Democracy promotion East and South after the Arab Spring: Re-evaluating the EU’s engagement with authoritarian regimes
7 December 2011
Dr Lisbeth Aggestam was invited to give a speech at the conference, Democracy promotion East and South after the Arab Spring: Re-evaluating the EU’s engagement with authoritarian regimes held in Brussels, 1-2 December 2011. The conference was jointly organized by Maastricht University, the Trans-European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA) and the Institut für Europäische Politik, and was held in Brussels 1-2 December 2011.
The aim of the conference was to bring together academic scholars, senior members of the Brussels diplomatic community, and European institutional decision makers, to provide a comparative perspective on EU relations with authoritarian regimes on its Eastern and Southern rim.
The popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya and Syria in 2011 not only present new challenges for EU policy towards the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), but also underline the need to re-evaluate the EU’s engagement with authoritarian regimes more generally. The conference analyzed what paradigms and strategies have guided EU policies towards authoritarian regimes over the past decades, and the factors that explain the strengths and limitations of EU democracy promotion in authoritarian countries.
Dr Aggestam argued in her speech that the Arab Spring is a watershed in EU foreign policy. It challenges the very core of the EU's normative vision as a power and transformative model in global politics. She spoke of how the Arab Spring of 2011 is not like the revolutions of 1989, when the EU enjoyed a semi-hegemonic position of influence. Moreover, EU foreign policy is heavily determined by the conflation of another two critical junctures in world politics, namely (1) the rise of new powers in the neighborhood, and (2) the economic crisis in Europe. Hence, a new type of pragmatism has become the leitmotif in EU foreign policy. Lisbeth Aggestam concluded her speech by outlining a new research agenda that involves greater emphasis on the inter-subjective, relational dimension of the EU as a global actor and power.
