iran remained relatively untouched by the wave of revolts that swept through Arab states, low-level protests did take place. A group of six EU member states—including the so-called ‘big three’, the UK, France, and Germany—pushed for stronger pressure partly in response to the regime’s repression of these gatherings. European governments and the US were more outspoken in their support of the Green movement than they had been after the rigged elections in 2009. EU states expressed concerns over the systematic violation of the right to freedom of expression and the death penalties handed down by Iranian judicial authorities against bloggers. The Dutch were particularly active: the winner of the 2009 Human Rights Defenders’ Tulip prize, Shadi Sadr, had been sentenced in absentia to lashings and a prison term. However, beyond critical declarations there was no desire to see the regime implode. Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt summarized the prevailing view: ‘the countries that will soon restart talks with Iran should state that 17   G. Abdo, ‘The new sectarianism’, The Arab uprisings and the rebirth of the Shia-Sunni divide, Brookings Saban Center, Analysis paper 29, 2013, p. 7.

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their goal is not to change the regime in Tehran but rather to engage with Iran in a comprehensive fashion on a broad range of issues’.18 When the EP pressed for recognition of the opposition People’s Mujahedeen Group, member states resisted. New European reform funds were not extended to Iran. Such was the caution of external actors that the regime’s familiar attempt to suggest that the protests were stirred up by Western powers did not gain traction; indeed, regime unpopularity deepened even as protests quietened.19 Some diplomats noted that the priority attached to the nuclear talks expended the EU’s available capital; pressure for political reform was sacrificed. This trade-off represented an essential continuity of EU policy prior to the Arab spring; the latter did not fundamentally change European strategy towards Iran. As the non-proliferation talks ground to a halt, the EU offered Iran a series of positive incentives. An EU-engineered deal appeared to be within reach: Iran would keep some enrichment capacity but with a fuel swap, and sanctions would be lifted. Iran was advancing towards weaponization, but probably only enough for one warhead, and with International Atomic Energy Agency monitors present could not render this operational without being noticed.20 Supreme leader Khamenei stopped President Ahmedinejad signing off on the fuel swap deal. The question now was whether Israel and the US would allow a situation where Iran had the capability to make a bomb but did not actually do so. There was concern that this could split the US and EU. Ashton’s team insisted that the aim was to enmesh Iran in a long-term process rather than secure a complete set of substantive concessions per se. Events in the autumn of 2013 vindicated the high representative’s efforts. Hassan Rouhani’s electoral victory unleashed a new spirit of cooperation, and most strikingly a thawing of relations between Iran and the United States. The main European aims after the election were first, to give Rouhani some early sign of reciprocation on the nuclear deal in order to show hardliners that his more pragmatic line could be fruitful, and second, to find some degree of common ground on Syria. Nuclear talks indeed recommenced in Geneva. By August 2013, a number of member states were speaking more warmly about new possibilities of cooperation and sending high-level officials for visits to Iran. The UK and Germany remained most wary about any positive moves.21 European diplomats spoke optimistically about Rouhani’s restraint during the crisis provoked by the chemical weapons attack in Syria. After the breakthrough in US–Iran contacts in September 2013, the EU looked at taking its re-engagement further.   C. Bildt, ‘The only option on Iran’, International Herald Tribune, 21 March 2012.   G. Tezcür, ‘Democracy promotion, authoritarian resiliency, and political unrest in Iran’, Democratization, 19/1, 2012: 120–40. 20   M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Iran can be stopped’, Prospect, April 2012, 26–31, 29. 21   EUobserver, 10 August 2013. 18

19

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Despite this, officials acknowledged that the consensus among member states was for a cautious response—in tune with warnings that the new president was not about to reform the Islamic Republic’s political system in any dramatic way. There was no rush to lift sanctions, some governments feeling that Rouhani’s victory demonstrated that these punitive measures were having a useful effect. The focus remained squarely on the nuclear dossier, diplomats opining that progress on this issue was still needed to unlock any resumption of civil society links, aid cooperation, or any internal reform focus. Of course, a breakthrough interim deal on the nuclear programme was reached in November 2013. Iran accepted certain limitations to enrichment in return for a modest easing of sanctions. The deal raised the question of whether the EU would or could develop a broader range of cooperation beyond the nuclear issue. The challenge was to assess how external support would feed into tensions between the republican and religious strands of Iran’s unique political system. By early 2014, despite the immense achievement of the nuclear accord, the EU and member states remained in wait-andsee mode, keen to see implementation of the nuclear deal before aiming at more ambitious cooperation. Catherine Ashton met with opposition groups and human rights activists on her trip to Iran in March 2014, against the will of the regime. Nevertheless, despite the success of its nuclear diplomacy and the advent of a more moderate government in Tehran, EU policy towards Iran was still disconnected from its broader response to the reforms of the Arab spring. Standing even more starkly apart from the new wave of Arab reform, the EU’s involvement in Iraq remained negligible. Neither the Arab spring nor Iran’s growing influence in Iraq sufficed to prompt more meaningful European levels of engagement here. Far from being swept up in the enthusiasm of the Arab awakenings, Iraq slid back into quasi-authoritarianism. Iraq kept some distance from the Syrian conflict, while quietly supporting the Iranian line. The Malaki government clearly preferred Assad to Sunni jihadist rebel forces, but declined to engage actively in his favour. Iraq was itself increasingly destabilized, however, by the regional fallout. The EU had little leverage to prevent or even mitigate this. Commission and member state officials pointed out that a large number of training and capacity-building programmes had been run for Iraqis. A partnership and cooperation agreement (PCA) entered into force. The Commission allocated nearly €60 million to Iraq for 2011–13, with a change of priorities from emergency relief to institution-building and reform. The EULEX rule of law mission was extended. A memorandum of understanding on energy cooperation became operational. Germany assisted Iraq in building the rule of law, market economy, and civil society structures with over €400 million of aid and 166

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€4.8 billion of debt relief between 2004 and 2012. From 2009 the European Technology and Training Centre in Erbil offered training courses for government officials, and in particular for staff of the Iraqi ministry responsible for human rights. Various programmes proceeded to support reconciliation processes in Kirkuk. Officials pointed to increased efforts in 2013 as the EU become more aware of the growing instability in Iraq. As the US stepped back the need was recognized for a greater European engagement, especially from France and Germany. Catherine Ashton visited Iraq in June 2013 and sought to build bridges between the main factions. Diplomats noted that Iraq progressed keenly with cooperation under the new PCA, to a modest degree searching for external partners to offset Iranian influence. Plans were forwarded by mid-2013 for more cooperation projects under the PCA. Cooperation on Syria, energy, and human rights were listed as priorities. However, these worthy and useful initiatives were of a limited scale and could not compensate for European governments’ strategic no-show in Iraq. EULEX’s training offered returns over the long term, but officials acknowledged the difficulty of tempering Iraq’s immediate authoritarian drift. After a case involving the torture of a French citizen, EU council conclusions committing to an upgraded engagement were held back in March 2013; however, they were then agreed in April, with most member states keen not to let one human rights issue impede a geopolitical focus. After its humbling defeat in Basra, the UK adopted a far lower profile; having read the local political dynamics so disastrously wrongly, it seemed to have little credibility among its partners for pushing the EU into a more active presence in Iraq.22 UK aid to Iraq dropped from £337 million in 2008–9 to only £7 million in 2011–12. As violence reappeared in Iraq at the beginning of 2014, and Sunni jihadi groups once again gained ground, European commitment to any strategic presence was negligible.

Conclusion Syria’s heart-wrenching conflict demonstrated the unpalatable reality that even careful and balanced international efforts can fall short of influencing the cruellest of tyrants. In hindsight, it might well be suggested that early military intervention would have saved much later loss of life. It was striking that no agreement on R2P principles emerged in Syria despite the number of deaths being far in excess of those in Libya. One expert argued that the US and European governments sought too much in offering some support for

22

  F. Leftwidge, Losing Small Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012).

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Assad’s removal while hoping that the limits to their involvement would also ensure a smooth change of regime; the longer they prevaricated the greater the danger was of an irreversible Balkanization of the Syrian state.23 Yet, surely European governments were right to ponder the lessons from Iraq and the way that invasion could have worsened Syria’s plight even further. It would be fair, however, to question some of the tactics adopted by some member states. Sanctions were wide-ranging but somewhat piecemeal in their protracted accumulation. European governments veered between supporting mediation with the regime and insisting that a pacted solution was not possible—a lack of consistency that left Syrians asking what the underlying EU policy or political vision actually was. Practical help to the opposition was equivocal and hampered by stringent caveats. The SNC was formed almost because France and some other countries wanted a principal interlocutor; it lacked weighty authenticity. International actors failed fully to engage with tribes or national coordinating committees. Weapons ended up reaching opposition groups in a covert and thus uncontrolled manner, primarily by Gulf providers keen to reach out to Salafist groups. The fastrising MB felt cold-shouldered by the West, risking antipathy in a post-Assad future. Wavering factions did not see sufficient incentives being offered by the international community for them to pull decisively away from the regime. The EU failed to influence the regime and equally the opposition. By early 2014 its focus was back on a negotiated solution, but the EU was unable to convince the opposition to make any meaningful concessions. The International Crisis Group accused the West of focusing on boosting the opposition’s organizational capacity rather than on the necessary step of getting it to buy into an attainable political solution.24 At a more sober, analytical level Syria was the case that most clearly enjoined member states to reconfigure a realpolitik strategy for change. France mirrored the shift in Turkish policy: President Sarkozy moved from being the Assad regime’s staunchest protector in Europe to being its harshest critic. For a decade the EU’s aim had been to enmesh Syria within the cooperative initiatives of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and encourage it to upload EU governance regulations. These efforts dissipated and provided little balm as the civil conflict intensified. The larger member states regained control over policy in Syria. They determined the precise ways in which support for change and conflict resolution were defined and delivered. Policy shifted between options for compromise with the regime and coercion against the Assad inner circle. Such fluctuation was aimed at ensuring

23  S.  Heydermann, Regional implications of the Syrian uprising:  challenges to the post-Ottoman state order in the Levant, FRIDE working paper, 2013. 24   International Crisis Group, October 2013 report on Syrian opposition.

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that the regime’s fall did not bring in its wake violence-stoking sectarian splintering. It informed a broader regional strategy—pertaining also to Iran and Iraq—that veered between the opportunistic, the pragmatic, and the conservatively passive. Member states drew different conclusions about the geopolitical effect of more actively supporting opposition forces, with humanitarian principles playing a residual limiting role. Syria was a case where key European governments needed little convincing that a more committed process of alliance-building with the US, Turkey, Gulf states, Russia, and other rising powers was vital. Syria’s tragedy meant that the Arab spring was at least in part about conflict and a reversion to more traditional geopolitics, and was not just a harbinger of cooperative, civic-led patterns of governance. Commentators argued that the international community approached the crisis as a means of weakening Iran and a newly resurgent Hezbollah.25 European governments had no desire to redraw boundaries. Some kind of pillar of the pre-existing state apparatus was seen as necessary to ground a democratic transition. It did not seem implausible to suggest that diplomats’ geopolitical calculation was that continued stalemate between the regime and the rebels was the least bad outcome for European interests. By early 2014, these calculations and the fate of the conflict lay very much in the balance, as the unpalatable reality of having to deal with the Assad regime featured high on the international agenda.

25   D. Lesch, Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 245.

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9 The Libya Conflict

Unlike Syria’s logjam, the dramatic defeat of Colonel Qaddafi opened the doors for democratic reform in Libya. European involvement in the intervention that assisted rebel forces played a significant role. The partnership between Libyan fighters and external forces sufficed stirringly to oust one of the world’s most eccentric dictators in the summer of 2011. Several European states played a lead role in this military intervention. It was an episode that seemed to remind doubters that a crisis-hit, declining Europe could still count in international affairs. At the same time, there were some dimensions of the engagement in Libya that spoke less favourably of European capacities and strategy. The campaign raised searching tactical questions about the use of military force and the effective marshalling of democratic opposition. It took an agonizing nine months to finish off a regime that had appeared to be facing insurmountable odds very early on. A relatively modest deployment tested the limits of European military capacities. Member states were split on tactical questions, with arguably deeper significance even than in Iraq. Clarity, consistency, and foresight were all lacking in the way that nonmilitary European support was provided to rebel forces. Qaddafi would not have been ousted without the involvement of the US and Gulf states; the Libya conflict was simultaneously a heartening case of European leadership and herald of a new era of de-Europeanized governance. It was to Europe’s credit that it did not turn its back on Libya once the post-Qaddafi period commenced; this chapter details the raft of European initiatives introduced though 2012 and 2013. Yet, the EU’s standard offers of support struggled to gain traction, at the levels of cooperative regional, civic-oriented cosmopolitan, and exported governance mechanisms. While many of the mistakes of previous post-conflict state-building efforts were avoided, Libya’s internal security situation became increasingly brittle into 2014 and the country remained outside the orbit of any democracy-enhancing Euro-sphere.

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Military Intervention After civic protests erupted in Benghazi in early 2011, strong European condemnation was forthcoming of Qaddafi’s brutal crackdown. Finnish foreign minister Alexander Stubb asked: ‘How can we on one side look at what’s going on in Libya, with almost 300 people shot dead, and not talk about sanctions or travel bans for Qaddafi, and at the same time put travel bans and sanctions on Belarus?’ However, there were exceptions. Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini pondered: ‘we did not ask Mubarak to step down, so why Qaddafi?’ Silvio Berlusconi said he did not want to ‘disturb’ Qaddafi. And the Czech foreign minister Karel Schawzenberg warned: ‘If Qaddafi falls, then there will be bigger catastrophes in the world.’1 It took the EU time to agree on sanctions. Italy and Malta initially blocked any punitive measures. But as Qaddafi’s actions became increasingly lethal, the EU ratcheted up the pressure. Talks were suspended on an EU–Libya framework agreement. An arms embargo was imposed. Sanctions were targeted at Qaddafi and his family. These were progressively widened during February and March 2011 to include a wider range of regime members and institutional entities such as the Libyan Investment Authority. However, the EU froze fewer assets than the US. While efforts were made to prevent oil revenue reaching the regime, no oil embargo was imposed. In mid-April the EU imposed restrictions on twenty-six oil and gas firms that ministers argued amounted to a de facto embargo. In June six ports were added to the entities subject to sanctions. The repercussions of these measures revealed how far European economic interests extended into Libya. The Italian stock exchange closed briefly; such was the extent of interdependence between the Libyan and Italian economies and the Libyan presence in the Italian stock market that there were fears of a major run. The pre-conflict period saw record increases in Italian investment to Libya and vice versa.2 More than 150 European companies had set up in Libya since 2005. Spain had just agreed an arms deal worth over €1 billion. Several governments had sought funds from the Libyan Investment Authority. As violence flared, a no-fly zone was then imposed. Several member states were reluctant to acquiesce until Qaddafi’s forces seemed to be on the point of defeating the rebels. The UK and France were obliged to wait for nearly two weeks to win support for the move from other member states. In both

  EUobserver, 20 February 2011.   G. Bonvicini, A. Carati, A. Colombo, R. Matarazzo, and S. Silvestri, Italian foreign policy in 2010: continuity, reform and challenges 150 years after national unity, Rome, IAI 11/06, May 2011, p. 8. 1 2

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Germany and Italy divisions ran deep and cut across party lines. The Italian left had initiated the policy of deep engagement with Qaddafi under Romani Prodi and Massimo D’Alema, so struggled to define a distinct position from that of Silvio Berlusconi’s government. The significant step was Germany’s abstention in the UN security council. German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle declared: ‘We do not want to get sucked into a war in North Africa and we would not like to step on a slippery slope where we all are, at the end, in a war.’ Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, and Malta refused to participate in the military action. A sobering thought was that if it wasn’t for votes from Nigeria and South Africa, Germany’s abstention would have sunk the UN resolution 1973 that provided for military deployment—which could have triggered a hugely symbolic crisis for the EU’s common foreign and security policy. Defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s exit from office at this very moment took away a potential champion for German involvement. The decision left Germany more isolated than it had been in its opposition to action in Iraq. Some opposition SPD politicians suggested it would have been better to vote in favour of the resolution and then simply not participate. Germany even withdrew its boats from patrolling the Mediterranean and stopped NATO AWACS planes taking off because the crew contained German nationals. Westerwelle subsequently even justified the vote by saying that Germany felt comfortably aligned with the world’s biggest democracies, India and Brazil—an interesting twist to new alliance formation. The new defence minister immediately said he was also ambivalent about German peace-keeping troops helping in any eventual post-Qaddafi mission. In contrast to Brazil and India, South Africa voted in favour of the UN resolution but then began to criticize the aim of regime change and to argue that the African Union should take the lead to reach a negotiated solution with Qaddafi. China was set firmly against the intervention. Its deputy foreign minister termed Westerwelle an ‘ally’. China’s evacuation of nearly 50,000 of its workers from Libya provided a remarkable snapshot of how much the country’s presence had increased in North Africa; European states had only around 6,000 citizens removed. China already imported 3 per cent of its oil from Libya and Chinese rail companies had signed lucrative railway contracts with Libya. Yet, ultra-pragmatic China also bought the first oil shipment sold by the anti-Qaddafi rebels’ provisional authority. As the military action commenced, differences surfaced over command structures. The US role in the first three days was crucial, launching over 1,000 cruise missiles. A reluctant France then bowed to pressure for NATO to take charge as the US stepped back from any lead operational role. A deal was struck between the UK and France: command passed to NATO, while political guidance went to the operation’s broader set of allies, crucially including 172

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the Arab League. Even the UK and France were concerned over their paucity of military capacity available for sustained engagement in Libya. The US supplied most cruise missiles; the UK soon ran low on its stock of Brimstone and Tomahawk missiles. The UK also had to deploy reconnaissance aircraft and helicopters due for decommissioning.3 In late March, the mandate for a common security and defence policy (CSDP) mission, Euform, was agreed. The mission was mandated to provide armed support for the delivery of humanitarian aid, upon a request from the UN’s Office for Humanitarian Affairs. It was to last four months and cost €7.9 million. It made both Battlegroups and the EU Civilian Response Teams available, for the first time under a CSDP mission. The significant breakthrough was to get an initially ambivalent Germany signed up to the mission. However, by the end of April the prospective mission already seemed to be in crisis. The UK, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland, and Italy expressed concerns that the EU was muscling in and cutting across air strikes. The UN said it did not want military cover. The fact that the mission was set up in a way that required a request from the UN’s Office for Humanitarian Affairs seemed almost to invite inaction.4 Tensions mounted as preparations for the armed protection of aid continued at EU level. Member states grumbled behind the scenes about Catherine Ashton’s insistence that the EU confine itself to neutral humanitarian issues. As Qaddafi clung to power and the balance of superiority swung back and forth between regime forces and the rebels, new tensions emerged over the military engagement. European governments did not support the idea of a stabilization force beyond the limited no-fly zone when this idea was floated by some US generals. The no-fly zone did not prevent a new massacre in Misrata in mid-April. Of EU states only the UK, France, Denmark, and Belgium participated in hitting targets. Spain, Holland, Greece, Sweden, and Italy did not fly attack missions and were involved only in air-to-air action; but this was largely irrelevant by now as all Libyan fighter aircraft were grounded. Bulgaria and Romania offered to help with the naval dimension of the arms embargo. At the end of April, Italy announced that it would be willing to participate in bombing targets. Indeed, Italy had made the most dramatic volte-face as it calculated that Qaddafi was now irredeemably finished. As one Italian diplomat acknowledged, Italy changed position as it realized that the ‘Benghazi council was the only game in town’. Governments flew far fewer sorties in Libya than they had flown in Kosovo over a decade previously, and yet muttered about overstretch. Britain and

3  S. Joshi, ‘Six lessons from Libya’, in Conservative Middle East Council, The Arab Spring: Implications for British Policy (London: Conservative party, 2011), pp. 18–19. 4   R. Gowan, ‘The EU and Libya: missing in action in Misrata’, E!Sharp, 30 May 2011.

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France had to use mothballed planes. Member states could not even agree a common EU mission to evacuate European citizens, resisting the idea of helping each other. Ironically, a northern country that had opted out of EU defence, Denmark, flew the most sorties per pilot in Libya, killed Qaddafi’s son, and acquired additional bombs so as to carry on its campaign having used up its own stocks. Other states who talked endlessly about the need for EU cooperation did far less. Tomas Valasek pointed out that all NATO missions suffer from such shortfalls and that Libya still represented an overwhelmingly European deployment, where the US was reluctant to engage.5 But the longer Qaddafi held on to power, the more doubts surfaced over the sufficiency of air attack capabilities. Overall, the feeling was one of the military engagement looking increasingly limited in its effectiveness. The UK’s focus was increasingly on pressing the US to re-engage, while also extending targets to the regime’s communications systems. At an international meeting in Qatar in early April, the UK and France lambasted other EU member states for failing to take on more of the burden. In June the UK and France deployed helicopters more directly to attack Qaddafi’s headquarters. These attacks took resolution 1973 to its limits, its red line being the deployment of ground forces. Many European diplomats remained nervous about mission creep, saying that the EU should simply protect civilians within a separate eastern entity rather than becoming a partial actor in a civil war. Paradoxically, when the Qaddafi regime precipitously fell in August 2012, European governments were actually reflecting on the apparent ineffectiveness of their military engagement. European attacks had prepared the ground; the regime’s fall was more proximately the result of internal fracturing and more effective rebel assaults on the core of its power structures.

