Euro-Mediterranean partnership and youth policies in the MENA: why policy discourse travels but implementation doesn’t

ABSTRACT

This article explores the transfer of European approaches to youth policy to MENA regimes through their Mediterranean partnership programmes. Drawing on the papers and research conducted for the POWER2YOUTH (P2Y) research project, this conclusion investigates how European institutional and MENA governmental interests in similar models of youth policy-making converged but also why this convergence remained largely a feature of the discursive domain and did not translate into effective implementation or institutional embedding of policy in the authoritarian contexts of the MENA.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• policy
• European Union
• Euro-Mediterranean Partnership
• MENA

The POWER2YOUTH (P2Y) research project and the various articles in this special issue have demonstrated how youth as a social category have been constructed by the dominant economic and political elites in the region. They have developed narratives which have influenced how young people became a subject of concern for policy implications and how they are represented within their polities and in the region at large. These narratives, however, are not constructs of the MENA regimes as such, but they are also a reflection of how countries in the North, especially the European Union have developed their own narrative towards young people in general and towards young people in the MENA in particular. Drawing on the articles presented by the contributors to this special issue, in addition to research that was developed by other contributors to the P2Y project, this conclusion discusses the policy implications of the decades-long Euro-Mediterranean partnership and its impact on young people in the region.

The research problem addressed here in this conclusion begins by noting the stark contrast between lively youth policy discourses within the MENA regimes and a reality of largely absent or institutionally hollow actual youth policy. The P2Y project found that, when it does exist, youth policy is poorly implemented and barely funded. Furthermore, it has been clearly instrumentalised by regimes as a tool for co-optation and control of young people. Far from addressing the needs of young people, youth policy may actually exacerbate their multiple insecurities (Calder et al., 2017). While there was much talk of youth-specific and cross-sectoral youth policy at the national level, and whilst much of this was generated by international partners such as the EU, a survey of public policies showed that where policy exists it is constructed principally to govern youth rather than to address their needs and interests (Catusse & Destremau, 2016). MacDonald and King (2020) demonstrate, young people are recipients of public action, not its authors and constructed as a target for public policy around the twin narratives of ‘youth as hope of the nation’ and ‘youth as threat.’ For policy purposes, they are defined as an exclusive cohort, with arbitrary boundaries set by regime determinations of what constitutes an appropriate, desirable, or convenient transition to adulthood and when this should occur. In reality, however, their life experiences are deeply intersected by a wide range of other identities and profoundly different from the transitions that their parents experienced and policy-makers anticipate, not least in terms of their prolonged and even indefinite extension. Importantly, ‘the mechanisms of governing youth are definitely embedded in ad hoc institutions but are not the exclusive domain of these institutions specialising in youth policy and action’ (Catusse & Destremau, 2016, p. 13). In fact, most public policy was shown to serve two principal objectives in every country analysed, albeit with some contextual and institutional differentiation between them: on the one hand, regimes utilize public policy as a means of promoting economic development models which unfetter neo-liberal capital whilst securing cronyist rents for political elites; on the other, public policy is a means to co-opt cohorts of the population into existing political structures whilst disempowering or coercing those who would challenge them (Calder et al., 2017).

These disappointing conclusions are echoed in other research on the Arab countries. Another research project that was closely linked to P2Y on youth in the MENA region – SAHWA – concluded that youth policy in five Arab Mediterranean countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, and Lebanon) remained predicated on the narrative of ‘youth as problem,’ overly focused on its function as an (insufficiently matched) reserve army of labour, overly centralized with low community involvement and a heavy reliance on external donor funding, discouraging of independent youth participation, gender-blind and reproductive of social and economic inequalities (Kovacheva et al., 2018, p. 26).

In 2016, a regional review of youth policies in the Arab region conducted by researchers in UNESCO and the UNDP and focusing on Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan, Palestine, and Kuwait concluded that youth, although often consulted in the early stage of needs assessment, were largely absent from policy-formulation processes. No permanent youth structures had been set up for policy-generation other than a youth forum in Lebanon. Youth policy documents, while professing alignment with international standards and frameworks (rights-based, inclusive, participatory, comprehensive, gender-sensitive, cross-sectoral, evidence-based) have not been translated into tangible mechanisms, governance tools or indicators, and are framed in anachronistic jargon which is often inaccessible to many young people. They remain theoretical documents and are not backed with implementation strategies or action plans, ‘suffering from instable institutional structures, insufficient democratic reforms and multi-stakeholders’ managerial and technical capacities’ (UNESCO, 2016, p. 4).

