Europeanisation through Cooperation? EU Democracy Promotion in Morocco and Tunisia

Abstract

The Arab spring has highlighted once more the European Union's failure to bring about democratic change in the Middle East and North Africa through its Mediterranean democracy promotion policy. However, Arab authoritarian countries engage to different degrees in cooperation on democracy promotion, giving the EU more or less influence on domestic institutional change related to political participation, respect for human rights, and the rule of law. A comparison of domestic change and cooperation in Morocco and Tunisia in 2000–2010 shows that the EU has been instrumental in supporting and potentially reinforcing domestic reform initiatives. Yet the EU cannot trigger domestic institutional change in the first place. The degree of political liberalisation determines the fit between the domestic political agenda and external demands for reforms. It reflects different ‘survival strategies’ between political inclusion and exclusion and is therefore a scope condition for rather than the result of cooperation and change.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tanja Börzel, Thomas Risse, and two anonymous reviewers for most valuable comments and suggestions. This article is based on the doctoral dissertation ‘It Takes Two to Tango. The European Union and Democracy Promotion in the Mediterranean’, submitted and defended at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 2010.

Notes

1. The remainder of this section draws heavily on the empirical analysis of EU democracy promotion in Morocco and Tunisia until 2008 documented in detail in the author's doctoral dissertation and in particular parts of chapters six and seven (van Hüllen 2010a: 132–81, 232–43; see also van Hüllen 2009, 2010b). In the following, references to primary sources are only included for more recent data on cooperation in 2009–10.

2. This does not preclude that the EU might play a role in bringing about the different levels of political liberalisation in Morocco and Tunisia, e.g. through mechanisms of emulation, but it clearly shows the limits of the EU's attempts at directly promoting democracy and human rights.