Supporting Opposition Beyond debates over the scale of military action was the challenge of logistical and organizational support for rebel forces. This was complicated by haphazard and fast-changing internal opposition structures. Divisions existed between different strands of the rebel forces, as secular lawyers, Islamists, regime defectors, and tribal leaders uneasily pursued the common aim of Qaddafi’s defenestration. Some tribes and mercenaries fought for the regime, delaying progress. Qaddafi’s paramilitary force proved more steadfastly stubborn than had militaries in some other Arab transitions. The National 5   T. Valasek, What Libya says about the future of the transatlantic alliance, Centre for European Reform essay, July 2011.

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Transitional Council (NTC) struggled with the prosaic constraint of cash-flow problems. Broadening and solidifying opposition to the regime became a priority for external actors. Gradually, EU states began to explore ways of supporting the rebel forces. They were still reluctant directly to arm the rebels, as the UN arms embargo covered the whole country. They were also reportedly concerned that al-Qaeda operatives were present among the rebels. European governments were prompted into action by the US beginning to offer covert help for the rebels and by Qatar’s decision to recognize and buy oil from the NTC. Catherine Ashton sent a senior diplomat to Benghazi to establish contact with the Libyan insurgents. The UK looked at indirect means of support, suggesting that private companies train rebels and be paid by Arab states. By the end of April the UK, France, and US began helping the rebels with communications equipment and credit lines. Turkey provided cash directly to the NTC from the middle of 2011. The UK, France, and Italy sent logistical advisors. The UK now backed US attempts to push the boundaries of the arms embargo. Several member states sent diplomatic representatives to Benghazi. Poland was strongly supportive of pro-democracy actions, while an adamant critic of the military intervention, further confusing alliances within the Union. Insiders whispered that while MI6 was prevented from arming the NTC, both French and Qatari covert forces were beginning to assist with hardware. France took a far more forward-leaning position in favour of the rebels than other member states. On 8 March France recognized the rebel’s transitional council. Other member states were openly critical of this move. Foreign minister Alain Juppé himself did not have prior knowledge of President Sarkozy’s move. France did not even consult its EU partners or inform them before its unilateral recognition. By early March the UK and other states were just beginning to make contact with opposition groups in Benghazi. They did not offer material support but advice on organizational and campaigning issues. British SAS officers were captured by the rebels, trying to make contact—this adding to criticism that the UK government was bungling its way through the crisis. Little was done to coordinate such putative on-the-ground strategies at a common EU level. Catherine Ashton confined her efforts to sending a fact-finding mission to Tripoli, which generated little in terms of operational support. Indeed, the Libyan opposition complained strongly when an international conference in London on 29 March produced no substantive breakthroughs on the main issues of support the rebels were looking for: wider recognition, arms, and repatriation to them of the $30 billion of frozen assets abroad. On all these issues, France struggled to push a reluctant US to consent to action. Most governments argued that releasing the regime’s funds was not possible 175

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legally while Qaddafi remained in power and formally the sovereign representative of the nation. At the London meeting, the only change was the setting up of a contact group. Few Arab or African representatives turned up to the conference. Media coverage was dominated by the defection of Libya’s foreign minister. Against the backdrop of regime perseverance, differences widened over whether or not to negotiate with government loyalists. Turkey began mediating to offer Qaddafi an exit and negotiated settlement. Italy supported the notion of offering Qaddafi a deal to leave office and safe exile. The UK and France wanted him brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC). European governments decided to offer humanitarian aid to the population in Tripoli, even though it was felt this would probably prolong Qaddafi’s regime. Italy pledged €400 million in cash and €150 million in fuel, using Libyan assets frozen in Italy as collateral. The money was provided in the form of soft loans to pay day-to-day needs of the NTC. Italian companies ENI and Unicredit pledged to help meet the council’s needs by providing fuel. In June France announced that it was ready to deliver €290 million to the NTC, in particular by unfreezing some assets held by French banks. The UK gave £13 million (€16 million) to meet immediate humanitarian needs, providing funding for medical and food supplies, emergency shelter, and assistance for evacuating poor and vulnerable migrants. Germany made available nearly €10 million in humanitarian aid. Spain made a contribution of close to €6 million, making it the fifth largest European donor to Libya. The Spanish government sent more than 40 tons of humanitarian aid. In May, new funds were offered at a meeting in Rome of the International Contact Group, mainly from Kuwait and Qatar. A new fund would receive international donations, while blocked assets worth €40 billion in Europe and the United States would be added at a later date. France and Italy would alternate managing the fund. Difficulties were compounded by growing tensions within the rebel camp. Differences widened between regime defectors, tribal leaders, and several prominent members of the NTC trained in the US. The main tribes hedged their bets, holding up the rebels’ progress. Tensions also surfaced as prominent families gained power through newly emerging patronage networks. Debates took place inside the Council about whether elections were needed to legitimize their representatives. No moves could be agreed in this direction, even though complaints grew over the NTC’s legitimacy as the military campaign dragged on for longer than anticipated. The French government started arming rebels in June. Several member states, especially the Netherlands, expressed unease. Other member states complained at UK and French inflexibility on negotiating some kind of 176

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exit deal with Qaddafi; by late July both London and Paris seemed to have changed their stance slightly and were intimating that Qaddafi could stay in the country—this sitting uneasily with their prior enthusiasm for having an ICC warrant issued against him. Debates took shape over whether NATO would protect civilians on the pro-regime side if and when rebels reached Tripoli. European governments leant on the rebels not to attack oil and gas pipelines leading into Tripoli. Reflecting nervousness over the impact of the conflict on energy markets, Western nations released stocks through the International Energy Agency to offset the decrease in Libyan supplies. It was striking that throughout this period most debate was about arming the rebels, not broadening out peaceable pro-democracy activity and coalition-building. Commission president José Manuel Barroso claimed that the EU was preparing well for transition. A project on capacity-building for civil society was launched in early July. An expert on security sector reform started working from the Commission’s Benghazi office. Two further EU expert missions arrived in late July. The UK invited the NTC to set up office in London and stepped up mentoring of the rebels in Libya. It also sent in combined security-development teams to plan post-conflict stabilization, together with Italy, Denmark, and others; and it began tentatively supporting police and media development in the east.6 However, the overall range of such activity was limited. In general, member states were not open about what was being done to prepare for the post-Qaddafi scenario. At a July meeting of the Contact Group the rebels won broad political recognition as the country’s ‘legitimate authority’ as well as the promise of huge financial support and a British commitment to intensify NATO bombing. It was recognized that the key was for the population in Tripoli to switch sides peacefully to allow an implosion of the regime from within, without NATO having to ‘finish it off militarily’. Of course, as this began to happen the Qaddafi regime indeed crumbled—just as many observers were alluding to its apparent inviolability. The combination of internal and external pressure had sufficed to oust one of the world’s most enduring dictatorships.

Post-Qaddafi General progress in the initial months of the new regime was impressive in some areas, but not without serious disappointment. When the post-Qaddafi era commenced it was clear that Libya would require the most basic of state-building assistance. The new interim administration was slow to form

  Chatham House, Libya: prospects and challenges, transcript of conference, 8 June 2011.

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and was often reduced to paralysis. The NTC gained a reputation for inefficiency. Several tribes moaned at a lack of representation; some complained that former regime figures were included in the administration. The government failed to disarm the militia or tempt fighters into a national army. Rival militia each got government figures of whom they respectively disapproved removed. Berbers also protested at their under-representation. The militia holding the capital, the Tripoli Military Council, had links to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and was increasingly confrontational with the NTC. The latter also struggled with the question of how to integrate former members of the Revolutionary Committee Movement. While media freedom and civil society flourished, the NTC was seen as lacklustre in its response to human rights abuses against regime-linked prisoners in detention centres. The NTC announced it would not stand in elections. Learning lessons from Iraq, neither the NTC nor international actors sought to ostracize regime security forces; the problem was rather that the police began to melt away of their own accord. Qaddafi loyalists fought on, as they doubted that they were being offered political inclusion. Libya became one of the most heavily armed pieces of territory in the world. Human rights groups noted rebel reprisals against regime forces. Underlying the security problems, the basic structure of the state exhibited much continuity. Rentier state dynamics did not disappear. Battle ensued over patronage, as the NTC took key positions determining the allocation of funds from the $160 billion Libyan Investment Authority. Transition was menaced by an emerging class of oligarchs. Tensions surfaced over the rising role of Islamist influences. The assassination of the NTC’s military head was attributed to the rise of Jihadist elements in the coalition. A  new law permitting polygamy was introduced. Radicals from the Islamic Fighting Group (IFG) reassembled and suspicions grew that freelance jihadists were receiving funds from the Gulf. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) gained prominence as the Justice and Construction party, while Salafists emerged as a powerful counterbalance to the jihadists and the IFG. Jihadists, tribes, and criminal networks increasingly intermingled. Despite all these challenging trends, however, democratic elections were held in the summer of 2012. The MB was surprisingly defeated, and a moderate secular government took office. In terms of external support, much initial hope was invested in UN initiatives. The NTC rejected offers of foreign troops and full ‘protectorate’ oversight, but rather asked the UN to organize a more modest, technical mission to help with a range of matters from policing to technical aid. The EU’s most senior diplomats insisted that support in Libya must be channelled primarily through the UN and that the priority was to get India, Brazil, and China back on board to help provide the kind of resources that cash-strapped Europe lacked. Catherine Ashton defined her priority 178

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as being to keep non-Western powers on board, despite their anger over French and British military action. France expressed disappointment that the UN wound down its presence so quickly and left only 150 personnel of a non-operational type. Indeed, French diplomats lamented the fact that rising powers showed little willingness to help with reconstruction, but rather persisted in criticizing the Western intervention. Libyan political actors admonished the UN mission for being so limited and disconnected from local actors. Meanwhile, elements of EU policy moved relatively quickly to forward support for reconstruction. The European Community Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) set up office within a few days of the rebels’ victory, and released €10 million of a €70 million fund created for the Libyan emergency. A more targeted €2 million was provided to support the NTC in setting up an interim government. An additional €10 million was made available from the European Neighbourhood Policy budget to be used for rebuilding Libya’s health and education sectors; this was spent before the end of 2011 on boosting core administrative state capacity. By early 2012 a basic division of Commission funds had been determined: €30 million for immediate stabilization, €50 million for longer-term development projects. At this stage the Commission agreed on a medium-term allocation of an additional €60 million for 2011–13. The EU’s declared priority for these funds was to build basic state capacity, in a country where the population still looked to the state to provide most services. A separate €5 million Technical Assistance Facility was set up to work specifically on such capacity-enhancing administrative reform. The other main Commission priorities were disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. Several EU projects were funded through civil society, offering vocational training to 200,000 militia members to help with their ‘reintegration’ into the workplace. The Commission gradually switched funding from short-term emergency relief to longer-term capacity-building. Taken together, these contributions made the EU the biggest donor in post-Qaddafi Libya. Member states started the complex work of trying to unfreeze Libyan assets. The US released $1.5 billion; Britain freed up $1.6 billion, some of it in huge blocks of Libyan banknotes flown in by the Royal Air Force; France released $2.2 billion. The largest immediate cash injection after the rebels took control came from Qatar. At the end of 2011, the EU unfroze assets belonging to the Libyan Central Bank and the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank worth $97 billion. The UK provided a beefed up team of ‘stabilization advisors’. UK aid to Libya in 2011–12 was $13.8 million, and the country was the only North African country to have a bilateral development programme from Britain. The French government froze $10 billion of Qaddafi assets, which they proposed putting into a fund to be used only for institution-building, health, 179

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and education projects. France also offered the new administration military assistance to patrol the Mediterranean Sea. Italy moved quickly to advance its national interests and embed a continuation of its traditional support. In January 2012, Prime Minister Mario Monti visited Libya and signed a renewed Declaration of Tripoli, which aimed at strengthening cooperation. Although presented as a new vision of bilateral relations, the agreement largely mirrored the Friendship Agreement previously signed between Silvio Berlusconi and Qaddafi. It upheld promises of reparations for Italian colonialism. It focused overwhelmingly on intensifying economic relations, including several technical measures for facilitating Italian investment in Libya. The agreement also included provisions for reducing the flow of migrants towards Italy. Indeed, Italy’s flagship offer to the new Libyan administration was a package of hi-tech border management and surveillance equipment. Despite all this quickly implemented support and intense diplomatic activity, a number of views and reactions pointed to the limited nature of the EU’s post-Qaddafi role. Staffing levels at the new EU mission in Tripoli remained extremely limited. While twenty member states opened or reopened embassies, only the Italian, French, and British missions did so with any political weight. Karel De Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, downplayed expectations of outside help: ‘You can forget the idea that you can start the reconstruction of the country as of tomorrow.’7 Shortcomings were compounded by Libyan ambivalence. Islamist groups that supported the intervention now wanted more distance from the West, insisting that Libya had sufficient resources of its own. A number of member states prepared a 300-page report on what assistance should be delivered to Libya; the NTC rejected it because they had not been consulted and the report did not fit with their priorities. Officials lamented that many EU offers of help were paralysed as the interim administration had no authority to take decisions. This applied, for example, to the offer of Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) membership. Crucially, it was also true for EU proposals to cooperate on better governance in the energy sector; while oil production returned to significant levels, little progress was made on rules for sharing out more fairly the income from oil sales. German diplomats reported that the interim Libyan administration did not react enthusiastically to several offers of assistance; only gradually did it come to admit the need for support in the areas of demilitarization and electoral design. Germany ran an increasing number of projects in Libya under its Transformation Partnership, but expressly kept these modest and small scale.

  European Voice, 1 September 2011.

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Security plans moved slowly. While restoring security was the top priority for both NATO and the EU, the two organizations were reluctant to commit themselves to a large-scale mission to train security personnel in Libya—an idea mooted in a leaked UN document written by officials close to the UN secretary-general. In May 2012, the NTC for the first time welcomed an EU team to contemplate cooperation in the security sector, border controls, and demobilization. Yet the feeling persisted that the administration was too soft on the militia, as their control over Tripoli tightened. Diplomats acknowledged that by spring 2012 the main concern was with tensions between militias intensifying in response to grievances over exclusion or under-representation. They also recognized that they had been slow to address the regional security context; as unrest in Mali seeped into Libya, the EU Sahel Strategy appeared drastically behind the curve. After the elections basic security concerns if anything intensified. Intelligence warnings led the UK to pull key staff out of Libya, shortly before the fateful attack on the US embassy that killed the American ambassador and other personnel. The civil society dimensions of European support gradually became more notable. In May 2012 the UK signed a raft of cooperation programmes with Libya, on civil society, open government, health and education, and police and prisons reforms. EU senior representatives increasingly spoke out on human rights abuses in detention centres, and won from the interim administration access for monitors. The EU funded a number of European NGOs to mediate with tribal leaders. The terrain remained challenging, however. With 500 NGOs forming in a short space of time, EU officials admitted that they struggled to understand which had genuine legitimacy and grounding. Due to rights abuses, Médecins Sans Frontières suspended its operations in Misratah. Behind the scenes, the larger member states reached the conclusion that Libya needed clearer lines of political authority and thus had encouraged the NTC not to push elections back. Libyan civil society representatives criticized European policies on several grounds. The perception took root that European governments were rushing with indecent haste to sign commercial contracts. External pressure was certainly strong for the highly restrictive oil deals negotiated under Qaddafi to be made more favourable for international companies. Libyans noted the contrast between oil production returning to normal within two months and the delays to democratization. A number of European majors depended on ‘protection’ from militia forces in Libya. The international community was also seen as fragmented, with different factions supported to different degrees by different outside powers—which aggravated confusion and polarization. In particular, secular groups were tainted as having been ‘made in France’, in the words of local reformers. Urban youth groups complained that the international community overplayed the tribal dimension, duped 181

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by tribal leaders looking for their own share of power, when Libyan identities were in fact much more modern. Eyewitnesses pointed out that the ‘tribal factor’ took many locals aback as this had previously not been so evident.8 By the autumn of 2012, the new government and a General National Council (GNC) were up and running, with an eighteen-month term in which to agree a constitution. One core dilemma was whether to opt for decentralization or full federalism. Appointment of the committee to draw up the constitution was delayed due to disagreements over regional, tribal, and ethnic representation. Justice was increasingly delivered through customary processes, depending on tribal deals rather than codified judicial independence. The question of who would decide how oil revenues were distributed needed to be tackled. The GNC was ambivalent towards outside help in drafting the constitution. As this was a sensitive question most European states still remained in wait-and-see mode, until they knew what avenues for cooperation and influence might open up.9 Into 2013, EU support was ramped up and given a tighter focus on the deteriorating security situation. A CSDP mission was prepared to deploy sixty to eighty experts in border management. This was linked to the conflict in the Sahel; what remained undetermined was how the mission would be able to route around militia forces, and avoid inadvertently providing the latter with additional oxygen. With €30 million of funding the mission finally deployed in mid-2013. An additional €10 million financed a rule of law project. The EU funded a Crisis Centre to coordinate the roles played by the different Libyan ministries in responding to growing instability. Nineteen new funded projects commented in the area of security. On the back of the border mission being deployed, the EU stepped up related support to boost the capacity of the interior ministry. Officials acknowledged that by late 2013, the agenda was once again increasingly dominated by security concerns. The security dimension became even more prominent as Libyan involvement in the January 2013 Algerian hostage crisis became apparent and as violence now made it impossible for Europeans to operate in Benghazi. It was felt that the UK’s particularly acute concerns over security led it now to adopt a lower profile; although an early 2013 visit by David Cameron yielded promises of upgraded British security cooperation. French bilateral efforts became more proactive—causing some consternation at the External Action Service. The EU also pressed forward with preparations for an association agreement, in the hope this would bring Libya into the network of EU accords across the neighbourhood. Libya was

  R. Jawad, Tripoli Witness (London: Gilgamesh, 2011), p. 197.   Chatham House, Libya: turning the page, Libya working group meeting summary, Chatham House, September 2012. 8 9

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accepted as observer in the UfM. None of this support had any tangible effect on the ground. By late 2013, jihadists appeared to be gaining ground amongst militia forces, further weakening the de facto power of the central government. The brief kidnapping of the prime minister in October, apparently in retaliation for the US’s capture of an al-Qaeda leader, revealed the fundamental absence of core state capacity. New militia attacks rocked Libya in late November 2013. Journalists uncovered internal papers showing that the EU Border Assistance Mission was in effect funding paramilitary forces. Italy set aside a new €250 million for Libya for 2012 and 2013, the vast majority of which was spent on security projects by Italy’s defence and interior ministries, in particular training various branches of the police force. The UK inserted a Defence Assistance Team in the Libyan defence ministry and developed a ‘joint operations unit’.10 Yet, these member states acknowledged that the necessary political inclusion of militias by now seemed a more remote prospect than at the beginning of the year. The process of drawing up a new constitution slowed due to the decision to call another set of elections for a regionally balanced constituent assembly, as the 2012 general elections appeared not to have provided the GNC with sufficient, consensual legitimation. As 2013 unfolded, more radical Islamist forces gained power in the GNC and forced more punitive measures against ‘liberals’ associated with the previous regime. The promised elections to the constitution-drafting assembly did not take place. This stasis kept the EU largely in wait-and-see mode. The EU created a €4 million public administration facility to offer technical help when and where the Libyan government requested such input. It also extended support to the GNC secretariat, to help strengthen its policy delivery capacity. Another €15 million was made available to NGOs, as the human rights situation worsened amidst clashes between rival militias and the government. Diplomats pondered that the EU and member states now had an extensive range of different programmes available, but that these remained somewhat stranded at the behest of Libya’s tortuous internal politics rather than being able to influence those dynamics.

Conclusion The military engagement in Libya demonstrated real commitment to European leadership in the EU’s neighbourhood. Some member states concluded that this was where the EU could count geostrategically, even if it

  EUobserver, 18 November 2013.

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meant reducing commitments to Afghanistan and other more distant theatres. Involvement was motivated by genuine moral and humanitarian concerns; Libya was not strategically vital and member states had already signed lucrative oil deals with Qaddafi. Of course, Qaddafi’s defeat provided a successful outcome of the kind that proved more elusive in Syria. A combination of external military support and the narrowness of Qaddafi’s rent-based patronage network explained why Libya’s authoritarian edifice crumbled. But the Libya conflict also exposed serious limitations to the breadth and depth of engagement. While the US eschewed a prominent role, its core military capabilities were still essential to giving European engagement sufficient bite. In some ways the—especially Germany versus Anglo-French—divisions over Libya were more serious than those over Iraq. The latter were about how to react to a peculiar moment of US unilateralism, whereas splits over Libya revolved around the whole principle of active engagement in a very close, major crisis. The result was that certain member states were lead protagonists, not the EU as such. The internal EU split also encouraged states such as the UK and France to invest more effort in forming pragmatic, operational alliances with non-European powers. Accusations from top Libyan politicians that the international community ‘abandoned Libya’ after Qaddafi’s fall were an unfair exaggeration. The worries were more nuanced, related to the balance and types of outside support that were forthcoming. The most prominent Libyan politicians and civic leaders themselves seemed uncertain of what they wanted from the EU. Money was not a pressing imperative for oil-rich Libya, and anyway funding was pouring in from the Gulf and elsewhere. The dynamics of Euro-Mediterranean and external governance were not entirely absent; their spirit infused many of the new institution-building initiatives offered by the EU. But they failed to attain any significant momentum; they did not represent a primary reference point for Libyan reformers. For more than a year after Qaddafi’s exit, basic security challenges continued to be pre-eminent. This led to a complicating securitization even of cosmopolitan-style civil society support. It ensured that Libya was dealt with through the prism of bilateral strategic relations, and not enveloped purely or primarily within common EU regional policy frameworks. Many European states offered a broad range of technical, diplomatic, and commercial assistance. While this played a role in Libya’s incremental process of state-building, it was not enough to break the country’s stasis of semi-stable, quasi-reform.

