Routledge Handbook of EU–Middle East Relations

Dimitris Bouris, Daniela Huber, Michelle Pace, Dimitris Bouris, Daniela Huber, Michelle Pace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367330767
• eBook ISBN: 9781000475210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique européenne

EU–Middle East relations are multifaceted, varied and complex, shaped by historical, political, economic, migratory, social and cultural dynamics. Covering these relations from a broad perspective that captures continuities, ruptures and entanglements, this handbook provides a clearer understanding of trends, thus contributing to a range of different turns in international relations.

The interdisciplinary and diverse assessments through which readers may grasp a more nuanced comprehension of the intricate entanglements in EU–Middle East relations are carefully provided in these pages by leading experts in the various (sub)fields, including academics, think-tankers, as well as policymakers. The volume offers original reflections on historical constructions; theoretical approaches; multilateralism and geopolitical perspectives; contemporary issues; peace, security and conflict; and development, economics, trade and society.

This handbook provides an entry point for an informed exploration of the multiple themes, actors, structures, policies and processes that mould EU–Middle East relations. It is designed for policymakers, academics and students of all levels interested in politics, international and global studies, contemporary history, regionalism and area studies.

1
Introduction

Entanglements in EU–Middle East relations

Dimitris Bouris, Daniela Huber and Michelle Pace

DOI: 10.4324/9780429317873-1

EU/rope and the Middle East – the problematique of this handbook

Relations between the European Union (EU) and the Middle East have been the subject of close academic scrutiny for some time (Hollis, 1997; Dosenrode and Stubkjaer, 2002; Nonneman, 2004; Wassenberg and Faleg, 2012). The European Community/Union is often seen as a new kind of actor which has emerged from the ashes of the Second World War, a departure from its temporal “other” in the past (Wæver, 1996). However, from the viewpoint of the Middle East, through first an “anti-colonial” (Mohamedou, 2018; Gani, 2019; Salem, 2020) and then a “postcolonial” lens (Azeez, 2019; Ball and Mattar, 2018; Kandiyoti, 2002; Göçek, 2012; Bilgin, 2018), both hope and doubt have been shed on this development. Have relations really changed substantially, or is there actually more continuity than usually assumed? In other words, does the EC/EU really represent a discontinuity from Europe’s colonial past (Pace and Roccu, 2020; Huber, 2020)? To paraphrase Arundhati Roy, is “colonialism really post-? … So many kinds of entrenched and unrecognised colonialisms still exist. Aren’t we letting them off the hook?” (Roy and Sejpal, 2019).

Scholars have a tendency to focus more on discontinuities rather than on continuities, whilst continuities can actually also be disguised as discontinuities (Kamel, 2019a). Discontinuities – which refer to when “a culture sometimes ceases to think as it had been thinking up till then and begins to think other things in a new way” (Foucault, 2002: 56) – are rare, and the period following the end of World War II may well be considered a discontinuity “in disguise”. In his groundbreaking critical work Orientalism (1978), Edward Said traces, discusses and analyses Western forms of “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said, 1988: 3). In this work, Said laid out the foundations for what developed into what is now referred to as “postcolonial theory”. For Said, Orientalism serves as a conscious strategy/method through which the “Orient/Other/East” is socially constructed and produced. This construction in turn allows for its management and control through hegemonic practices and power relations. This method is operationalised through images, tropes and representations of the “Other” in the arts, the film industry, visual media, literature, and travel writing as well as other aspects of cultural and political appropriation. The West simply cannot deny its imperial past (see Haugbølle and Mazza chapter in this volume), which forms a solid part of its cultural and political history and which continues to influence its policies towards the “Other”. Indeed, as some chapters in this handbook show (Aydın-Düzgit et al., Haugbølle and Mazza, Lafi, Sen, Bilgic and Cebeci), EU–Middle East relations are heavily influenced by historical representations and colonial hierarchies to this day.

