Introduction

Interpreting the overall visibility and functioning of the policies of the European Union (EU) in the Arab world very much depends on whether they are assessed from an economic or political perspective. This paper focuses principally on the political expectations of the Arab world. Consequently, its aim is to identify the perceptions of the potential Arab partners of EU . How, in the Arab mind, do European actions and pronouncements compare with those of the United States? The weight of such expectations correlates directly not only with the geographical proximity of the partners concerned, but also with the degree to which the colonial past and, not infrequently, its migratory undertow have intertwined their societies – critical here is the degree of historical intimacy. Expectations may also be influenced, as it is in the case of the Palestinian territories, by the perceived degree of urgency with which an Arab actor is seeking out sources of western support alternative to that provided by the United States.

An analysis of the political arena within which Euro–Arab relations are played out, requires prudent recourse to several notions and categories that have now achieved wide currency, in particular 'civil society' and 'religious actors'. These, especially within the setting of authoritarian governance, may have lost much of their normal meaning. Without wishing to downgrade the value of many EU initiatives, this study's primary object is to draw attention to the difficulties facing any European attempt to strengthen relations with the Arab world and, above all, to render them durable and sustainable. Such an assessment has of necessity to take account of the role of Arab public opinion.

Can the confidence of any Arab population be secured if Europe is perceived to be the ally and accomplice of its two main adversaries? Here lies the fundamental challenge that confronts the EU, first and foremost regionally, that is, its original proximity to and ongoing affinity with the State of Israel. This becomes an inescapable consideration, when Israeli policies are clearly deemed to have overstepped the yellow line of international legality (International Court of Justice, 2004). Can the EU win the confidence of the Palestinian population without more forcefully taking issue with the serious violations of fundamental rights committed by the Israeli occupying forces? This challenge concerns the EU as a whole, and also its members, their national governments and parliaments. A second and closely related difficulty stems from the overt complacency with which the EU has treated the Arab regimes that violate with impunity the very principles of good governance that Europe professes to espouse and promote. How feasible is it for the EU to establish its credentials with the Libyan, Algerian or Tunisian populations, when red carpets are repeatedly rolled out before the current leadership of these countries, notwithstanding the obduracy with which they have flouted the most elementary human rights and freedoms?

The EU has generally been slow to recognise the far-reaching implications of partnerships, especially for relations with civil society or political dissidents. More specifically, Europeans had found it perennially difficult to establish even limited contacts with the newly emerging moderate Islamist currents. The net effect has been to inflict severe collateral damage on Europe's standing in the Arab world, thereby undermining the very sustainability of its initiatives. The impasse into which the EU managed to manoeuvre itself in January 2006 – when it boycotted the Palestinian government elected a few weeks earlier – graphically highlights the latent schizophrenia, which is always threatening to tarnish its reputation.

In order to lend weight to our interpretation of 'moderate Islam', it might be useful to make explicit here the position we have developed over a number of years¹ on a question that has been the subject of considerable discussion, namely the origins and nature of political Islam. Two lines of enquiry have underpinned our understanding of this phenomenon.

To begin with, we distinguish as systematically as possible two closely related processes, hence two levels of analysis. The first level of analysis has to do with the motivations that have led a number of political actors to privilege a language borrowed almost exclusively and often ostentatiously from Islamic culture, and at the same time the diverse uses to which the very same actors have put this language, both nationally and internationally, as well as the variable factors which have influenced their choices. The second involves an evaluation of the impact of this use of language on the behaviour of political actors. In other words, we seek to establish whether or not this way of speaking about Islam has shaped their affinity with 'modernisation and political liberalisation'.

In our first line of enquiry, identity becomes the key variable in what is a distinctive explanatory framework. Our hypothesis is that societies, which have experienced forms of acculturation linked to colonial expansion, are ready to embrace a reactive identity. 'Islamism', we argue, is an affirmation of the capacity of traditional culture to compete not so much with the West's values as with its symbolic categories and identity markers. As for the impact which certain ways of thinking about Islam have on its exponents, we have sought to stress that the plasticity of a certain 'Islamic speak' makes possible a great many different forms of 'Islamic do', hence the multiplicity of political attitudes and behaviours, including the most moderate and most liberal.

The hypothesis, then, which we have long defended, is that Islamist mobilisation is not so much the territorially delineated product of a political ideology, which conditions its exponents to privilege this or that way of acting, as it is the result of a complex process, largely trans-societal, which reconnects the identity markers of Islamic culture with the entire terrain of ideological production. This hypothesis leads us in the end to reject the category 'Islamism', in that it does not permit us to portray with sufficient precision the very actors it claims to identify. An analysis of the causes and manifestations of a certain common Islamic lexicon – and of the forms of ideological and political radicalism, which are not to be underestimated – belongs to the world of politics rather than that of religion. Such analysis must, therefore, go hand in hand with causal explanations, profane more often than not, which shed light on the diverse ways in which this lexicon is used, hence on the variable workings of the state, the different social movements and the different forms of Islamist oppositional mobilisation.

