The political action of the European Union in the Arab World is frequently described – both by state actors and opposition figures – as suffering simultaneously from the «unfinished nature» of the institutional framework underpinning its elaboration, and possessing too weak a political identity in comparison to that of the United States. Despite the fact that the increasingly low credit-rating of President George Bush and his administration in the foreign policy arena is tending to accrue a highly favourable a-priori in wide swathes of arab public opinion, the EU has so far only managed to capitalize very incompletely on the potential represented by the millions of « Washington-bashers» there. At the term of protracted « wait-and-see » negotiations, the mountain of highly principled declarations all too soon gives birth to an overdue mouse of too-little, too-late decisions, at best disqualified for being merely co-terminous with those of the United States, at worst slammed for being too openly favourable to Israël.
In the handling of the issue of the passion-fraught Israeli-Arab conflict and its regional ramifications – more specifically since the recent France- US rapprochement over the issues of Iraq and Lebanon – the EU is thus being accused of having swung into line – against the best interest of all and sundry, including the Hebrew state – with the most unilateralist and least universalist positions of the Israeli-American axis. Therein lies the first, and most vocally decried handicap impacting its credibility and reputation.
To the generation of those who declare themselves disillusioned with Europe, the latter is often portrayed as forward in emitting legal pronouncements, when all too often and too spontaneously these last in fact boil down to merely rallying the law of the strongest. And that holds true, not only within the region-wide framework (« Israel has the right to self-defence »), but just as frequently within various national settings, where the strict calling-to-heel of parliamentary and judiciary institutions and the generalisation of the recourse to torture against political oponents have all too rarely been denounced in due time and with the hoped-for severity. When the EU consents to recall the rights of the weak, all too often it incurs the charge of not having provided itself with the necessary means, be they military or merely diplomatic, of getting the latter enforced, complacently closing a blind eye to the worst breaches of those same norms solemnly proclaimed to be the basis for its action.
If a whole generation of the political opposition,and not the islamists alone, no longer believe in the reliability of these much-touted «principles» and «values» of the EU, this must be attributed to the fact that the politics of double standards has severely damaged its credit-worthiness as the regional whistle-blower. In the national framework, the long Algerian civil war has provided the archetypal examples of such repetitive failures. Since the annulation of the December 1991 electoral process, the limitless use and cynical manipulation of violence by the back-office boys of the Algiers regime have incurred no more than silence on the part of Brussels and lent credence to an absolute incapacity on its part to impose respect for or even recall in due time the very rights, guarantees and principles that the Union purports to be promoting in the region.
If, in the Middle East, it some times arises that certain staff members of the EU are somewhat loth to disclose their professional belonging, that is no doubt because, in the Israeli-Arab conflict, there has been a growing number of episodes in the course of which the passive submission of Europe to the law of the strongest has prevailed over any capability it may have to enforce its own clearly stated international commitments. From well-informed closed diplomatic circles to mass satellite channel audiences, Europe’s show of flexibility in political ethics and its variable geometry in the expression of concern for humanism in the Middle East has lent weight to the discredit which lies at the heart of practically any assessment: the best documented observer can only highlight a blatant contrast: that between the intransigence with which Europe has required Hamas to respect the three conditions stipulated for its recognition and the sheer laxity with which Israel has concomitantly been authorized to totally set aside the five conditions attendant on the approval of its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.
The «shelving» of the «Jerusalem Plan», resulting from a remarkable joint effort by top European envoys, for once in perfect agreement, but since then mysteriously declared «null and void», jolted the specialists on all sides. In March 2006, the conditions under which the withdrawal of European observers from the prison of Jericho took place, in order to provide access forthe Israeli army in breach ofinternational law, causing Mahmoud Abbas to cancel his speech before the European Parliament, was particularly damaging to Europe’s credit-rating. But up to today, in the eyes ofa great majority of Arab public opinion, the most notable – and symbolically the most disastrous -of the Union’s counter-performances must remainthe withdrawal of its budgetary support from a Palestinian Authority government issued from the very same elections which Brussels and Strasburg had unreservedly condoned, supervised and approved as the model of democracy in the Arab world.
In July 2006, during a strangely comparable situation – seeing that the Hebrew state, following its offensive against Hamas, had launched an armed attack under the pretext of targetting 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 Union –broken only by a single declaration from its presidency (also alone in evoking the existence of palestinian prisoners) – and its incapacity to deliver the goods by shortening the delay extended by the US to Israel for it to be able to complete the destruction of civil infratructures in Lebanon, have set the seal on this unanimous disavowal, both for Arab public opinion and, with a few shades of grey thrown in, its ruling elites.
When on August 2, 2006, Ahmed Mansour, star anchorman to the flagship broadcast of the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera (Bi La hudûd: ‘Without Borders’) hosted Mrs. Tarja Halounen in her capacity as President of the European Union, he put the gist of this deep resentment into a nutshell: « You only help Israel ! All the European officials who have visited the region have evoked the release of Hezbollah or Hamas 3 detainees. But not one has evoked […] the five hundred women and children incarcerated in Israeli prisons. Up till now, not one singleEuropean has demanded their liberation, neither theirs, nor that of any of the other prisoners. Is the European Union then only concerned by the Israelis ? »
