The 20 February movement

Speaking at an Italian restaurant in Rabat some early-twenties activists from the ’20 February movement’ are saying that ‘We do not feel represented by the existing political parties. We want a monarchy like in Holland. For now we are asking for reforms, not regime change.’ The movement is not a typical youth movement modelled on the type of Otpor in Serbia, Pora in Ukraine or Kefaya in Egypt. Actually the early-20s activists of the Moroccan movement have not even heard of Kefaya. Their movement brings together or is supported by a ragtag of young urban middle class ‘spoiled kids’, the outlawed Islamist movement Al-Adl Wal Ihsane (Justice and Spirituality) and leftists disappointed with the left-wing parties. On 20 February they brought together a few hundred thousands people on the streets of several Moroccan cities to voice their demands for greater democracy. Now they organise such big marches once a month. In the meantime they organise smaller sit-ins, flash-mobs and days of giving flowers to the police, donating blood, or supporting Libya.

The protests are not likely to lead to a revolution, yet the mosaic of the movement is potentially hugely disruptive of the Moroccan political system as we know it. For decades the crown positioned itself between the secularists and the Islamists. But these forces are now united in contesting the existing political regime. This is also one of the lessons from Tunisia and Egypt, where much has been done about the Muslim Brotherhood protesting against Mubarak shoulder to shoulder with Facebookers and Coptic Christians. The Moroccans learned the lessons. The secularists and the Islamists are (for) now united in wanting a drastic curbing of the powers of the king and the creation of a parliamentary monarchy. Then, as a 20 February Movement activist says, ‘we all agree we want a democratic system. Later, we will compete against each other. We agree on the need for democracy, not on a concrete political agenda.’ And the monarchy is not in the middle anymore, it is poised against them.

The King’s Speech

On 9 March the king gave a speech announcing a constitutional reform process.  The Moroccan Foreign Minister Taib Fassi Fihri claimed in an article in Le Monde that Morocco has been in an ‘Arab spring’ phase – evolutionary changes and gradual liberalisation – for many years. Yet the process is faulty and hugely top-down. The king invited political parties and other groups to submit their ideas. Then a group of constitutionalists will design amendments to the constitution. But opposition journalists sympathising with the 20 February movement say commission for constitutional reforms visibly consists of only ‘servants to the palace’. There is no process of negotiating, agreeing or even debating properly the new constitutional amendments. Invited parties are supposed to send in their suggestions and the king and his experts will decide on the changes by 30 June. Then, sometime in September a referendum will be held and is certain to pass. Leaving the procedural issues aside, some substantial issues also seem to cloud the process. The King’s speech referred to the need to reform the constitution while within ‘constantes sacres’, among which the sanctity of the monarchy and the role of Islam.

Political parties and protesters alike all agree that Morocco should move from the current system where the king, not the government, governs, to a system where the king that does not govern. Yet, political parties give the king the benefit of the doubt and participate in the process, whereas protesters on the streets do not. Many see the constitutional reform process as an attempt to fake some reforms, buy time, let the tsunami pass, amend the constitution without changing the fundamentals of the political system. As a civil society activist says: ‘the king initiated the process under the pressure of the street and events in Tunisia and Egypt, not from an enlightened impulse.  In his 12 years since he is king he did not nothing of the sort.’ Thus many see that street pressure is the only factor that could maintain the momentum for reforms. The Moroccan foreign minister wrote in relations to Egypt and Tunisia that there is ‘no guarantee that the ‘Arab spring’ will lead to an ‘Arab summer’. One cannot totally discard the arrival of a ‘sobering winter’. But the same might refer to Morocco as well. There is not guarantee that the constitutional reform will bring about ‘a Moroccan summer’ to the country’s democratic developments.

Overall, gradualism and evolution is the talk of the town. But should this round of constitutional amendments fail to alter the system significantly, the next time the protests might be less loyal to the king than they are now and those who are loyal to the process now might not be as loyal next time.

The ‘Arab spring’ has not left Kingdom of Morocco untouched. Protesters across the country demand more limits on royal power and less corruption and clientelism around the palace. Few challenge the monarchy itself, but a wide range of forces demand a system where the king ‘reigns, but does not govern’. King Mohammed VI launched a process of constitutional reforms in an attempt to shore up the monarchy’s legitimacy and be seen as responding to the demands of the ‘Arab spring’. Morocco might not face a revolution, but the road ahead for Morocco might still be quite bumpy.

The political system

Morocco’s political system is a strange-ish hybrid. One the one hand it has a dominant monarchy with strong executive powers. The monarchy dominates political and economic life. The king reigns and governs. Yet, Morocco also has a multi-party system, holds regular elections which are judged as relatively free and fair, and has alternating governments. The parties that win most votes at the election are invited to head the government. But while elections lead to changes of government, the winning parties do not really govern. They might be in government, but they don’t govern; and whereas the political pendulum is swinging once in a while, political power did not.