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The political unrest of the Arab spring awoke concerns that European economic interests would suffer in the tumult. There were relatively few voices ready to suggest that the changes afoot represented a positive economic opportunity. In some senses, this was ironic given that European trade and investment flows to the region had been disproportionately low prior to 2011, despite the relatively warm EU diplomatic relations with authoritarian regimes. In fact, the Arab spring did not have a decisive impact on Europe’s economic relations with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. European governments insisted that concerns over the social impact of political change led them to rethink their focus on neo-liberal orthodoxy; many Arab politicians and civil society organizations complained that this change in EU policy did not extend far enough. Economic uncertainty led to some European companies withdrawing or delaying investment plans. However, it gradually became clear that the region’s momentous political developments were not of game-changing significance for European economic interests. The variation in political trends was matched by a mixture of both positive and negative commercial consequences. Islamists’ rise did not close the region off to European investors or exporters. It was striking that the more specific interest of EU energy security policy barely registered a change after 2011. Overall, the Arab spring proved to be neither singularly calamitous nor a galvanizing fillip for European trade and investment.

Trade and Investment Conditions A common reading was that the revolts presaged a less liberal approach to economic relations. The Economist Intelligence Unit observed that ‘the

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policy response to the unrest has been uniform:  more state . . . governments across the region have now generally abandoned free-market economic reform’.1 In Egypt, the SCAF was populist, reversing some Mubarak-era economic reforms and increasing the state’s wage and pension bill by 25 per cent. Egypt also introduced new protectionist measures and refused to advance on opening procurement and services markets or tightening intellectual property rights, despite European pressure on these issues. Algeria adopted notably more restrictive investment measures. The UN Development Programme’s annual report on the region lamented that by 2012 there was still little evidence of a new development model less dependent on rentier dynamics. It called for more expansive fiscal policies to fund growth-oriented investment.2 However, while neo-liberal policies were widely questioned, it gradually became clear that a dramatic closing of North African and Middle Eastern markets was unlikely. Most GCC states moved some way towards the ‘Dubai model’, opening up to foreign investment even as they firmly resisted political liberalization.3 Crucially, the various Muslim Brotherhood (MB) constellations across the region came out in favour of relatively open markets, and if anything courted international investors more than any other domestic actor. It was the secular, leftist-nationalist current that was more protectionist and autarchic in economic policy. Many experts in the region detected a new entrepreneurial spirit, with company start-ups booming in the wake of the Arab spring. According to Middle Eastern entrepreneurs, the regional uprisings made governments more sympathetic to the needs of new and smaller companies. Many Arab interlocutors themselves argued that the need was for more not less competitive private sectors, as jobs were unlikely to be created in sustainable fashion by a return to state socialism. A constant refrain from Arab interlocutors was that they needed private investment more than big, statist, development aid. From within the region, European policies were still commonly identified with neo-liberal economics and seen as based on heavily market-oriented EU legal rules. Many in the region saw EU aid as still linked to pressure to cut subsidies, which would be prejudicial to social stability. One Egyptian expert linked to the revolt summarized the situation: while the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) had become more selective on harmonization requirements, Egypt still needed more freedom to reject those parts of the EU acquis harmful to its economic development, including restrictions on state 1   Economist Intelligence Unit, Spring tide: will the Arab risings yield democracy, dictatorship or disorder?, London, EIU, July 2011, p. 25. 2  United Nations Development Programme, Arab Development Challenges 2011, New  York, 2012, p. 6. 3   M. Hvidt, ‘Economic and political institutional reforms in the Arab Gulf countries’, Middle East Journal, 65/1, 2011: 85–102.

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aid, procurement liberalization, and rights of establishment for EU firms in the services sector. One Egyptian ambassador complained that the EU was still attaching too many market-based conditions to its assistance, when the country needed short-term assistance without strings attached to kick-start a faltering economy and cover a liquidity crunch. Some academics thought that the EU remained wedded to the IMF’s understanding of good governance as a technical-managerial concept joined at the hip with economic liberalism.4 Egypt rejected IMF support, even though structural adjustment conditions had been dramatically watered down. In Tunisia, the standard critique was that the EU remained unduly focused on market liberalization, before and after the revolution, in a way that hollowed out democracy; its support for free economic zones, for example, was seen as detrimental to local democratic mechanisms.5 One view was that the region did not need education, training, or vocational programmes—these being dismissed as a ‘fad’ of international donors—but more growth-oriented assistance to help absorb the ample number of young people already overqualified for their current jobs. The eurozone crisis seemed to narrow European manoeuvrability: some local critics insisted that EU approaches to geo-economics actively sought to draw capital out of the region to cover European deficits rather than investing locally to meet social grievances. European policymakers rejected such critiques, insisting that they saw the shift away from neo-liberalism as positive. An External Action Service representative concurred enthusiastically with the trend: ‘the liberal approach to economics will be a dead end for the region’. Although EU policymakers feared the unsustainability of subsidy hikes, they exerted little pressure on this issue. They agreed to dilute conditionality placed on the IMF loan offered to Egypt. In Morocco, the largest Spring project of €110 million aimed to improve social and union rights. Officials insisted that a significant new focus was the involvement of DG Employment in offering support for social security systems and social dialogue initiatives with workers’ organizations in the south. France and Spain, in particular, professed to feel comfortable with this policy shift from within the region: if Arab populations had more say over economic policy and tilted against free markets, southern EU member states had a stronger argument for protecting their own markets. Against this background, market integration was unlikely to be the warmest element of relations in the new Middle East. Some noted the irony of the EU supporting deficit expansion in the MENA while European governments were incurring

4   H. Huelss, ‘A force for good governance? The EU’s normative power and standards of appropriate governing’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 17/1, 2012: 93–112. 5   V. Reynaert, ‘Preoccupied with the market: the EU as a promoter of “shallow” democracy in the Mediterranean’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 16/4, 2011.

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a heavy political price at home for cutting their own fiscal deficits. The EU’s talk of ‘deep democracy’ seemed to correspond in policy-makers’ minds with social democracy: issues of social justice and equality, the welfare state, and social protection were most frequently mentioned in answer to the question of what officials understood by this concept. The shift away from ‘untrammelled’ neo-liberalism was also supported rhetorically by the US.6 There was no single, uniform impact of the Arab spring on European trade and investment flows. MENA growth rates dived in 2011 because of the Arab spring protests and resulting political upheaval. The Tunisian and Egyptian economies shrank. The inflow of foreign investment dried up; in Egypt’s case from $6.4 billion in 2010 to only $500 million in 2011. Over eighty companies left Tunisia in the six months after the revolution. The HSBC bank estimated that the cost of the Arab spring from 2011 to early 2013 was $800 billion.7 In 2011 EU exports declined to Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia; they increased to Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Palestine.8 While this list might suggest that trade increased most where political reform advanced least, commercial decisions were varied. Spanish firms such as Santander and Telefónica divested from North Africa due to liquidity squeezes at home. Italy was the largest trade partner of southern Mediterranean states. However, the really significant trend was that of Germany, which snatched market shares and contracts where traditionally France, Spain, and Italy had prevailed; this was due to a combination of Germany’s own gathering economic strength and the fact that southern Mediterranean states had relied more on contacts with the ousted political elites.9 Overall, China recorded the fastest-growing trade presence in the region, albeit from a relatively low starting base. Trade flows continued to increase throughout 2012, at a very modest trend rate that appeared to have been neither dramatically set back nor boosted by the Arab spring. EU exports to the MENA region increased in absolute terms from €81 billion in 2010 to €93 billion in 2012. This was a slower rate of increase than overall European trade; the MENA took 6 per cent of EU exports in 2010, 5.5 per cent in 2012. With imports increasing at a similar rate, the trade balance remained a constant €20 billion in the EU’s favour between 2010 and 2012.10

6   M. Dunne and M. Revkin, Egypt: how a lack of political reform undermined economic reform, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Commentary, 3 February 2011. 7   Tunisia Times, 16 October 2013, ‘The cost of the Arab spring’. 8  European Commission, Joint Staff Working Document, Implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2011: Statistical Annex, SWD(2012) 122 final, p. 27. 9   M. Carli and L. Forte, Economic and trade relations between North Africa and the leading players in the Mediterranean Basin: what can be expected after the Arab spring, German Marshall Fund policy brief, March 2012, p. 6. 10   DG Trade Statistics 2013, mimeo.

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The share of North African exports going to EU markets did not change dramatically: in Egypt it moved from 30 per cent in 2010 to 32 per cent in 2011; in Morocco from 59 per cent to 56 per cent; in Algeria from 49 to 51 per cent. Other powers accounted for nothing approaching Europe’s level of commercial presence. The EU accounted for over 50 per cent of Morocco’s trade; the US for 7 per cent; and China for 5 per cent. It represented 70 per cent of Tunisia’s trade, compared to the 2 per cent each accounted for by Russia, Turkey, and the US. Egypt did 30 per cent of its trade with the EU, but only 9 per cent with the US, 6 per cent with China, and 5 per cent with Saudi Arabia. States such as India, Brazil, and South Africa represented well under 5 per cent of the North African market.11 France was the top European investor across the Mediterranean, investing nearly three times more than any other EU state. European foreign direct investment (FDI) to Morocco doubled; to Egypt it halved by the end of 2011.

European Commercial Diplomacy EU institutions and member states advanced a raft of policy initiatives to strengthen Europe’s commercial presence. The EU’s task forces established themselves as the principal means of mobilizing prospective investors, with companies seeking political forums to help assuage uncertainty over new conditions and players in the region. The Neighbourhood Investment Facility was increased from €400 million to €450 million. A new small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) investment scheme, Sanad, was launched. The Commission’s trade directorate (DG Trade) took over responsibility for investment issues under the Lisbon treaty and proposed a new regional initiative on investment protection to cover the Mediterranean under a single framework. The UK Trade and Investment ministry set up a Partner Middle East 2012 initiative to encourage British companies to invest in the MENA region. The UK G8 presidency organized a large conference in September 2013 aimed at increasing investment in MENA countries and getting Arab governments together with Western companies to discuss how to lower obstacles to FDI. Spain’s parastatal Casa Árabe switched its focus to economic diplomacy at the behest of the government; the administration’s whole mission now had to be framed in terms of economic interests. Three features coloured post-Arab spring European investment and commercial diplomacy. First, the aim was to ensure that political openings presented positive opportunities. Political change in Tunisia appeared to 11  Eurostat, International trade indicators, 2012, DG Trade Statistics, 2013, Brussels, European Commission.

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engender some enhanced interest from European companies. The French, Spanish, Italian, and German governments launched a range of initiatives to attract companies to invest in the Tunisian market. At the end of 2012 the EU established an Economic Advisory Council with Tunisia to bring investors into contact with Tunisian authorities with the aim of clearing obstacles to European private sector investment plans. Similar efforts were pursued in post-Mubarak Egypt. The country’s largest trading partner, Italy, promised new investment projects, voicing confidence that the new political openness was creating a dynamic environment for investment and business. The UK was the largest foreign investor in Egypt, with over 1,000 British companies operating in the country. In February 2011 the minister of state for trade and investment visited Egypt with a large and high-ranking delegation of major UK companies. New projects included BP’s May 2011 decision to pump $11 billion into the Egyptian market. A large France Télécom tender advanced. Sweden announced that IKEA, Ericsson, and Tetra Pak would all strengthen their presence in Egypt. Spanish organizations revealed that they found interaction with the MB far more fruitful on commercial than on rights questions. On a smaller scale, Libya also presented new opportunities. Investors such as Monsoon and Next returned to Libya in mid-2012, even though they remained concerned over restrictive rules stipulating that foreign firms could not own a majority stake in any enterprise.12 A second trend, pulling in a contrasting direction, was that political instability engendered increasing concerns in some places. Because investors had defined political risk in narrow terms, political revolutions were defined as highly unlikely ‘black swan’ events that companies had not factored into their risk assessments.13 This compounded investors’ difficulties in adapting to the new environment. Business Europe representatives pointed out that, while political openings might be positive in the long term, investors were struggling with short-term risks; they opined that EU foreign policy did little to assuage their concerns. European companies did not play a high-profile role pressing for deeper relations; many remained perplexed and concerned about political trends. A Euro-Mediterranean Charter of Enterprises was set up in 2008, but business representatives complained that it gained less traction than similar forums covering Asia and Latin America. DG Trade officials expressed concerns with political instability deterring European investors— although they pointed out that the impact of the eurozone crisis was probably greater. UK diplomats likewise found companies to be nervous rather

12   Chatham House, Libya: turning the page, Libya working group meeting summary, Chatham House, September 2012, p. 9. 13   I. Bremmer and P. Keat, The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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than enthusiastic. In the immediate aftermath of the revolts, investors certainly admitted to uncertainty. One risk analyst observed that investors were looking increasingly at the likes of Morocco and Jordan precisely because their reforms had not unleashed a turbulent transition like that in Egypt. One Spanish SME representative complained that entry to small companies not previously present in the region was harder and not a problem addressed by EU initiatives. An abiding problem in Egypt was the limited regulation of the small business sector, which frustrated EU attempts to get more European SMEs interested in the market. The arbitrary nature of legal cases against the business sector was cited by Western investors fearful of expropriation as a reason for delaying their plans in the country.14 One EU official revealed that most member states with big investments in the pipeline—French companies had particularly sizeable projects in nuclear power and construction of a metro line to Cairo airport—did not want diplomats to ‘rock the boat’. Hence, they cautioned, ‘in the short term it is not in our interests to press for democracy’. Other powers appeared less dissuaded by political conditions. Competition intensified from both Turkish and Gulf investors. Turkey was more active than the EU in promoting trade and investment, for example convening a joint initiative with Tunisia and Libya to define FDI opportunities for Turkish companies. The EU delegation in Ankara launched a programme to get Turkish and European businesses to cooperate in a mutually beneficial way, by exploring new opportunities in Arab states. Several Gulf banks, along with Etisalat, Qatar Telecom, and Saudi Telecom, all moved ahead with new projects in Libya. GCC investment shifted from big infrastructure to smaller SME and agricultural projects.15 China made a new commitment to boost trade to $200 billion a year with the Middle East by 2015. A third feature of European economic policy was that commercial diplomacy was not focused preferentially on reformist states but also targeted the most resilient of authoritarian regimes. Saudi officials reported that economic relations warmed and intensified during the EU’s economic crisis, as investment opportunities were hunted out more assiduously. The GCC’s exports prioritized Asia but its imports still came overwhelmingly from Europe, and its FDI was oriented even more heavily towards Europe in the aftermath of the eurozone crisis. A Saudi Finance Forum held in London in October 2011 came on the heels of visits by trade experts from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to the north-east of England to encourage more local companies to explore 14  I.  Saif, Challenges of Egypt’s economic transition, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2011, p. 6. 15  N. Tocci, E. Maestri, S. Özel, and S. Güvenç, Ideational and material power in the Mediterranean: the role of Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council, Rome, IAI Mediterranean paper series, 2012, p. 6.

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business opportunities in the Middle East. The UK strove to be ‘the Gulf’s ­commercial partner of choice’. It put in place a network of bilateral accords across the region to help British businesses win more contracts. Ambitious ­targets were set to increase trade to the Gulf by two-thirds by 2015—in a region to which the UK already exported more than to China.16 Far from reacting critically to the Saudi protest-quashing incursion into Bahrain, in early March 2011 the UK sent a trade mission to Saudi Arabia. In November 2012, David Cameron made a second extensive trip round the Gulf, to build on the 20 per cent increase in exports to the region registered in 2011. He backed a British Aerospace (BAE) bid for a new five-year aircraft supply deal with Saudi Arabia. In the UAE he lobbied explicitly in favour of a possible $10 billion contract for Typhoon fighters against French and US competition. BAE was now more dependent on Gulf and Saudi contacts in particular as new procurement contracts within Britain itself dried up. Spain won a highspeed train contract for the Mecca–Medina line only after personal lobbying from King Juan Carlos; this deal was termed locally ‘the contract of the century’. The king also visited Kuwait once a year from 2008 to push infrastructure projects on the behalf of big Spanish companies. Diplomats in Kuwait acknowledged that companies were increasingly concerned at the country’s fractious politics that held up contracts; to some extent this was viewed as an unwelcome result of Kuwait’s relative political openness compared to other Gulf states, although also a function of state inefficiency being unresponsive to popular accountability. In Morocco, investment contracts still often relied on personal links to the palace. Spanish diplomats observed that it was easier for Madrid to back change in Libya, Tunisia, and even Algeria than in Morocco, where over a thousand Spanish companies operated. After the EU signed a liberalizing agricultural deal with Morocco, Spanish companies began taking direct control of tomato production in Morocco to export back into the EU; soon nearly half Moroccan production was in the hands of Spanish companies. Moroccan NGOs and the (then) PJD opposition criticized a French TGV deal for its exorbitant expense, running on a route aimed at tourists and businessmen, out of the range of Moroccans; when the PJD won power it tempered its critique. Yet, compounding the complex variation in commercial trends, economic opportunities were often scuppered in these markets because of the lack of reform. Telefónica and other Spanish companies downscaled their operations in Morocco in part because they felt a heavier hand of clientelismskewed palace interference. In the UAE, the shift of power from Dubai to Abu 16   Lord Howell, foreign office minister, ‘UK relations with the GCC region: a broadening partnership’, speech, GCC and the City conference, 20 June 2012.

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Dhabi went hand in hand with a more cautious attitude towards Western investment that was seen as part of the former’s downfall. French firms such as Carrefour were pushed out of Algeria by greater restrictions placed on foreign companies and uncertainties over legal rights. In a varied economic landscape, European companies both gained and suffered from the lack of reform, while also both winning and losing where reform did occur. They did not uniformly push strongly for EU governments to support democratization, but neither they did they always work to undermine reforms; and they were certainly not granular enough in their political thinking to band together to press for detailed forms of ‘low intensity’ democracy.

Energy Interests Preserved? The EU implemented a range of initiatives designed to accord energy security greater priority in relations with the Middle East. However, these new policies were not commensurate with the region’s growing importance to European energy supplies and appeared disconnected from the shifting internal politics of Middle Eastern producer states. The Middle East remained crucial to European energy interests. The US’s development of shale gas meant that the energy impact of the Arab spring was of much greater importance to European governments than to the Obama administration. By 2012, the Middle East was providing nearly a third of the EU’s imported gas and a quarter of its oil imports. Qatar’s share of the gas trade expanded dramatically, from a 1 per cent to nearly 10 per cent share of EU imports between 2001 and 2011, taking market share from Russia.17 Saudi Arabia remained the world’s swing producer, the only state with sufficient capacity significantly to temper fluctuations in world oil prices. North African gas offered the cheapest transportation rates into European markets. In Egypt significant new reserves of gas were discovered in the Nile Delta. The then energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs asserted that North Africa should soon be as important to Europe as Russia.18 As the Arab spring commenced, a wide range of energy cooperation was already in place across the Mediterranean. Echoing the external governance framework, the EU’s aim was to encourage southern Mediterranean states to bring their regulatory norms into line with those of the single market. In 2007, a Euromed energy partnership strategy was agreed. An associated action plan was agreed for 2008–13 with commitments to harmonize regulatory frameworks; develop trans-European networks; increase aid to energy   British Petroleum, Statistical Review 2012, London, 2013, p. 14.   Platts EU Energy, 11 January 2008, p. 3.