With this diagnosis in mind, this study seeks to analyse the implications of the partnerships that the EU has recently forged with governments, civil society and religious actors located in the Maghreb and the Middle East. Ultimately, this paper proposes a pathway that would facilitate the renewal of Arab post-independence ruling elites, and do away with the unilateralist impulse (both political and cultural), which ought now to be seen as little more than a historical curiosity.

Analysing Arab Disillusionment with Europe

The political actions of the EU in the Arab world are frequently described – by government leaders and opposition figures – as suffering from the 'unfinished nature' of its institutional framework and, simultaneously, from a political identity considered weak when compared to that of the United States. Although the foreign policy of the recent Bush Administration would normally be considered a plus for Europe by Arab public opinion, the EU has managed to derive at best limited capital from the potential offered by the millions of 'Washington-bashers' in the Arab world. Following protracted 'wait-and-see' negotiations, the mountain of highly principled declarations has so far given birth to an overdue mouse of too little, too late decisions, at best dismissed for merely parrotting those of the United States, at worst condemned for being too openly biased in favour of Israel.

In handling the highly emotional Israeli–Arab conflict and its regional ramifications – more specifically since the recent Franco–US rapprochement over Iraq and Lebanon – the EU is seen as having swung into line with the most unilateralist and least universalist positions of the Israeli–American axis. Therein lies the first and most loudly expressed weakness undermining the EU's credibility and reputation in the Arab world.

Arab disillusionment with Europe is based on the succession of legal pronouncements, which have too often been limited to a mere application of the law of the strongest. This holds true not only within the regional framework ('Israel has the right to self-defence'), but also within the various national settings, where the controversial conduct of parliamentary and judiciary institutions and the systemic recourse to torture against political opponents have only rarely been denounced with due speed and severity. Even when the EU is prepared to affirm the rights of the weak, it often incurs the charge of not having provided itself with the necessary means – be they military or diplomatic – for getting the latter enforced. Simply put, Arab opinion sees Europe as complacently turning a blind eye to the worst breaches of the very norms it solemnly proclaims as forming the basis for its action.

A whole generation of political dissidents in many Arab countries – and not the Islamists alone – has ceased to believe in the utility of the EU's much touted 'principles' and 'values'. The politics of double standards have, therefore, severely damaged Europe's creditworthiness as the regional whistle-blower. In the national framework, the long Algerian civil war provides the archetypal example of such repeated failures. Since the annulment of the December 1991 electoral process, the endless manipulation of violence by the apparatchiks of the Algiers regime has elicited virtual silence on the part of Brussels. Ultimately, this has lent weight to the argument that the EU is incapable of gaining respect for the rights, guarantees and principles that the Union purports to be promoting in the region (Güney and Çelenk, 2007).

EU officials in the Middle East are sometimes reluctant to disclose their professional affiliation. The reason for this is to be found in the EU's posture vis-à-vis the Israeli–Arab conflict, in which the passive submission of Europe to the law of the strongest has impinged upon its capability to enforce its international commitments (Aoun, 2003). From well-informed closed diplomatic circles to mass satellite channel audiences, Europe's display of political flexibility and its variable geometry when expressing concern for humanism in the Middle East have helped to discredit it in Arab eyes. The well-informed observer cannot but be struck by the growing contrast between the intransigence with which Europe has required Hamas to respect the three conditions stipulated for its recognition² and the sheer laxity with which Israel has concomitantly been authorised to set aside the five conditions attendant on the approval of its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza (The White House, 2005).

International specialists and observers have been jolted by the shelving of the 'Jerusalem Plan', which, after a remarkable joint effort by senior European diplomats – for once in perfect agreement – was mysteriously declared 'null and void' (McGreal, 2005). Europe's credibility in the region was further eroded by the provisions that regulated the withdrawal of European observers from the prison of Jericho (March 2006), which, in breach of international law, provided the Israeli army with access to the precinct. This ultimately led to the cancellation of the speech of Mahmoud Abbas before the EU Parliament. In the eyes of the great majority of Arabs, the most notable – and symbolically the most damaging – of the Union's responses has been the withdrawal of budgetary support from the government of the Palestinian Authority. This is all the more telling as this support was offered in the course of the very election campaign that Brussels and Strasburg supervised and unreservedly approved as the model of democracy in the Arab world (Milton-Edwards, 2007, p. 308).

In July 2006, during a strangely comparable situation, the EU watched as Israel launched an armed attack against Hezbollah. The strikes were justified under the pretext of targeting an adversary excluded from the legitimate political field for the sole reason of it being qualified as 'Islamist'. The protracted week of silence on the part of the EU – interrupted only by a single declaration from its Presidency set the seal on the nearly unanimous disavowal of Europe's response, not only by Arab public opinion, but also, to different degrees, by the ruling elites (EU Presidency, 2006). Especially noted was Europe's inability or unwillingness to call Israel and the United States quickly to account before they completed the destruction of much civilian infrastructure in Lebanon (Moore, 2006).