Such a system is clearly more diffuse and open than the consolidated single-party rule of Ben Ali in Tunisia or Mubarak in Egypt, let alone that of Gaddafi. It also allows the population to let political steam off by voting for various political alternatives. Yet, the system also led to a gradual discreditation of parties. Whereas people voted for alternative parties, they in fact did not get alternative governments. Rather than becoming vehicles for change, the parties were easily co-opted by the system through perks, rents and posts.

The result of such a system is increasing apathy, low election turnout and anti-makhzen (establishment) frustration.  Morocco might have had many parties, but it only had one political actor (a half-joke in Russia says that whether Medvedev stays on as president after 2012 depends on one single vote, that of Vladimir Putin). As a Moroccan journalists puts it: ‘Our parties ceased to pursue power. They are only pursuing posts, since only one person has power in this country – the king’.  The country is ruled by a ‘shadow government’ of advisors to the king, not by the ministers. (Again this closely resembles the Russian political system during Putin’s presidency where real power lied in the Presidential administration, not the government).

Commander of the Faithful

Any conversation on politics in Morocco reveals relatively quickly attitudes to the royal house. Those who refer to the monarch as the ‘king’ are more critical than those who refer to the monarch as ‘His Majesty’. But even loyalists start to have questions. A member of the currently ‘ruling’ Istiklal party says that ‘His Majesty initiates and launches all the ‘grand chantiers’, such as motorways or high-speed-rail. He always brings the good news. The achievements are of the king, and all the failures – are because of the government. That’s a problem.’ Whereas the king is always seen inaugurating something and getting the credit, the ministers are seen as bad and corrupt.

The king is clearly not a Ben Ali style dictator. The monarchy as an institution, and we the king as a person are genuinely popular. The royal house is over 300 years old, descends from the prophet and the King is Amir al Muminin, ie commander of the faithful. This is a role that is hard to pin down, but seems to have real meaning in the Moroccan political culture.

The Monarchy has for decades played skilfully on two stages as a centrist force for good. One stage catered to a traditional Islamic audience, and the other to a modernist one. As a local expert puts it the ‘crown has a double legitimacy: it constantly alternates between showing its modernist face and then its Islamic face’. For decades the monarchy controlled the middle ground, sometimes playing to one audience and sometimes to the other, alternating between Islamic legitimacy and modernising legitimacy. One the one hand, the king is the driver of modernising projects, openness to tourists (the number of tourist in Morocco rose from 2.2 million in 2002 to 8 million in 2008), free trade with the EU, moderate emancipation of women. This buys him the support of the urban middle classes, the establishment and, quite importantly, the EU and the US. Yet, he is also supportive of pretty rigid religious policies. In Morocco one cannot even change sects (turning from a Sunni into a Shia, for example), let alone change religion or be openly atheist, without fear of reprisals from the state.

Gouvernant ou commerҫant

The monarchy might have played well on two scenes for decades, but playing a third role might have been one too many. In addition to being commander of the faithful and the de facto head of government, the king and his entourage are also the most important business actors in the country. The political system might have been more pluralist than in Tunisia and Egypt, and even if economic power is also slightly more diffused, the system reproduces the model of convergence of economic power, cronyism and rent-seeking around the palace so common in the Middle East.

For years discussing or questioning the affairs of the king in the media was an absolute taboo. The king was untouchable. Those who dared touch the king could be exiled, imprisoned or fined at best. But the toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia opened the gates to a flood of questions and debates about the king. This debate is still prudent. Newspapers do not venture into discussing specific business ventures, yet they question whether the king should be as involved in business as he is. An expert from Casablanca puts in stark terms: ‘The king should decide if he wants to govern or do business. If he wants to do politics, he should not be doing business.’ Certainly the issue is not related just to the king. Like in any centralised system there is always a whole bunch of family members, advisors or friends who are extremely successful businessmen.

This is of course superimposed on a stark background of social inequalities.  For the last decade Morocco had healthy economic growth, but little redistribution. The government seems obsessed with infrastructure spending. In Casablanca and Rabat new and modern tram lines are built that seems more majestic than the tram system in cities like Brussels or Budapest. The government invests EUR 2 billion in a high-speed rail. Yet for all for all its relative openness and projects aimed at economic modernisation, the country has a stark illiteracy rate of 45%, compared to Egypt’s 34%, Tunisia’s 23% or Algeria’s 24%. Morocco’s levels of illiteracy are lower than those of Sudan, Haiti and Rwanda, though its GDP/per capita 2 to 4 times larger, according to UN data. Besides illiteracy, the underpinning of the system are also shaky. Social and economic inequalities in Rabat’s sprawling posh suburbs are bigger than those of Tunis, as are Casablanca’s slums. Abdelillah Benkirane, the leader of the Islamist Party of Justice and Development, sumed it up in the following way: ‘our ministers are richer than yours (in Europe), and our rich live better than yours’. This sounds like a good populist punchline, but reflects a widespread feeling.

