The European Union's Democratization Agenda in the Mediterranean

Michelle Pace, Peter Seeberg

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415551687
• eBook ISBN: 9781317988618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Democracy promotion in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) remains a central pillar of the foreign policy the European Union (EU). Rather than concentrating on the relations between the incumbent authoritarian regimes and the opposition in the relevant countries, and on the degree to which these relations are affected by EU efforts at promoting democracy, human rights and the rule of law (an outside-in approach), this collection of articles inverts the focus of such relationships and attempts to look at them 'inside-out'. While some contributions also emphasise the 'outside-in' axis, given that this continues to be analytically rewarding, the overarching thrust of this book is to provide some empirical substance for the claim that EU policy making is not unidirectional and is influenced by the perceptions and actions of its 'targets'. Thus, the focus is on domestic political changes on the ground in the MENA and how they link into what the EU is attempting to achieve in the region. Finally, the self-representation of the EU and its (lack of a) clear regional role is discussed.

This book was published as a special issue of Democratization.

Preface

 

At a time when the processes of political reform in the Mediterranean are going backwards rather than forwards, and when there are calls for strong voices in Europe, the US, and elsewhere to speak out and condemn the authoritarian Regimes' tight reign on their populations in the MENA region, engagement with concrete alternatives on the ground are most urgent.

It is in this spirit that this book brings together an active group of academic researchers. The origins of this group lie in an Encuentro, a meeting of UK and Spanish specialists on the Mediterranean and the Middle East, held in Barcelona between 10–11 March 2006, sponsored by the British Council and coordinated by Richard Gillespie and Iván Martín. A guiding principle of this endeavour has been the need to address the needs of ‘early career’ researchers and, in particular, to facilitate the entry of PhD researchers, close to submitting their thesis, into the wider academic community. Besides that, the Encuentro made clear the need for longer term enhancement of research activity by establishing frameworks and infrastructures that will last, and that include close interaction with the policy-making community and the media. The need to promote interdisciplinary approaches and comparative studies in the EU-MENA region was also emphasised.

Thus, in April 2007, with the generous financial support of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES), the British International Studies Association (BISA) working group on International Mediterranean Studies, the Faculty for the Humanities & the Institute for History and Civilization (University of Southern Denmark), the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Danish – Egyptian Dialogue Institute (Cairo) and the European Research Institute (Birmingham University), Peter Seeberg and I co-organized a workshop on the EU's democracy promotion in the Mediterranean region at the Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies in Odense, Denmark. Our agenda was not just to have an academic discussion on the topic but to attempt to engage with the policymaking community: thus, the different panels offered a critical investigation of the recent emergence of socio-political movements in the wider Mediterranean and the EU's postcolonial legacy.

This book is the fruit of all the work that this team of new and older generations of researchers has put together since that workshop in the hope that our voices will contribute to a more nuanced and informed EU policy towards the MENA. Most of us have carried out extensive field research on the ground in this region and thus we also attempt to bring to our readers the recurring themes in the reflections of the people we interviewed and whose calls for a more pluralistic society in their area we seek to represent. I wish to sincerely thank all those who were directly or indirectly involved in this project and can only hope that our policy recommendations find some sympathetic ears for action in the corridors of Brussels.

Finally, but not least, I would like to thank the British Academy and the Economic & Social Research Council for project grants which facilitated my own contribution to this project.

Michelle Pace, Birmingham, 15 October 2008.

The EU's democratization agenda in the Mediterranean: a critical inside-out approach

Michelle Pace^a, Peter Seeberg^b and Francesco Cavatorta^c

^aPolitical Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK; ^bCentre for Contemporary Middle East Studies, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark; ^cSchool of Law and Government, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland

Introduction

Democracy promotion in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) remains a central pillar of the foreign policy of both the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), despite the failure of ‘democracy by imposition’ in Iraq. A recent relative military success in fighting insurgents still leaves a problematic political reality where war-lordism and a weak central government make democracy a difficult goal to achieve. Despite the embedding of the Iraqi government's control, the growing numbers of actors who seem prepared to take part in politics according to democratic norms/rules of the game may yet be outflanked by extremists. The fragmentation of Shi'a and Sunni communities into numerous sectarian political organizations and the reluctance of many Sunnis to participate in formal politics mean that some eschew violence while others perpetrate violence on a daily basis.¹ In addition, external actors plough on with democracy promotion efforts even though there are still significant contradictions between the objectives of the policy and its instruments.²

To a large extent, post-2003 American policy in Iraq has focused attention of both scholars and policymakers on the methods through which the EU attempts to export democracy in the MENA region, such as positive political engagement with authoritarian regimes, the promotion of economic reforms, and the strengthening of civil society activism.