When on 2 August 2006, Ahmed Mansour, star anchorman of Bi la hudd (without borders), the flagship broadcast of Al-Jazeera, hosted Tarja Halounen, then President of the EU, expressed this deep resentment rather succinctly: You only help Israel! All the European officials who have visited the region have evoked the release of the three prisoners held by Hezbollah or Hamas. But not one has evoked [.] the five hundred women and children incarcerated in Israeli prisons. Up till now, not one single European has demanded their liberation, neither theirs, nor that of any of the other prisoners. Is the European Union then concerned only with the Israelis?

Paradoxically, the demand that governing elites in the Arab world address to Europe centre on the expectations that European partners will strive at the international level for a more equitable balancing of political resources, a condition they no doubt sincerely hope for, but which they themselves are hardly inclined to meet at the domestic level, as they see its fulfilment as denting their own privileged positions. Facing the barrage of US unilateralism (and more particularly, the paralysis of the UN Security Council), the expectations of the ruling Arab elites, so far as Europe is concerned, hardly differ in nature from those of the opposition parties. Even in the absence of significant change in the 'societal model', if they have a tendency to be for 'more Europe', it is first and foremost because they aspire to 'less America'.

Such wishful thinking, at least officially, has temporarily fractured over assessments as to whether the US intervention in Iraq was opportune. Saddam Hussein's eviction, before the full impact of 'collateral damage' and the multiple blowbacks of the military campaign had come home to roost, benefited at least from the tacit support of a number of Arab countries and even certain sections of public opinion.

Internationally, these governing élites seem to harbour the expectation that their European partners, once they have broken loose from the overall direction of US policy and its ingrained commitment to Israel, will become less offensive in the eyes of their citizens. The more EU's policies and pronouncements become distinguishable from those of the United States, the better appreciated it will be as a prospective partner.

The EU Relationship with Arab Regimes: From Cooperation to Support

Europe faces the complex task of communicating with a group of authoritarian and unpopular leaders who have both the natural bent and the thoroughgoing talent for harnessing all the channels and vectors of communication to their own advantage.

Arab expectations with regard to Europe/EU and the chief obstacle to any strengthening of Europe's links with the Middle East stem in one way or another from the authoritarianism of most governmental and institutional partners involved. The seeming incapacity of the EU to take account of the increasing unpopularity of its state-centred partners might be mitigated by a policy of direct contact with non-state actors. However, as we shall see, such an approach has not materialised.

The EU has been unable to identify, among the organised opposition parties, civil society or religious actors – the partners that might be in a position to offset the unpopularity of its official contacts. Barely distinguishable from the unpopular policies pursued by the United States or Israel, the EU's actions are relayed by regimes that, in the interests of their survival, are ready to play the role of transmission belts for these very policies, not least in the field of security. It may be a little glib, but not entirely inaccurate, to say that they have hooked the heavy wagons of their own repressive strategies onto the gravy train of the global 'War on Terror'. Without substantive modulation, EU policies are poorly placed to preempt or countervail the sharp tensions that will no doubt arise once new regimes, more in tune with the aspirations and expectations of their citizenry, rise to power, as sooner or later they must.

One way – brutal, but didactic – of gauging the distance which, both in the Maghreb and the Middle East, separates the people's expectations from prevailing regime discourses, is to consider the case of Iran, which, though situated on the margins of the Arab world, sheds nevertheless useful light on the phenomenon. Here, we see a state within which, although temporarily, the 1980s revolutionary process established a high degree of congruence between popular perceptions of western policies and a certain straight talking on the part of the regime. To get a sense of the depth of the dissent from western policies in the Middle East, one needs only to note the rhetoric used by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with regard to the West and Israel. Aside from the wholly reprehensible questioning of the historicity of Nazi crimes against humanity, the presidential discourse may be regarded as a reasonably plausible matrix not only for privately expressed views, but also for opinions that are aired with increasing frequency on prime-time television (Burkholder, 2006, p. 51). We already have, in other words, a glimpse of the kind of political line that succeeding regimes may favour, when the inexorable knell for the current ruling elites finally sounds.

As a general proposition, Arab ruling elites are logically more inclined to practice the politics of regime survival than to import the principles of good governance advocated by the EU. There are, however, varying degrees of unpopularity and authoritarianism. Repression is not the predominant feature of the political systems either in the Sultanate of Oman or the petrol-rich Emirates of the Persian Gulf. Here, low population growth has combined with plentiful reserves of oil and natural gas to lighten the political burden of governance and increased the elbow room available for various forms of cooperation.

Generally speaking, these rentier petro-states are not among those whose expectations of Europe and its policies are the most stridently expressed. Libya is probably the odd man out here. Its oil revenues and limited population growth have not shielded it from the deep political fault line, which its big European partners have attempted to obscure. To say that Yemen has not yet broken free from the age of authoritarianism is an understatement. Yet, perhaps because it has opted not to exclude the Islamist opposition from the system – its leader is the President of the parliament – Yemen has not yet had to resort to the came contortions we see displayed in the Maghreb and Egypt. It is primarily in these countries, and also – but otherwise configured – in the zones of the Middle East where the Israeli–Arab conflict has its most far-reaching ramifications, that the EU's support for the principles of good governance, the independence of the judiciary, human rights and fundamental freedoms is most sharply tested.