‘More for more’ stands for a more meritocratic ENP. It should lay the basis for proper differentiation between neighbours, not based on geographic criteria, but based on their performance. The concept is also supposed to change the way the EU is spending its money. Currently the EU pre-allocates most of its assistance to specific neighbourhood states (almost irrespective of their reform performance) in 7-years budgetary cycles. ‘More for more’ is supposed to make it easier to shift its more EU assistance from one neighbourhood state to another depending on their reform performance. Overall, the concept the concept of ‘more for more’ is laudable and fair, but also quite slippery.

More for more, but not that much

To begin with, the concept is not that new. Back in 2006 the EU launched a so-called governance facility – a pool of money that was supposed to be spent on the 1-2 most reformist neighbours. That was a ‘more for more’ in all but name. Morocco and Ukraine (Moldova joining later on) got most of it. The ‘governance facility’ funds were ‘more’, but still too little to alter reform trajectories in the neighbourhood states. And many reforms were not that sustainable, if not reversible, as the case of Ukraine showed. To be truly effective ‘more for more’ might need to be ‘much more money, for much more reforms’ to have an impact.

Geopolitics vs ‘more for more’

‘More for more’ runs up against geography and geopolitics as other key criteria for capturing EU attention. Geography is unbeatable in many ways. Belarus will always preoccupy more minds in the EU than Armenia, and Tunisia will preoccupy more minds than Jordan. In a sense the real geographic division inside the neighbourhood policy is not only between states that are South or East, but also between states that are closer or further away from the EU. In this sense the ENP states of Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Tunisia, Morocco are likely to be higher on EU radar screens than Azerbaijan, Syria, Jordan or Armenia, irrespective of the pace of reforms.

Even though the ‘more for more’ concept is pushing the debate into the right direction by focusing primarily on reforms delivery, not geography, the tensions between the two approaches will persist. Witness the recent letter by France, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia and Malta calling for a re-allocation of funds from East to South. Such an approach is a clear-cut challenge to the ‘more for more’ approach. Instead of calling for supporting reforms the letter calls for supporting the south. That is a rather self-serving approach. But it is strongly embedded in the thinking of many member states and the French can be quite ruthless in pushing for their agenda in the EU.

Then there are the other geopolitical priorities. A situation like Palestine is probably exempt from the ‘more for more’ approach, I suspect. Palestine is by far biggest recipient of EU assistance in the neighbourhood, yet this is assistance has been tied less to reforms and democracy, and more to state building and the Middle East peace process. EU assistance to Palestine is 75 eur/per person/per year, which is 3 times per capita more than Moldova gets, 5 times more than Jordan and ten times more than Tunisia under Ben Ali.

What is more and what is less?

‘More for more’ will run into tensions of what to consider more in those cases where democracy and reformism do not go hand in hand. In ‘more for more’, the second more actually subdivides into two types ‘more’ – one stands for ‘more reforms’ and the other for ‘more democracy’. Think of the following cases: Orange Ukraine was democratic, but not reformist. Georgia – was reformist, but less democratic. In the South – Lebanon is pluralist, Tunisia (under Ben Ali) was reformist, but less pluralist. When such a division exist – assessing what is more can become tricky.

Then, the question is whether ‘more is more’ also means ‘less for less’. This opens all kinds of questions related to how far the EU can go in expanding sanctions, pressures, negative conditionality and other forms of coercion against problematic states in the neighbourhood. I have serious doubts the EU has any appetite or desire to match ‘more for more’ with ‘less for less’.

Another question is who will define what is more? I suspect the neighbourhood states might often consider they deserve more than they get. Their reading of their reform performance might be more optimistic than that of the EU. ‘More for more’ is hard to quantify because the notion of more is relative.

The EU has tried to methodologically identify what is more back in 2006 but such criteria were hardly a compass for EU action. The EU forgot its criteria almost as soon as they were published. This time, perhaps an aggregated monitoring mechanism run by a coalition of European and neighbourhood NGOs lumping together all kinds of indicators and indexes – from the cost of doing business, the economist democracy index, freedom in the world, and corruption perception index – could help to at least partly de-subjectivise the notion of ‘more’. Such a monitoring mechanism could also monitor whether ‘more’ is done not just the neighbourhood states, but also by the EU.

How to get more?

Finally, the most important question is where to take money for ‘more is more’? With a few EU member states on the verge of bankruptcy, and a few others unwilling to pay for those on the verge of bankruptcy – increasing spending for foreign policy is rather unlikely. So most of the action will be reduced to nasty battles between proponents of spending in the south with proponents of spending in the east. However, the EU should start redirecting funds not so much between the eastern and southern neighbourhood, but rather from the non-neighbourhood to the neighbourhood.

