EU Security Policy in North Africa and in the Middle East (original) (raw)
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MENARA Future Notes, No. 1 (July 2016), 2016
The Middle East and North Africa are in turmoil, Europe’s security is inextricably linked to what happens in this region, and yet the EU has limited capacities to change realities on the ground. These are three of the main messages of the EU Global Strategy presented in June 2016. The document presents Europeans and the wider world with a vision on the international context in which the EU will operate in the coming years. It depicts a complex, contested and connected world, where the EU’s strategic interests must be coherent with its values. It also espouses the concept of principled pragmatism as a guide for the EU’s external action in the years ahead and mentions the concept of resilience more than forty times. The strategy acknowledges that the EU is not alone, that it needs to partner to be influential and that it has an interest in promoting cooperative regional orders. In the framework of the MENARA project, let’s launch a discussion on what could be the practical implications of this new vision for EU policies in the Middle East and North Africa in the next decade.
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International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research, 2019
The issue of securitization of the European community has consistently and significantly been a major concern of the European Union. However, since no geopolitical space can be considered as an island, there is the need for a supranational institution like the European Union to safeguard the interest of its sovereign member states by consolidating itself with the security issues of neighbouring non-European states. The reason being that most of the European states, as well as the European Union has some profitable engagement with these neighbours specifically the North African states. Since the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the European Union has developed a new mechanism in addressing security issues in the North African states. This research therefore looked at the non-militarization policy design employed by the European Union to promote political, economic and social security in North Africa. The study made use of expert in-depth interviews and relevant quantitative secondary sources to arrive at its findings. It was realised in the study that the European Union has significantly contributed to the political transformation in Tunisia, economic liberation in Morocco and enhanced social wellbeing in Algeria. There is no single North African state who has fully developed in all the European securitization processes. A country like Libya has been crawling in all these areas due to its statelessness. Egypt, in this case, has also not shown much progress due to its indecision to subscribe to the concept of Europeanization and the auxiliary prescriptions it comes with in the Egyptian sovereign geopolitical space.
Addressing threats: European foreign policy toward the Middle East since the ESS
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The European Union as a Security Provider
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