By adopting a highly political reading of US imperial overstretch, the ruling elites have tended to endorse the most culturalist or blatantly 'theological' American perspectives, in the hope of masking the banality of the political causes that animate the growing ranks of their opponents. By depoliticising the meaning of the resistance they confront, and by overideologising purely political tensions, state institutions seek to obfuscate their important contribution to the problem.

The cartoon crisis of January 2006, and the commotion caused in September of the same year by Pope Benedict XVI's ill-considered remarks concerning Islam are two cases in point. They show how a certain number of state actors (Syria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel) found a paradoxical interest in amplifying this 'theologising' game of smoke and mirrors by evoking the rage of those intent on resisting them (Saunders, 2008). If the Clash of Civilisations formula – first crafted in 1990 by Bernard Lewis – came to be applied to the Israeli–Palestine conflict (Lewis, 1990), it was in part because it conveniently masked the trivially nationalist matrix of the confrontation. If a number of authoritarian Arab regimes are willing to accommodate anti-Western religiously inspired protests – even surreptitiously encouraging them – it is because they hope to lend weight to the (false) idea, readily fostered among European interlocutors, that the basis of the opposition that increasingly confronts Arab regimes is sectarian and religious in nature, rather than political.

Arab ruling elites are thus often inclined to propose culturalist ('help us to resist these Islamists who are also your own worst enemies') or economistic ('help us out financially and our opponents will lose their social base') arguments, when justifying their obstinate procrastination in promoting any genuine political pluralism. Thanks to this strategy, many of them have succeeded in securing, from the international community generally, and, within the Barcelona Process, from the EU in particular, renewed support for their respective brands of authoritarianism (Carapico, 2001). Most Arab regimes, and particularly the most authoritarian, have every reason to congratulate themselves on the EU's docility. The Hamas government of Palestine (which aspires to regain its standing with the EU) and Syria (which needs to overcome strong EU hostility, not so much because of its repressive methods, which the Union has been prepared to tolerate, but because of its strategic rapprochement with Iran) are perhaps two partial exceptions.

Arab authoritarianism, thanks to the claim of its purported struggle against 'fundamentalism' and notwithstanding the amply documented fact that such 'securitanian radicalisation' lends credence to, and indeed, fuels the counter radicalisation of their opponents, has succeeded in whitewashing its grim and often reiterated breaches of human rights and public freedoms. Such breaches have not, it seems, weighed heavily on or modified the EU attitude towards the Arab regimes. Nor have they stemmed the flows of financial support for them, to the detriment of the quality of Europe's relations with oppositional forces, which comprise the large majority of the populations of these countries, and have suffered from a steadily deteriorating political situation over the past decade.

Generally speaking, the main non-governmental actors concerned are impatiently waiting for the EU to adopt a more independent position vis-à-vis the US–Israel axis. On key issues, notably human rights and good governance, they are waiting for Europe to emerge as a more demanding interlocutor for the region's governments.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the launching of the global 'War on Terror' intervened once again to deter the concretisation of the EU's demands with respect to good governance, the Rule of Law, human rights and fundamental freedoms. This backtracking is strikingly highlighted in the bitterness of such opposition figures as Tunisian Moncef Marzouki who decried the passive resignation of the international environment towards Arab authoritarian regimes: 'since 9/11, dictators have never had it so good' (quoted in Burgat, 2006). The use of brutal force to eradicate any oppositional elements as in the cases of Tunisia and Algeria, the manifest corruption of the electoral process in Egypt, the 'sanctuarisation' or the fireproofing against any electoral constraints on the structures and mechanisms of power in Morocco, not to mention the totalitarian stonewalling of the Libyan political stage (whose leader has nevertheless seen Europe's red carpets unfurl before his feet), are all elements that paved the way for the profound disaffection of wide sections of the Arab world from the EU (Mohamed, 2007, pp. 109-110).

'Why do we support all the Arab dictators? Their peoples no longer want to do this, so somebody has to do the dirty work!' This imaginary exchange between the French President and one of his young fellow compatriots, published in 1996 by the Canard enchaïné, has lost little of its pungency in 2008. It remains a reasonably accurate description of the mindset that characterises the EU's political class. If such examples are often laid at France's door – though the latter is far from holding a monopoly on such attitudes – it is because Paris has often set the trend in what is a general European disinclination to assess the democratic performance of the regimes situated along the northern rim of Africa.