‘More for more’ is a useful principle to be applied not just in the neighbourhood, but across the countries where the EU gives assistance. And some other countries should not receive EU assistance at all. Why should the EU spend money in the BRIC countries (except for student exchanges and public diplomacy)? The BRIC governments are all on shopping sprees in the EU and elsewhere investing in projects that many EU countries cannot afford, whereas the EU still offers them development assistance…

Recently the UK cut development assistance to 16 countries (including Russia, China, Vietnam, Serbia, Bosnia, Cameroon, Indonesia, Kosovo, Moldova etc). India was not one of them. Yet this provoked a debate as to why should a UK that that is about to fire 11.000 Ministry of Defence personnel including soldiers just returning from Afghanistan, cannot afford a space program and a nuclear program, and is forced to share aircraft carriers with France for lack of funds, offer development assistance to an India that has a space program and a nuclear program. Certainly paying for past colonialist abuses and alleviating poverty are serious considerations. But the point is worth raising.

The EU keeps offering preferential lending and direct development assistance to BRIC countries. It is not that much, but it still is a bad investment. Its political impact is zero. The same money would almost double the EU assistance to countries like Georgia or Tunisia. China spent on the Shanghai World Expo alone EUR 39 bn (USD 55 bn), which is more three times the amount of money the EU plans to spend in the whole of its neighbourhood in 7 years between 2007 and 2013. Russia’s planned Nord and South Stream pipelines would also cost more than two times the amount of EU assistance to the neighbourhood in 7 years.

It is true that development assistance to the BRICs is decreasing. But the picture is starker with lending money. The European Investment Bank financed the construction of the Beijing Airport before the 2008 Olympics with EUR 500 million and another half a billion for other projects. As the EIB website says the Bank’s ‘AAA credit rating enables it to obtain the best terms on the market. As a not-for-profit institution, the EIB passes on this advantage in the terms it offers to the beneficiaries of its loans in both the public and private sectors.’ The EIB is supposed to ‘make a difference to the future of Europe and its partners by supporting sound investments which further EU policy goals’. It is not clear how lending to modernise the Beijing airport for the Olympics helps achieve that goal, whereas lending a billion to develop neighbourhood countries would be make a bigger difference.

The era when the EU was the biggest bag of money in the world has ended. Others have more money than ever before, and the EU has less. Alleviating poverty cannot be a bigger priority for the EU than for the governments of the BRIC countries. It is time for the EU to focus its spending closer to home – where it needs to and can have an impact. And even if the EU starts spending more in the neighbourhood countries that deserve it, the even more difficult question is whether the EU has the will and the unity to become more of a political and security actor in this region as well.

This post is based on a conference presentation at the Danish Institute for International Studies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, 22 March 2011.

The Realist Consensus

For the few couple of years the realist consensus on democracy promotion seemed to be on a seemigly unstoppable (repeated) rise. It marked the end of two decades of noisy, often arrogant, but equally often concerned tough talk and action to promote human rights and democracy. The idea was that time has come to focus on achieving certain, rather quantifiable interests, such as ensuring security, fighting terrorism, expanding trade or managing migration, rather than adopting vague goals like promoting human rights and improving governance.

Obama’s foreign policy seemed to be a pretty visible embodiment of this realist approach to foreign policy. The formulation of the Obama administration primary foreign policy goals was restructured around a few clusters of issues – (more or less) achievale, quantifiable, measurable and tradeable (eg get an international consensus on Iran, make sure Russia plays a constructive role in Afghanistan etc). US partnerships with third states would be measured depending on how they help or complicate the achievement of certain goals, not by how those states were governed. The US-Russia reset was a clear example and testing-ground of this approach.

The EU was also by default moving in the same direction. Sometimes, well before the US did. Of course EU foreign policy was never as clear-cut and neat as that of the US, but as a ‘policy cloud’ it adopted the same trajectory – towards greater realism. EU policy on Russia, for example, has long ago abandoned any pretence of systematic support for human rights and democracy, except for scattered summit remarks for EU media here and there. The EU also started to engage Lukashenko in Belarus, arrived to a near complete cessation of any serious criticism (as opposed to occasional pro forma huffing and puffing) of human rights issues in not just in Russia, but also in China and even smaller places like Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tunisia or Libya. The sanctions on Uzbekistan were removed, those on Belarus suspended (until January 2011) and the pressure – public or private – on other autocratic regimes or even democratic regimes with small authoritarian hiccups significantly scaled down.

All this was branded under the respectable-sounding name of ‘engagement’. I actually believe ‘engagement’ is a legitimate strategy to deal with dictators. I also do not think wishy-washy targeted sanctions and big public speeches are the only way to promote democracy. The primary function of many of these (like travel bans on Burmese generals – LOL) is to provide substitutes for action, placate domestic Western public opinion, the gung-ho media and preserve a modicum of self-respect, rather than achieve any specific democracy-promotion goals in tough places like Burma or Zimbabwe.

