The long road towards real democracy

Despite their diversity, there is a common thread running through all the problems experienced by the countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean - the fact that almost all of them are undemocratic.

Of the ten non-EU members of the Euromed partnership - Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey - just three (Israel, Lebanon and Turkey) can be meaningfully described as democratic, though others have made some progress in recent years.

Morocco has gradually, though carefully, opened up since the death of its long-time king, Hassan, in 1999. Algeria has managed to emerge from the horrific violence of the 1990s, when more than 100,000 people died in a campaign of terror and counter-terror waged by radical Islamists against the government, but its voters do not have credible choice at the ballot box and the military is still pulling the strings. Jordan has also opened up somewhat but fundamentally remains an authoritarian regime, though of a more enlightened sort.

Such progress, however, has been cancelled out by backsliding in places such as Egypt. Libya, which was given observer status in the Barcelona Process after it renounced terrorism and gave up its nuclear ambitions, is as far away as ever from being democratic. Lebanon’s democracy is in the middle of a serious crisis provoked by the systematic assassination of anti-Syrian lawmakers and the walkout of the Islamist Hizbullah from the governing coalition.

Overall, the region remains shackled by repressive regimes, and unfree societies are the norm; those that do exhibit more openness would not appear to be doing so as a result of Euromed. Turkey’s relations with Brussels go far beyond the mechanisms provided by the partnership and are therefore not typical. Instead, developments in Turkey seem to confirm the validity of the EU’s more traditional method of exercising ‘soft power’ - holding out the prospect of membership and attaching clear conditionality to it.

Euromed aims to build a political and security partnership "based on fundamental principles including respect for human rights and democracy". There are two main problems with this aspiration: measuring progress and determining its causes, and finding the right mix of approaches.

The EU has funded countless projects to improve service delivery by governments to citizens but it is very difficult to measure what these technical interventions amount to collectively. They do not seem to have produced a more open climate in terms of political participation overall; what careful liberalisation there has been seems to be the result of elite choices, not outside assistance.

EU funding for civil society projects is a fraction of what Brussels spends on more technical issues (often through direct funding of government operations) and is practically nil in countries such as Syria, which would need it most. This might well be evidence of an implicit trade-off, whereby co-operation in technical sectors is secured by staying out of anything that might actually challenge the strangleholds in which these governments hold their societies.

The danger here is that the EU’s core interests in the region - the concern for energy security and a desire for stability - outweigh the wish for more democracy. But the trade-off between stability and democracy may be a fallacy: authoritarian regimes across the region have stimulated the emergence of hard-line Islamist opposition movements. Under such conditions, democratisation may well have implications that will be highly unwelcome to the EU - such as in Gaza, where voters sided with Hamas.

Democratic politics may be messy on the surface, but a political system that is seen as legitimate by a majority of its citizens will be far more robust than an authoritarian regime, which may fall from one day to the next. The EU needs to take account of this experience and translate it into a proper political strategy for its southern periphery.

Despite their diversity, there is a common thread running through all the problems experienced by the countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean - the fact that almost all of them are undemocratic.