'I honestly and truly don't see what is to be criticised about those elections', said Jacques Chirac the day after the notoriously rigged April 2004 Algerian presidential poll. In September 2005, he went on to reward President Bouteflika with the Louise Michel Award for Human Rights and Democracy. Fifteen years before the French authorities had conferred the same prize onto Egypt's Hosni Mubarak in the aftermath of an electoral process whose derisory character is graphically but accurately described in the historical novel The Yacoubian Building.³ The process was described by French governmental sources as 'reasonably democratic' – an assessment which the EU did not contradict. Following another blatantly rigged Algerian election, France again raised its voice, pointing to Tunisia as an 'exemplary experiment in modernisation', without once being questioned by Brussels. When commenting on the hunger strike undertaken in December 2003 by the human rights lawyer Radhia Nasraoui, in protest against the securitanian radicalisation of President Ben Ali, another recipient (1988) of the Louise Michel Award, the French President explained that human rights consist essentially of 'the right of access to food' (with the double entendre that democratic freedoms are less urgent).⁴

Oppositional movements in the Arab countries which have ratified 'association agreements' with the EU (including Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria) cannot but observe the contradiction between the 'essential' commitment to human rights,⁵ which they solemnly lay down with the subsequent daily violations, which are incidentally never sanctioned. They perceive this double standard to be the very symbol of the duplicity of the EU, whose moral discourse is deemed to be no more than a game of smoke and mirrors fashioned in the pursuit of short-term interests.

The wrath of two Tunisian human rights militants, Sihem Bensedrine and Omar Mestiri, eloquently encapsulates the terrible double bind of EU decision-making. In their book L'Europe et ses despotes, they draw attention to the 'criminal hypocrisy of EU officials' and explain how 'human rights violations and corruption are, to varying degrees, the common traits of those regimes to which Europe constantly lends its political and economic supports, from Morocco to Syria, via North Africa and Egypt' (Bensedrine and Mestiri, 2004).

Europe and Arab Civil Society: The Problem of State-Sponsored NGOs

Slow to appreciate the extent of the price to be paid for the unpopularity of its policies, the EU has not succeeded in establishing effective communication with more representative non-state actors, whether it is opposition forces, political parties, or other civil society organisations, which, it is true, remain highly fragile.

Civil society in the Arab World has been the target of two types of restrictive appropriation. Authoritarian regimes have usually managed to bring civil society under their control, depriving it of any teeth. This internal highjacking is accentuated by the European tendency to restrict the notion of civil society to secular actors. As a consequence, the whole spectrum of Islamist opposition forces, intellectuals and associations emanating from or sympathetically disposed to this political landscape, has been more or less subliminally excluded. When it is not engaged in state-centric discourse, Europe is able to speak to 'its own image and likeness'. Spokespeople designated as secular are more often than not selected without much effort to verify their degree of proximity to the regimes concerned. The main requirement appears to be that they should speak the language of their European interlocutors, or at least one of the languages they know (indeed any language so long as it is non-local), and that they should employ the terminology they are familiar with, or, simply put, to say what they want to hear.

However respectable it may be, this rather small but vocal minority is able to flatter its western counterparts by reassuring them that it still holds a monopoly over the Arab potential for modernisation. And in order to protect its quasi-monopolistic position in the international context, it becomes actively engaged in the demonisation and exclusion of its Islamist rivals. Comforted by this secularised intelligentsia, which is little more than a radical fringe, Europe seeks quite systematically to capitalise on these associative expressions of civil society, even when they are largely unrepresentative. Too often they only need to bandwagon as 'feminists', 'left-wing' or 'secular' for their European interlocutors to shed any circumspection with regard to their roots in the population or their possible intimacy with authoritarian rulers. So much so that on occasions secular actors are created ex nihilo by the regimes themselves with the obvious objective of fuelling and exporting the disrepute of another, more representative, segment of the political opposition.

Under the NGO rubric, diverse entities have been in circulation within the Arab World (and elsewhere). These include what some victims of authoritarian regimes have derisively christened 'OVGs',⁶ which might be better translated as 'TGOs', (that is, 'truly govermental organisations'). From Tunisia to Morocco, via Yemen and Saudi Arabia, these organisations have come off the assembly line, 'custom-built' and 'context-oriented', according to the current communication needs identified by the regimes in their relations with foreign powers or donors. These organisations have helped Arab governments to tone down their authoritarian image, keep the funding flowing and discredit and thoroughly discourage any competition from genuine civil society organisations.

In this way, the EU's generous support for NGOs, and through them for the civil society, is in practice often transformed, courtesy of such 'TGOs', into additional aid and empowerment for the ruling regimes. The case of Tunisia provides a particularly revealing example of practices, which are by no means case-specific, but can be readily applied to virtually all the countries in the region. On 26 June 2004, during the meeting of the preparatory commission for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Hammamet, the authorities displayed, with a view to effectively muzzling independent associations, their considerable talent for stage managing the pressure of vassal organisations sworn to their allegiance. Béatrice Hibou (2006, p. 120) described the regime's proficiency in syphoning off aid originally destined to civil society in the following terms: The delegation of the European Union in effect only funds associations co-opted in line with a strategy of token payments per governorate defined by Carthage. The MEDA «democracy» projects are funnelled through intermediaries appointed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and, via official channels, morph into support for TNOs, those «Truly Govermental Organisations» as they are called by Tunisians, which are no more than pseudo counter-powers.