But ‘engagement’ is when you minimise public criticism and talk to a dictator in the hope that it opens up space for you to do some other useful things on the side like getting political prisoners out or supporting media and NGOs. But, unfortunately, the banner of ‘engagement’ is often used for pretty unprincipled stuff. In Tunisia such ‘engagement’ (see the post on Post-Revolutionary Tunisia) lead to a situation where Ben Ali was receiving hundrers of millions of euro, which allegedly ‘bought’ the EU the possibility to spend 100.000 eur/year on civil society (though a good chunk of it was going to fake NGOs set up by the government). ‘Engagement’ with Russia and China does not strike me as having been used to scale up support for civil society in these states. Quite the contrary. And it is this kind of fake engagement stemming from the ‘realist consensus’ that became increasingly dominant in democracy promotion (or lack of it).

The Unhappy Consensus

But the realist consensus was not a happy ‘consensus’. The reasons for the emergence of the Realist consensus were both tactical and structural. The gradual shift in power away from the West meant that the West cannot just shout around the world promoting democratic values. Its pressure was less and less effective, the targets of pressures could ignore the EU and US more and more without significant consequences. Countries like China and Russia, but also Brazil and India were happy to offer alternative trade deals, economic assistance and political protection in international fora to ‘the Mugabes’ of this world.

But the tactical factors also played an important role. Bush’s presidency discredited  democracy promotion as an explicit foreign policy goal. After Bush – going around the world talking democracy promotion rang all the wrong bells and was counter-productive. what is worse, the supposed riders of the democracy promotion wave have not proved terribly good swimmers either. Coloured revolutions in places like Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan or Lebanon dissapointed many, starting with its most committed activists. The few coloured revolutions also provoked a much wider counter-revolutionary backlash in other countries, adding to the negative side of the balance. (See Tymoshenko’s recent reflections on revolutions. Good, but not self-critical at all). All these factors put together have set the stage for the end of ‘post-Cold war’ democracy promotion. But the realist consensus, which seemed like an unpleasant, but still alternative, proved not to be one.

The (Happy?) Death of the Consensus

Just when most Western decision-makers finally (more or less) settled for this realist consensus – it all exploded in their face in Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia and elsewhere in the Middle East. After such a wave of revolts, which do have a significant potential to open up the political space in many Arab states (not overnight, not in one go and not always successfuly) it would be stupid to continue with the realist consensus. But returning to 90s style democracy promotion is also not going to work. The West has fewer money and less relative political power to back up its support for democracy (not mentioning the allergy the US provokes in so many states).

They cannot go back to the 90s and most of 2000s policies on democracy promotion, but they can no longer settle for the minimalist ‘realist’ approach either, since it is out of touch with popular demands on the ground. What will come out of it is unclear, but will be an important conversation for the next couple of years or so.

The mood

… is very positive. It is not the end of a president (like Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004), but the end of an era. Since independence in 1956, Tunisia had only two presidents – Bourghiba and Ben Ali who ruled for 30 and 23 years respectively. In this sense Tunisia feels a bit like Central and Eastern Europe in late 80s-early 90s.

Confusion

There is a lot of optimism, but even more short term confusion. There is no clear understanding, nor agreement on what to do the following weeks and months. There are no institutions, no leaders and no united platform of dissidents, NGOs or oppositionists (like Solidarnosc in Poland or Saakshvili in Georgia) to stir the country through the next months. The interim president is unelected with little legitimacy, there is no parliament, the interim government is very weak politically, and under constant assault from protesters who want jobs, salary raises etc. So far the government had to accede to most of the demands of the protesters, since it has little power to say no. With such tempo the country can easily go bankrupt (add the outflow of tourists, uncertainties of the investors etc).

The starting point of post-revolutionary transitions in Serbia, Georgia or Ukraine were much better, and even there many of the results are mixed. These countries’ protest movements had leaders who could assume the responsibility for governing in a matter of weeks, not (6-7) months. They also had some history of competitive elections, established political parties, NGOs, more independent media, and economic power was more diffused. They also had decent laws (electoral codes, media laws, and constitutions), which even if not fully respected, were at least in place and did not need to be drafted all almost from scratch in a matter of weeks after the revolution. Central and Eastern Europe in late 80s-early 90s also did not have many of these things, but they at least had organised and united governments’ in waiting such as Solidarnosc or Charter 77, and much more EU support.

In Tunisia there is no clear understanding on the sequencing of next steps. Should one elect a president or change the constitution first. If changing the constitution comes first – then an constituent assembly needs to be convened, but the question is how to elect? Any elections will need changes to media and electoral laws at least. A dilemma outlined by some active revolutionaries is that if the country holds elections too early – this might favour Ben Ali’s old guard who have the money, the resources (including media), the skills and the organisations to score too well; but if elections are held too late when disappointment with the economic performance might kick in – then Islamists might score better than anyone thinks.