Youth and public policy in the MENA

In one way, these findings are not entirely surprising. Youth had little political significance before the rise of the modern state in the MENA region, and barely featured as a target constituency for public policy. Children progressed directly into the life-stage of adulthood: boys were propelled at an early age into the world of work, while girls progressed into married life and child rearing. In patrimonial social contexts that valorized age and seniority, young people – especially young women – were for the most part subordinate and silent recipients of policy which targeted more generalized cohorts.

The emergence of the relevant age-group in modern Arab societies – Mannheim defined the formative age as between 17 and 25 – was primarily the product of a revolutionary introduction of modern education beginning in the early 19^th century (Erlich, 2000, p. 48). At institutions such as the Khedivial Law School in Cairo, the Galatasaray Secondary School in Istanbul, the Sadiki College in Tunis, and later the universities of Cairo, Algiers, Baghdad, and Damascus, the sons of prosperous families adapted the new-found knowledge into programmes for national political revival. As these young men progressed through education and the civilian administrations of colonial rule, and despite physically ageing themselves, they impelled an adjustment in public and political discourse which now recognized ‘youth’ as a synonym for national renovation. The Young Egypt movement, the Tunisian Neo-Destour Party, and a corresponding generation of shabab (youth) organizations at the forefront of anti-colonial struggles across the region (Bennani-Chraïbi & Farag, 2007, p. 13), all contributed to a narrative positioning youth at the heart of the nation-building project. They not only provided the intellectual energy for political change but, through their recruitment into the local military forces and militias they also provided the muscle-power in the struggle for independence.

But youth as a cohort with distinct needs and interests were still not a significant target constituency for public policy-makers. For many years the corporatist models of political organization which prevailed in most MENA countries identified their young citizens by function rather than age (Tohamy, 2016, p. 52). The state interacted with young people as children in need of education, as students to be mobilized, as workers, as members of the armed forces or security services, or as age-specific cohorts of the single or dominant political party. Through limited and carefully supervised national associations, parties, and student unions, the energy and creativity of young people were harnessed by the state in support of its own project of nation-building and regime consolidation (or in the case of young women, for reproducing the nation): when youth challenged this project, or asserted alternative agendas, it was either suppressed or channelled into more ‘youth-appropriate’ non-political activities such as sport or cultural activity. It was no coincidence that the primary authority with responsibility for young people in most MENA countries was a Ministry or equivalent which included the two words youth and sport in a single title. Through the implicit assertion that the energies of young people (especially young men) had to be pro-actively directed towards healthy pursuits, the twin narratives of ‘youth as hope of the nation’ and ‘youth as deviant, disruptive and a potential threat’ evolved as justifications for both the mobilization of young people and regime control over them.

Young people were nonetheless the beneficiaries of étatist development models which rapidly expanded education and health care, raised living standards, and allowed new opportunities for leisure. It might even be said that these welfarist regimes were responsible for the emergence of an identifiable youth cohort:

In the enthusiasm of the new era, the state built for the first time in a grand scale schools, universities and other facilities for what became the first mass generation of adolescents, which was created by the extension of the intermediate age between childhood and adulthood from 13 to 25. Whereas previously the majority of youth had immediately entered adulthood with early employment and marriage, now its opportunities for forming its own opinions and gaining personal experiences during this intermediate age were much larger (Meijer, 2000, p. 4).

The international community and its impact on youth policy in the MENA

Recognition of youth as a target category for public policy beyond education and sport came only through international engagements, although even the early initiatives sought to mobilize Arab youth for solidaristic identity-building purposes. In 1983 the

UN Western Asian Regional Preparatory Meeting for the International Year of Youth recommended that each member government in the region should formulate appropriate national youth policies, prompting the establishment of a Council of Arab Ministers of Youth and Sports in the same year. The Council argued for a basic needs of youth approach to be incorporated into national planning, defining those needs as the provision of a nationalist education, the unity of the youth of the Arab nation, the educational values of youth activities and sports, opportunities for youth to use their energies to the fullest, support for the youth of Palestine and special attention to gifted youth, special groups of youth (the handicapped, delinquents and young Arab expatriates) (ICNYP, 2005, p. 27).