The Euro–Mediterranean Civil Forum and NGO platform, whose aim – within the Barcelona Process – is to bypass the monopoly of states and institutionalise horizontal exchanges between civil society organisations, has also failed to cut the knot of this contradiction. In the view of those generally excluded from these programmes, the Forum personalities are an entirely alien entity so far as the wider intellectual and political constituency is concerned. The organisations and networks closest to the Islamist opposition forces are rarely, if ever, associated with such meetings. Those in favour of a positive evolution invariably have to contend with the overexposed media lobbying of a small but active minority of civil society. Working hand in glove with the so-called 'eradicators', this minority has effectively deprived the Islamist challenge of any vestige of political legitimacy in the eyes of Europeans.

Marginalising Moderate Political Islam

Although the contacts established between the EU and Arab opposition movements should help to circumvent the state's grip over civil society, in practice they suffer from the same defect. With rare exceptions, these contacts are exclusively restricted to secular actors, fancifully regarded by Western policy-makers as some kind of 'third force', which must inevitably arise from the clash between authoritarian regimes and their Islamist opponents. This mythical third force has two closely related implications. First, it has been widely established that this force is devoid of the very roots, which would enable it to lay the foundations of a credible alternative to the current regimes. Second, the notion of a third force is based on an interpretation of Islamist trends, which portrays the latter as absolutely impermeable to the dynamics of political liberalisation and democratisation. There is little evidence to support such an assessment, for it rests on a profound misreading on the part of mainstream western thinking, and in particular, of European decision-makers.

In the Arab World, the EU is generally perceived as representing societies which are more 'de-Christianised' than secular, a characteristic, which distinguishes it from its US counterpart, widely seen as deeply religious. American religiosity is occasionally attributed to the US constitutional system, which, in contrast to the European model, allows for the religious in the public arena. At the core of Europe, France is sharply criticised not only for banning the Islamic veil from school premises but, less legitimately, for having stigmatised it over a much larger public space. American religiosity is conversely criticised as fuelling the missionary enterprises of Protestant NGOs, to which must be added the latter's often unconditional support for the state of Israel and what is deemed to be their particularly obnoxious support for the Neocon foreign policy agenda.

Most Arab religious institutions (muftiat, councils of 'ulam, Islamic universities) are too closely tied to the ruling regimes to be able to represent anything other than the analyses and strategies dictated by them. Their expectations of Europe, expressed in frequent interreligious dialogues and other meetings, usually overlook an important consideration. Especially when it comes to analysing the causes of terrorist violence, they consistently fail to mention the iron fist of repression that presses down on their societies. It is precisely in this area of interreligious communication, that we can see the main sources of the myopia, which afflicts the EU, and greatly influences the tenor of information, images and actions.

The dead hand exercised by the regimes over their religious authorities does not stop with the territorial limits of their own political jurisdiction. It is also felt widely afield within Europe itself, impacting just as much on the workings and the representativeness of a number of Muslim institutions. Thus, when an 'interreligious dialogue' manages, with the encouragement of European governments and institutions, to bring together the senior representatives of the Mosque of Paris – still very much under the thumb of the Algerian regime – as well as the religious authorities of Algeria, Tunisia or Morocco, the end result is an encounter between different facets of the same panoptic authoritarianism. Its overriding rationale is to obscure the converging expectations of believers on either sides of the Mediterranean.

By refusing to take account of the essential role of the ruling regimes in the development of what is usually characterised as 'Islamic' violence, official religious actors generally tend to fill the resulting void by an excessive theologisation of political tensions. Be that as it may, the emphasis attached to the mythical third force has prevented EU institutions, as well as religious, political or human communities on both sides of the Mediterranean, to interact productively, except in a severely curtailed and contradictory mode.

Any strategy designed to circumvent this dead hand would require the EU to interact with religious interlocutors unfettered by any allegiance to the ruling regimes, and consequently more closely connected with the opposition. Instead, the unfortunate conjunction of 'Islamic speak' and an oppositional stance have generally been enough for any Muslim actor to be placed beyond the pale.

As already noted, Europe's decision to boycott the Palestinian government elected in January 2006 graphically illustrated the highly paradoxical situation in which the EU presently finds itself. The resulting contradictions, which reflect the cumulative impact of the two main biases in Europe's stance – an excessively pro-Israeli bent and the incomprehension of the nature of an Arab political alternative – threatens ultimately to extend to the totality of its Arab environment.

The same biases that weaken the European definition of legitimate actors in Arab civil society also hinder the accurate identification of oppositional forces. When the EU takes it upon itself to address only state level actors or the state-sanctioned representatives of civil society, it becomes the prisoner of a screening process that is antithetical to representativeness. The first generation of so-called 'secular' oppositions (the more or less historical heirs to different Arab socialisms) has been the exclusive focus of Europe's attention. This preoccupation often mirrors the quantum of energy expended on stigmatising their Islamist competitors. More damaging still, forces favouring the secular alternative to current regimes (often self-proclaimed 'democrats', a label which subtly implies that the whole spectrum of Islamist trends is hermetically sealed off against such a possibility) are in fact able to muster in their respective societies a degree of representativeness that is inversely proportional to that granted them in official European circles and in the European media.