Rather than concentrating on the relations between the incumbent authoritarian regimes and the opposition in the relevant countries, and on the degree to which these relations are affected by EU efforts at promoting democracy, human rights, and the rule of law (an outside-in approach), this book inverts the focus of such relationships and attempts to look at them ‘inside-out’.³ While some contributions also emphasize the ‘outside-in’ axis, given that this continues to be analytically rewarding, the overarching thrust of this book is to provide some empirical substance for the claim that EU policy-making is not unidirectional and is influenced by the perceptions and actions of its ‘targets’. We thus focus on domestic political changes as they are happening at the time of writing (late 2008) on the ground in the MENA and how they link into what the EU is attempting to achieve in the region. Conceptually, the literature on democracy promotion takes it for granted that certain institutional structures are necessary to promote reform within existing institutions, in accordance with liberal-democratic and market-capitalist ‘guidelines’ for good governance. Rather than merely looking from the outside at how democracy promotion policies shape reform in the context of authoritarian regimes, or how regimes and opposition are induced toward a liberal democratic model, we invert the focus and look from the inside-out at how regimes and opposition groups can induce external actors to view and react to their situation as a viable exception to their preferred practices. Our reference to MENA countries as an ‘exception’ denotes, on the one hand, exception at a practical level where regimes rule over populations mainly unversed in democratic politics and, on the other hand, exception at a conceptual level where Islamists who accept democratic procedures aim to build a significantly different type of nation-state, which might challenge what European policy-makers would consider to be democratically acceptable (see Volpi in pp. 20–38). Finally, we discuss the self-representation of the EU and its (lack of a clear) regional role (see Pace in pp. 39–58).

The combination of strong regimes in weak states⁴ and the reluctance of the EU to approach popular Islamist opposition groups in the MENA region creates a situation which – from an EU perspective – entails a very limited range of political options. Thus, while the EU promotes a liberal-democratic and capitalist type of governance that reflects its own experience and its own interests, it is also willing to compromise on what can be achieved in the region, especially in a context where MENA regimes and some secular opposition actors influence how the EU conceives both political change and, more importantly, stability. Thus, this book examines how MENA ruling elites encourage the EU to look at them as a ‘special case’ or as an exception in terms of the EU's preferred practices built around the notions of democratic accountability and human rights. Similarly, opposition actors, be they secular or Islamist, are not only influenced by the ways that the EU seeks to export its preferred norms, but also may contribute to the EU's preferred policies by virtue of their ideologies and policy positions. It follows that secular opposition parties and civil society movements tend to present themselves as the only genuine ‘democratic’ actors in the region in order to gain benefits from a privileged relationship with the EU and organize their political activities around the necessity of satisfying the requirements of this privileged relationship. This behaviour tends, however, to marginalize them in the domestic political game, as the wider population may not subscribe either to their tactics or proposed policies.⁵ In the case of the Islamists, related parties and movements generally accept democratic procedures while at the same time wishing to construct a different type of nation-state, which may offer a conceptual exception for the EU and the way it conceives of nation-state building in terms of founding norms. Yet, while Islamist movements in the region have generally accepted the primacy of elections as one of the crucial founding moments of democracy-building, the EU has remained highly sceptical of their involvement in the electoral process. Thus, the move towards electoral politics that many Islamist parties consider to be extremely significant is paradoxically perceived to be very problematic by the EU because such moves are not usually accompanied by the adhesion of Islamists to the liberal values that the EU considers inseparable from democratic procedures and institutions. In addition, it should be borne in mind that Islamist parties have usually not changed their views with respect to a number of international issues that the EU deems important for international stability, such as the Arab–Israeli question or the occupation of Iraq. It is thus the ambition of this book to move beyond an exclusively normative or exclusively realist approach, and to adopt a combined approach to understanding relations between authoritarian MENA regimes and opposition groups in Middle Eastern societies within the framework of external democracy promotion efforts. In some ways, this work has already begun with the contributions of authors like Pace and Bicchi, who in their respective work use the concepts of discursive constructivism and ideational inter-governmentalism in order to capture the complex mixture of realist and normative concerns at the heart of EU external policy-making.⁶ In this book, we assume such a mixture and examine in some detail how EU policy-making processes are informed by the feedback effects that the targeted domestic actors in the MENA generate. In other words, by highlighting the current reality on the ground in MENA, the book gives prominence to how local actors' actions themselves influence EU democracy promotion policies in the region.