As Pace and Roccu have argued, colonialism is “silently inscribed in the genes of the European integration project since its origins” (2020: 671). In fact, both political practices and the related “literature on the role of memory in European integration has predominantly had an inward focus. Thus, it has failed to adequately grapple with Europe’s colonial past and its influence on the EU’s external relations with the Mediterranean” (Pace and Roccu, 2020: 672). As a result of this amnesia, the EU continues with these violent practices, most evidently in the areas of migration (Qadim, 2014; see also İşleyen and Fakhoury in this handbook) and arms exports (see Wearing and Schumacher chapters in this handbook) which directly flow into Middle East conflicts. When the EU conceptualises the Middle East in politics and economics, it prioritises authoritarian regimes for the sake of “security” and “stability” (Roccu and Voltolini, 2018) and has, as a result, fostered a trade imbalance in the EU’s favour (Langan and Price, 2020, Aboushady and Zaki chapter in this volume). Furthermore, as Badarin and Wildeman show in Chapter 36, this is also evident in aid policies. “As military forces and direct colonialism became unsustainable in post–World War II international politics, the EU used aid as a foreign policy device to maintain its influence in the Global South”. These practices are embedded in a larger social and cultural fabric in which the Middle East continues to be portrayed as exotic or dangerous, and gazed upon through gendered lenses in which men are construed as violent and women as passive victims to be saved by Western (wo)men, including through military intervention (Huber, 2017; see also the two chapters by Jünemann and Muehlenhoff in this handbook).

How can we understand the continuity in how the EU gazes at the Middle East and formulates its policy on the basis of how it constructs the Middle East politically, economically, socially and culturally? This handbook addresses this general problematique from a longue-durée perspective, enquiring into the continuity in relations between the EC/EU and the Middle East. With this larger question in mind, it aims to place its core raison d’être at the intersection between the two regions covered here. It does so by offering an equal platform to both Middle Eastern and European viewpoints, as well as to interdisciplinary perspectives that question the manner in which relations between the EC/EU and the Middle East have evolved – since the foundation of the EC and, in particular, the EU, in their various dimensions, including political, economic, societal, cultural, security and migration related ones. Thus, while the handbook is conceived of in its larger structure around the gravitational point of historical legacies and continuities which reverberates in the larger themes covered, the authors of single chapters adopt their own and different theoretical, conceptual and methodological lenses tailored to the specific topics they explore. Adopting diverse viewpoints, the collection of chapters in this handbook accounts for the perspective that what we see depends on where we stand in the sense that “every view is a view from somewhere” (Abu-Lughod, 1991: 161). This is most evident in geographical and disciplinary terms. Regarding geographical denotations, we firstly note that we couple the terms “European Union” and “Middle East”, that is, a political organisation (the EU is not Europe) with a geographic entity (see Mamadouh in this handbook). Furthermore, both terms – European Union and Middle East – are defined from the stand- and viewpoint of Europe (see also Bilgin, 2004, 2017). As Kamel has pointed out, unlike “geographical names used to refer to other regions or continents – the ‘Middle East’ refers to an area of the world largely defined from the perspective of those living on the two sides of the Atlantic” (Kamel, 2019b: 31). While the terms “Orient” and “Occident” were coined already during the Roman Empire, they became “popularised” through the Suez Canal crisis (1956) and the Eisenhower Doctrine (1957); before, “Near East” (Western Balkans) and “Middle East” (Levant) were used to describe various parts of the Ottoman Empire. As Ali Bilgic points out in this handbook, the “Middle East as a geopolitical ‘truth’ is a discursive regime which essentialises and instrumentalises a certain Middle East for Euro/Western geopolitical interests”.

But while this book uses the terms “European Union” and “Middle East”, it problematises the Eurocentric viewpoint from which they have been produced. It does so in six broad issue areas which have emerged in scholarship on EU–Middle East relations, namely history, theory, multilateralism/geopolitics, contemporary politics, peace/security/conflict and economics/development/trade. Within these issue areas, it also mixes a variety of views from diverse disciplines with the aim of cutting across these, including history, international relations (IR), area studies, comparative political science, sociology, political economy, etc.

