Racing Against Time: Reform in North Africa and Transatlantic Strategies

Perceived by most U.S. policymakers as a comparatively problem free area, North Africa had been historically ignored by the United States, which had seen it as more naturally Europe’s 'backyard.' Only after 9/11, in fact, did the United States pay any real attention to the growing structural risks associated with the region as a whole. For the European Union the situation was precisely reversed. Priority was given to the countries on the EU’s Mediterranean border. Then European and U.S. policy toward the region remained diffuse, fragmented, and largely uncoordinated. Each saw the region through its own prism and neither had had the diplomatic energy to redress root causes of persistent economic and political pathology. And yet, four countries of North Africa — Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia — together represented an opportunity for the United States and Europe to collaborate with the governments, their respective peoples and each other to deepen on-going economic reform and secure those reforms through better, and hopefully more democratic governance. Alternatively, permitting the status quo to persist risks allowing a growing legitimacy crisis in each to torpedo inchoate reform and metastasize into full-blown instability, most likely through labor unrest, with profound consequences for the United States and its European partners. This paper explores economic and political developments in each of the four countries and the mechanisms by which the transatlantic community had sought to channel social, political, and economic change in them — for both good and ill. It then offers recommendations to strengthen U.S. engagement with Europe to help secure positive economic and governance trends.