By 1998, a more ‘universalist’ understanding of youth policy propagated by the UN made itself felt when the Council of Arab Ministers of Youth and Sport adopted a resolution on the implementation of the UN’s World Programme of Action on Youth, but little progress was made in any country on considering what this might mean in practice or how it might best be done. In fact, when youth policy discourses did begin to make inroads into the region, the impetus came rather from Europe than from the UN.

The evolution of youth as a European policy constituency

The European organizations have long understood the importance of drawing youth into a shared sense of ownership of the European project. The Council of Europe (CE) sponsored a range of initiatives, responding to the ‘youth crisis’ of 1968. In 1970, the CE set up the European Youth Centre in Strasbourg, in 1982 a new inter-governmental Committee of Experts on Youth Questions, and in 1985 the first European Conference of Ministers responsible for Youth. In 1988 the Youth for Europe programme was established funding youth exchanges and volunteering opportunities. Through these initiatives, the narrative of youth evolved to understand the construction of European citizens as being more than an educative task. Young people had the potential to be participant citizens in democratic politics, but could also become alienated, rebellious, and desirous of alternative lifestyles.

Göksel (2014), in a paper for SAHWA, has explained how this led to two features of European youth policy; on the one hand, policy responded to the dual narratives of ‘youth as resource’ and ‘youth as problem’, but on the other, it shifted the role of the state and transnational authorities from being one of government to one of governance, the latter being considered as a facilitating and empowering rather than determining action.

By the late 1980s, the Council of Europe (CE) was positioning itself as the global pioneer in developing youth policy objectives, implementation programmes, and evaluation methods. Member states were encouraged to invest in young people through an opportunity-focused (rather than problem-oriented) manner, to engage young people themselves in policy discussion, and to develop policy approaches which drew on multi-national, bilateral (country-specific) and standing resource support systems. This latter point was key – it established the CE as ‘expert’, provided legitimacy for policy programmes devised at a national level but drawing on multi-lateral resources, and suggested that youth as a cohort had, at least at some level, a shared, transnational, cohort-specific set of interests and needs.

The European Commission (EC) was slower in growing an inclination towards youth-specific policy-making. Until the 1990s, its legal remit towards young people was confined to the exchange of young workers and then to their education and even then only within the context of subsidiarity, that is when policy could clearly be seen to be better enacted at institutional rather than national levels (Tel Haar, 2015, p. 6). There was greater enthusiasm for ‘soft’ instruments which could enervate youthful enthusiasm for Europe itself. In 1988, for example, the EU initiated the programme Youth for Europe, (renovated in 2007 as Youth in Action) fostering tens of thousands of exchange visits every year to bring young Europeans into contact with one another (Nikos, 2009).

Rising, sustained, and generalized youth unemployment in the mid-1990s, and evidence of growing political disaffection among youth, provided the impetus for a series of White Papers which brought youth closer to mainstream policy-making, for example, through the 1997 European Employment Strategy and the 2001 document A New Impetus for European Youth (European Commission, 2001). The latter proposed a new framework for cooperation between the CE and the EC, consisting of two components: on the one hand, policy should reflect increasing cooperation between EU countries, while on the other youth issues should be mainstreamed within sectoral policies. The paper identified four areas of policy activity: enabling young people to participate in public life, improving information on European issues for young people, encouraging voluntary service and increasing knowledge of youth-related issues, collectively forming the 2002 Framework for European Cooperation in the Field of Youth. In 2005 the CE adopted the so-called Youth Pact, which committed member states to policy activism in the fields of employment integration and social advancement; education, training, and mobility; and the reconciliation of work and family life (Tel Haar & Copeland, 2015, p. 8) while in 2009 the EC launched its own assessment of Europe’s youth population (Youth – Investing and Empowering) which encouraged all member states to initiate permanent and regular (structured) dialogue with their young citizens. The 2009 resolution on a renewed framework for European cooperation in the youth field (2010–2018) (OJ [2009] C311/1) established two overall objectives for the renewed framework: more and equal opportunities for young people in education and in the labour market, on the one hand, and active citizenship, social inclusion, and solidarity of young people on the other (Tel Haar & Copeland, 2015, p. 8).

With the CE and the EC both committing to the framework, known as the EU Youth Strategy, there was now a consensus-based reference point for both the objectives of youth policy and the best-practice pathways to its implementation, as well as increasingly coherent policy activism, and its mainstreaming across diverse areas of social policy where ‘harder’ modes of governance apply.

