Editorial by Michael Emerson
The ‘D’ word had virtually disappeared even from the lexicon of the European Union in its dealings with the Arab world, in deference to Presidents Ben Ali and Mubarak. Now it is the demand of the peoples of almost all Arab states, including two post-revolutionary regimes in the making (Tunisia, Egypt). And elsewhere in the Arab world the leaderships are being forced to make moves in the direction of democracy. Those trying to make do with gestures rather than real reforms seem doomed to escalating conflict, if not to be overthrown in the weeks and months to come.
At any event all the Arab world from Morocco to Yemen is now living in a drastically new political context. The European Union cannot control these processes, but has every interest to try and help channel them in the direction of soundly functioning democracy.
The ‘D’ word has been brought back in the joint Barroso/Ashton document of 8 March proposing a new ‘Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity with the South Mediterranean’. But that was just a first sketchy political statement. The next step must translate the initiative into operational plans. The opportunity to do this will be the review of the European Neighbourhood Policy, promised for 10 May. There are several key issues that the EU has now to confront.
The first and principal question is whether democracy promotion is really to be brought onto the front-burner, after years of virtual neglect or only token attention, as regards at least the Arab world. European leaders are already answering this question with an emphatic yes. In saying this, they have to recognize the extent to which democracy promotion was diluted if not banished from the mechanisms of the neighbourhood policy, while it was deliberately excluded from the Union for the Mediterranean initiative of President Sarkozy. But the main question now is what are they going to do. Is there enough political will to give the EU’s democracy support agenda a serious push, and if so where would this push lead us? At the level of the European Parliament there is manifest keenness, as evidenced by their April resolutions on neighbourhood policy, and their powers in relation to the budget are significant.
The EU’s main aid programme (ENPI) has many thematic or sectoral priorities, but democracy is not one of them. The nearest apology for this is a heading called ‘governance’, but the actual projects under this heading tend for example to be about ‘modernisation of public administration’, or ‘improvements in the judiciary’, all a safe distance from core issues of political system. The separate instrument dedicated to democracy and human rights according to its name (EIDHR) has the soft option of election observation (when invited) as its first speciality, and it otherwise mounts a plethora of projects relating to human rights and civil society development. Of course to mount highly political projects against the wish of an authoritarian leader is impossible, unless these are to be off-shore or covert operations. But this political vacuum in operations to date only underlines the extent of radical changes now due, if democracy is really to be placed high on the agenda.
The second question then is how to do it organizationally. A minimalist option would be to revise the priorities of the EIDHR, and make core issues of democratic political organization a major priority, making room for this together with softer options, i.e. election observation and civil society initiatives.
More fundamentally there has been a long ongoing debate over whether the EIDHR would be better transformed in whole or part into an independent foundation, drawing on the models of the German political party foundations or the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) . Something like this seems to be the idea of the Polish government in proposing a European Endowment for Democracy (EED). This proposal is under consideration by Brussels in the context of review of the neighbourhood policy. A foundation of this kind would function as an agency of the EU, with administrative autonomy. If it followed the German or NED models it would establish offices in those partner states which wanted it. One can imagine that Egypt and Tunisia might be among the first Arab countries to be interested. Such offices would be local hubs for all democracy promotion activities for which there was a demand (advice on constitutional issues, political party organisation, training programmes, etc.). They would be endowed with resources to make micro grants, or ‘re-grants’ from block allocations from the central budget. The EED would also engage in actions in ‘difficult’ countries where local offices might not be welcome, for which Poland has Belarus in mind. One successful initiative in east and southeast Europe has been the creation of 15 national Schools of Political Studies, following the Moscow School. These are sponsored by the Council of Europe in partnership with the European Commission. The model could be extended to Arab countries, adapted of course to the very different context.
A third issue would be how to take into account Islamic specificities. The US, German and British political foundations all have structured links to the main political parties of the West — right, left and centre. All these foundations in part work explicitly with recognisable ‘sister parties’. But in the Arab world there are the Islamist parties with no counterpart in Europe or the US. However in Turkey the counterpart very much exists, in the AKP party. This prompts the idea of EU-Turkish cooperation, in which a Turkish counterpart might be invited to enter into a cooperation structure with the EU.
Fourth is the territorial map for a new impulse: should it be just for the South Mediterranean, or all neighbourhood partners East and South, or an extension of either of these two maps to embrace the rest of the Arab world, notably the Gulf states and Yemen, or even global. The EU’s neighbourhood policy has its map, and the EU-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) cooperation is a separate affair. The case for stepping up EU-GCC cooperation certainly exists, but it would not seem advisable to merge the two regions for the purposes of EU policy, since there are too many difficult issues to sort out for the EU and Mediterranean alone, including what to do with the badly limping Union for the Mediterranean. However to make an ad hoc opening, by extending the new democracy initiative to the rest of the Arab world would make sense.
Fifth is how to make good use of the Arab diasporas in Europe. The second generation of immigrant families are now well established in mainstream educational and professional career paths. Maybe not as much as one would like, but still there are cohorts of young Euro-Maghreb professionals of the highest quality, now often with EU citizenship, who retain family connections in their countries of origin and of course Arab language competence. They amount to a valuable resource for EU programmes in the South Mediterranean, whose mobilization warrants a special effort, both for democracy actions as well as in the staffing of the EU delegations.
The notorious disunity of the EU over matters of hard security policy have once again been in evidence over Libya, with France and the UK in the front line, various other member states half-participating, and Germany disappointing all with its abstention over UNSC resolution 1973. Alongside this the case for an impressive upgrade in the EU’s democracy promotion policies in its neighbourhood stands out now as a clear opportunity and necessity
Michael EMERSON, CEPS Senior Research Fellow