Some claim that the whole idea of focusing on the EU's democracy promotion efforts is no longer enlightening. They suggest that the explicit focus on democracy promotion is in itself preventing new insights.⁷ Schlumberger, for example, suggests that instead we should focus on the nature of MENA states, in particular, on the inter-relationship between rents, rent-seeking, and the prospects for economic and political transformation to a market economy and democratic governance:

For current research, the key challenge is to increase our knowledge of the causes for Arab authoritarianism. This topic has only recently become a core area of research on Middle East politics. Donor strategies, in their turn, should follow research and be ready to enter the ‘post-democratization era’, take into account these causes and develop new ideas in order to explicitly address them … Such ideas need to start from present authoritarian conditions in recipient countries rather than from idealtype images of liberal democracies.⁸

But to our mind such claims still leave a research vacuum, which has thus far not been filled. In fact the underlying assumption of these critics is that a comprehensive, academic description and analysis of democracy promotion initiatives by the EU in the Mediterranean region and/or the wider Middle East has been achieved and nothing more needs to be said. While we agree on the focus on conditions in MENA countries, we endeavour to add MENA actors and their actions to the context. The contention here is that, in light of both scholarly and policy-making developments, a new form of analysis is necessary, particularly when the focus shifts from evaluating the policies of the EU to analysing how the targeted actors (MENA regimes and opposition actors) themselves react to and influence how such policies are designed and implemented.

From a scholarly point of view, the wider literature on democratization has now accepted the significant role that external actors can have in influencing processes of regime change, which were previously believed to be solely domestic affairs.⁹ This means that more refined, theoretical tools can now be employed to understand how specific EU policies and actors affect the transitional game within targeted countries. This allows scholarship to move beyond discussions of the EU's attempts at exporting the model of liberal democracy to the MENA and seek instead an approach where the focus is on domestic actors and their possible contributions in shaping the perceptions of the region of external actors. Previous discussions largely focused on the notorious failures of progress in democratization processes in the region and on the internal contradictions that characterize EU policy-making.¹⁰ From a policy-making point of view, much has changed since previous systematic analyses of the EU's relationship with the MENA,¹¹ because of the extremely important impact of the US-led ‘war on terror’, which has reconfigured both strategies and policy tools of action and led to the rise of security and stability go...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Preface
• 2 The EU's democratization agenda in the Mediterranean: a critical inside-out approach
• 3 Political Islam in the Mediterranean: the view from democratization studies
• 4 Paradoxes and contradictions in EU democracy promotion in the Mediterranean: the limits of EU normative power
• 5 Hamas in transition: the failure of sanctions
• 6 The EU as a realist actor in normative clothes: EU democracy promotion in Lebanon and the European Neighbourhood Policy
• 7 Constraints on the promotion of the rule of law in Egypt: insights from the 2005 judges' revolt
• 8 Egypt's moment of reform and its reform actors: the variety–capability gap
• 9 ‘Divided they stand, divided they fail’: opposition politics in Morocco
• 10 Islamist moderation without democratization: the coming of age of the Moroccan Party of Justice and Development?
• 11 Promoting democracy in Algeria: the EU factor and the preferences of the political elite
• 12 A clash of norms: normative power and EU democracy promotion in Tunisia
• Index