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projects; work towards Libya’s inclusion; and energy sector reform, especially through southern Mediterranean states creating independent regulatory agencies. Regular dialogue deepened under the Euro-Mediterranean Energy Forum and yearly energy ministers’ summits from 2007. Memoranda of Understanding were signed on energy cooperation with Algeria and Egypt. The philosophy was to support sub-regional integration within the southern Mediterranean and to lock such integrated systems into the EU internal market. One key programme was the sponsorship of a Euro-Maghreb electricity market, backed by a group of technical harmonization measures. To help pursue such convergence, a Euro-Mediterranean Energy Platform was set up in Rome and in 2007 the Medreg working group was convened, comprising energy regulators from twenty-three (European and Arab) Mediterranean states.19 The EU promised funding to link the Trans-Arab pipeline into the Nabucco line. In parallel with EU-led governance initiatives, France and Spain signed bilateral energy partnerships with Algeria. Libya was the clearest case where bilateral investment reached significant levels—BP and ENI signed particularly large-scale deals—even as regulatory governance failed to take root. In the early stages of the Arab spring, governments, companies, and analysts worried openly about the potentially prejudicial impact on energy interests. Initially, the main effect of the Arab spring was to push up oil prices from around $70 to over $100 per barrel. Many experts expected changes in pricing, investment, and export policies due to political instability. As Arab regimes doled out huge subsidies in an effort to keep themselves in power, analysts feared they would search for ever higher oil prices to cover the increased expenditure. One criticism that protestors aimed at the Saudi regime was that it exported too much oil to international markets instead of using supplies for domestic consumption. Qatar switched some gas exports to petrochemical plants at home in order to create jobs and calm political grievances. Increased subsidies diverted resources and efforts from the upstream investments needed to release more supplies. There was domestic pressure for the new Egyptian government to reduce energy supplies to Israel. Energy experts feared that prospects worsened for the EU’s energy projects, including the Mediterranean Interconnection Plan, Euro-Arab Mashreq Gas Market, and Euro-Med Energy Market. British Gas was targeted by protestors in Tunisia in May 2011 and obliged to agree to new social investment projects and micro-credits to assuage hostility to its presence. In early 2011 the Arab gas pipeline from Egypt through to Syria and Jordan was attacked. This cut off supplies to Israel. It took more than

  Platts EU Energy, 30 November 2007, p. 13.

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five weeks for the repair work to be completed and for Egyptian pipeline gas exports to resume, only for a second explosion that took place in April to cause another suspension of gas flows. Fears grew over the disruption of transit flows through the Suez Canal, through which nearly 10 per cent of global liquefied natural gas passed. In July two explosions disabled the Transmed gas pipeline to the south of Tunis, closing off Algerian gas flows to Italy. Algerian gas shipments through the Transmed pipeline, which supplied Italy with a third of its pipeline gas imports, recorded a sudden 40 per cent dip amid the chaos immediately following the departure of the Tunisian president, Ben Ali. The discovery of gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean began to awaken considerable interest from potential European investors and diplomats. Investment in East Mediterranean gas was held back by the uncertain political context, however. Tensions between Israel, Lebanon, and other neighbours was cited by companies as a serious concern; diplomats in Beirut stressed that the desire to provide a stable and transparent environment for potential foreign investment in East Mediterranean gas projects was a major factor in efforts to deepen cooperative security in the Mashreq. More broadly too, EU officials in Beirut lamented that projects designed to free up the private sector and make contracts more transparent faced constant obfuscation from political factions. Notwithstanding many new uncertainties, the EU declined to introduce any big new energy initiatives in the wake of the Arab uprisings. This was a policy area marked by incremental addition to existing initiatives and much continuity in European approaches. Officials admitted to a lack of linkage between energy policy and the overall response to the Arab spring. No significant new initiatives were forthcoming in energy. Indeed, many working energy meetings were postponed because of the political unrest. No Euro-Mediterranean energy summit was held after the Arab spring; Turkey blocked these meetings for accession- and Cyprus-related reasons. A  general sense of uncertainty prevailed, as EU officials wondered whether new governments would cooperate on energy matters to the same extent. One expert argued that by 2012 the EU had still not reacted to the Arab spring in its energy policies towards the region, and that a ‘comprehensive pact’ for energy security and climate change with the Middle East was no more apparent.20 The EU loosely stated that it would revive efforts in 2012 to advance on a Euro-Mediterranean Energy Community. A September 2011 Commission

20   K. Westphaal, ‘Testing times for energy security and co-operation’, in M. Asseburg (ed.), Protest, revolt and regime change in the Arab world: actors, challenges, implications and policy options, SWP research paper 2012/RP 06, 2012, p. 59.

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strategy document on external energy policy included new recommendations covering the MENA region. The strategy stated that in the wake of the Arab spring the EU needed to craft a new EU-Southern Mediterranean Energy Partnership. In particular, the energy panorama called for a major new effort to deepen cooperation with Algeria, integrate Libya fully into EU-Mediterranean networks and European markets, and eventually to extend the Energy Charter treaty to Arab producers.21 The Economic and Social Committee launched a plan in September 2011 for a new green energy development programme in the Mediterranean. The Union for the Mediterranean advanced with its flagship Solar Plan. In practice, however, little new energy cooperation was implemented. The eurozone crisis exerted a notable effect on energy policy. Lower demand in Europe dissuaded companies from embarking on the large-scale investments needed for renewable projects in North Africa. European Investment Bank funds were directed increasingly to palliate the internal European crisis, diverting money slated for energy linkages. EU member states were reluctant to subsidize loans to Mediterranean countries when they now had better credit ratings than several European governments. Spain was reticent to accept renewables imports from Morocco, a direct competitor for market shares in other European countries. No large-scale funds were forthcoming from the Spring programme for energy infrastructure links. The Mediterranean Solar Plan was held back by political obstacles in Arab states. Indeed, Arab governments were often reluctant to prioritize energy cooperation. The EU’s ambitions of governance-convergence were stymied by the resistance of Algeria, Libya, and even Egypt to importing EU energy regulations. These countries’ governments perceived EU market rules to be detrimental to the freedom of manoeuvre of their national champions. While energy companies such as BG, BP, and ENI did not have operations that were directly affected by the June 2013 coup in Egypt, they reportedly considered putting some plans on hold because of the Egyptian regime’s refusal to pay them $5 billion of arrears.22 The EU’s aim to link its supply routes into the Arab gas pipeline, running through Egypt, remained blocked due to tensions within the region. The game-changing Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan line across the southern Caucasus was finished because the US provided a security umbrella; the EU’s new policies in the Middle East came nowhere near providing sufficient protection to ensure the completion of new pipeline connections into European markets.

21  European Commission, On security of supply and international cooperation—the EU energy policy: engaging with partners beyond our borders, COM(2011) 539, p. 7. 22   Financial Times, 27 August 2013.

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While investors fretted over the uncertainties of political change, neither were trends entirely favourable in those states resisting reform. Authoritarian regimes that escaped EU opprobrium because they were judged important energy partners were in fact not entirely benign for European interests. Some experts detected a shift in power in Saudi Arabia from oil ‘doves’ to ‘hawks’, in response to domestic protests. Investment potential in Qatar decreased due to the moratorium on further development of its North Field. In the autumn of 2012, BP was excluded from bids for a new oil tender in the UAE as the latter expressed anger at UK criticisms of its repression of the MB. While Kuwait’s parliament was said to have used its growing influence to push back Project Kuwait, the initiative designed to open up the country’s oil sector, the regime itself deliberately exaggerated the blame attached to opposition politicians for its own ends.23 In Algeria, fiscal and other conditions continued to be unfavourable for foreign investors. When the Algerian government backtracked on energy liberalization, it cited EU ‘hypocrisy’ as one reason.24 Algeria’s successive rounds of bids for exploration rights elicited very low levels of interest and even lower levels of success.25 Of international companies, only Cepsa was able to enter a 2011 auction of Algerian upstream lots. While Algeria was now seen as more stable than Egypt, French investors pulled back in response to political uncertainties that circulated Algiers. Jihadist attacks on oil refineries in the south of the country in early 2013 intensified fears. By the end of 2013 BP had not resumed full operational capacity in Algeria after the attacks. In July 2013 the EU finally signed a new energy Memorandum of Understanding with Algeria, under negotiation since 2008, covering a broad section of cooperation in the conventional and renewable energy sectors, as well as the transfer of technology and measures to help boost investment. While this was a promising step forward, the accord did not immediately unlock deeper energy market integration between Europe and Algeria, because of the latter’s continuing ambivalence. In Iraq, a Shell proposal to convert flared gas into electricity for local use languished in parliament, caught up in the country’s political impasse. While Syria was not a large producer, sanctions added to pressure on a tight market. Gulfsands Petroleum, the London-listed company, cut its production in the country by around 40 per cent at the request of Syrian authorities. Shell and Total also received orders to cut output. Complicating calculations, 23   J. Kinninmont, Kuwait’s parliament: an experiment in semi-democracy, Chatham House briefing paper, August 2012. 24   H. Darbouche, ‘Third time lucky? Euro-Mediterranean energy cooperation under the Union for the Mediterranean’, Mediterranean Politics, 16/1, 2011: 193–212, p. 202 and p. 206. 25   F. Ghilès, Ahead of spring in Algeria: tough energy and economic challenges await, CIDOB Notes Internacionals, 32, May 2011, p. 2.

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in February 2013, the Assad regime’s strategic value increased when it signed up to feed an energy pipeline linking Iran and Iraq with European markets. Energy commissioner Günther Oettinger declined to visit the Gulf. In some ways, Gulf countries were judged to have been such cooperative players within global energy markets that EU-governance approaches were less necessary than, for example, in the case of Russia, whose provocation of short-term crises dominated European diplomats’ agenda. The Commission proposed extending its idea for both the ENP Energy Treaty and the EuroMed Common Energy House to GCC states. It also raised the prospect of a Memorandum of Understanding for the Gulf, of the type signed with Egypt, Algeria, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan. GCC states were lukewarm and these ideas did not progress in practice. The Commission advocated support for building pipelines across the Arabian peninsula to reduce the amount of oil that had to pass through the vulnerable Strait of Hormuz.26 But as Europe’s financial crisis coincided with a period of renewed oil price hikes, EU states soon needed liquidity from cash-rich Gulf states more than the latter required European investment in energy infrastructure. Gulf states were increasingly most interested in partnership with Asian markets. By 2011, China and Japan were the two largest markets for Gulf oil exports: 80 per cent of Asia’s oil imports came from the Middle East, compared to only 25 per cent of Europe’s imports; and 65 per cent of Gulf oil was exported eastwards. In Iran, nuclear diplomacy subjugated a potential energy partnership. EU sanctions were applied on Iran’s nuclear programme despite these hindering funding for oil and gas projects in the country. One reason for the limited opening in the energy sector was the Revolutionary Guards’ determination to sew up energy contracts for their own operators. The regime toughened buy-back terms, deterring foreign investors, quite apart from any geopolitical disincentives. Chinese companies picked up a number of contracts that European companies were increasingly reluctant to bid for. Only after President Rouhani’s election did the situation begin to improve: in late 2013, Iran moved to change the restrictive buy-back contracts for more generous arrangements designed to attract Western companies. It was uncertain how far this apparently new spirit of openness would extend. Energy policy remained limited in Iraq. A Memorandum of Understanding on energy cooperation was agreed between the EU and Iraq in April 2008. However, it remained unclear how Iraq would provide the promised 10 billion cubic metres of gas to Europe. Member states were still cautious about taking forward energy cooperation before a hydrocarbons law was agreed in Iraq, fearing that the EU would otherwise give succour to separatist regions 26   G. Luciani, ‘The economics and politics of the “Dire Straits” ’, GRC Security and Terrorism Research Bulletin, 6, Dubai: Gulf Research Centre, August 2007: 15.

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seeking greater control over their own resources. European companies were unable to move ahead with oil contracts in the absence of a hydrocarbons law. A small number of independent firms signed contracts directly with the Kurdish government in the north, but larger companies were reluctant to take such a step. European companies were effectively shut out of Iraq, with Turkish and Chinese companies snapping up contracts. Iraq also committed itself to Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative principles in 2008, but EU officials judged it ‘fanciful’ that in the prevailing security and political climate this would provide a feasible basis for cooperation. An update EU– Iraq accord was concluded in February 2013, although again with uncertainties remaining over the implementation of new cooperative commitments. The absence of any upgraded energy security policy reflected the fact that largely normal conditions gradually reasserted themselves after the initial phase of the Arab spring. Energy experts noted that the power map of oil and gas production did not change significantly. The long-running Iran–Saudi Arabia rivalry still broadly shaped internal OPEC politics. International Energy Agency (IEA) members pressured OPEC for a hike in output to calm markets in the early months of the revolts. Once again, Saudi Arabia stepped forward to increase supplies onto the market. Industry experts predicted that ‘as countries, irrespective of their political regime, need revenues, nothing much will happen in the longer run’.27 In February 2011, the IEA adopted a new charter to improve consumer–producer dialogue. Indicative of abiding realities, the Egyptian government tightened security over the Suez Canal; with fees from the latter providing 3 per cent of GDP, Egypt had much motive to remain cooperative on external energy issues. Notwithstanding post-coup concerns President Morsi had spoken directly to Prime Minister David Cameron to make sure that BP resumed and carried through investment plans in the Nile Delta. Despite political uncertainty, companies soon signed a raft of new deals, in both reforming and non-reforming states. Tunisia awarded three seismic survey licences to Spain’s Repsol in the first contract awarded after Ben Ali’s overthrow. ENI announced plans to invest $500 million in Tunisia over three years. In June 2011, Shell signed a $20 billion deal with Qatar for the world’s largest commercial gas to liquids project. ENI started working on shale gas possibilities in Algeria. Italian prime minister Mario Monti signed a new energy deal with Algeria in late 2012 to help ENI and other companies into the Algerian market. Sonatrach and Gas Natural resolved a long-running dispute and talked of new cooperation. Iberdrola signed a deal with UAE energy company TAGA in the summer of 2011. Iraq’s government signed 27   Oxford Energy Forum, Political events in the Middle East and their impact on energy, Oxford, 2011, .

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a $100 billion deal with Exxon Mobil, BP, and ENI for extensive upgrades of the country’s mega-fields; Shell also agreed a new deal with Iraq in late 2011. Commercial activity often transcended the difficulties that beset government-level energy diplomacy.

Conclusion Fears that European investors and traders would be excluded from the new Middle East were not borne out. While new governments questioned the way in which economic liberalization had been pursued by previous autocratic regimes, they generally came to court rather than shun foreign investment. After 2011, investors struggled to broaden their understanding of how uncertain political trends affected economic interests. This led many to delay investment plans, while also considering the longer-term potential for new market openings. Trends to some extent corroborated Ian Bremmer’s influential J-curve hypothesis, which suggested that stable autocratic regimes pass through a period of instability and worsening conditions for international investors until stability returns in the guise of a more fully open regime.28 Gradually investors moved back into the North Africa and broader Middle East region. However, the overall picture was more varied than a simple J-curve. Many of the barriers to significantly larger investment flows remained. Outside the hydrocarbon sector, the MENA’s weight in the EU’s external commercial profile continued to be disproportionately low relative to that of other markets. Commercial relations deepened moderately with both reforming and non-democratizing states; the density of European economic relations was correlated strongly neither to democratization nor resilient autocracy in the reshaped Arab world. There was broad continuity in European energy security strategy; this was comforting to the immediate interest in guaranteeing supplies but undercut the ostensible commitment to support democratic reform. At official level, EU pressure for market liberalization in Arab states was exerted with greater sensitivity but did not entirely abate. The dynamics of both Euro-Mediterranean and external governance strengthened in the economic realm. Simultaneously, however, member states engaged in more mercantilistic, geo-economic competition with each other across the region. The region’s heightened uncertainties encouraged member states to focus more systemically on their own bilateral economic diplomacy, as the deeper

28   I. Bremmer, The J-Curve: A New Way to Understand why Nations Rise and Fall (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

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integration of EU–MENA market structures proceeded so slowly. These two levels of policy were not always fully consistent with each other. While a notably Europeanized focus persisted, Arab governments also diversified their international economic links. Even in the least-sensitive sphere of economic relations, EU-specific forms of governance were not entirely dominant.

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11 The Israel–Palestine Conflict Catalyst or Distraction?

The core of European Middle East policies had, of course, for a long time centred on the Arab–Israeli conflict. Curiously, the Arab spring to some extent galvanized peace efforts but also risked eclipsing the conflict as the fulcrum of EU strategy in the region. For nearly a year it seemed possible that the Arab spring would act as a catalyst to the moribund peace process between Israel and Palestinians. Citizen-empowering events elsewhere in the region shone a sharper light on Palestinian self-determination and the need for a genuine process of democratization in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs). The EU sought to harness the potential with a range of new initiatives. However, the fragile new momentum gradually dissipated and it began to seem that, if anything, the Arab spring had proven an unhelpful diversion from efforts to revive the Arab–Israeli peace process. Having built up a deeply embedded presence in the OPTs, the EU was well positioned to influence the new ethos that pervaded internal Palestinian politics. It certainly sought to ride the crest of the Arab spring by intensifying efforts to inject a spirit of reform and more solid institutional capacity into Palestine’s fragmented political landscape. However, it failed to use the new trends across the region as a foundation for moving beyond this largely indirect contribution to reviving the peace process. A great disappointment was that in the new Middle East a very familiar stalemate endured between Israel and Palestinians, and if anything the prospect of a final settlement appeared more distant than ever; new peace talks commenced rather desultorily in mid-2013, but failed to gather momentum.

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EU Policy Prior to 2011 During the first decade of the century the international community failed to oversee progress in the Israel–Palestine conflict. The EU was a member of the Quartet and an active provider of diplomatic ideas and initiatives. Probably most significantly it was the most generous provider of funds to the Palestinians. In the years prior to 2011 the European Commission and EU member states poured billions of euros into beefing up Palestinian institutions. The reasoning was that the EU could best use its modest influence by helping create a de facto Palestinian state on the ground. This indirect approach was seen as more valuable than punitive pressure against Israel directly on final settlement issues. After Hamas won elections in 2006 and then ejected the ruling Fatah party from Gaza in 2007, the EU focused primarily on offering concrete, practical assistance to the Palestinian Administration (PA) in the West Bank. In the early 2000s, the EU struggled to wield any influence over Israel. In the aftermath of Israel’s January 2009 military incursion into the Gaza strip the EU broke off talks over an advanced status association agreement. But this move had no discernible effect on Israeli attitudes. A nucleus of member states—Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Germany— continued to block any significantly punitive measures against Israel. While the EU suspended talks on the new agreement, all existing cooperation continued with Israel. A much-commented autumn 2009 EU statement on the conflict was more pro-Palestinian, and sharply rebuked by Israel. But it stopped short of recognizing east Jerusalem categorically as the capital of a future Palestinian state. If its influence was limited at the diplomatic level, the most substantive EU contribution was through the sizeable aid funds channelled to the OPTs. Total aid to the OPTs was running at nearly $3 billion a year by 2008. External aid per capita rose to over $800 and external funding amounted to two-thirds of Palestinian GDP. The EU (European Commission plus member states) accounted for the largest share of this, at half the total aid spend. The Commission was by far the single largest donor, giving three times more than the US and Saudi Arabia, the second and third largest donors respectively. By 2010, the European Commission provided a total of €500 million a year, taken from an array of budget lines providing support at both governmental and civil society levels. Member states provided another €1 billion of overall aid a year. European support focused on shoring up Prime Minister Salem Fayyad’s plan to strengthen Palestinian institutions. This new wave of funding marked a turnaround from emergency relief back to longer-term institution-building— for the first time since the latter had effectively been aborted by the second 203

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intifada. The aim was to back the Palestinian Reconstruction and Development Plan (PRDP) in enhancing the capacity to implement service delivery aims. While labelled by donors as institution-building, much funding in fact covered direct running costs, simply to keep a Palestinian proto-administration functioning as Israel held back transfers due to the PA. Much European support went directly to the prime minister’s office. An EU–PA European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) Action Plan was adopted in May 2005. This was closely dovetailed to the PRDP; its listed priorities were essentially those identified by the latter in an effort to enhance local ownership. Cooperation was stalled until Fayyad was appointed. The first ENP joint committee for three years took place in May 2008. As support for the PRDP increased, humanitarian aid decreased. The Commission had run two funding initiatives since Hamas’s election in 2006 forced a restructuring of funding processes. The Temporary International Mechanism (TIM) subsequently became PEGASE (Mécanisme Palestino-Européen de Gestion de l’ Aide SocioEconomique), with a three-year mandate starting in February 2008. These frameworks were designed to channel funds directly to the PA in the West Bank, circumventing Hamas in the Gaza Strip. They provided €2.5 million of running costs to the PA every month after 2006. Of the Commission’s €500  million yearly allocation, around €180  million went to direct running costs, mainly PA salaries. Contributions to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) aid represented the other two main slices of funding. Governance aid was calculated to be only around €12 million a year.1 The largest share of Commission aid went to enhancing the strategic planning capacity of PA institutions and the latter’s basic technical expertise. Much governance support was linked to the PA’s commitment to adopting EU standards.2 A top priority was judicial training through the Commission’s Sevada project. A  broadly similar orientation towards state-enhancing technical capacity was evident in EU member states’ bilateral aid programmes.3 With member states refusing contact with Hamas or to recognize the latter’s 2006 electoral win, all EU work was limited to the West Bank. In Gaza there was no support for institution building: assistance was cash-based emergency relief and a small amount of funding for non-Hamas humanitarian civil 1   A. Bertrand-Sanz, ‘The conflict and the EU’s assistance to the Palestinians’, in E. Bulut Aymat (ed.), European Involvement in the Arab–Israeli Conflict, Chaillot Paper 124, Paris, EU Institute for Security Studies, 2010, p. 44. 2  Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council, Implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2008:  Progress Report on the Occupied Territories, SEC(2009) 519/2. 3   For details of these programmes see H. Michou and R. Youngs, Palestine: assessing democracy assistance, Madrid, Fride, working paper,, 2011.

