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Abstract
This article examines to what extent the Arab Spring constitutes a critical juncture – a major turning point – for the EU’s sanctions policy towards Egypt, Libya, Syria and Tunisia. Based on a multidimensional critical juncture operationalization, we find that the Arab Spring only constitutes such a turning point for the EU’s sanctions policy towards Syria. Both the level and nature of measures differ substantially from previous years. By contrast, the EU’s sanctions practice towards Libya, Egypt and Tunisia shows more resilience. More generally, changes in the nature of the measures are prominent, whereas changes in the level of the policy instruments and in underlying norms and goals are limited.
Acknowledgements
We thank the three anonymous reviewers, the participants of the 2013 CES and 2015 EISA conferences as well as Arnout Geeraert and Colleen Carroll for their valuable feedback. Also, we would like to thank the officials and experts who kindly agreed to an interview. We appreciate the kind encouragement of the Wilfried Martens Fund, Miet Smet and Steven Van Hecke.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
16 The level refers to the number of sanctions, independently from the number of targets listed
17 Not included in Council Decision
1. The notion of Arab Spring refers to a series of political and socio-economic uprisings that spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa from December 2010 onwards. This paper focuses on the EU’s reaction during the first three years (2011–14). While recognizing the existence of cross-case variation in terms of protest magnitude, we assume that the Arab Spring constituted a similar external shock for the four cases studied (see Discussion).
2. The Southern Mediterranean refers to those countries located at the EU’s southern borders: Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria and Tunisia.
3. Sanctions are defined as politically inspired restrictions affecting bilateral trade, finance, travel and diplomatic relations imposed against a target in response to what a sender perceives as objectionable behaviour. While most of the measures contemplated under EU sanctions fall within the scope of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), our definition also includes measures imposed in the 1980s within the context of European Political Cooperation, as well as diplomatic sanctions which are often adopted outside these formal frameworks. Conditionality mechanisms foreseen in the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) are excluded.
4. These four episodes constitute the entire universe of the EU’s Arab Spring sanctions cases.
5. The interviews were conducted between April 2013 and March 2015. Names and affiliations are omitted to preserve confidentiality.
6. For an authoritative review of the critical juncture literature, see Hogan and Doyle (Citation2007).
7. Hogan’s empirical analysis suggests a timeframe of less than 12 months (Hogan, Citation2006).
8. For instance, changing the weights from {1, 2, 3} to {1, 1, 1} or {1, 2, 4} does not fundamentally alter the conclusions.
9. The Arab Spring cases are labelled ; the pre-Arab Spring or null sanctions cases
.
10. The absence of collective measures led some member states, like Germany, to impose bilateral sanctions (Peters & Weiland, Citation2013).
11. In the first period, 11 measures were imposed; in the second period, 12 measures were invoked.
12. Santini (Citation2008: 43) also notes that the EU froze Syrian assets and blacklisted several Syrian terrorist suspects. Yet, since these measures were anti-terrorism sanctions, they are excluded from our country-specific analyses. Then CFSP high representative Javier Solana reportedly announced that the Association Agreement would be unblocked only if Syria acted against the suspected flow of weapons to Lebanon and helped ease tensions between the pro-western government in Beirut and pro-Syrian opposition (Khalaf, Citation2007).
13. The lack of visible EU-wide diplomatic sanctions is in line with the recent trend of not including such measures by member states in Council Conclusions.
14. Only an import ban was active at the time of writing. The Council abandoned the full embargo in June 2013 (Council of the European Union, Citation2013a; SIPRI, Citation2013b).
15. In Hall’s reading, the former constitutes a ‘paradigm shift’ while the latter two are part of ‘normal policy making’ (Hall, Citation1993: 279–280, 291).