From Democracy to Stability: European Union Democracy Promotion in Tunisia 1995-2007

Very little scholarship has been published on politics in Tunisia in the last two decades, resulting in scant coverage of the country’s political relations with the European Union (EU). Likewise, few studies of the EU’s democracy promotion and Mediterranean policies have provided any in-depth analysis of Tunisia. Meanwhile, much has been made by scholars of role played by democracy promotion in the EU’s foreign policy, particularly focusing on understandings of the Union as a ‘normative power’ or as an advocate of the ‘democratic peace theory’. By assessing EU democracy promotion in Tunisia, this thesis argues that democracy promotion has become a predominantly functional part of this foreign policy; its principal role being a means of realising the Union’s principal objectives of achieving security and stability for Europeans. By analysing the discourse of actors involved with the EU’s democracy promotion, the thesis traces a shift in EU policy from a more normative position in the mid-1990s to a more realist and securitised one since the turn of the twenty-first century. Tunisia has evolved over the last two centuries as a state strongly committed to European-influenced socio-economic reforms, but reforms which have led to little political contestability and few changes in government. However, as the EU forged a new approach to its Mediterranean neighbours, it established the promotion of democracy in its neighbours as an integral part of its foreign and security policies. Democracy was to be promoted in Tunisia within multilateral and holistic policy frameworks, such as the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, and by a range of methods that encourage reform of many levels of the region’s societies. Yet it appears that these reforms are failing to deliver the political reforms they once promised. Furthermore, democracy is gradually slipping off the EU’s agenda, and its policy objectives converge with those of the Tunisian government as security concerns come to dominate its policy discourses. In the Tunisian context at least, democracy is a purely utilitarian device used to achieve security. When that security already exists, democracy loses its utility, and fades from its once prominent place in the EU policy in Tunisia

Be Free? The European Union's post-Arab Spring Women's Empowerment as Neoliberal Governmentality

This article analyses post-Arab Spring EU initiatives to promote women's empowerment in the Southern Mediterranean region. Inspired by Foucauldian concepts of governmentality, it investigates empowerment as a technology of biopolitics that is central to the European neoliberal model of governance. In contrast to dominant images such as normative power Europe that present the EU as a norm-guided actor promoting political liberation, the article argues that the EU deploys a concept of functional freedom meant to facilitate its vision of economic development. As a consequence, the alleged empowerment of women based on the self-optimisation of individuals and the statistical control of the female population is a form of bio-power. In this regard, empowerment works as a governmental technology of power instead of offering a measure to foster fundamental structural change in Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) societies. The EU therefore fails in presenting and promoting an alternative normative political vision distinct from the incorporation of women into the hierarchy of the existing market society