Combining various perspectives helps to break through the boundaries and limitations often imposed by each singular discipline on its own. Amitav Acharya has recently argued that much of IR theory is actually “European/American area studies masquerading as universal” and that “in most parts of the world, IR rode on the back of area studies” (Acharya 2020). In this vein, literature in the field of IR – as Dionigi points out in this handbook – has represented the Middle East and the EU as two “exceptionalisms” whereby the first is produced as an antithesis to the second. Another example which highlights the necessity of interdisciplinary work is the issue of trade, typically studied in (international) political economy rather than IR or comparative political science, a tendency which depoliticises the role socio-economic inequalities play in both democratisation and decolonialisation and so contributes to neutralising divisions between rich and poor.¹

In trying to irritate such established geographical and disciplinary view- and standpoints when studying EU–Middle East relations, this handbook situates itself in what is crystallising into a fifth debate (or rupture) in the field of international relations, focused on questions of Eurocentrism/racism and IR, as well as the imperative to decolonise IR. While such questions have been raised in the fields of postcolonialism and decoloniality, mainstream IR has, for a long time, not entered into a conversation with these literatures (Nora Fisher-Onar’s chapter in this handbook outlines what such a conversation could look like; see also Sabaratnam, 2011). The debate has already entered related fields, in particular history and sociology (Bhambra, 2010); and it has also more recently been simmering in IR, evident not only in the call to decolonise university curricula ( Jivraj, 2020) but also in the literature which has been picking up on a non-Eurocentric/decentring IR (Acharya, 2010; Acharya and Buzan, 2019; Tickner, 2020; Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004) and European foreign policy analysis (Onar and Nicolaïdis, 2013; Keukeleire and Lecocq, 2018; Qadim, 2014), as well as on racism and IR (Rutazibwa, 2020; Anievas, Manchanda, and Shiliam, 2014). This debate has recently accelerated due to two developments which happened almost at the same moment. Firstly, within the IR community, a virulent debate surrounded the publication of an article by Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit on “Is Securitization Theory Racist? Civilizationism, Methodological Whiteness, and Antiblack Thought in the Copenhagen School” (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2020) in the journal Security Dialogue to which the leading Copenhagen School scholars Ole Wæver and Barry Buzan published a reply in the same journal (Wæver and Buzan, 2020), taking the debate also to social media. As the debate was in full steam, George Floyd was brutally murdered by a US policeman and the #BlackLivesMatter movement has since gained momentum in the US, but also across the world, raising questions of racism and colonialism also in Europe where – for the first time in history – statues of colonial rulers responsible for genocides were taken down (Knudsen and Andersen, 2019; Cornelius, 2020). This has also forced the IR discipline to start engaging its own racist and colonial heritage. The US Foreign Policy Magazine even brought the issue of IR and racism/colonialism to a larger audience (Salamanca et al., 2012). While this debate is in its beginning and is evolving, it is particularly relevant for the study of EU–Middle East relations as these prevail on the back of European colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East, as well as of racism against Muslims and Jews in Europe – which has been growing particularly since the “war on terror” period and has now even entered European parliaments and governments in the form of ethnocentric nationalist parties. Many scholars of EU–Middle East relations have, for a long time, been studying the legacies and actual remnants of colonialism, most strikingly present in Israeli settler-colonialism and the expropriation of Palestinian land and disenfranchisement of Palestinian rights (Salamanca et al., 2012; Barakat, 2018; Qato, 2020), but also the US–European occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq (Welch, 2008) and intervention in Libya (Nyere, 2020; Capasso, 2020), as well as the Russian intervention in Syria.

Ruptures, contradictions and paradoxes in EU–Middle East relations

Drawing on Foucault and Said, we have so far argued that there might be more continuity – since the ‘end’ of colonialism – in EC/EU–Middle East relations than typically assumed. This, however, does not mean that there have not been ruptures – moments in time when contradictions and paradoxes in EU–Middle East relations become particularly evident, when apparently harmonious relations suddenly experience a breach, and when moments of truth emerge in which silences in a discourse – what has been said and what has been left unsaid – are exposed for the underlying interests they serve. The end of the Second World War was a rupture for both Europe and the Middle East. Europe was divided into “East” and “West” with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface/Acknowledgments
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: entanglements in EU–Middle East relations
• Part I History
• Part II Theoretical perspectives
• Part III Multilateralism and geopolitical perspectives
• Part IV MENA–EU relations in the contemporary world
• Part V Peace, security and conflict in the Middle East
• Part VI Development, economics, trade and societal issues