Europe's Struggling North African Reset

''It is no longer time for ambiguity. The problem has a name. Gaddafi must go away….But transformation will not happen overnight and Europe intends to be a partner for the long-term.” Such were remarks made by permanent EU president Herman Van Rompuy at the end of the Friday, March 11 European summit on the crisis in Libya.  

This summit came amid the growing realization in the EU that two things must happen in order to safeguard the security and continued prosperity of Europe. The first is that the EU is in urgent need of a comprehensive retooling of its policies vis-à-vis the Arab world. The second takes a longer view, and reflects the need for Europe to assume greater ownership in its dealings with its immediate neighborhood.

European leaders have from the first Tunisian democracy protests in January expressed more disorder than leadership. This first major foreign policy crisis to hit the EU since the appointment of Lady Ashton as EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and the creation of the External Action Service has resulted in repeated scandals in France, hesitation in Italy and embarrassed waffling in the UK. By the time Van Rompuy called for an emergency EU summit for Friday, 11 March, there had amassed a cacophony of varying and contradictory European messages regarding the uprisings in North Africa.

In this context an important moment came earlier this month when Stefan Fuele, EU commissioner for enlargement and neighborhood policy, voiced unequivocal support for the democracy movements sweeping across the Arab world. “We must show humility about the past,” he said. “Europe was not vocal enough in defending human rights and local democratic forces in the region….Too many of us fell prey to the assumption that authoritarian regimes were a guarantee of stability in the region.”  

It was a statement that gave voice to an uncomfortable truth: the traditional coddling of dictators to Europe’s south stood in stark contrast to EU values. Actors central to the crises in North Africa, Hosni Mubarak and Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, had long been allies of the EU, while relations with Colonel Gaddafi had recently been normalized.  The EU’s Mediterranean policy also clashed with the EU’s other near-abroad policy, the democracy-promoting Eastern Partnership program directed at post-Soviet states on Europe’s periphery.

Central to Europe’s strategy in the Mediterranean in recent years has been the European Neighborhood Policy, which was designed to create a “ring of friends” around the EU by offering benefits in exchange for political reforms. While imperfect both in design and in its implementation, the Neighborhood Policy, along with the 1995 Barcelona Process, aimed to foster a “Euro-Mediterranean Community of Democratic States.”  EU policy objectives became less value-driven, however, following the 2008 creation of the Union for the Mediterranean, a pet project of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. This organization took a more realpolitik approach to the Mediterranean, as calls for political reforms were replaced by an emphasis on promoting regional security, energy and business links. As if to emphasize this shift, the Union for the Mediterranean’s secretariat provided for two rotating presidencies – initially Nicolas Sarkozy and Hosni Mubarak.  

There was little of that in the March 11 declaration, as the European Council called for a new partnership that stressed political openness in the region. Also, future EU policies in the Mediterranean would be based on three incentives: money, market access, and mobility (i.e. liberalized visa regimes between the EU and North African countries). The EU’s biggest carrot – the prospect of accession into the union – was essential to the EU’s efforts in Central European states in the 1990s.  Unable to pursue that option, the EU will instead structure its efforts, as Poland’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, has termed, in the form of “multiple small carrots.” 

To be clear, none of this will much help rebel groups on the ground in Libya. EU unity is least evident on the subject of the use of military force in the Libyan conflict. Paris and London continue to push for a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone in Libya, while Berlin, Rome and others balk.  Frustration at EU divisions and military shortcomings were on display this week in the European Parliament, where MEP and former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said, “This makes me sick of the EU, we have learned nothing at all from history….I count on France, on Britain, on the U.S. to take action – not the EU!”

From the U.S. perspective, however, a more active and engaged Europe in the Mediterranean is critical whatever its role. The North African crisis could not have occurred at a worse time for the United States, which remains heavily committed militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, with an increasingly wary eye cast towards a rising China.  The country is also in the midst of a fiscal debate which will likely see the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development suffer extensive budget cuts.  These could further erode U.S. capacity to influence events in North Africa in the years ahead. 

Last week’s summit has hardly put the EU in the position to handle the North African crisis alone. The hardest question for EU member states will remain the desirability and the feasibility of the EU using military force without the leadership of the United States. However, this crisis has injected within the EU a renewed recognition that the Union’s long-term interests do not conflict with its values, and that the southern Mediterranean, like Central Europe and former Soviet Eastern Europe in the 1990’s, must be seen as a long-term project rather than a quick fix.  

As the U.S. has learned in its dealings with Russia, resetting policies is a messy business. But as Europe has learned in its dealings with former Soviet states, engagement and democracy promotion are the best kind of realpolitik.