In 2012, the first EU Youth Report summarizing the results of the first ‘work cycle’ of the EU Youth Strategy (2010–2012) stated that ‘nearly all Member States report that the renewed framework has reinforced existing priorities at national level, with several member States emphasising its direct impact’ (European Commission, 2012, p. 10). Most EU countries were reporting that they had introduced or maintained youth-specific legislation, all but two countries had institutional mechanisms in place for cross-sectoral approaches to youth policy and twenty-two countries reported that the EU Youth Strategy had impacted upon youth priorities at the national level. In other words, the Council and the Commission had achieved their objectives of becoming youth policy innovators and standard setters for the member states.

Tackling youth unemployment in the wake of the global financial crisis was at the heart of national policies, with an evolving focus on those deemed most at risk of social exclusion, the so-called NEETS (not in education, employment, or training) (European Commission, 2015). A second priority was fostering inclusion and participation, with the emphasis on engaging multiple stakeholders and empowering youth to participate in policy formulation and implementation. By the time the second report was published in 2015, another priority was also making itself felt. A Communication from the Commission issued with the Draft 2015 Joint Report noted that the economic crisis had impacted young people inequitably and that widening gaps in income and opportunity threatened to undermine the social fabric itself by fuelling extremist violence and radicalization. While there was nothing new about youth being securitized (Nyman, 2013) Sukarieh and Tannock (2017) have argued forcefully that the formulation of a ‘youth, peace and security’ agenda, of which initiatives such as the European Youth Against Violent Extremism were a part, represented a new ‘turn’ in global youth policy discourse and one which inevitably turned European eyes towards linkages between the youth bulge, political instabilities, and socio-economic grievances in the SEM countries. According to Harb et al. (2020) young people prior to the uprisings were often referred to as apathetic, and disinterested in political participation. Nevertheless, after the uprisings, they were perceived as a security threat, leading to a homogenization of youth representation across the region. This has led to the negligence of the fact that young people have various dynamic subjectivities, which cannot and should not be reduced to this dichotomy of either securitizing youth or implying their apathy.

In addition, European and MENA policies fail to address the insecurities that are faced by young people themselves in the region. According to MacDonald and King (2020), policy initiatives do not take into consideration that fact that young women are most vulnerable to sexual harassment, that young Palestinians, for instance, face violence when conducting simple activities like travelling to their universities, or political activists being arrested and detained by the authorities in various MENA regimes.

Youth and the Euro-Mediterranean partnership

Europe’s evolving interest in youth had already extended beyond the confines of its own member states. The 1995 Barcelona Process, or Euro–Mediterranean Partnership, was an ambitious effort to create an enlarged region of shared security, prosperity, and cultural exchange, moving beyond traditional understandings of development assistance to a new form of partnership-based mutual growth. From its inception, the Barcelona Process overtly identified young people as a key constituency, both in terms of restructuring the SEM youth labour force to better service neo-liberal economics and in building the human links between the partner states.

A Euro-Med Youth Programme was established in 1998 by the EC and the Euro-Mediterranean (MED) Committee as part of the third ‘basket’ of initiatives aiming to create a partnership in social, cultural, and human affairs. The EuroMed Youth Programme extended the existing Youth for Europe programme, including exchanges, voluntary service, and support measures, overseen by a system of national coordinators based in member countries. From the start, there was an unacknowledged contradiction in this third basket in terms of a shared language of civil society enhancement when in reality MENA regimes remained undemocratic and coercive. The European Framework for Youth Policy asserted the principle that ‘youth policy should conform to the political objectives of the relevant institution (local council, national government or intergovernmental organisation’ but also that ‘learning and exercising citizenship skills must lie at the core of [European] youth policy’ (Siurala, 2012, p. 7). Together, these principles place a burden on political institutions to devise and implement youth policy, but they also allow for local differentiation in policy objectives, processes and outcomes, as well as reproducing existing power constructions which both define the aspirations associated with transition to adulthood and privilege policy that ensures their own political sustainability. Inevitably, this placed an unspoken tension at the heart of European efforts to export their policy paradigm. Understanding youth citizenship in the European context is about recruiting young people to actively reproduce an assumed democratic socio-political context whilst simultaneously being actively prepared for the labour market (Siurala, 2012, p. 16). But when European youth policy is exported through the external affairs agenda, the necessity of working at the level of inter-governmental politics brings the reality of alternative and undemocratic constructions of citizenship.