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society organizations. Both the Swiss and Norwegian governments engaged in tentative dialogue with Hamas, but neither were able to progress to concrete cooperation projects with the organization. The EU inched towards a degree of unofficial flexibility on the ground, but support in Gaza remained limited mainly to humanitarian relief. The EU also undertook a mission (EUPOL COPPS) to strengthen civil policing. In 2010 the mission was allocated €6.6 million. It had eighty-eight staff and had trained over 3,000 officers. Seventeen member states plus Canada and Norway participated. EU diplomats defined COPPS as a rule of law not a standard police mission. COPPS was mainly about training a civilian police force; imbuing a civil policing ethics; and embedding policing within the context of more effective rule of law. In contrast, US security policy centred on the Presidential Guard and the National Security Forces, and was more akin to direct counter-terrorism support that backed Fatah forces against Hamas. All this represented a sizeable investment of European resources. However, when US-sponsored peace talks collapsed in the autumn of 2010, many began to question whether EU financing had not unwittingly proven counterproductive. One line increasingly heard was that focusing on ‘preparing the ground’ had given Israel a pretext for stalling tactics. Some critics charged that the EU played into Israeli hands, to the extent that it implicitly apportioned ‘blame’ to the Palestinians for not progressing further with institutional reform. Many European diplomats and parliamentarians—in Brussels and national capitals—expressed their frustration with the indirect, state-building focus. They lamented that state-building had become a forlorn end in itself, rather than what it was ostensibly designed to be, namely one contribution to a more comprehensive political strategy aimed at a final settlement. Local actors expressed doubts that state-building assistance and security reform confronted the overarching issue of Israeli occupation and settlement expansion. Palestinians expressed much scepticism that more progress could now be made on institution-building without parallel moves on sovereignty. The EU had drifted into putting ‘risk avoidance above conflict resolution’, pumping money into the PA merely as a ‘holding strategy’.4 The EU investment in and approach to institution-building did not prevent West Bank politics becoming more authoritarian. Elections were cancelled, Fatah’s political opponents were hounded from their jobs, media freedoms were restricted, the Palestinian Legislative Council was suspended, and human rights abuses were perpetrated by security forces. If anything, European support helped shore up the PA against effective democratic 4   R. Hollis, ‘The UfM and the Middle East “peace process”: an unhappy symbiosis’, Mediterranean Politics, 16/1, 2011: 99–116, p. 100 and p. 110.

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accountability. The International Crisis Group pointed to a lack of focus on human rights issues within security sector reform initiatives.5 The perception was widespread that ‘security sector reform’ served merely as a banner for getting Palestinian forces to do Israel’s policing work. Such stubborn authoritarian dynamics would come under closer scrutiny as the Arab spring began, just weeks after the collapse of the peace talks.

Breakthrough? Compounded by the stalling of the peace process, the impact of popular revolts across North Africa on domestic Palestinian politics was significant. Palestinian protestors were inspired by events elsewhere, having always defined their battle against occupation as part of a more general struggle for freedom from the vestiges of the colonial past. Fatah lost its main backer, Hosni Mubarak; Hamas saw its main backer, Bashar Assad, under pressure. This focused both their minds on internal reconciliation. Initially, both Fatah and Hamas quashed ‘dignity marches’. An escalation threatened; a deadly bomb attack rocked Jerusalem in March 2011, and rocket launches from Gaza increased in frequency. A robust response from Israel followed. Hamas felt under threat from Islamist Jihad and the now-rising Salafi groups, who accused it of being too ready to discuss national unity in pursuit of a non-existent peace process. Many hoped the new Egyptian administration would push Fatah to clean up on corruption. Israel felt more nervous and perceived a need to demonstrate its strength. The impact of the revolts on Israel was to make doves more doveish and hawks more hawkish. Israel was arguably the state most nervous about Bashar falling. Israel had traditionally argued that it could not make concessions because it was surrounded by dictators; now it was saying it could not make concessions because it might be surrounded by democracies. Some newly ascendant Muslim Brotherhood (MB) leaders initially questioned Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. The weakening of law and order in the Sinai facilitated the rise of jihadist groups committed to launching attacks over the border. Israel would not be able to dismiss Arab criticism quite so easily if it now came from legitimately elected democrats. The West would find it more difficult to indulge Israeli crackdowns against the Palestinians, when it was excoriating Arab dictators for using heavy-handed tactics against protestors. Politicians such as Shimon Peres and Tzipi Livni, and much of the Israeli left, condensed these trends into a clear warning:  if Israel did not make peace 5  International Crisis Group, Squaring the circle:  Palestinian security reform under occupation, Middle East Report 98, September 2010, p. 33.

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now, a satisfactory deal would become progressively harder to obtain as the tectonic plates of regional geopolitics shifted. An apparently significant breakthrough came at the end of April 2011 when Hamas and Fatah agreed to a form of unity government that accepted the Oslo accord principles and committed to renewed talks. This unity deal was the result of the changed regional scenario. The new Egyptian government exerted stronger pressure on the two parties to bury their differences. In particular, the Egyptian generals pressed Hamas to sign the accord in return for opening the border to ease Gaza’s siege. And with the encircled Bashar Assad targeting the Damascus headquarters of Hamas, the latter worried about its apparent isolation. Many details of the deal were left unspecified. Two separate security forces would remain, but Hamas agreed not to impede cooperation with the Israeli defence forces in the West Bank. In return, Fatah would allow Hamas to restart political activity in the West Bank. One challenge was that Hamas wanted Fayyad removed as prime minister. Yet this was still a far deeper accord than that reached in Mecca in 2007, as Hamas was allowed into the PLO and in turn asked for more cooperation with Egypt than with Syria. Against this background, the EU sought to use the Arab spring as an opportunity for the peace process. The UK government made an explicit link to the broader processes of empowerment: ‘The inability of Palestinians to live their lives in a sovereign and democratic state, with the freedom to govern themselves, will jar increasingly with more positive developments in the region.’6 French diplomats likewise highlighted that the Arab spring was about self-expression and that as such this must entail Palestinian independence. The UK devised a new initiative to speed up a peace deal. Angela Merkel pressed Israel for concessions, in what some observers felt represented a notable shift in the traditional German timidity towards Israeli positions. The UK, France, and Germany then combined forces to set out what they saw as the a priori elements of a final deal. The changed regional dynamics appeared to have propelled European governments into a more proactive stance. The US even cancelled a Quartet meeting in concern at EU states pushing too assiduously for short-term progress that would harvest tangible gains for the Palestinians. However, Western governments were in practice relatively passive in seizing this opportunity, with dynamics specific to the conflict militating against progress. EU member states’ deliberations on the virtues of pushing a more direct route to peace resulted both from the collapse of peace talks and the spillover from revolts elsewhere. Yet policies did not shift in any 6   House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, British foreign policy and the ‘Arab spring’: the transition to democracy, October 2011, p. 59.

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qualitative sense. Through 2011 the PA ramped up its plans to have a unilateral declaration of statehood approved at the UN. This by-product of the new Middle East soon deepened rifts between member states. If the early phases of the Arab spring had seemed to engender stronger EU unity and resolution, by the end of 2011 European diplomacy on the peace process had descended into farce. Member states split in the vote on Palestinian statehood that was held at the UN General Assembly in September 2011. Germany, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic were most firmly against. The UK and France had waivered but eventually fell into line with the US. The purely symbolic vote passed with the EU in confusion. In early September, a draft was hammered out that was apparently acceptable to twenty member states. This supported limited rights for Palestine in the UN but without obliging member states to recognize the PA as a state body in their bilateral relations. This contorted line did nothing to hide the gaping divergence in member state positions. Even more painfully, member states could not unite on a subsequent vote to allow the PA into UNESCO; this failure cost the EU dearly in legitimacy and good will among Palestinians. The disarray was absolute: eleven member states voted in favour (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovenia, and Spain), eleven abstained (Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and the UK), and five voted against (Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Sweden). The sceptics argued that Palestinians had spent the best part of a year focused on garnering support for a declaration that would merely divert attention from reactivating peace talks—the only route that could lead to tangible improvements on the ground. Israel would be likely to dig in its heels even more resolutely and make daily life even more unpleasant for Palestinians. The risk was that Israel would withdraw in a violent manner just to the dividing wall, in an attitude of hostility to a state that was declared unilaterally. In any case, the resolution excluded the issues of importance to the Palestinians, such as refugee returns and the status of Jerusalem. In contrast, proponents of the declaration insisted that only such a dramatic move could jolt Israel out of its intransigence. In his speech to the General Assembly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu did indeed acknowledge that talks must resume. But his preconditions were as unyielding as ever: no flexibility on Jerusalem and Israeli military presence to continue inside a new state. Israelis appeared not to perceive any urgent need for a peace deal, having contained the worst effects of the conflict. To head-off the unilateral move, President Sarkozy had launched a grand initiative to bring the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table over the summer of 2011. The US State Department responded coolly. Hillary 208

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Clinton dismissed the French push for a peace conference as unconstructive, unless the Israelis and Palestinians both committed anew to a clear set of negotiation principles. Fawaz Gerges insisted that the Obama team if anything tilted even further in Israel’s favour than previous administrations, backing away from insisting that a Palestinian state must be based on pre-1967 lines, giving Israel a guarantee that $3 billion a year of financial support would continue for ten years, supporting Israel’s rejection of the Fatah–Hamas power-share, and expressly delinking Palestinian self-determination from the Arab spring.7 Against this background, it was not surprising that admirable EU efforts to assume the lead role in reconvening peace talks came to nothing. By the end of the year, all optimism had dissipated. The EU had been unsuccessful in influencing the Palestinians’ tactics at the international level; and new peace negotiations appeared increasingly remote. One European diplomat wearily summed up the impasse: while the current approach was going nowhere, no-one believed any alternative policy was possible either; the Arab spring had diverted diplomatic attention, subjugating interest in a durable solution to the Israel–Palestinian conflict. Diplomats insisted that by mid-2012 the EU had recovered from the disaster of the UN votes. In conclusions to council meetings it stressed how fragile the whole principle of a two-state solution was, and also pushed the US successfully to press Israel on withdrawing from so-called Area C pockets of land as a means of easing the path to new peace talks. European leaders persisted, even if more out of routine than genuine belief. In a July 2012 meeting with the Palestinian government, José Manuel Barroso called for a return to talks and again made a connection with regional changes: ‘The momentous change that we are witnessing throughout the Arab world should constitute an incitement and not a deterrent to the resumption of negotiations. . . . The Middle East peace process cannot become an orphan of the Arab Spring.’8 In October 2012 the EU agreed with the PA an upgrade to the ENP Action Plan. Catherine Ashton linked this to the Arab spring, noting that the Palestinians were ‘one of our first partners in the region to conclude such a plan, which reflects the EU’s new response to changes in the region’. However, in late 2012 the UN gambit was replayed. Prime Minister Abbas announced he would bid for upgraded non-member state status at the UN General Assembly. This status would give the PA the right to file cases against Israel at the International Criminal Court. Israel threatened to withhold Palestine’s tax revenues, to cut off electricity and water supplies, and to intensify settlement construction. The US was implacably opposed to Abbas’s

7   F. Gerges, Obama and the Middle East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 138 and p. 140. 8   Global Europe, 9 July 2012.

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move and threatened further to cut funding to the PA. The EU line was again opaque, being both partially sympathetic and non-committal. One official was quoted as saying: ‘if we are to persuade Abbas not to pull the trigger, a serious alternative needs to be put on the table, and fast’.9 In November, the Palestinians won the vote, gaining observer non-state status. Fourteen EU member states voted in favour (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden). From the UNESCO vote, nine states had changed their vote in a pro-Palestinian direction. Only the Czechs voted against the Palestinian bid. Germany and the Netherlands switched to abstain, a seemingly minor change, but picked up with consternation in Israel. The Netherlands’ new centre-left foreign minister, Frans Timmermans, strongly criticized the previous Dutch government’s pro-Israeli line. At the same time, however, the EU upgraded select trade preferences with Israel. Several member states such as Germany and central and eastern European countries strengthened bilateral partnerships with Israel even after the aforementioned upgraded association agreement talks were suspended. German arms sales increased. In practice, the EU allowed a raft of technical areas of new cooperation to advance under the aegis of the pre-existing agreement. Overall, European trade and investments flows increased markedly after 2011.10 A number of member states began talks with Israel on exploration rights for East Mediterranean gas. The Commission pushed through trade openings in the face of European Parliament complaints that Israel had again not been obliged to change its position on the labelling of goods being exported out of illegal settlements into European markets. Reports at the end of 2012 revealed that EU imports from illegal settlements were now worth fifteen times more than the goods it was buying from Palestinians. European investments into the settlements increased in 2012. Progress was halting on the long-standing process of drawing up a code of conduct for imports from the settlements.11 The Commission also launched sixty new programmes of cooperation with Israel. Far from encouraging the Palestinians to use their new chance to take Israel to the International Criminal Court, EU member states sought to dissuade them from doing so. Yet, once again this generous deepening of cooperation appeared not to give the EU any political leverage over Israel. Israel felt more secure and in control of Palestinian radicalism. Its new government, elected in 2012, appeared even less willing to contemplate concessions. At the end of November 2012 a

  The Guardian, 2 October 2012.   For an excellent summary of EU–Israel relations see N. Witney, Europe and the two-state solution, London, European Council on Foreign Relations, 2013. 11   EUobserver, 31 October 2012. 9

10

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short conflict broke out, as Hamas fired more missiles across the border and Israel retaliated to kill the Hamas military commander and bombard Gaza for several days, killing scores of Palestinian civilians. The key mediating role in this episode was played by Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, who both enjoyed access to Hamas and seemed to suggest he could now accept the Arab Peace Initiative, an apparently notable change in the MB position. The conflict appeared to harden European positions towards Israel. When tensions calmed, EU member states moved forward with visa bans on ‘violent settlers’. In December 2012 Israel authorized the construction of over 3,000 housing units in the West Bank. Every member of the UN Security Council except the US issued statements condemning the construction. The tone of European criticism of Israel was unprecedented. The EU claimed it was moving finally towards action on the labelling of settlement goods. Plans stepped up to draft sanctions in relation to imports from Israeli settlements, still well in excess of Palestinian sales to the EU.12 A whole range of technical cooperation fiches were beset by tension over whether these should apply to the settlements. Then, in July 2013 the EU caused waves when it decided that its funding programmes could no longer benefit recipients based in the settlements. In fact, this was merely a long-delayed implementation of an ostensibly alreadyexisting policy, and of relatively limited magnitude. This occurred just as the US was overseeing somewhat low-profile and cautious new peace talks in the summer of 2013. The US leaned heavily on the EU to delay the new measures against Israel, claiming these undercut the talks. While the EU insisted it would abide by its decision, by late 2013 the weightier matter of restrictions on trade from the settlements was still outstanding, despite seven member states pressing hard to advance such measures. Moreover, German spokesmen publicly disagreed with the decision to remove aid from the settlements. There was little optimism in European foreign ministries that the new talks were likely to produce any major breakthrough, or that the EU could wield any direct influence. The Obama administration once again assumed lead role, although by 2014 scaled back its ambitions as the peace talks already appeared doomed.

Supporting a Palestinian Political System? If movement on the high politics of international diplomacy and peace talks appeared to recede into the distance, European governments still sought to

12  ‘Patience runs out:  EU to crack down on Israeli settlement products’, Spiegel Online, 11 February 2013. .

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fashion progress from the changes in domestic Palestinian politics. The EU’s response to the unity government accord was positive. The EU supported new elections and implied it would this time accept the results. The US was more cautious and Israel was hostile. EU member states reportedly intimated in private that they would not formally hold a new unity government to the Quartet conditions. In support of the new government, France and the UK agreed large aid increases to the OPTs. The Commission also agreed €85 million on top of existing aid. The EU was comforted by the fact that the unity administration was made up primarily of technocrats and that no Hamas representatives would be directly in charge of big ministerial portfolios. There would be a higher committee for political affairs, in which Hamas and Fatah would merely oversee general developments. Hamas agreed not to seek to use international money for its own ‘state’ employees in Gaza. The EU also improved trade provisions, offering Palestine free access for (most) agricultural goods. This was vital:  Palestine imported €50  million worth of goods a year from Europe, but sold to Europe a pitifully limited €6 million. This imbalance indicated there was little to show for sixteen years of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership’s ostensible focus on low politics and practical integration. Hamas pocketed these improvements but still judged EU policies imbalanced. Hamas leaders wrote an angry letter to Catherine Ashton complaining that they had done everything the EU had asked but that full recognition of their right to be in government was not forthcoming. Traditionally more pro-Israeli member states sought to rein the Commission back from its enthusiasm in backing the unity deal through any significant increase in on-the-ground support. The EU became increasingly frustrated as Hamas and Fatah squabbled and failed to take forward the unity accord. European governments cajoled the two sides, with promises of new cooperation. The Norwegian government used its distinctive engagement with Hamas primarily to make the same case. It became apparent that Hamas had been pushed into the unity government by events in the region and neither party had a strong basis for negotiation, in the absence of any common agenda. With Hamas nervous about its own weakened position due to events in Syria, Fatah felt able to pull back from offering concessions. Talk even surfaced of Hamas becoming a branch of the MB, as the only way of surviving the new trends across the region. Palestinians complained in private that the EU may say it was in favour of new elections in the OPTs but still declined to press Israel to lift its de facto block on new polls—imposed for fear of a Hamas victory. Despite promising to unite on restarting the electoral process, Fatah and Hamas shared an interest in limiting a spillover of the Arab revolts to the OPTs; moreover,

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protestors here sought unity to end the occupation at least in parallel with democratization.13 During her January 2011 trip to the region, Catherine Ashton formally stated that support for Palestinian state-building would continue to be the core element of EU policy. The UK announced an increase in its budget for the OPTs by $10 million to $85 million for 2011. Commission officials on the ground estimated that in 2011 around €25 million was available for rule-oflaw programmes. With the justice sector seen to be somewhat overcrowded in terms of international support, the Commission aimed from 2012 to tighten a distinctive focus on the relationship between judicial reform and security, and to include a particular effort to enhance capacity in the penitentiary system. The contrast with the US was stark: after the 2011 UN vote, the US cut funding to PA state-building projects, and Israel started to withhold revenues again. In April 2012, a UN report declared that Palestinian institutions were now ready for statehood.14 Most Palestinian civil society organizations insisted that external support for improvements in human rights protection in the OPTs was more concrete and meaningful than the unilateral declaration at the UN. Officials in the PA Planning Ministry acknowledged that the next phase of international support must begin to shift from budget support to long-term development projects. They talked of the ‘over-saturation’ of capacity-building support, especially in the justice sector. In conversation, many donor representatives admitted that the post-2007 period had seen too marked a shift in funding towards PA ministries. Yet in its statements on institution-building, the EU tended to urge ‘transparent and efficient public finance management’, but made little mention of democracy—a curious difference from statements on the revolts under way in other countries in the region. In March 2013 a new EU–PA accord was signed that explicitly paved the way to a full association agreement. The Commission’s Instrument for Stability launched a new programme on social and economic development in Gaza. The EU brought forward aid payments of €60 million to help the Palestinian Authority finance its budget deficit, pay civil servants and pensions, and provide essential public services, with another €40  million going to UNRWA for Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Diplomats revealed that by 2013 the precarious situation on the ground had forced them back to prioritizing short-term emergency assistance. The shift in focus towards long-term institution-building had been only partially

13   M. Pace, ‘An Arab “spring” of a different kind? Resilience and freedom in the case of an occupied nation’, Mediterranean Politics, 18/1, 2013: 42–59. 14   United Nations, Palestinian State-Building: A Decisive Period, New York, United Nations 2012.

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possible. For 2013 the largest slice of support was for PA salaries (€150 million) and for UNRWA (€80 million), with €70 million for institution-building. The short-term focus was forced on the EU, officials insisted, by Israeli obfuscation and the US’s failure to make good on their €200 million allocation to the PA in 2012. The External Action Service and member states began to intimate that funding could not be maintained in the absence of a breakthrough on the peace process. Although the EU indicated a desire to reactive its long-dormant border control mission in Rafah, in practice this was further downgraded and its few remaining officials sent to Tel Aviv to await developments. With little prospect of its redeployment, several member states pressed for the mission’s definitive disbanding. The US embarked on a major exercise in building security capacities on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, in what was seen to be the principle underpinning of the peace talks. Insiders commented that this eclipsed somewhat the EU’s security initiatives and its focus on the rule of law dimensions of policing. They also felt the US focus on capacity-building and new surveillance technologies risked worsening the problem of Palestinians seeing their security forces as having become most accountable to external actors and the IDF. By mid-2013, diplomats acknowledged that the EU was not able to position itself as a mediator between the two factions as it was still so closely associated with the PA government and with Prime Minister Fayyad in particular. It still had negligible leverage over Hamas and hence over the balance in internal Palestinian politics. Some European diplomats saw the consolidation of an apparently moderate leadership within Hamas in early 2013 as meriting an EU response. Fayyad’s resignation in April 2013 seemed to open the way for the unity deal finally to move forward; unleashing new jockeying for positions and social agitation, it also required the EU to rethink an approach that had relied so heavily on the outgoing prime minister. The Egyptian coup then complicated the fragile balance, as the new army-led interim government in Cairo clearly made Hamas feel far more defensive and anxious about ceding ground. In response to these internal developments and the failure of US-led peace talks to gather tangible momentum, the EU offered new incentives at the end of 2013. At the December 2013 European Council the EU promised ‘unprecedented levels of aid’ and political cooperation in the form of a privileged partnership to the PA—and indeed Israel—in the event of a peace deal.15 Events in early 2014 suggested that this offer had little effect. Given the parlous state of talks, the EU’s traction in the OPTs seemed more limited

15

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  FAC Conclusions, 16 December 2013.

