How is a group whose authoritarian and unpopular leaders have both the natural bent and a thorough-going talent for harnessing all the channels and vectors of communication to their own needs, best to be communicated with ?
The main Arab expectations pending with regard to Europe and the chief obstacle to any strengthening of its links with this region of the world directly result in one way or another from the aforementioned authoritarianism of most of the state-level and institutional partners involved. The relative incapacity of the Union to take into account the increasing lack of popularity of its state-level partners might indeed be mitigated by a policy of direct communication with non-state actors. However, as we shall ascertain, such is by no means the case.
The EU seems hard put to identify, among organised opposition parties, civil society or religious actors, such partners or counterparts as may be in a position to mitigate the unpopularity of its official contacts. Barely discernable from the unpopular policies of the US administration or Israël, the EU’s actions are relayed by regimes which, to ensure survivability, accept to play the role of conveyor belts for these self-same policies, including in the field of security. They have thus hooked the heavy wagons of their own repressive strategies onto the gravy train of the « global war on terror ». EU cooperation policies, if they are not more substantively modulated, are consequently in jeopardy of failing to preemptively countervail the pattern of strong tensions which will no doubt arise as soon as new regimes more in tune with the feelings and expectations of their fellow citizens rise to power, as sooner or later they must.
One way – brutal, but didactic – of guaging the distance which, both in the Maghreb and the Middle East, separates people’s expectations from the discourse of their regimes, is to refer to the case of Iran, albeit on the margins of the Arab world. This approach enables observation of a state within which the 1980 revolutionary process – temporarily – established a strong level of congruency between popular perception of the policies of the western environment and a certain «straight-talking» on the part of the regime. To get an idea of the amplitude of the dissent from western policy in the Middle East, one only needs to be aware that – precluding of course the wholly condemnablecalling into question of the historicity of Nazi crimes against humanity – the rhetoric implemented by President Ahmadinejab in the direction of the West and Israel can be considered as a reasonably plausible matrix for the opinions most frequently aired, within the compass of a number of private precincts, but also increasingly on prime-time TV, by an overwhelming majority of the population. It is thus already possible to obtain a fleeting glimpse of the kind of political line which might well come into favour under other, succeeding regimes, when the – inexorable – knell forthe current ruling elites finally sounds.
2.1. The tree of government strategies…
2.1.1. In the international arena : European Aid « against» the United States
The paradox of the demands addressed by Arab governing elites in the direction of the EU consists, at the international level, in their expecting from theirEuropean partner a more equitable balancing of political ressources in their favour, a condition most devoutly hoped for, but which they themselves are hardly inclined to meet on the domestic level, seeing its fulfillment might dent their own priviledged positions. Facing the wall ofUS unilateralism (and more particularly, the blockage of the Security Council), the ruling Arab elites’ expectations from Europe hardly differ in nature from those of their oppositions. Without any significant change in ‘societal model’ being implicit therein, however; if their aspiration tends to be for ‘more Europe’, it is first and foremost because they aspire to ‘less America ‘…
Such wishful thinking, at least officiously, has temporarily appeared to diverge over assessment of whether or not US intervention in Iraq was opportune ; Sadam Hussein’s eviction, before the full impact of « collateral damage » and the multiple blow-backs of this military campaign had come home to roost, benefited from at least the tacit support of a fair share of the countries concerned, and indeed of certain sectors of their public opinions.
Generally speaking, in the international arena, the governing elites seem still to harbour the expectation that their European partners, once they have broken loose from the overall pattern of US policy and their ingrained pro-israeli path-dependency, will become less « off-limits » in the eyes of their public opinions. The more the UE becomes discernable from the United States, the better appreciated it will be as a prospective partner.
2.1.2 In the domestic arena: against theopposition’s rights
In their relations with the EU, the Arab governing elites logically tend to display more of a natural proclivity to make their rule perennial thanimporting the principles of good governance insisted on by the Union. Their varying degrees of unpopularity and authoritarianism are however unevenly spread. Repression is not the predominant feature of the political make-up of the Sultanate of Oman nor that of the petrol-rich Emirates of the Persian Gulf, where low population-growth combines with plentiful oil and natural gas reserves to lighten the political burden of rulers there and increase their elbow room for wheeling and dealing.
Generally speaking, such lowly populated rentier petro-states are not among those whose expectations towards Europe and its action are the most stridently expressed, nor the most highly staked. Libya is no doubt the odd man out here; its oil revenue and limited population-growth have not shielded it from a deep political fault-line, albeit plastered over by the repressive methods implemented by the latest of its big European partners.
Even though it has not yet broken free – an understatement – from the age of authoritarianism, Yemen, perhaps because of having chosen to maintain the islamist opposition within the pale of the system – its leader is the President of Yemen’s parliament – has not yet sunk to the level of contradiction displayed in the Maghreb and Egypt. It is above all in the latter, the most highly populated states of North Africa, and also – but otherwise configured – in the zones of the Middle East where the Israeli-Arab conflict shows the biggest spillover, that the vital question of the rôle of the EU in support of the principles of good governance, the independence of the judiciary, Human Rights and fundamental freedoms is the most acutely pending.