On the positive side, however, is the fact that Tunisia is a decently functioning country. Confusion is not chaos. Tunisia has functioning state institutions, a very well educated (and French-speaking) elite, emancipated and active women, and strong connections to Europe. Sicily is 160 km away (Lampedusa is 70km) and Europe feels close. Aside from a narrow circle of Ben Ali’s family, corruption is relatively low. In the Transparency International corruption perception index Tunisia (59^th place in the world) scores better than Croatia, Macedonia, Greece, Italy, Montenegro, Georgia (68), as well as Moldova (105) let alone Armenia (123^rd place), Ukraine (134) or Russia (154). Tunisia is also on the respectable 55th place in the World Bank Cost of doing business index. Obviously such indexes are not entirely objective, but they still give a sense of the overall trend. The ministries might be a bit chaotic, but the system seems to function nonetheless. And the population has discovered the joy of protests and keeping in check those in power. But chanelling these structural factors into an organised political process will be a challenge.

Media

The newspapers are a joyful read (the ones I could read in French, at least). They provide a daily deluge of comments and post-revolutionary hopes. But the TV could become problematic. There are only a few private channels and all of them belong to Ben Ali’s old guard. They are very pro-revolutionary now, but can play an important role in propelling many of the unsavoury ‘have beens’ into politically strong positions in the future. Al Jazeera is more popular than the local channels, but while contributing to pluralism in general, it is less likely to affect the media-battles between the future political forces that should emerge in Tunisia. Equally problematic, there is no independent broadcasting council that could contribute quickly to greater pluralism of the media by granting more licences to new media outlets.

The Army

… are seen as the good guys. They stayed neutral during the protests, and this meant refusing a clampdown. Declaring ‘neutrality’ meant supporting the protesters. The way the army is seen Tunisia challenges two Western notions of what an army should be like. The first relates to restrictions on the use of the army in domestic politics (except natural disasters and exceptional situations). In Tunisia such a role, in the short term, at least, is welcome. They provide some security on the streets, provide a check on the hated police and pushed Ben Ali out. (They also guard the building of the Ministry of Interior which still has protesters outside.) The second notion is the idea of conscripts. In the west a modern army is an army of professionals. In Tunisia the army, unlike the police, is the ‘people’s institution’ precisely because of consists of conscripts, not professionals.

Europe before the revolution

… was in cahoots with Ben Ali. People talk of a case when a local NGOs (Association of Democratic Women) received a 30.000 EUR grant from the EU commission delegation. The regime froze the bank accounts and the NGOs could not use the money. Instead of putting pressure on the then-government to release the money, the EU requested the funds back from the NGO at the end of the financial year. Disgrace. Another case was that of Rama Yade, ex-state secretary for human rights in France, refused to meet opposition NGOs during Ben Ali’s reign. Certainly some EU states were more principled than others. Unsurprisingly – the Nordics. A Tunisian summed it up neatly: ‘EU wanted democracy for themselves, but not for us’

… and after the revolution

Despite some bitterness vis-a-vis Europe, there is no one else to help. The is US not that visible, the other Arab states will be consumed by their own post-revolutionary transitions (Egypt, at least) or will have few stakes in seeing the revolution succeed. Quite the contrary.

Counter-revolution

… is possible. In two ways. Either the old elite uses its money, power, media, networks, etc to entrench themselves successfully in the new system and push back the changes (in the next 1-2-3 years); or some revolutionary leaders reproduce a centralised system that is perhaps freer than that of Ben Ali, but nonetheless quite authoritarian. Most revolutions in history knew one of these two outcomes (the Russian revolution in 1905-1907 for the first, and the French and Mexican revolutions – for the second). Either way, democracy does not descent upon states in one go, and may require more than one upheaval, zigzagging between phases of centralisation and democratisation before democracy consolidates.

The economy

A European diplomat’s explanation of the revolution was quite interesting. He argued that despite high growth in the last years, Tunisia’s economy could not generate enough jobs for young people. In the last decade or so, the share of the rural population was slightly increasing. This was partly explained but much better and tougher border-controls by the EU, which made it impossible to let the demographic steam off. Hence the growing dissatisfaction and frustration with economic conditions and the revolutionary explosion.

Virtually everyone notes that the economy will make or break the success of the revolution. People went in to the streets for socio-economic reasons (lack of jobs, Ben Ali family’s extravagant corruption and richness etc) and the success of the revolution will depend on its ability to deliver economic improvements. This is a tall order, since job-creation was Ben Ali’s number 1 priority anyway, and moving those into even higher is that not that easy. And others actually say that the economy might only get worse in the near future.

What next?

The success of a revolution is not defined just by the capacity to overthrow a regime, but especially on what follows next. A successful revolution is a revolution that over the next decade delivers a more pluralistic and inclusive political and economic system.

Besides supporting economic delivery through loans and grants, the outsiders do not have much room for manoeuvre. This is not Central Europe, the Balkans or even Armenia where the EU deployed high-level advisors that work within the governments advising locals what to do. The southern neighbourhood is much more sensitive – both due to the colonial legacy and EU’s tarnished reputation due to the support for all kind of autocrats.