On closer inspection, the nationalist legacy has been taken up everywhere by Islamist currents. By replacing the language of 'endogenous' Muslim culture at the centre of the political discourse, they have in quite a simple but obvious way extended to the cultural and symbolic arena the process of distancing themselves from their former colonisers, which their nationalist predecessors had already begun. Europe, it seems, has as yet been unable to develop a coherent understanding of the present political landscape. As we have seen, it has failed to establish even minimal channels of communication with the latter, and has consequently severely curtailed its own knowledge and appreciation of most salient features of the current Arab environment.

There are a few commendable exceptions. EU representatives managed to establish and conserve their contacts with the Lebanese Hezbollah; they have maintained cooperation with Lebanon's Ministry of Energy, even when a senior Hezbollah member was appointed at its head. Generally, however, the expectations of the Arab world are filtered through a reductive European prism, whereby the voices of ruling regimes overwhelm those of civil society, whereas those of a relatively unrepresentative secular opposition are allowed to obscure the voices of an entire generation of Islamists.

Among the ranks of the Islamists, Europe is unsurprisingly accused of continuing its search for a mythical 'third force', in the hope of making moral capital out of shunning both the (military) 'plague' and the (Islamist) 'cholera'. In the words of exiled Algerian academic, Abbas Aroua (quoted in Burgat, 2006): This 'neither plague, nor cholera' thesis has afflicted Europe with an undeniable political 'blindness'. Blinded by an ideological vision often bordering on Islamophobia (as certain highly official reactions during the Cartoon crisis have shown) – a prism amplifying its ancestral phobias – Europe has lost sight closed a blind eye to the evolution of Algerian and Arab reality. Yet its legitimate interests will be better served by the true representatives of the populations in question, which truly representative political and societal forces will sooner or later manage to bring to power.

The Obama Presidency: Implication for Euro–Arab Relations

External events could no doubt push European governments to reassess policy directions. The departure of the Bush Administration, the Israeli offensive against Gaza, and the significant changes to US policy on the Palestine conflict foreshadowed by President Barack Obama, both before and after his inauguration, raised significant questions about the future of Middle East politics. Change, it is arguable, was about to outweigh continuity. Though many might wish this to be the case, there was nevertheless little evidence to support this line of argument.

US strategy in the region was marked first and foremost by the administration's manifest inaction in relation to Palestine both during and the after the Gaza war. On the ground, a core element of the policy was the continued ostracism of Hamas despite its victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections and the more or less explicit ostracism of all its Arab counterparts, notably the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which continued to operate as oppositional movements. Here, again continuity prevailed. In the case of the nuclear dispute, the main source of friction in relations with Iran, several positive signals were directed towards Iran. But, such signals could not override the commitment to things as they are, even though such a stance overlooked the important help that Iran could extend to the United States at a difficult moment when it was attempting to disengage from Iraq.

The electoral promise to withdraw from Iraq, notwithstanding the vagueness of the proposed timetable, no doubt reduced the scope of misunderstanding between the United States and public opinion in the Muslim world. Nor should the efforts of the American President to communicate with Turkey during his first state visit to that country be underestimated. Yet, the misunderstanding of the currents traversing the Muslim, not to say Islamic, world remained essentially unchanged. The misunderstanding was simply geographically displaced. The redeployment of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan was once again justified in terms of the 'struggle against al-Qaeda'. The priority now given to Afghanistan and Pakistan's inclusion in the military effort suggested that the same structural error underpinned the vision of the administration. Like Bush, Obama 'overideologised' the roots of radicalisation aimed at the United States and its European and regional allies, preferring to focus almost exclusively on its Islamic characteristics and overlook its non-religious or political dimensions.

The persistent notion that the 'war on terror' could be won by military means and within the territorial confines of two countries in the region suggests that the Obama administration shared the same confused thinking which had led the US policy under Bush to a terrible impasse. Though it was the radical, sectarian and to this extent utterly unacceptable expression of a radicalised minority, the growth of the al-Qaeda generation owed at least as much to the politics of desperation, a widespread phenomenon among the populations of the Muslim world. This desperation was in turn the product of a political dysfunctionality operating in three domains: the global domain (occupied largely by the United States since the collapse of the Soviet Union), the Arab–Israeli domain, which the American superpower refused to regulate, and national Arab domains where authoritarianism was itself the expression of a threefold rejection of the right of an entire generation to be politically represented.

It is this complex dysfunctionality, in which Europeans, Americans and their Arab client states were deeply implicated, which should have been at the core of the reform agenda and not the securitisation of the radical movements that it feeds. This remained a distant prospect at best. The continuing recourse to hard power and excessive emphasis on the cultural and religious dimensions of conflict (at the expense of political and non-religious considerations) risked inflicting on the interests of the United States and its allies a rather heavy price, at least in the medium term.

