Prior to the Arab Spring, the policies pursued by the EU and most of the Member States were focused on dealing with the regimes. In most cases, European governments shied away from dealing directly with the small, courageous and genuinely independent civil society movements or groups of individuals who campaigned for human rights. The EU’s interlocutor was the status quo. Moreover, the EU really had no unified, coherent long term strategy towards the region. As for the Member States, they had their own network of bilateral economic and trade ties built up over many years. [...]
At the time, the aim of the ENP was to foster stability, security and prosperity in these countries. It reflected the EU’s first European Security Strategy drawn up by Javier Solana. That document referred to establishing an arc of stability, from Europe’s east around to Europe’s south. Clearly for those campaigning for democracy in the MENA countries, neither the ENP nor the EU’s Security Strategy addressed the underlying tensions in the region: the irreconcilability of authoritarianism and democratisation; that the kind of stability prevailing in the MENA countries was inherently unstable.
The Arab Spring could have and should have provided the EU with a new and bold opportunity to radically overhaul its policies toward the region as a whole and towards particular countries. Certainly, in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring, the EU did realise that its previous policies had been flawed. But because of the sheer scale of the upheaval engulfing that Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt particularly, the EU scrambled for a reactive policy. [...]
The long term consequences of Europe’s role as bystander in the Syrian war is extremely damaging. Salam Kawakibi summed it up in a piece he wrote for Carnegie Europe. He argued that if the Europeans do not take the Syrian conflict seriously, other global actors will not take the Europeans seriously either. Indeed, one wonders if European governments now see its southern neighbourhood through the lens of security and stability in order to ensure the security of EU citizens. [...]
Echoing the Commission’s Review, the official insisted that the EU’s policies would be able to reconcile security and stabilisation with promoting good governance, ‘democracy, rule of law and human rights.’ But as the Commission itself states throughout the 21-page long review, it is the security and stabilisation issues that take priority.
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