Twelfth session of Aula Árabe Universitaria and Aula Mediterránea, given by Andrea Teti (University of Aberdeen).

The event is also available on our Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/ss0_EFy3-aE

After a lukewarm reaction to the Tunisian revolution that erupted in late 2010, the European Union proclaimed that it had learned the lessons of the Arab uprisings in early 2011. So, what were those lessons according to the EU? Primarily that previous policy had failed in two ways: first of all, that support for authoritarian regimes in the name of “stability” and gradual “reformism” was wrong both pragmatically (because it did not lead to democratization) and ethically (since it did not “fit in with Europe’s core values”). And secondly, that supporting democracy and development had to undergo a matching “paradigm shift” and become much more inclusive than the EU had thought before the “Arab Spring.” Unfortunately, these commitments translated into little more than words. In fact, Brussels was prioritizing “stability” again by 2015 (as demonstrated by its acquiescence to the coup in Egypt). But even before then, contradictions had already arisen in the EU’s stance: despite announcing that it was breaking away from the past, closer examination showed that it had not been able to “change” the “paradigms” it had allegedly acknowledged as unsustainable.

How could the Union and its Member States publicly proclaim they were breaking away from their earlier Neighborhood Policy while reproducing the same strategies in the “Southern Partnership”? Part of the answer is clearly geopolitical and geo-economic. However, if we examine this even more closely, a careful linguistic analysis of EU policy strategy documents shows that their outlook on new policy strategies reproduces the logic, and sometimes even the terminology, of the Neighborhood Policy prior to the uprisings. This lack of a response and innovation is especially serious because, according to a painstaking analysis of public opinion poll data over the last decade, populations across the Arab MENA region have clearly and repeatedly pointed out that they “demand democracy,” especially a form of democracy which is socially just. This is not simply a matter of failures in institutional learning, but also that these failures are actively contributing to destabilization of the Mediterranean on both shores.

Casa Árabe has organized this twelfth lecture in the Aula Árabe Universitaria event series, to be given by Andrea Teti, a professor of International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, with the cooperation of the UAM’s EUROSUD - South European Studies Master’s program. As part of the pairing of both the Aula event series, the conference will also be the sixteenth session in IEMed’s “Aula Mediterrània” program, in collaboration with the Master’s degree program in Diplomacy and International Organizations at the CEI/UB. Ignacio Gutiérrez de Terán, a professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the UAM, will be participating in the presentation on behalf of the EUROSUD Master’s degree program, as will Jordi Quero, coordinator of the CEI/UB Master’s program, who will give the initial reaction on behalf of that program. The event will be moderated by Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe’s International Relations Coordinator.

Foto: CC-BY-4.0: © European Union 2020 – Source: EP

More information: https://en.casaarabe.es/event/democratization-versus-democracy-how-european-policy-failed-the-arab-uprisings