Despite the enthusiasm of youth organizations around the Mediterranean, the outcomes of this phase were limited. Lacking previous experience of youth-specific policy and empowerment, and operating within illiberal political contexts, the capacities of national coordinators and agencies in southern partner states were limited and variable. Access to exchange programmes was uneven and lacked transparency. There was little or no local tradition of youth volunteering to build upon in most countries and the visibility of programmes was low. On the positive side, the programmes helped promote the idea of youth and ‘youth work’ as involving something beyond sport among national policy-makers, created opportunities for youth organizations to meet one another and speak to policy communities, and established the role of the EU in influencing national youth policies (ECOTEC, 2001, p. 9).

To this end, the SALTO-YOUTH network of resource centres to support advanced learning and training opportunities for youth was expanded to include a Euromed Resource Centre, offering training, accreditation, research, educational tools, and best practice guidance for youth work, youth organizations, and youth policy. While the framework and tools for this training were largely driven by Europe’s own experiences and values, some adjustments were made to accommodate regional differences. For example, the age group itself has been expanded from the original 15–25 category to a new 13–30 category, reflecting the more prolonged transition period in southern partner states, and decentralized management has allowed individual Youth Units more scope to prioritize at a local level.

Nonetheless, successful diffusion of the paradigm relied on MENA government institutions which ultimately lacked capacity, were only interested in exercising power and patronage over young people, and were ultimately to be among the targets for youthful outrage and rebellion. In addition, these policies have failed to address pertinent issues facing people living under authoritarianism, increased securitization and occupation as is the case in Palestine, for instance (Musleh, 2016; Murphy, 2017). After the Oslo Peace Accords, funds flooded in to develop new initiatives of youth inclusion, civic and political participation, however, these became only to the satisfaction of the donor communities, rather than to the development of an organic civil society in Palestine (Musleh, 2016). In addition, as Welchman, Zambelli, and Salih (2020) argue that the human rights discourse that is adopted by international actors has been adopted to depoliticize the Palestinian struggle against occupation. While on the other hand, for young people belonging to the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), this depoliticization is a ‘source of disconnect.’

Since the Arab uprisings which started in 2011, the EU has worked with other international organizations to elevate youth as a priority policy arena in its southern partner states. In 2013, it offered a revised version of its 2009 Youth Policy Manual – How to Develop a National Youth Strategy document specifically tailored for the Arab countries (Denstad et al., 2013). A new NET-MED programme (2014–2017) was funded by the EU’s DG for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations (DG-NEAR) to build the capacity of young people and promote their civic engagement in developing and implementing more substantive national policies and strategies on youth.

By increasing youth participation, NET-MED Youth mainstreams youth issues and priorities across national decision and policy-making in 10 southern European neighbourhood countries to improve the situation of young people (UNESCO, 2019, p. 1). This is done through mapping youth organizations at the national level, training young people to lobby and advocate for national youth policies, monitoring youth representation in the media, and building young people’s participation in national dialogues on employment and training.

The EU has thus witnessed an evolution in its youth policy activity in MENA countries. The uprisings indicated that political systems, structures, and institutions remain exclusionary, patrimonial, and authoritarian, and while the responsibility for securing the future of young people is directed primarily at national regimes, the EU works hard not just to impress upon the latter the need for youth policy-making (as well as its own formulas and technical support) but also supports young people in acquiring the skills and capacities to better organize and lobby for their own needs and interests.

An interesting commentary on this comes through Omar Soni’s P2Y study of the internationalization of youth policy in Tunisia post Arab Spring. He demonstrated how the promotion of youth policy agendas by international organizations like the EU carried with them thematic and ideological biases which limited the appeal and efficacy of their youth policy models and initiatives among Tunisian themselves (Somi, 2016). Youth policy projects pre-determined the areas for action to those favoured by Europe, they were overly dependent on recruiting privileged French or English speaking Tunisian participants and partners, and they presumed the inevitability and desirability of European models of political democracy, none of which necessarily resonated with the broader Tunisian population or the political parties competing for their support. Somi also points out that many international organizations also deliberately by-passed state institutions, attempting to address youth exclusion issues directly themselves, assuming public bodies to be inefficient, corrupt, and under-resourced, and it is certainly true that many of the European initiatives focused on capacity-building among youth associations and CSOs rather than within state institutions. Similarly, Pierre Tainturier’s (2016) P2Y research indicated that external donor support for youth-led CSOs can further the empowerment and emancipation of individuals, and particularly young men, and can legitimize their participation in public arenas but does not guarantee that all such organizations will be ‘capable of overcoming dominant social representations’ or of overcoming institutional exclusion.