Conclusion

In the Arab context, today's Europe no longer disposes of the contacts, relays and resources that would enable it to prepare for the challenges that ongoing and future political transitions will inevitably create. The indiscriminate ostracism of all oppositional (or even governmental, as in the case of Hamas) political voices in the Arab World, whenever they have recourse to the vocabulary of Muslim culture, has become increasingly problematic. A large majority of the opposition, not only Islamists but also a wide cross-section of the region's citizenry, views this ostracising strategy as one of the Europe's diplomatic failures. The Barcelona process is now widely considered to have lost both meaning and content (Malmvig, 2006).

Europe's inability to group the historical process that has given rise to these forces and their currently pivotal role in the Arab political landscape holds perhaps the key to its predicament. The EU has failed to recognise the significance of moderate Islamist groups and their roots within the population. Worse still, it has overlooked their modernising potential – in all the fields of political liberalisation, including the strengthening of individual rights for both women and men – as at least equal to that of the secularists.

By contrast, several US democratic think tanks have come round to the view that we have long ago articulated,⁷ which considers moderate Islamists to hold the key to Arab reform. As Amr Hamzawy (2005) puts it, before significant reform can take place in the Arab World, [T]he US and EU must initiate relations with moderate Islamists, which is not so prickly as it might seem, because these Islamists have taken on board democratic rules and shown themselves to be a very real support for the Rule of Law.

This possibility is attested by the multiple alliances forged by Islamists in much of the Arab World, from Lebanon (where Christian General Aoun has gone into partnership with the shi'ite Hezbollah) to Yemen (where, during the September 2006 presidential election, the Socialist Party made an alliance with the Yemeni Rally for Reform, a formation closely tied to the Muslim brotherhood) to the highly instructive Pact of Sant'Egidio, signed in January 1995 between different elements of the Algerian opposition (Bouandel, 2005, p. 409).

When the effects of the pro-Israel gravitational pull and the incapacity to relate with the Islamist dynamic snowballs the worst possible outcome – the boycott of the legally elected government of Palestine and the highly contradictory message that it conveys to dissenting movements in the Arab world – becomes a reality.

By denying the existence of a political generation, by jettisoning its principles and focusing instead on the economic resources and prospective markets of the Arab world, by sacrificing the political long-term interest on the altar of short-term financial and electoral interests, Europe has arguably jeopardised the value and efficacy of its relations with Arab countries and the Muslim world more generally. When it identifies eventually the Arab interlocutors other than authoritarian ruling elites and peripheral social actors who beam back the flattering image of its own universe, Europe might finally put an end to the state of permanent discord to that frequently typifies its relationship with a region of immense cultural and strategic significance.

Notes

¹ For a more exhaustive development of our hypotheses on Political Islam, see Burgat (1997, 2005, 2008) and Esposito and Burgat (2002).

² These conditions are (1) recognition of Israel; (2) renunciation of terrorism and violence; and (3) acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the 'Roadmap' (Klein, 2007).

³ The Yacoubian Building (Imart Yaqbn) is a novel by Egyptian author Alaa al-Aswany. In 2006, the book was made into a homonymous film, and eventually into a TV series broadcasted in late 2007.

⁴ It is not accidental that these examples focus on French measures and positions. The top EU partners from the south of the Mediterranean (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) were for decades colonies of France. And it is now a well-documented fact that for years, within the upper echelons of the EU, the representatives of the main Member States tacitly agreed that the management of 'Maghrebin affairs' was a 'domestic issue of France'. Over and beyond partisan platforms, colonial heritage continues to impact upon the definition of EU policies towards the southern rim of the Mediterranean. Paradoxically, the authoritarian regimes ruling these countries, in spite of the several links with the former colonial power, never forego an opportunity to highlight this handicap of the EU, hamstrung by its capacity to define a foreign policy free of postcolonial afterthoughts.

⁵ See the Article 2 of the Association Agreements between the EU and Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, which express their commitment towards '[T]he respect for democratic principles and fundamental human rights, spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, inspires the domestic and international policies of the present parties and constitutes an essential element of the present agreement'.

⁶ Organisations Vraiment Gouvernementales, in French.

⁷ As former Belgian Minister Guy Spitaels remarked: 'We are left with the recommendation put to us by François Burgat, one whose relevance is increasingly apparent. To allow Islamists, who constitute an integral part of these societies, to participate in some form of power sharing, has become the sine qua non of a democratic transition. Strangely, eight years after its initial framing, we see constant references to this proposition in ICG reports devoted to the Islamic world, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, and from Palestine to the Philippines' (Spitaels, 2005, p. 37).

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About the Author

François Burgat is Senior Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Since May 2008, he has been the director of the Institut français du Proche-Orient. He was resident in the Middle East for over 18 years: at the University of Constantine, Algeria (1973–1980), at the CEDEJ in Cairo (1989–1993), then as the director of the French Centre for Archaeology and Social Sciences in Sanaa, Yemen (1997–2003) and at the Institut de Recherches et d'Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman in Aix-en-Provence (2003–2008). His publications include The Islamic Movement in North Africa (University of Texas Press, 1997); Face to Face with Political Islam (IB Tauris, 2002), Islamism in the shadow of al-Qaeda (University of Texas Press, 2008).