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than ever. Catherine Ashton discontinued the post of EU special representative to the peace process. Against the backdrop of peace talks grinding to a halt, Fatah and Hamas recommitted to a unity deal in April 2014. This new accord promised a technocratic government without members of either Fatah or Hamas, and elections. It was not clear whether Hamas was to join the PLO and accept the terms of a two-state solution. The EU was cautiously supportive of the deal. European diplomats felt that Hamas was on the back foot, now finding itself distant from both the Assad regime and Egyptian government, and that as a result there was more chance of the deal working this time—and on terms favourable to peace. Neither the US nor Israel shared such hope. Israel pulled out of the peace talks, and the US threatened to disengage.

Conclusion The post-2011 context did not resolve the essential misfortune of EU policy towards the Arab–Israeli conflict: namely, that such an extensive, generous, and holistically designed investment in constructing something akin to a Palestinian state failed to dislodge the barriers to a final settlement. For many months after the flowering of the Arab spring, debate centred on the Palestinian petition for recognition in the UN. The PA saw this as the logical spillover from the changed regional context; most European governments doubted the validity of its arguments. The EU as a whole lost much influence and political capital by failing to unite in support of a Palestinian declaration of independence. In practice most member states were not prepared to make this tangible read over from the Arab spring, even as positions shifted in a pro-Palestinian direction in the November 2012 UN status vote. Rather, they retained the core tenets of their pre-Arab spring strategy: to assist in building up the institutions of the Palestinian state and support new elections when and if they came. This line had limited impact over policy outcomes, as it did not succeed in providing sufficient incentives for Fatah and Hamas to proceed with a unity administration that many saw as the best hope for many years of unblocking the peace process. When the two parties belatedly recommitted to a unity government in April 2014, it was mainly because of regional shifts in power and Israel’s inflexbility in the US-sponsored peace talks; and it remained uncertain whether this accord would succeed where the previous one had failed. The EU also failed to gain any tangible payback for its strenuous efforts to indulge Israel’s heightened concerns over the region’s newly emerging geopolitical contours. Curiously, this was an area of policy that witnessed a simultaneous deepening of quite distinctive patterns of governance. At the level of on-the-ground 215

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reconstruction and institution-building, Europeanized forms of governance were highly relevant. In contrast, member states were so divided on the high politics of the peace process that they retained much sway over deciding the right strategic response to the conflict’s interplay with the Arab spring. The evolution of Israeli and Palestinian, and indeed US, positions if anything tilted the balance towards the high politics dynamic. Conditions were not strongly propitious after 2011 for the export of EU governance templates. The apogee of the state-building agenda was reached in 2009–10. While after 2011 the EU continued efforts to nest the OPTs within its regional frameworks and to have the PA align to the EU’s rules, norms, and standards, it did so largely because the political will for a more decisively effective approach was absent. The citizen-oriented, trans-border links that thickened in some parts of the region proved elusive in Palestine, as initial protests failed to generate any qualitative shifts in a highly elitist structure of politics. For all the optimism and fluidity of the new Middle East, in relation to the Israel– Palestinian conflict the same stubborn realpolitik refused to depart the stage.

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This book has offered an extensive empirical account of the EU’s response to the Arab spring. It has considered the ways in which the EU supported and constrained putative reform processes, how it endeavoured to stem violent conflict in Libya and Syria, how it sought to help reactivate Israeli–Palestinian peace talks, and how European governments adopted different visions of their own interests in the region. This concluding chapter returns to and reflects upon the book’s four core issues: how far EU policies changed between the end of 2010 and early 2014; what influence European strategies had over ongoing processes of reform and authoritarian resilience; how the reconfigurations of the new Middle East affected European interests; and what kinds of governance dynamics best captured these evolutions in EU–Middle Eastern relations. Additionally, it reflects upon the longer-term legacy and meaning of this period in the Middle East for EU foreign policy and the broader project of European integration.

A Policy Changed, in Moderation Prior to 2011, the EU had begun to focus effort and resources more on the rising powers and to some extent left its Middle Eastern policies on ­autopilot. From late 2010 it certainly refocused on its southern neighbourhood as a top foreign policy priority. A  tendency towards insularity in EU external relations was to a modest degree offset by a need to respond to brave Arab reformers’ calls for backing in the Middle East. David Gardner noted aptly on the eve of the Arab revolts that the West was ‘start[ing] from a historic low in the region’ as it faced the challenge of correcting its counter-productive ‘shallow realism’.1 To some extent, the EU did recover from this low point and began to look beyond such wilfully Machiavellian realpolitik. 1   D. Gardner, Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance (London: I.B.Tauris, 2009), p. xvi and p. xviii.

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The EU worked hard to support incipient political change in a more nuanced, sophisticated, and demand-driven fashion. The fact that some new resources were found in the midst of the eurozone crisis and such an acute economic recession was to the EU’s credit. Much that sustained the EU’s ‘renewed’ Neighbourhood Policy was admirably broad and generous, in particular the commitments to dialogue with the full range of political actors in Arab states, the provision of more generous mobility partnerships, assistance in job creation, and the backing of deeper economic integration across the Mediterranean. In the cases of Libya and Syria the EU showed itself willing and able to pursue tougher forms of diplomacy and operational engagement. European governments did much that went beyond the ‘soft power’ moniker. In Libya, post-conflict strategies incorporated many of the lessons from Iraq and the Balkans, even if to limited avail in terms of the impact EU efforts had on the ground. Certainly, the breadth of strategies increased, with some critical measures existing alongside more locally led positive support strategies and hands-off caution, all combined with more mini or multilateral ad hoc coalition-building. However, the EU’s enthusiasm for change in the Middle East was bounded. In overall terms European support for democratic change remained partial and was forthcoming largely after the fact. With reforms domestically driven, most in the EU genuinely judged it prudent to avoid anything remotely evangelical in democracy support. Notwithstanding commitments to positive conditionality and sanctions in select cases of violent conflict, in general the EU moved even further towards a network as opposed to hierarchy-predicated governance mode in its relations with the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). The maxim was to listen to and take the lead from local actors; yet even many of these reformers felt that the EU unduly neglected the opportunity to play a more engaged role. The vast majority of those militating for meaningful change judged the EU to have under rather than overplayed its hand. Incipient paradigm shift was followed in some parts of the region by paradigm reversion; a preference for the status quo was not entirely excised from European foreign policies. Broad-brush preliminary assessments all tended to point to the fact that the EU responded hesitantly and without qualitative change in existing EU-level instruments.2 In places the optimistic vision of deeply integrated and shared Euro-Mediterranean governance was not given any significantly new lease of life. European policies remained replete with uneasy strategic contortions. Traits of pre-2011 strategy persisted. Between

2   See, for example, J. Peters (ed.), The European Union and the Arab Spring: Promoting Democracy and Human Rights in the Middle East (Plymouth: Lexington, 2012).

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new opportunity and heightened risks, in the redrawn Middle East European policymakers judged themselves to be walking on eggshells. Several qualitative aspects of EU policies evolved. Interaction with civil society in the Middle East both deepened in intensity and widened in its range of interlocutors. Many even perceived the EU to have begun unduly favouring moderate Islamist parties; while this might take the argument too far, it is the case that the EU was more drawn towards a focus on potentially positive agents of change than on continuing obstacles to reform—in this sense, some of its pre-2011 tendencies persisted. The economic dimensions of policy changed, if modestly. Critics routinely charged the EU with being responsible for an overdose of economic liberalization in the MENA. This became a slightly less valid criticism than in the past. While the EU’s claim that it was more focused on social rights and welfare protection may have been somewhat self-justifying, economic policy did move with the times. Yet it failed fully to address the kinds of economic incentives most desired by Arab reformers.

What Influence EU Policy? In the broadest of terms, the EU’s impact on the nascent shaping of the new Middle East was relatively marginal. In the initial revolts, it was also inadvertent, in failing to better the dire conditions that triggered protests—influence, perhaps, but not quite what was originally intended. Thereafter, the EU was garrulous in its pro-reform rhetoric, but not always efficient in its actions. The irony was that the EU changed its policies just when its own loss of power rendered it less able to have a major pro-reform impact. Its policies improved, but many in the region felt this now mattered less and that the chance of significant European-shaping had already been lost. The fear long held was of an EU that was overly hegemonic in and over its neighbourhood; now the EU struggled even to make its voice heard in the melee of domestic change. While nearly all accounts of the Arab spring rightly emphasize the internal origins of the revolts, it is best to conceive of outside and domestic influences as symbiotic, each conditioning the other, rather than one being a purely independent and the other an entirely dependent variable. It was at this context-shaping level that European influences were not entirely irrelevant. The concern not to engage intrusively in such a way as to generate counterproductive effects was genuine. This certainly succeeded in building a more positive tone of partnership with local actors pushing for reform. But the EU’s constantly repeated concern not to ‘dictate’ outcomes was out of tune with sentiment in the region: in most Arab states there was little belief that the EU could impose much even if it sought to. In most states in the region 219

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the main critique of European policies was that these remained so painstakingly neutral at times that their impact was to give succour to anti-reform forces. This was particularly the case as the army hung on to power in Egypt and monarchs in Morocco and Jordan stalled on reform promises. Positions justified by EU diplomats as ‘keeping clear’, to allow the forces of democracy healthily to play themselves out, were interpreted amongst reformers as indecisive and harmful ambivalence. European policies gave useful support to reformers in some places on a selective basis. However, they were too limited in magnitude and insufficiently proactive to constitute a major explanatory variable in reform outcomes. There was no strong correlation between the EU’s structural influence over a given country and that state’s degree of reform. Moroccan and Tunisian trade dependencies with the EU remained high, but their political trajectories diverged; Algeria exported nearly exclusively to Europe but resisted liberalization; Egypt’s dependency was lower, yet it initially undertook more reform than most other smaller North African states. While most Middle Eastern states still got most of their aid from the EU (the Commission and member states combined), such funding was not of a level tangibly able to condition major political choices. Reforms could be explained by a combination of underlying structural changes with agency-based determinants of the precise timing of protests. External factors set the contextual parameters within which reformist identities in the MENA region evolved, and tended to embed already unfolding trends rather than making any decisive difference to outcomes—with the arguable exception of Libya until 2012, where the imperatives of rescuing a collapsed state ensured international influences were more important. Where reform advanced, European policy did little to counteract the changes. Where reform remained blocked, European policy was not assertive or unequivocal enough to neutralize regimes’ resistance. The nature of the European impact differed significantly between countries. In a small state struggling with post-transition challenges, Tunisia, European resources, investment, and technical assistance played a positive secondary role. If Tunisia was the only undoubted success story of the revolts, even here EU policy was not the difference between success and failure, however much it played an admirable supporting function. The EU wielded considerable sway in the Occupied Palestinian Territories but not enough political clout to create the conditions for a revival of the peace process. At the other end of the spectrum, powerful and stubbornly authoritarian regimes such as those of Saudi Arabia and Algeria proved resistant, and the nature of European security cooperation if anything acted as an additional disincentive to reform. In Syria, more decisive support to the opposition rebels earlier on could have pushed the regime out and saved many lives; it was salutary to find that such a comprehensive range of diplomatic efforts 220

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short of military intervention in this case failed to prevent such widespread loss of life. While EU policies exhibited many advantages over US post-2010 strategy in the Middle East, in some aspects of policy the EU’s role was a derivative one, conditioned by the US’s evolving strategy and the competing interests of other powers. The EU often insisted it was not a major ‘player’ in the Arab spring; while this was true, it was also a line used as a cover for the failure to complement the US security lead in more subtle ways that would have been useful for reform. Many in the EU retained an allegiance to institutional frameworks seen in the region as idiosyncratic and ill-suited to influencing the constellation of domestic forces. The EU attempted to extend its model of external governance, exporting its own rules and regulations to what it hoped would be a more receptive southern Mediterranean. But both new and old regimes became notably more selective in deciding which aspects of the EU model of governance they were willing to import; and they negotiated far more assertively with the EU to resist the rules they deemed inappropriate. Regimes uploaded EU rules on the basis of a much more instrumental cost–benefit analysis, rather than as part of a more diffuse aim of ideational integration. The gravitational model of EU influence lost traction in the new Middle East, even as more reformist elites sought some form of cooperation on better governance standards. The EU was able to wield less of its traditional influence through attraction. And it struggled to devise alternative forms of influence that answered the long-posed dilemma of how the EU could replace the enlargement model. The EU offered incentives in return for reform; these were universally judged in the region to have been of negligible mobilizing influence. The effect of institution-building, twinning, and the extension of technical cooperation in socializing support for democratic norms was not apparent in Arab states’ political indicators; the amount of EU support offered for such programmes did not correlate with the amount of reform seen in different MENA states: those states that received most of this aid were not those that reformed the most. Notwithstanding the myriad limits to European influence, this book finds that the EU did not necessarily perform worse than other powers. One expert argued that the Arab spring entailed a wholesale loss of US influence, the end of ‘America’s moment’.3 Even if such views were slightly overstated, the EU’s relative loss in sway was of a lesser order. To some extent, the opening of political reform put non-Western powers more on the back foot and allowed the EU to stem the shift of attention to the rising economies. While the EU was a power in eclipse, in the Middle East it regained some degree

  F. Gerges, Obama and the Middle East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

3

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of a lead role amongst international players after 2011. A less Europeanized governance model certainly came to prevail in the southern Mediterranean. But given the EU’s broader travails of economic crisis and relative decline, European influence in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings was not replaced by other international actors quite as much as might have been expected. Contrary to much standard criticism of Western democracy support, there was little evidence that the EU influenced trends towards a rigid and unwelcome form of liberal democracy in the region. The precise institutional paths followed by different Arab states were not determined in any significant way by EU policies. The way that economic interests were pursued was too varied to fit neatly into a Gramscian ‘low intensity democracy’ explanatory framework. European support for political reform was characterized not so much by any narrow concept of liberal democracy as by a continuing focus on technical governance issues. It was on these latter issues where the EU had some identifiable impact. Moreover, the book finds some evidence for concluding that the most effective mode of governance was the multilateralized sort; when the EU broadened its efforts to build alliances with other powers the results were generally more positive than modes of governance relying on Europeanized governance export or power politics.

Adjudicating the Five Analytical Narratives In sum, the evidence presented throughout this book reveals a combination of governance dynamics. The Arab spring further deepened the eclectic mix of EU policy dynamics. Each of the five analytical narratives explored here captured some part of post-2010 developments. None provided an entirely dominant explanation of European policies. In very general terms a tilt could be observed towards a dynamic infused with government-mediated strategic calculation and variation. European governments to some extent moved beyond traditional realpolitik, but in doing so they also sought to regain their sway in overall EU policies towards the Middle East. A common view holds that democracy support is internalized within EU identities and self-images, and pursued in a somewhat unreflexive manner independent of geostrategic calculation. The evidence from the Arab spring does not entirely invalidate this picture but does raise serious questions over its sufficiency as an explanation of EU foreign policy. There was some resuscitation in the spirit of Euro-Mediterranean governance. However, the Arab awakening did not open the door to entirely harmonious cooperation and community-building across the Mediterranean. Indeed, many of the architects of Arab change insisted that they sought more autonomy from such deep Western entanglement. Nor did differences dissipate between member 222

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states themselves, sufficient for a common Europeanized cooperative security framework to assume more tangible shape—indeed, on some tactical questions divergences widened after 2010. The concept of external governance remained useful in accounting for the way in which some more technical areas of EU rules were adopted by Arab states. There was a certain unblocking of regulatory harmonization in the wake of the Arab revolts. But overall, there remained much resistance to the concept of importing EU governance across the Middle East. Indeed, popular control over decision-making in many areas tipped the scales against this technocratic vision of cooperation with Europe. A commonly repeated plea from the Arab world was for the EU to ‘treat us as strategic equals’ instead of simply trying to foist technical rules on newly reforming states. A certain contradiction was evident: while diplomats readily admitted that the EU was not the model it was before, a large strand of the concrete policy response remained dependent on an attempt to export EU rules and regulations. Cosmopolitan governance captured much of the spirit of the Arab awakening. The Middle East was much less overwhelmingly statist and much more vibrant with civic activity than it had been before 2010. And a significant strand of EU initiatives in the region followed this logic by seeking to deepen civil society and people-to-people linkages. The cosmopolitan governance model may not have been the primary driving force of Europe’s relations with the new Middle East, but it was a more prominent element than before 2010. Even as these various trends unfolded, government-controlled power politics was far from excised from the script. While deeper cooperation was pursued within the rubric of a common foreign and security policy, in some parts of the Middle East the Arab spring encouraged European governments to give greater priority to bilateral, national foreign policy action. Some member states celebrated and contributed to the Arab spring more than others. Three years into the Arab spring an underlying trend pointed to geopolitical calculation becoming in fact an even more prominent strand of the EU policymaking mix. A pattern of governance centred on national governments’ strategic calculations and actions was at least as eminent as Europeanized models of governance in structuring relations with the new Middle East. European responses were as much about French–Algerian, British–Gulf or Spanish–Moroccan high diplomacy as they were predicated on Brusselscentred policy instruments. While decentred and non-state forms of governance certainly advanced, they did so in parallel with some very traditional elements of realpolitik. European governments genuinely saw the fashioning of a new Middle East as a positive opportunity, but also sought to deploy national diplomatic means to protect against its risks and uncertainties. In some policy areas 223

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the balance between national foreign policies and common EU efforts shifted towards the former. This was seen particularly in Libya, where the divergence between member states was as fundamental as anything witnessed since the inception of the common foreign and security policy. It was also evident in European governments’ pursuit of more mercantile, geo-economic strategies across the MENA region. And there was much variation in the strategies adopted in different Arab states, explainable by a combination of strategic calculation and domestic specificities. Overall, it was doubtful that post-2011 European–Middle Eastern relations were imbued with a qualitatively different, values-preceding-interests form of governance. For all the EU’s woes, the Arab spring did not trigger a complete de-Europeanization of governance modes. The EU was not the core reference point or anchor for Arab reforms, and events after 2010 in some ways represented a compelling test case for how ‘Western decline’ would be manifest in the future of global politics. But in other ways, the Arab spring seemed to turn back the tide of non-Western illiberalism, which prior to 2010 appeared to many observers as clearly in the ascendancy. The Arab spring was humbling for Europe; but, as commented, it also posed uncomfortable dilemmas for China and Russia, while revealing the limits to the reach of other rising powers. If any country emerged with its status enhanced it was Turkey, although even here the role of this external actor was more nuanced than often assumed and was in retreat by early 2014. This combination of governance dynamics shed light on a broader analytical conundrum: was the variation in European policies across countries explained by the EU’s own geostrategic calculations or by a proper respect for national specificities? This book’s evidence suggests that in fact these two factors combined to condition EU policy choices: on the one hand, contrasting domestic political structures within different Arab states; and on the other hand, European governments’ contrasting security-related calculations in different parts of the region. Both these variables question explanations of EU foreign policy that attribute sole importance to common, socialized EU identities and Europeanized policy instruments. A commonly made claim is that EU policies tend to exhibit uniformity, and that in part this is because they proceed from entrenched institutional templates and elaborately designed external policy instruments. This is germane to institutionalist explanations: the EU tends to select certain modes of external governance because they replicate norms of internal governance in a given issue area. As indicated, some elements of the EU’s response to the Arab revolts did indeed fit this picture. To some extent, the EU sought to pursue its objectives though pre-existing frameworks such as the European Neighbourhood Policy, which preordained certain tactical choices. Aspects 224

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of EU policy still essentially sought to externalize dimensions of supposedly common European identity. However, this book finds that these popular inside-out explanations of EU foreign policy decisions must be seen as less primary than they were prior to the Arab revolts. The precise substance of European policy was a dependent as much as independent variable. A key thread throughout this account is how the EU responded in flexible and even expedient fashion to the fluidity and specificity of domestic developments within different parts of the Middle East. The variation in domestic conditions laid out in Chapter 3 found a clear resonance in the structuring of European strategies. The diversity in EU policies was the product of variations in domestic political processes more than those domestic outcomes were the product of a variation in European policies. Policy instruments and logics available in one part of the region were impracticable or judged inappropriate in another part. Part of this reflected a familiar explanatory formula: EU norms established some parameters or basic orientations that were then given more specific manifestation in accordance with interest calculations and tactical imperatives emanating from different states. But part of the changing mix was also about EU policy fluctuating at the behest of powerful international trends and influences. In short, evidence mounted of a more pluralist European approach. European policies reflected less a singular identity and more a calibrated moulding to varied trends in different parts of the MENA region. Arguably, the EU still needed to go further in the direction of an outside-in approach, in preference to its erstwhile inside-out presumptions. But the Arab revolts certainly contributed to making the EU a more eclectic foreign policy actor, both in terms of substantive output and the institutional-governance dynamics it employed.