The EU could help with building the structural conditions for a more pluralistic system. Obviously support for civil society, party-building and media will be key. Helping to set up a broadcasting council that could grant licences asap, getting FM and TV waves for BBC TV and radio in Arabic could be useful. Small things like some direct EU assistance to the families of the victims of the revolution would also help. A bit of lessons learned from other cases of transition – from South Africa to Poland to Georgia – would widen a bit the domestic discussion inside Tunisia, not least on the potential dangers and failures. Offering Tunisia an EU mobility partnership and a visa-facilitation deal (reduce cost of visas from 60 to 35 EUR, and grant long term visas to businessmen, students, civil society etc) is also an idea worth pursuing.

So far Tunisia managed to successfully get rid of an authocrat, but this is not yet a ‘successul’ revolution. Its success will be defined by what happens in Tunisia in the next 5 to 10 years. And the EU will be the most important external actor than can help in a meaningful way.

Coming up with coherent EU responses to today’s ‘revolutions’ is more difficult. The problem for the EU is not so much the lack of visibility, but the lack of a clear-cut position with which to be visible. Back in 2003-2005, EU’s sympathies were clear (though not always as explicitly articulated at revolutionaries wanted it), but now the EU is struck by the scale of events and is mainly stuck on the fence. As Daniel Korski asks: “Should the EU back the protests, support what has been a friendly regime or sit uncomfortably on the fence?”

The fence-sitting moment (for many it is a ‘fence-sitting eternity’) is something which comes up at every single revolutionary situation the EU is supposed to have a view on. It is always uncomfortable, but sometimes it is easier to choose sides than other. Responding to Belarus’ suppression of post-election protests last December was relatively ‘easy’. It might not be effective, but there was no room for fence-sitting, and the EU was practically pre-determined to reimpose sanctions on Lukashenko and his cronies. Of course this was tried before and hasn’t worked. But what else can the EU do? After years of sanctions since the late 90s, the EU tried to engage with Lukashenko for the last few years, but engagement was pushed aside by the repression of post-electoral protests. To a certain extent, the new set of sanctions are not introduced to change Lukashenko, but for EU’s peace of mind and modicum of self-respect. So the EU policy on Belarus came full circle – sanctions, then engagement and now sanctions again. Nothing worked in the end. (Though engagement seemed to bring some moderate progress, which proved unsustainable however.)

But Albania, Tunisia and Egypt are much more complicated when it comes to having coherent reactions and choosing on which side of the fence to put the EU. The reasons are many-fold. To begin with, the EU is relatively disappointed  with the value and sustainability of coloured revolutions. Mostly because of Ukraine’s Orange failure (see the blog post on ‘Ukraine fatigue’), but Lebanon (which just saw Hariri Jr ousted and a Hezbollah-backed prime-minister brought in) has hardly been a success story. Georgia has been a decent success in terms of reforms, but the 2008 war have tarnished its reputation and fueled ‘Georgia fatigue’ in the EU and US. Either way the EU burned its fingers on having high hopes in successful revolutionary mid-term outcomes in the neighbourhood. Add to that an Obama administration that seems to have a preference for realist-type engagements. And a general and increasing lack of self-confidence in the West because of the ‘rise of the rest’. What you get out of this is a mix of extreme caution and counter-revolutionary instincts in both the EU and the US.

Then, if you go through the latest set of revolutions country by country, the choices are even tougher. Albania has an EU accession perspective and has just received the possibility of visa-free travel to the EU, supposedly for structural reforms in the law-enforcement sector. So the Albanian government is supposed to be a respectable, democratic partner of the EU. You cannot treat it like Kuchma’s Ukraine or Shevardnadze’ Georgia. But then 3 people were left dead in Albania during the latest riots, the government’s legitimacy is seriously questioned, the country seems to be in a process of self-destruction, and the crisis is not over yet, even if all the media attention is on Egypt now. But the EU still cannot jump off its fence, because a legitimate question is how on earth did Albania get a visa-free regime just 3 months ago if the governments is so bad?

Tunisia, an authoritarian, but reformist state in the Southern neighbourhood also presented the EU with a set of hard choices. Tunisia was one of those cases where the EU was confused when it came to taking attitudes towards their reformism/democracy performance.  Still, Tunisia benefited from a lot of EU support. In the World Bank’s Cost of Doing Business index Tunisia was ahead of Croatia and Montenegro (but in the Press Freedom it was behind Lybia and Uzbekistan). Anyway, Tunisia was small, geopolitically not-so-important and Islamists were not a first-order issue. So EU’s fence sitting for most of the revolution had relatively limited costs. But Egypt is of an entirely different magnitude.

Egypt has a rather institutionalised, deep-rooted Islamist opposition network – the Muslim Brotherhood (which Tunisia never had). It is also an indispensable ally and cool-head in the whole Israel-Palestine set of issues. The choice in Egypt is much more difficult than choosing to support Yushchenko vs Kuchma, or ‘whoever’ against Lukashenko. Finding yourself on the wrong side of the fence in Egypt has huge implications for all kinds of issues – from Israel to how the EU is seen throughout the Muslim world and among European Muslims. The problem though is that there is no fence in Egypt to sit on. The revolutionary logic of such situations is that you can only be with or against the revolutionaries. Sitting on the fence equals opposing the street. And this is what the EU might increasingly become associated with, as it thinks is sits on the fence.

