EU officials in the MENA region: a two-sided sense of disillusionment

The outbreak of the “Arab Spring” threw EU officials into a rapture for three reasons: a) they sympathised with the demonstrating people who tried to overcome authoritarianism and negligence; b) they hoped for a repetition of the EU’s “success story” in former Eastern Europe; and c) they cherished the prospects that this will all happen with the support of the newly created European External Action Service (EEAS) and where they believed their support can make a difference. Tellingly it was Catherine Ashton, the High Representative for the EU’s Foreign Affairs, who travelled most of all top diplomats to Egypt during the difficult times of revolution and counterrevolution after 2011. Back then, the plans and objectives that had been formulated in cooperation papers such as the Barcelona Declaration or the many country-specific association agreements seemed to be in reach now. Most of these hopes however vanished in the light of the cruel war developments in Libya and Syria, the rise of “Islamic State” terrorism, Egypt’s re-autocratisation and Morocco’s persistent intransigency over the Western Sahara. An overall feeling of futility started to take hold among EU delegates working on and in the region. This disillusionment got a second dimension through the disappointment with the EU’s very own inability to contribute to the uprisings more successfully. The manifold initiative to support emerging political parties, train journalists, enhance science and empower democratic activists largely failed to deliver on their promises. “The deliverables”, to cite a core term in EU programme application forms, were widely missed by the EU’s very own staff and initiatives. This paper focuses on this two-sided sense of disillusionment among EU officials, following the theoretic approach of Pace/Bilgic in their article “Trauma, Emotions, and Memory in World Politics: The Case of the European Union’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East Conflict” (2018). It argues that the EU’s promoted self-image as benign partner of societies striving for political and economic reform has triggered this double disillusionment: about most MENA regimes’ obvious unwillingness to reform, and about the EU’s noticeable incapability to trigger meaningful change. Based on a quantitative questionnaire shared with EU officials working on MENA affairs reflecting on their personal perspectives, and further elaborated through qualitative interviews, this paper analyses the emotions that have informed these EU officials’ overall work ethics and have shaped their attitudes towards the MENA region since 2011. It follows the hypothesis that most EU officials have lost their initial enthusiasm, and a “back to normal” approach has become their guiding principle instead. With these findings, the paper will contribute to the debates about “normative power Europe”, the current rise of democracies and recurrent end of Western domination, and the overall limits to EU democracy export.