A Litmus Test For Eruope: EU Mediterranean Politics After the Arab Spring (original) (raw)

The dynamics of politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have attracted much attention from scholars, practitioners, the media and policy leaders since 2000, in particular since the events of the Arab Spring in 2011. The Arab Spring was a series of anti-government protests, uprisings and upheavals that shook the entire Arab region, creating fertile ground for democratic change and promising finally to topple the longestablished authoritarian regimes. Although the outcomes have varied across different states in the MENA region, what has become apparent is that the Arab world has been experiencing profound turbulence. Seven years after the first protest in Tunisia, international society saw little remaining hope and the spring had turned into a very heavy winter of economic stagnation and political violence. Such developments in MENA have dragged Syria, Libya and Yemen into ongoing civil wars while causing unrest in Egypt, Iraq and Bahrain, and destabilizing Arab governments from Morocco to Saudi Arabia.