Policy impact on youth

The extent to which these various policies, whether Middle Eastern policy initiatives or European policy initiatives, have impacted young people in the region is questionable. For instance, even though employment policy initiatives have been top priority for European funding opportunities and for MENA policy-making, young people themselves do not feel that their governments are doing enough to help them find employment opportunities. These range from 84 percent in Tunisia to 76 percent in Egypt (Sika, 2020). On the other hand, another pertinent problem is the fact that those who are employed, are employed in extreme precariat conditions, as is demonstrated by Paciello and Pioppi (2020) in their analysis of the working-class youth. For example, the increase in the employment levels of young people in the private sector has changed the job dynamics in the region. The majority of young people working in the private sector work under precarious conditions, with the proportion of those who have permanent contracts or social insurance declining over the past two decades. For instance, 80 percent of youth in Egypt, 60 percent in Lebanon, 66 percent in Morocco, 63 percent in Tunisia, and 83 percent in the OPT have no work contracts. Welfare benefits are rare, particularly in the OPT, Tunisia, and Egypt, where over half of all employed young people report to having no employment benefits at all. The majority of young people have no access to health insurance. For instance, in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, more than 80 percent of respondents have said that they do not have access to health insurance (Paciello & Pioppi, 2020, p. XX). These employment-related problems, in addition to low returns to education, have led many young people to strive for migrating either to the Gulf or to Europe. For instance, in Tunisia, 70 percent of young people want to migrate for employment purposes, while 57 percent want to permanently live abroad (Sika, 2020).

Policy initiatives have also prioritized advanced learning and various training opportunities for young people. Nevertheless, young people in our fieldwork have demonstrated their concern over education policies in their respective regimes, in addition to their dissatisfaction with the school to employment transition. Morocco is an interesting point, where the P2Y qualitative fieldwork demonstrated that young people believe that the education system therein does not help them to develop their skills nor their critical thinking and creativity (Zerhouni & Akesbi, 2016).

Conclusion: European influence on youth policy

This conclusion to the special issue suggests that Europe has succeeded in exporting youth policy discourse but not managed to influence its enactment in the MENA. This is because, while MENA governments and European interests converge in recognizing the salience of youth policy as a political instrument, they do so for different reasons. For Europe, youth policy serves to address issues of youth marginalization and exclusion which inhibit young people from engaging productively in the labour force as and when capital requires it. It further serves as a means for reproducing democratic and participatory formats of political citizenship which ensure political stability and socio-economic inclusion. This is vital if Europe is to be protected from waves of uncontrollable migration or Islamic radicalization coming from the MENA countries and accounts for the promotion of youth policy through its external affairs machinery. Thus, the politicization of European programmes in support of youth and youth policy, both at the European institutional end and in terms of the structure and system of Tunisia, has undermined Europe’s capacity to influence broader debates and local policies towards young people (Göksel & Şenyuva, 2016).

Ultimately, the European ambition to propagate youth policies among its Mediterranean partner states could only fall foul of one, very basic, contradiction: the European vision of democratic citizenship being fostered through youth participation and activism – and on which its prescriptions for national youth policy relied – are not shared by all its MENA partners. Although the MENA regimes have been increasingly and painfully aware of the political instabilities that can result from high youth unemployment and disengagement from formal politics, they have had no interest in empowering genuine youthful democratic citizenship or autonomous civil society, but rather have used the European (and other international) initiatives as pathways for legitimation, rent-seeking, and incorporation of selected and compliant communities of young people. The Euro–Mediterranean Partnership fostered new policy discourses around youth and established the authority of Europe’s own languages and toolkits for its design and implementation. Moreover, it provided networks, funding, and opportunities for youth organizations and associations in the MENA to develop grass-roots, bottom-up, and even trans-national activism. But actual policy formulation and implementation for youth, as for all social categories, remained profoundly obstructed by the broader structural impediments to development in the region which could not accommodate the conceptual shift from governance as discipline to governance as multi-stakeholder decision-making.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme [Grant no. 612782].