What Implications for European Interests? If the EU had relatively modest influence over changes to the new Middle East, did it at least protect its interests? The impact of the Arab spring on core European interests was varied and remained difficult for policymakers to read. Some conditions improved, others worsened, many were not affected significantly in either a positive or negative direction. Prior to 2010 the tendency was to ring-fence foreign policy from domestic dynamics. This separation partially dissolved as diplomats laboured to judge the relationship between European interests and political, social, and economic changes within the Middle East. The EU was preoccupied with an abruptness of political change. Worries intensified in particular as unthreatening gradualism in some parts of the 225

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region mutated into violent conflict in Libya and Syria; this unease explained the EU’s tortuous shifting between coercion against and negotiation with the Assad regime. European counter-terrorism policy became less acutely concerned with the MENA region but also remained vigilant of new risks, certainly as 2013 progressed; in consequence it melded more reformist elements with containment-based surveillance. An almost epoch-marking shift lay in the fact that Europe ceased to see the Middle East quite so exclusively through the lens of terrorist threats. Many officials concerned with counter-terrorism certainly viewed regime changes with foreboding. But if post-9/11 Middle East policy was overwhelmingly about counter-terrorism, the Arab uprisings balanced the focus on this area of policy with other perspectives on the Middle East. The EU knew it needed to engage with political Islam, yet lacked the political courage to do so in part precisely because of the long absence of contact with these ascendant actors. In the wake of the Arab spring, this Gordian knot was cut; even if some in the EU expended much effort on retying it. The EU’s approach to political Islam evolved but remained reductive in at least some of its elements. Engagement with moderate Islamists deepened, but not with those seen as further from this mainstream. While the EU’s relations with most Islamist parties were normalized, the totemic spectre of the Islamist threat did not entirely dissipate. By early 2014 the motif of containing sectarianism was becoming more dominant within European policies. Political change—both successful and frustrated—was increasingly seen as having unchained regional and sectarian rivalry more than providing a socially pacifying dynamic of personal empowerment. Contrary to initial fears, there was no huge surge of migration into Europe. The assimilation versus multiculturalism divide between France and the UK stretches several hundred years back to the way the two countries managed their respective empires; the Arab spring did not dislodge the difference. Trade and investment interests neither benefited nor suffered in any major sense. New Islamist governments did not aim to exclude European exporters and investors; but neither did commercial conditions improve dramatically. Policies aimed at enhancing energy security exhibited broad continuity. Despite initial hopes of a positive read over from the Arab spring, the Middle East peace process did not benefit. Underlying these varied and often undramatic impacts, there was no uniform rip-tide of anti-Westernism, as many predicted. As Olivier Roy observed, anti-imperialism was ‘yesterday’s story’ in the region.4 Yet, the broader significance for regional security dynamics remained difficult to ascertain and

4   O. Roy, ‘The transformation of the Arab world’, Journal of Democracy, 23/3, 2012: 89–103, p. 99.

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the EU struggled to delineate a geostrategic response at this level. Most significantly, EU states still thought in terms of safeguarding individual security alliances rather than helping ensure that the pattern of domestic political change opened the way towards a more cooperative Middle Eastern security community.

The Longer-term Perspective Policy challenges in the Middle East between 2010 and 2014 were fastmoving, and swung between competing short-term crises that successively appeared on the EU’s agenda. Not surprisingly, European policymakers were invariably concerned with simply keeping up with these events and trying to affect some degree of influence as and where they could. But what kind of judgement would be merited through a longer-term perspective? What might be concluded by adopting a wider lens and considering how EU strategies in this crucial period measured in comparative terms and in relation to the broad context of European integration? The EU’s response to the Arab spring will not go down as a success story similar to the role the EU played in southern and Eastern Europe. It was not the same kind of episode that helped reaffirm the identity of the EU project itself, as most analysts insist that the southern and eastern enlargement processes succeeded in doing. The challenge of the Arab revolts was of a different order. In many—if not all—parts of its policy, the EU focused on supporting reforms, but through a far more geopolitical lens rather than a dynamic of self-legitimizing identity. In comparative perspective, the EU’s previous experiences of democracy support on its immediate periphery were far more formative than its reshaped policy towards the Arab spring is likely to prove. The EU certainly learnt lessons from its previous policy failings in the Balkans. If the Arab spring was not as ideationally empowering to the EU as were the post-Soviet revolutions, conversely neither was it as traumatic to the EU’s identity as the 1990s Balkans upheavals. The EU’s distance—emotive and strategic—from the Arab awakening was greater, notwithstanding the recognized importance of the region’s changes and all the EU’s undoubted diplomatic endeavour. The humiliation suffered in the Balkans sapped European self-confidence but also had the remedial counterpoint of spurring a number of integrative improvements to EU foreign policy structures. The EU’s struggle for influence in the Arab spring will almost certainly leave less of a permanent mark. The challenges there were more subtle and thornier, while the expectations of European influence were lower. In some ways this was a lost opportunity, but in other ways it brought about a more appropriate means of assessing policy initiatives: retrospective long-term assessments 227

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should rightly talk less about an unfolding of Europe’s own values and more about the difficulties of moulding external policies to what complex local societies really desire. The issues and time span under scrutiny in this book will probably not be remembered in future years as a fundamental inflection point in European foreign policy; they will have provided no major fillip to EU cooperation. Their lasting analytical interest may lie much more in the long-term lessons they impart for how external actors can either help to build on the potential of domestic-driven pressure for reforms or squander such potential when their policies are poorly conceived. If it is doubtful that this period will go down as any kind of identityreaffirming experience for the EU, from a future vantage point it is more likely to chime with the prognostics of relative European (and indeed American) decline. The events and policies described in this book may in the longer sweep be remembered as one of the earliest and dramatic instances of a curtailing of the West’s influence. This is certainly not to go to the exaggerated extreme of suggesting that the EU and European governments exerted no impact at all; this book has argued that, for all the disappointments, there were positive elements of the European response, and in many countries any major European influence would have been beyond even the best-designed and well-funded outside initiatives. But, on the longer-reaching horizon, this period is likely to be seen as significant because it was an instance where the EU began self-critically to re-examine some long-held assumptions about its own model and its own centrality. This very subtle and nascent change might have been difficult to notice amidst the flurry of crisis management imperatives between 2010 and 2014, but it may in future years be seen as a more enduring, comparative conclusion to draw from this period in the Middle East. For all the shortcomings of the European response to the Arab spring, the beginnings of this recalibration might later on be seen as a first step towards an EU role in the region that was helpful to local aspirations without aspiring to be primary in any way. By 2014, the EU had certainly not reached this point; given the Middle East’s growing turmoil and fragmentation, at this juncture a strongly positive assessment of EU efforts was difficult to make. But, extracting from the day-to-day fog of turbulence, the faint outlines of more benign policy reassessments could be detected. There is a chance that these will deepen over the longer term. In this period, the EU was facing its own challenge of crisis, perhaps as serious as the Middle East’s. By 2014 it remained uncertain how the model of integration would emerge from this period of crisis. Certainly, many by this stage were talking of the crisis having weakened the EU’s global image and influence. Beyond and beneath the strictly economic aspects of the Eurozone crisis, the crisis was one of the EU’s declining legitimacy with its own citizens. A committed response to the Arab spring could have helped recover 228

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some of that legitimacy. It could have enabled European states to atone for some of colonialism’s bitter legacy. To some extent, member states indeed looked to enhance their foreign policy cooperation in the MENA region to offset the negative impacts of internal crisis. The revolts led to sharper assessments of how much the EU still needed the region for energy and other security concerns. But over the longer stretch, analysts are likely to be more struck by the very limited extent to which policymakers made the connections between these internal and external challenges. By remarkable coincidence, the EU and Middle East faced system-shaking crises at the very same moment—crises that were radically different in nature, of course, but of similarly existential importance to each region. Yet, in years to come, the period considered in this book might be taken to be a point at which Europe and the Middle East moved further away from each other, rather than towards common partnership based on problem solving. This was difficult to see so close up in the short term; and the negative prediction is certainly not a forgone conclusion. But it was a longer trend that looked eminently possible. As of early 2014, the prospect of a more effective EU foreign policy in the region was not to be entirely discounted. Certainly, there was a striking mismatch between the EU’s long-term rhetoric about its values and its global mission, and the initial responses it gave to the Arab awakening. There was an evident failure to rise to the occasion, which this volume has been concerned to reconstruct and explain. Yet close inspection of the evidence also provides some more positive indications. There was still scope for the initial setbacks to spur further and more constructive European contributions to what will inevitably be a long and complicated process of change in the Middle East, with many ebbs and flows. Some elements in the existing diagnosis, and some parts of the short-term response, were more productive than others, and these could still be built upon. The EU had a strong incentive to return to these issues in the light of its marginalization, and to do better in future. After all, at stake was not only its overall claim to represent a beacon of democracy and peaceful political reconciliation in a troubled world, but also its relations with its largest, closest, and most strategically vital neighbours. The period from late 2010 was an exciting, inspiring, tragic, and uncertain time for the Middle East. In light of what in many states followed brutally in the wake of initial uprisings, a certain wisdom of naivety played its part in the heady optimism of 2011. The EU passed many tests in the way it responded to the responsibilities that such brave democratic activism placed on its own shoulders. But even the most charitable observer must conclude that European governments failed to rise fully to the scale of challenge that a fundamentally redrawn Middle East presented. The EU followed no single, clearly defined analytical logic; its response was as contradictorily and chaotically multifaceted as the internal dynamics of the Arab spring 229

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itself. The Arab spring unleashed trends and phenomena that will take many years to play out. By early 2014, the tempest of change was not yet spent; in some places it hovered becalmed, in others it raged as virulently as ever. This book’s account of European policies in this new Middle East is the script for the opening act of a play that will recount many more twists and turns as it unfolds.

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242

Index

Abbas, Mahmoud  209–10 Abdullah, King of Jordan  29, 30, 107 Abu Dhabi  32, 44–5, 50, 192–93 Afghanistan 108 African Development Bank  84 African Union (AU)  106, 172 Ahmedinejad, Mahmoud  35, 165 aid programmes, European  52, 65, 106–11, 148 Algeria 66 conditionality of funding  76–7, 78 doubts over conditionality  93–5 Egypt  66–7, 104–5, 109 Gulf states  84, 110 increase in funding  64–9 Jordan  77, 110 Libya  176, 179 monitoring of  71 Morocco  93, 98, 110–11 Occupied Palestinian Territories  93, 203, 204, 212, 213–14 principal donors  67 qualitative improvement in initiatives 69–75 Syria 148 Tunisia  66, 111 Yemen 111 Al Jazeera  38 Al Nour Party  26, 134 Al Wefaq  134 Algeria 53 counter-terrorism cooperation with EU 100 economic policy  186 elections 99 energy policy  197 EU-Algeria Scientific and Technological Agreement 99 European financial aid  66 foreign policy  45, 46 military’s role  40–1 political reform  30–1 resistance to economic reform  37 restrictions on foreign companies  193 security cooperation  140, 143–4

uncritical European acceptance of cosmetic reforms 99–100 US security cooperation  144 al-Qaeda  125, 138, 139, 140, 145 decline of  128 in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI)  128, 129 in Syria  155, 161–2 Annan Kofi  152 Ansar al Din  129 Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development 84 Arab League  46, 71, 110, 149–50, 172–3 Arab Maghreb Union (AMU)  46 Arab Monetary Fund  84 Arab Reporters for Investigate Journalism  72 Arab spring  1, 23 assessment of European policy  227–30 coalition-building 37 economic cost of  189 economic effects of  185–9 economic reform  36–7 European economic interests  185 European influence  219–22 European response to  3–4, 22, 61–3, 90–2, 217–19 factors explaining  35–6, 39 geopolitical effects of  1, 42–6 impact on European interests  6, 225–7 incremental reform  28–32 lack of unified leadership  38 loss of American influence  221 militaries’ role  40–1 monarchies 39–40 partial reform, durability of  39–40 political effects of  2 primacy of domestic factors  41 reaffirmation of democratic values  2 regimes ousted  24–8 resistance to reform  32–5 social media’s impact  37–9 social mobilization  37 structural factors  36 variation in reform processes  23–4 Armed Islamic Group (GIA)  129 arms sales  77–8, 120–1, 140

243

Index Army of Islam  162 Ashton, Catherine  60, 61, 64, 121, 130 Algeria 99–100 cautious approach of  90 Egypt 103 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)  120 Hamas 132 improving support for transition countries 70 Iran  163–4, 165, 166 Iraq 167 Israel-Palestine conflict  209, 212, 213, 215 Libya  175, 178–9 meeting with Morsi  77 ‘more for more’ principle  93 Morocco 98 Muslim Brotherhood  135 mutual accountability  93 Syria  148, 159, 161 women’s rights funding  71 Assad, Bashar  43, 53, 147, 149, 206, 207 asylum seekers  49, 50, 115, 117, 118 Atlas network  141 Bahrain  32, 77 British security pact with  120 European pressure for reform  78 military’s role  40 reduced European cooperation with opposition 97 resistance to reform  33–4 Salafism 127 as Saudi protectorate  44 Barcelona process  50, 55, 58, 146, 148 Barroso, José Manuel  177, 209 BBC World Trust  68 Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine  52 Ben Ami, Shlomo  42 Benkirane, Abdelillah  29 Berlusconi, Silvio  171, 180 Bildt, Carl  164–5 Boko Harem  138 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz  31, 41, 53, 99, 100, 138 Brazil  21, 44, 86, 156, 172, 178, 189 Bremmer, Ian  200 British Aerospace  50 British Council  68 Bulgaria 173 Burt, John  137 Business Europe  190 Cameron, David  62, 133, 138, 161, 182, 192, 199 Carothers, Thomas  81 China  20, 44, 189, 224 increasing influence of  45, 85, 188 Libya  172, 178

244

Middle East  85 Syria  149, 151, 152, 156 trade policy  191 civil society: cosmopolitan governance  14–16 role in international relations  14 Civil Society Facility  66 civil society organizations: criticism of European policy  110 European support for  72, 73, 74, 87–8, 160, 181 Clegg, Nick  61–2 Clinton, Hillary  208–9 Coalition of Political Forces and Parties inside Syria 162 coalition-building: democracy support  71 political reform  37 commercial policy, European  189–93 Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) 5 Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)  139, 173, 182 corruption, European support in combating 72 cosmopolitan governance, and European foreign policy  14–16, 48, 58, 88, 124, 145, 223 Council of Europe  72 counter-terrorism, European policy  125, 136–42 Atlas network of special forces  141 concerns over impact of Arab spring  136–7, 141, 145 conflation of violent and non-violent radicalization 140–1 desecuritization of Islam  139 enhancement of capacities  141 EU/MENA cooperation  49–51 knock-on effects of Arab spring  138 lack of European coordination  137 migration 139 Sahel 143–5 Stockholm programme  141 critical theory, and democracy support  19 Cyprus 92 D’Alema, Massimo  172 Davutoglu, Ahmet  82, 83, 92 De Gucht, Karel  180 debt relief packages  69 Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA)  64, 66, 78, 79, 98, 113 de-Europeanized governance, and European foreign policy  19–21, 146, 170, 224 Democracy Reporting International  73

Index democracy support: coalition-building 71 conditionality of European funding  76–7, 78 critical theory  19 doubts over conditionality  93–5 European financial aid  64–9, 106–11 European geopolitical calculation  118–23 European pressure for reform  75–8 Gulf states  84, 85 incentives for reform  75 lack of European incentives  94–5 lack of European pressure for reform 95–100 ‘more for more’ principle  75, 92–3 non-Western support  20–1 qualitative improvement in European initiatives 69–75 trade policy, European  78–9 uncritical European acceptance of cosmetic reforms 98–100 United States  82 democratic reform in Middle East: coalition-building 37 comparison with Eastern Europe  41 economic reform  36–7 European financial aid  64–9, 106–11 European influence  219–22 European pressure for  75–8 European support for  61–3, 218 factors explaining  35–6, 39 geopolitical effects of  1, 42–6 incremental reform  28–32 lack of European incentives  94–5 lack of European pressure for reform 95–100 lack of ideology  38 militaries’ role  40–1 monarchies 39–40 partial reform, durability of  39–40 primacy of domestic factors  41 regimes ousted  24–8 resistance to reform  32–5 social media’s impact  37–9 social mobilization  37 structural change  36 uncritical European acceptance of cosmetic reforms 98–100 variation in  23–4 see also individual countries Denmark: Arab Partnership Initiative  68, 93 desecuritization of Islam  139 Libya 174 DW Akademie  73 economic reform, impact on political reform 36–7

economic relations, and the Arab spring  185–9, 200–1, 219 European commercial policy  189–93 Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)  185–6 Egypt: American policy towards  105–6 civil society organisations  66–7 conditionality of European aid  76–7 conflict with Europe over civil society dialogue 103 constitution (2013)  27 economic policy  36, 186–7 European commercial policy  190, 191 European democracy support  73–4 European engagement with Muslim Brotherhood  131–2, 133 European financial aid  66–7, 104–5, 109 European marginality in  101–2 European reaction to Morsi’s appropriation of powers  103 European response to military coup  104–5, 133 foreign policy  46 gas reserves  193 human rights  27, 76, 105 interim regime  101 Israel-Palestine conflict  207, 211, 214 lack of European pressure for reform  100–5 liberal criticism of Europe  131 military coup  27, 104 military’s role  40, 101 perceptions of EU/USA positions  135 political reform  25–7 pre-2011 unrest  55 repression of NGOs  76, 102, 103, 104, 106 Salafism 127 Supreme Council of the Armed Forces  25–6, 76, 101, 102, 135, 186 Turkish policy towards  106 Egyptian Democratic Academy  73 energy interests/policy: Algeria 197 Arab reluctance over energy cooperation 196 discovery of gas reserves in Eastern Mediterranean 195 Euromed energy partnership strategy 193–4 Euro-Mediterranean Energy Forum  194 Euro-Mediterranean Energy Platform  194 European policy  193–9 Gulf states  197, 198 impact of Arab spring  194–5 importance of Middle East for European supplies 193 investment in MENA  199–200 Iran 198

245

Index energy interests/policy (Cont.) Iraq 197–9 Syria 197–8 uncertainty as obstacle to investment 195, 197 Ennahda party (Tunisia)  25, 73, 126, 127, 128 complaints over European attitudes towards 135 European engagement with  130 European pressure on  75–6 Erasmus programme  65, 66 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip  83, 106, 151, 160 Euromed Youth  65 Euro-Mediterranean Charter of Enterprises 190 Euro-Mediterranean Charter on Peace and Stability 54 Euro-Mediterranean collective governance  10–12, 48, 51–4, 57, 123–4, 145–6, 184, 200, 222–3 Euro-Mediterranean Energy Forum  194 Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP)  2, 10–11, 54, 57 aim of  48 civil society components  15 European aid programmes  52 lack of conditionality  51–2 limited economic impact  53–4 original vision of  10 problems with  11 shortcomings of  51–4 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)  64, 65, 107 European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur)  49, 115, 116, 117 European Commission  64 evaluation of aid  71 human rights  70 improving support for transition countries 70 internal security  141 praise for Tunisia  52 radicalization-awareness network (RAN) 141 resistance to conditionality  93 revised European Neighbourhood Policy 64–5 scale for allocation of funds  75 Support for Partnership, Reform and Inclusive Growth  65 European Commission Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO)  159, 179, 204 European Court of Human Rights  140 European Endowment for Democracy  64, 108 European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR)  56, 70, 73, 108

246

European Investment Bank (EIB)  64, 65, 84, 150, 196 European neighbourhood  19–20 European Neighbourhood Partnership Instrument (ENPI)  52 doubts over conditionality  93 increased budget  66 European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP)  10, 48, 218 bilateral agreements  54 Israel-Palestine conflict  204 revision of (2011)  64–5 European Parliament  71, 72, 77 European Union, and Middle East and North Africa policy  2–3 analytical framework  4, 9–10, 21–2, 222–5 Arab spring’s impact on European interests 225–7 assessment of  227–30 commercial policy  189–93 compared with United States  11, 81 cooperation with other powers  79, 86 cosmopolitan governance  14–16, 58, 88, 124, 145, 223 criticisms of  219–20 decline in influence  19–21 de-Europeanized governance  19–21, 146, 170, 224 economic relations  185–9, 219 energy interests/policy  193–200 Euro-Mediterranean collective governance  10–12, 48, 51–4, 57, 123–4, 145–6, 184, 200, 222–3 external governance  12–14, 48, 57, 58, 70, 87, 146, 184, 200, 221, 223, 224–5 frustrations over  91 geopolitical calculation  118–23, 224 incentives for reform  75 inclusive nature of  10–11 influence of  219–22 lack of pressure for reform  95–100 limited impact of policies  6–7 limited support for change  6 member states’ control of  7, 16–17, 18 ‘more for more’ principle  75, 92–3 neo-liberalism  17–18, 19, 186–7 pluralist nature of  7, 225 post-Arab spring policies  22, 60 pre-Arab spring policy  49–59 pressure for reform  75–8 qualitative improvement in initiatives 69–75 realpolitik  7, 16–19, 123, 124, 146, 168, 223–4 reduced priority of  49 reformist policy  5–6 reluctance to impose sanctions  95

