Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Economics and Political Science - Department of Political Science

For more than two decades, the EU has played a pivotal role in the mediterranean and North Africa. Although it never yielded the hard power of the united States, the EU{u2018}s soft power and its deep social, political and economic ties with the countries of the southern and eastern mediterranean have provided it with considerable sway in mediterranean affairs. Through its euro-mediterranean partnership, first launched in 1995, the EU promoted the vision of an open and integrated Mediterranean region that was organically tied to and politically oriented towards the EU. To pursue this vision, the EU has relied on a number of tools and measures that it appropriated from its enlargement policies. Over the years, the EU considerably refined these tools and repeatedly adjusted the shape and content of its mediterranean policies. In the process, the EU jettisoned some of the more intrusive normative goals of its original mediterranean policies for a close relationship with the region{u2018}s autocratic, yet western-oriented, Arab regimes. By toppling some of the regions{u2018} long standing dictatorships and forcing others to pursue an agenda of domestic reforms, the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 effectively drew an end to this relationship. While the popular revolts appear to have opened the door to a more modern, free and democratic Arab world, they also called the EU{u2018}s role as a regional power and reference point in a changing region into question. Not only has the EU{u2018}s image been considerably tainted by its long-standing relationship with autocratic Arab rulers, but it also no longer provides the only model for the proto-democratic states of the southern Mediterranean that are witnessing a revival of pan-Arab and pan-islamic trends

Issued also as CD