First, many EU member states hesitated to act assertively in the Eastern neighbourhood for fear of irritating Russia. For many EU states good relations with Russia are more important than developments in Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova. This often forced the EU to act at the lowest common denominator. Whenever it could, the EU shunned meaningful action.

Second, EU member states diverged hugely in the interpretation of events and, consequently, in possible responses. As one EU official once told me about a president from the eastern neighbourhood “you can’t save Y from his once stupidity”. This entirely misses the point: the EU had to get engage in the Balkans not because it liked Hashim Thachi or Slobodan Milosevic, but because Balkan realities were threatening European interests and values. The same goes for the eastern neighbourhood. The EU might not like Aliev, Lukashenko, Sargsyan, Youshchenko, Saakashvili and Voronin, but that is precisely the reason why it has to get more engaged. And that is precisely the reason why the Eastern partnership is being launched. If Moldova was like Estonia and Ukraine was like Poland, there would be no need for an Eastern partnership.

Mediation as a substitute for policy

EU divisions have been visible across every single crisis in the region. EU member states interpretations of the war in Georgia and possible responses diverged hugely. Some blamed Saakashvili, others blamed Russia. The January 2009 gas Russia-Ukraine gas crisis was perhaps even more divisive. Some blamed Ukraine, others blamed Russia.

In such cases the by default EU reaction is to offer mediation and monitoring (gas monitors in Ukraine and the EU Monitoring Mission in Georgia). But mediation and observation, however useful, is hardly a policy. Mediation can diffuse crises, but can rarely solve them; observation can inform policy, but does not amount to a policy. Norway is a respected international mediator, but I doubt the EU wants to be a big neutral “Norway” always mediating in the eastern neighbourhood. Its stakes in the region are much higher.

United on strategy…

The recent crisis in Moldova was perhaps a bit different. On Moldova EU seems more united than almost ever before. Most EU states (except Romania) had a rather similar interpretation of events – condemnation of violent acts by the protesters, but also of the violent crackdown by the government against opposition, media and NGOs. And EU reactions have not been constrained by fears of irritating Russia. The EU Special Representative was in Moldova from practically the first day of the crisis. There was a flood of statements and phone calls from Solana, the Czech presidency, the French-Czech-Swedish Presidency trio, the European commission and some EU member states, including France, Poland and Lithuania. Then two weeks after the crisis the Czech PM Mirek Topolanek and then Javier Solana visited Moldova (today). Though the problem partly was that EU statements and phone calls mostly came two days later than they should have (when most abuses had been commited and therefore could not be prevented).

(The story with Solana is a telling one. The last and only time the High Representative for CFSP had been to Moldova was in 2001 (besides a previous trip as NATO Sec Gen). For years Moldova practically begged the EU for a high-level, ie Solana, involvement in conflict settlement in Transnistria to match Putin/Medvedev’s hands on approach to the issue. It never worked. The country had to make it to the edge of the abyss of authoritarianism in order to get Solana to Chisinau. Of course crises forced the EU into action, but still the irony if unfortunate. Bad behaviour seems to pay off).

The EU has not feared to intervene in Moldova even if this would irritate Russia (which offered president Voronin riot-control gear, many statements of political support and promises of a bail-out should relations with the EU sour as a result of the crackdown). EU intervention in Moldova was judged on its own merits.

… divided on tactics

At the same time, the EU is still disunited on the tactics of an EU response. Should the EU use coercion and pressure or reinforcement through rewards? Should it put pressure on Voronin, threat to withhold assistance, play tough and risk a Moldovan realignment with Russia? Or should it deal with Moldova through engagement – promise more (a new agreement with the EU, financial assistance to help with the economic crisis and maybe a push on conflict settlement in Transnistria) and “buy” a reversal of Moldova’s authoritarianism?

This intra-EU dilemma is not solved. Some states (among them Romania and a few others) tend to bend on the more coercive side; others seem to be on the engagement side. Perhaps the end result will be a combination of both, as a policy brief on Moldova just published by CEPS suggests. And perhaps none of these strategies on its own will work. A policy mix of conditionality and rewards will be needed. The difficult question is what are the right proportions for such a policy cocktail?

Divisions on tactics are not uncommon on other foreign policy dossiers as well – from Russia to Iran and China. But still, this is a sign that EU policy on Moldova might be more emancipated from the shadow of Russia than on most other issues in the Eastern neighbourhood (a similar policy seems to emerge on Belarus). The EU is deciding what to do with Moldova on its own merits and whether this irritates Russia or not has been a relatively minor concern. Perhaps this is a sign of a “Moldova-first” approach replacing the “Russia-first” approach to the country.

PS: This does not fit into the text,but as Obama presses the reset button on Russia, EU Obs launches a new blog on the east: Belarus Reloaded. welcome!