Index response to Arab spring  3–4, 61–3, 90–2, 217–19 trade policy  78–9, 111–14 uncritical acceptance of cosmetic reforms 98–100 see also aid programmes; counter-terrorism, European policy; Euro-Mediterranean Partnership; European Neighbourhood Policy; individual countries; migration policy; security policy; Union for the Mediterranean Europol  136, 141 eurozone crisis  20, 187, 196, 228 External Action Service (EAS)  56, 63, 65, 71 Arab civil society organizations  71 caution over religious issues  133 cautious approach of  90 economic policy  187 sidelining of democracy unit  91 Syria  151, 155 see also Ashton, Catherine external governance, and European foreign policy  12–14, 48, 57, 58, 70, 87, 146, 184, 200, 221, 223, 224–5 Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative  68, 199 Fabius, Laurent  140, 143 Facebook 38 Fatah party  203, 206 Fayyad, Salem  203, 204, 207, 214 February 20 movement (Morocco)  29, 98, 111 Fiqh Muslim Congress  136 First Lady NGO’s  148 Foundation for International Legal Cooperation 73 France: aid programmes  52, 67, 69, 72–3, 106 Algeria 99 arms deals with Gulf states  50 cautious policy of  91 engagement with political Islam  130 Israel-Palestine conflict  207, 208–9 Libya  171, 172–4, 175, 176, 177, 179 Morocco 106 secularism 132–3 support for Arab spring  62 Syria  53, 148, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 168 trade policy  112 Union for the Mediterranean (UfM)  55–6 Frattini, Franco  62–3, 171 Free Syrian Army (FSA)  153, 154, 155, 157, 162

Freedom and Justice (FJP, Egypt)  26, 46 Friends of Syria  152, 154, 156 Friends of Yemen  50–1, 111 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)  31 Frontex  50, 79, 115, 116, 117 Füle, Stefan  61, 71, 91 Algeria 99 Egypt 101 Morocco 98 G8: aid to Middle East and North Africa  65, 84 Transition Fund  65 Gamaa Islamiya  128 Gardner, David  217 General National Council (GNC) (Libya)  182, 183 geopolitics: European MENA policy  118–23, 224 impact of Arab spring  1, 42–6 inter-state power balances  42–3 Sunni-Shia tensions  43–4 Gerges, Fawaz  128, 138, 209 Germany: aid programmes  67–8, 69, 73, 108 arms sales  121 Egypt  102, 104 Iraq 166–7 Libya 172 MENA Partnership for Democracy and Development 69 Syria 157 Transformation Partnership in Egypt  73 Global Adjustment Fund  78 governance models, and EU-MENA relations  4, 9–10, 21–2 cosmopolitan governance  14–16, 58, 88, 124, 145, 223 de-Europeanized governance  19–21, 146, 170, 224 Euro-Mediterranean collective governance  10–12, 48, 51–4, 57, 123–4, 145–6, 184, 200, 222–3 external governance  12–14, 48, 57, 58, 70, 87, 146, 184, 200, 221, 223, 224–5 realpolitik  16–19, 123, 124, 146, 168, 223–4 Green Movement (Iran)  34, 35, 164 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)  32 democracy support  85 economic policy  186 EU-GCC security cooperation  120 foreign policy  45 increasing influence of  46 Syria 154 trade and investment policy  191–2 US-GCC Strategic Cooperation Forum  80

247

Index Gulf states: British arms sales to  120–1 British military presence in  121 British trade mission to  192 democracy support  84, 85 economic reform  37 energy policy  197, 198 European cooperation with  86 European financial aid  110 European security cooperation  50–1, 120–1 foreign policy  44–5 funding of Islamist groups  135–6 human rights  53, 77 lack of European pressure for reform  95–7 pre-Arab spring European policy  53 resistance to reform  32–4 Syria 151 Tunisian/Egyptian opposition to  84–5 see also individual countries Guttenberg, Karl-Theodor von  172 Hadas party (Kuwait)  34 Hadi, Abdu Rabu Mansour  28 Hague, William  63, 86, 90, 155–6 Hamas  43, 132, 203, 204–5, 206, 210–11, 212, 214 Hans Seidl Foundation  73 Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung 56 Held, David  14 Hezbollah  31, 100, 122 European policy towards  142–3 isolation of  43 Syrian conflict  43–4 Holland, Francois  91, 143, 155, 159, 161 human rights  70, 72, 74 Egypt  27, 76, 105 European support for  60, 67, 69, 70, 72 Gulf states  53, 77 Jordan 29 lack of European pressure for reform  96, 97, 98–9 Lebanon 67 Libya  178, 181 limits to European support  110, 140 Morocco  72, 98–9 Saudi Arabia  33 Tunisia 25 ideational transfrontierism  15 India  21, 44, 86, 151, 156, 172, 178, 189 Indonesia  21, 41, 86, 151 information and communications technology (ICT), impact of  37–9 Instrument for Stability (IfS)  66, 74, 108, 141, 213 International Atomic Energy Agency  165 International Contact Group  176, 177 International Criminal Court  72, 176

248

International Crisis Group  152, 168, 206 International Energy Agency  177, 199 International Monetary Fund (IMF)  76, 103, 112, 187 International Union of Muslim Scholars  136 investment in MENA energy industry  199–200 European commercial policy  189–93 impact of Arab spring  188 Iran 147 energy policy  198 European policy towards  163–6 foreign policy  44 lack of European pressure for reform  164–5 nuclear programme negotiations  163–4, 165, 166 protests in  164 resistance to reform  34–5 Syria  156, 163 Iraq: energy policy  197, 198–9 European policy towards  166–7 resistance to reform  34 sectarian polarization  34 Islam, political: al-Qaeda’s decline  128 boosted by Arab spring  2, 126 conflation of violent and non-violent radicalization 140–1 conservative nature of  126 context of more liberal Arab society  126 cultural identity  126 desecuritization of  139 European approaches to  125 European engagement with  130–6, 219, 226 expectations of  127–8 Gulf states’ funding of  135–6 increased risk of violent radicalism  128–9 jihadists 129–30 lack of European engagement with  51 loss of Muslim Brotherhood hegemony  127 national differences  126–7 reduced risk of violent radicalism  128 United States’ approach  138–9 see also Salafist movement Islamic Development Bank  84 Islamic Fighting Group (IFG)  178 Islamic Front  162 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS)  162 Islamic World League  136 Islamist Action Front (IAF, Jordan)  30, 130 Islamist Front  162 ISIS 162 Israel 43 American support for  209 approves construction of housing on West Bank 211

Index European cooperation with  210 gas supplies interrupted  194–5 impact of Arab spring  206 preconditions for peace talks  208 Union for the Mediterranean (UfM)  56 Israel-Palestine conflict  202, 215–16 British-French-German proposals  207 collapse of peace talks (2010)  205 criticism of European policy  205–6 Egypt  207, 211, 214 European aid removed from settlements 211 European cooperation with Israel  210 European divisions over Palestinian statehood 208 European financial aid to Palestinians  203, 204, 212, 213–14 European reaction to Palestinian unity government 212 Europe’s inability to act as mediator  214 Fatah/Hamas unity government  207, 212–13, 215 French initiative to revive peace talks 208–9 impact of Arab spring  2, 202, 206–7, 209 impact on Euro-Mediterranean Partnership 54 Israel-Hamas conflict (2012)  210–11 Israeli housing on West Bank  211 Israeli preconditions for talks  208 Palestinian Reconstruction and Development Plan  204 Palestinians gain observer non-state status at UN  209–10 pre-2011 European policy  203–6 pressure on Israel to make a deal  206–7 UN resolution on Palestinian statehood 208 United States  208–9, 211, 214 Istqlal party (Morocco)  29 Italy: aid programmes  69, 106 Algeria 99 immigration policy  50 increased diplomatic capacity  69 Libya  106, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 180, 183 migration control  115 perspective on Arab spring  90 scepticism over conditionality  93 support for Arab spring  62–3 Syria  149, 159 jihadists 129–30 Algeria 197 Egypt 27 Iraq 167 Libya  178, 183

Mali  45, 129, 138, 140, 143 Syria  160, 162 Jimenez, Trinidad  90, 97 Joint Situation Centre (EU)  141 Jordan: complains over lack of European funds 108–9 conditionality of European aid  77 European engagement with political Islam 130 European financial aid  110 European geostrategic considerations 121–2 human rights  29 political reform  29–30 security cooperation  142 trade relations with Europe  112–13 Juan Carlos, King  192 judicial reform, European support for  72, 74 Juppé, Alain  99, 135, 175 Justice and Charity (Morocco)  28, 29, 98 Justice and Construction Party (Libya)  178 Justice and Development Party (AKP)  82, 83, 84, 136 Justice and Development Party (PJD, Morocco)  29, 126, 130 Kerchove, Giles de  136 Kerry, John  106 Khamenei, Ayatollah  35, 165 Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung  76, 95, 102 Kurds, Syrian  153, 158, 159, 160, 162 Kuwait 77 British arms sales to  120 British policy in  97 resistance to reform  34 Salafism 127 Kuwait Society for Human Rights  97 Lampedusa  115, 117 Larayedh, Ali  25 Lebanon: European action plan  67 European assistance in strategic planning 70 European democracy support  74 European geostrategic considerations  122 European support for civil society organizations 74 Hezbollah  31, 142–3 human rights  67 impact of Syria conflict  43 judicial reform  72 lack of European pressure for reform  100 political reform  31–2 León, Bernadino  66 liberal internationalism, declining European commitment to  17

249

Index Libya 170 ambivalence towards European assistance  180, 184 constitution drafting  182, 183 criticism of European policy  181–2 divisions within opposition groups  174, 176 elections 178 EU cooperation agreement  53 European assistance in reconstruction  179–80, 181, 182–3 European civil society support  181 European commercial policy  190 European divisions over  171–2, 174, 184 European economic interests in  171 European financial aid  179 European involvement in military intervention  170, 171–4, 183–4 European reactions to protests  171 European sanctions against  171 European support for opposition groups 174–7 human rights  178, 181 humanitarian aid  176, 179 interim administration  177–8 Islamist influences  178, 183 limited nature of Europe’s post-Qaddafi role 180 military’s role  40 Muslim Brotherhood  178 security concerns  178, 181, 182, 183 security cooperation  182, 183 state capacity-building  179 Turkish policy  83 unfreezing Libyan assets  179–80 United Nations  178, 179 Ligue Tunisienne des Droits de l’Homme  72 Like Minded Group  130 Livni, Tzipi  206 Mali  45, 107, 129, 138 European involvement in  143–4 human rights abuses  144 al-Maliki, Nouri  34, 166 Mauritania  116, 143 Max Planck Institute  73 Médecins Sans Frontières  181 Media in Cooperation and Transition  73 MENA Partnership for Democracy and Development 68–9 Merkel, Angela  55, 104, 207 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) see Arab spring; European Union, and Middle East and North Africa policy; individual countries Middle East Development Bank  84 Mieux programme  49

250

migration policy, European  114–18 balanced approach to  116 counter-terrorism 139 externalizing border controls  116 illegal immigrants  116 limited migration from MENA  114, 115 member states’ control of  114 migration control  117 Mobility Partnerships  79, 98, 116–17, 118 Operation Hermes  115 Sahel Strategy  116 security factors  49–50 tightening access  115 military, role in reform process  40–1 minority rights protection  75, 95 Miqati, Najib  31, 43, 122 Mobility Partnerships  79, 98, 116–17, 118 Mohammed VI, King of Morocco  28, 98 monarchies, and political reform  39–40 Monti, Mario  180, 199 ‘more for more’ principle  75, 92–3 Morocco: aid from Gulf States  85 criticism of European policy  109 European commercial policy  192 European engagement with political Islam 130 European financial aid  93, 98, 110–11 European geostrategic considerations 122–3 European support for civil society organizations 72 foreign policy  45, 46 human rights issues  72, 98–9 ineffectiveness of European policy  52–3 political reform  28–9 Salafism 127 trade agreement with Europe  78, 112 uncritical European acceptance of cosmetic reforms 98–9 Morsi, Mohamed  26–7, 77, 85, 103, 132, 199, 211 Moussa, Amr  94–5 Mubarak, Hosni  25, 39, 101, 135, 206 Muslim Brotherhood  126, 128 economic policy  186 Egypt  26, 27, 103 European engagement with  131–2, 133 Kuwait 34 Libya 178 loss of hegemony within political Islam 127 perceptions of Europe’s role  135 Syria 158 National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces  158

Index National Coordination Committee (Syria) 153 national identity programmes  138 National Intelligence Council (USA)  42 National Salvation Front (Egypt)  26 National Transition Council (NTC) (Libya)  174–5, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181 NATO  119, 172 Istanbul Cooperation Initiative  44, 119 Neighbourhood Investment Facility  189 neo-liberalism, and European foreign policy  17–18, 19, 186–7 Netanhayu, Benjamin  208 Netherlands 73 aid programmes  108 caution over engagement with political Islam 132 Matra programme  68 Niger  107, 143 Nigeria 138 Norway 212 Nyon Process  130, 131, 133 Obama, Barack  80, 81, 82, 101, 132, 138–9 Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs), and European financial aid  93, 203, 204, 212, 213–14 see also Israel-Palestine conflict; Palestinian Administration (PA) Oettinger, Günther  198 Oman  32, 85 British role in  96 foreign policy  44 Organisation of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC) 136 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe  71 Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) 114 Palestinian Administration (PA)  204 authoritarian politics  205–6 EU-PA accord (2013)  213 EU-PA European Neighbourhood Policy Action Plan  204 European assistance in institution-building  203–4, 213 European financial aid  203, 204, 212, 213–14 European mission to strengthen policing 205 European reaction to unity government 212 European trade policy  212 Fatah/Hamas unity government  207, 212–13, 215 Palestinian Reconstruction and Development Plan (PRDP)  204

presses for UN declaration of statehood 208 Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity  64, 87 Patten, Chris  90 People’s Mujahedeen Group  165 People’s Party (Spain)  99, 106, 123 Peres, Shimon  206 Piebalgs, Andris  193 Pirate network  29 Poland  73, 175 Political and Security Committee (PSC) (EU)  76, 92, 141, 149 Portugal 90–1 Prodi, Romano  172 Qaddafi, Muammar  170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 184 Qatar  32, 121 aid programmes  84, 85 antipathy towards  84–5 foreign policy  45 funding of Islamist groups  135 gas trade with Europe  193 Libya 175 Quint forum  79 radicalization-awareness network (RAN)  141 Rajoy, Mariano  98 Rapid Border Intervention Teams  50 realpolitik, and European foreign policy  16–19, 123, 124, 146, 168, 223–4 Rees, Wyn  146 regional cooperation  45–6 Reporters without Frontiers  95 Revolutionary Military Council (Syria)  158 Romania 173 Rouhani, Hassan  35, 44, 147, 165 Roy, Olivier  36, 126, 226 Russia  44, 224 increasing influence of  45, 85 Iran 163 Syria  149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 161 Sadr, Shadi  164 Sahel 45 al-Qaeda in  125 conflict in  129–30, 143–5 Sahel Strategy  116, 143 Salafist movement  126, 178 Egypt 27 European engagement with  134–5 growth of  127 Gulf states’ funding of  135–6, 157 Libya 178 Qatari support for  45 Saudi Arabian support for  44

251

Index Saleh, Ali Abdullah  28, 78, 81 sanctions: Libya 171 reluctance to impose  95 Syria  148–9, 150, 156 Sarkozy, Nicolas  52, 55, 168 Libya 175 Morocco 98 support for Arab spring  62, 65 Saudi Arabia: aid programmes  85 British arms sales to  120 British trade mission to  192 foreign policy  44 funding of Islamist groups  135 human rights  33 muted European response to protests  96 oil industry  193, 197, 199 relations with United States  80 resistance to reform  32 royal succession process  33 support for Egyptian army’s coup  97 Schawzenberg, Karel  171 Schimmelfennig, Frank  13 Search for Common Ground  154 security policy, European: EU/MENA cooperation  49–51, 120–1, 140, 142, 143–4 foreign policy  17, 49 Gulf states  120–1 see also counter-terrorism, European policy Senegal 116 Shia Al Wefaq (Bahrain)  34 Siemens 150 social media, impact of  37–9 social mobilization, and political reform  37 South Africa  21, 86, 172 South Korea  21 Spain: aid programmes  67, 68 cautious response to Arab spring  90 democracy support  71, 74 Gulf states  121 Libya 176 Morocco  98, 106, 123 reduced foreign aid budget  106 scepticism over conditionality  93 trade policy  112 Stockholm programme  141 structural change, and democratic reform  36 Stubb, Alexander  171 Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF, Egypt)  25–6, 76, 101, 102, 135, 186 Sweden  72, 78, 108 Syria  147–8, 167–9 al-Qaeda  155, 161–2 Anglo-French attempts to life arms embargo 159–60

252

Annan plan  152, 159 Arab League negotiations  149–50 chemical weapons  160, 161 crackdown on protesters  148 divisions over Western approach  157 energy policy  197–8 European attempts at negotiation  152–3 European diplomatic links  150–1, 159 European engagement with opposition groups 149 European financial aid  148 European funding of civil society projects 160 European policy towards  167–9, 220–1 European reluctance to arm opposition 154 European sanctions against  148–9, 150, 156 European support for opposition groups  153–4, 157–9, 160 expelled from Arab League  150 fragmentation of opposition  149, 153, 162 France  53, 148, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 168 Friends of Syria  152, 154, 156 Geneva peace talks  161, 162 humanitarian aid  159, 161 Iran  156, 163 Kurds  153, 158, 159, 160, 162 massacres in  155 military intervention considered  151, 155–6, 161 military’s role  40, 155 Muslim Brotherhood  158 opposition criticism of non-Western powers  151, 156 opposition criticism of Western policy  158 regional impact of conflict in  43, 147, 160, 162–3 Russia  151, 152, 161 safe havens idea rejected  151 Turkey  149, 151, 153, 154, 158, 160 United Nations  149, 155, 159 United States  158, 161 Syrian National Council (SNC)  151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 168 Syrian Observatory for Human Rights  154 Syrian Transitional Council  153 Syrian Trust for Development  148 Tahrir Lounge  73 Taiex twinning projects  107 Taiwan 21 Taliban 128 Tamarod 133 Temporary International Mechanism (TIM) 204 Timmermans, Franz  210 trade, impact of Arab spring on  188–9

Index trade policy, European  111–14 bilateral agreements  113 commercial policy  189–93 linkage with democratic reform  78–9 trade policy, United States  114 Tripoli Military Council  178 Tunisia: Arab Maghreb Union (AMU)  45–6 criticism of European policy  94 economic reform  36 European commercial policy  189–90 European democracy support  72–3 European engagement with political Islam 130 European financial aid  66, 111 European influence  220 European pressure on  75–6 German support programmes  67–8 human rights  25 migration control  115 military’s role  40 Mobility Partnership  117 political reform  24–5 pre-revolution European praise for  52 pre-revolution unrest  55 Salafism 127 Turkey  21, 44 Egypt 106 foreign policy  82–4 impact of Arab spring  84, 224 lack of EU/Turkey cooperation  92 Libya  83, 175, 176 Syria  149, 151, 153, 154, 158, 160 trade and investment policy  191 Ukraine  66, 112, 117 Ülgen, Sinan  83 Union for the Mediterranean (UfM)  10, 14, 48, 55–6, 67, 71, 92, 180, 183 United Arab Emirates (UAE)  32, 45, 50, 77, 85, 121, 192 United Kingdom: aid programmes  68, 108 Arab Partnership Fund  68, 72, 73, 108 arms deals with Gulf states  50, 120–1 ‘Building stability overseas’ strategy  62 counter-terrorism  137, 140 doubts over conditionality  93–4 engagement with political Islam  130, 133, 134 Gulf Initiative  77 Gulf states  96 Iraq 167 Israel-Palestine conflict  207 Libya  171, 172–4, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181, 183 military presence in Gulf states  121 national identity  138

national security strategy  62 Partner Middle East 2012 initiative  189 Prevent programme  140 support for Arab spring  62 Syria  148, 154, 155–6, 157, 159, 161 targeted sanctions  95 United Nations: Libya  172, 178, 179 Palestinian status  209–10 Syria  149, 155, 159 United Nations Development Programme  153, 186 United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy 139 United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs 173 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA)  204, 213, 214 United States: aid programmes  81 Algeria 144 Bahrain 80 comparison with European foreign policy  11, 81 democracy support  82 Egypt 105–6 Israel-Palestine conflict  208–9, 211, 214 Libya  172, 175 loss of influence in Middle East  221 Middle East policy  80–3 Saudi Arabia  80 security policy  138–9 Syria  158, 161 trade policy  114 US-GCC Strategic Cooperation Forum  80 Valasek, Tomas  174 Van Rompuy, Herman  63 Venice Commission  67, 74 Wahabism  33, 44, 127 Westerwelle, Guido  172 Westminster Foundation for Democracy  68, 73 women’s rights  71 Yassine, Sheikh  29 Yemen: European democracy support  74–5 European financial aid  111 European pressure for reform  78 military’s role  40 political reform  27–8 security cooperation  50–1, 140 sources of instability  28 Zapatero, José Luís Rodríguez  55

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