Susceptible of cautioning a highly political reading of the «Imperial Overreach» of the United States, the ruling elites there have frequently conversely tended to endorse the most culturalist or blatantly «theological» american views in the hope of masking the banality of the purely political causes which animate the mounting ranks of their oppositions. By «de-politicizing» the readings of the resistance they come up against, and «over-ideologizing» purely political tensions,state actors indeed seek to obfuscate their often essential share in responsability.
The «Cartoon crisis» (January 2006), plus the showdown in September the same year caused by Pope Benedict XVI’s off-the-cuff remarks concerning Islam have demonstrated how a certain number of state actors (Syria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, but also Israel) may well have found a paradoxical interest in amplifying this «theologizing» game of smoke and mirrors with regard to the rage of those who persist in resisting them. If the «Clash of Civilisations» theoremwas first significantly floored in 1990 by Bernard Lewis to be applied to the Israeli-Palestine conflict, it was no doubt because it came in very handy to mask the trivially nationalist matrix of the confrontation. If more than one authoritarian arab regime is perfectly accomodating with anti-western religious demonstrations – even encouraging them surreptitiously – it is because the latter work wonders to lend credence to the (false) idea readily fostered among European interlocutors that the basis of the oppositions they are increasingly coming up against is sectarian and religious in nature, rather than political.
The ruling Arab elites thus often incline to caution 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 allsocial base ») types of approach, in order to justify their obstinate procrastination in backing off from any true form of political pluralism. Thanks to this strategy, a considerable percentage has succeeded with breath-taking sleight-of-hand in obtaining, from the international environment in general, and within the Barcelona Process, from the European Union in particular, renewed support for their own brands of authoritarianism. Apart from the very particular cases of the Hamas government of Palestine (which aspires to regain its credit with the Union) and Syria (which remains in need of overcoming strong EU hostility, not because of its repressive methods, which the Union has ever been ready to stomach, but because of its strategical rapprochement with Iran), most Arab regimes, and particularly the most authoritarian, have every reason to congratulate themselves on the EU’s mansuetude. Thanks to the sole demands of their 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, they have succeeded in whitewashing their grim and often reiterated breaches of Human Rights and public freedoms. Such breaches have never impacted nor inflected either the attitude of the EU towards them nor the flows of financial support it graciously grants them, to the detriment of the quality of its relation with the forces which oppose them – that is to say the immense majority of the populations of the countries concerned, confined within a constantly downgraded situation over at least the last decade.
2.2. …which hides the unknown forest of opposition demands
Generally speaking, the non-state actors concerned are thus impatiently waiting for the EU to become more autonomous with regard to the US-Israel axis, and in key sectors like Human Rights and good governance, to at last come out as a more demanding counterpart for the region’s state-level actors.
2.2.1. Concerning Human Rights: the conviction that double standards are applied
On the morrow of the 9/11 attacks, the launching of the « global war against terror » intervened to once again differ the concretisation by the EU of its demands on issues concerning good governance, consolidating the Rule of Law, Human Rights and fundamental freedoms. This backtracking is clearly epitomized in the bitterness of opposition figures such as the Tunisian Moncef Marzouki who, to summarize the passive resignation of the international environment towards the Arab authoritarian regimes, has written: «since 9/11, dictators have never had it so good». The use of brutal force to eradicate any opposition other than cosmetic decoys in the case of Tunisia and Algeria, the manifest corruption of the electoral race in Egypt, the «sanctuarisation» or fireproofing against any electoral sanction of the main mechanisms of the power structure in Morocco, not to mention the totalitarian stonewalling of the Libyan political arena (whose leader has nevertheless since seen Europe’s red carpets obsequiously unfurl before his feet), all these have paved the way for the heartfelt disaffection which the EU is currently suffering in wide sectors of the populations of the Arab World.
«Why do we support all the Arab dictators ? Their peoples no longer want to do so, so somebody has to do the dirty work !» This imaginary exchange between the French Head of State and one of his young fellow countrymen, published in 1996 by the Canard enchaïné, has lost nothing of its pungency in 2006 and can be extrapolated without much risk of distortion to the totality of the Union’s political class. If such examples are often preferentially laid at the French supremo’s door – but the latter is far from holding a monopoly therein – it is no doubt because Paris has so often been the trend-setter forgeneralEuropean laxness in true assessment of the democratic performance levels of the regimes situated along the northern rim of Africa.
«I honestly and truly don’t see what is tobe criticised about those elections», said Jacques Chirac the day after the – notoriously rigged –April 2004 Algerian presidential poll,before in September 2005 going on to reward President Bouteflika with the «Louise Michel Award…for Human Rights and Democracy.» Fifteen years before, it is true, the French authories had also graciously bestowed the same prize onto his egyptian counterpart Hosni Moubarak at the issue of an electoral process whose derisory nature canno longer be a secret to anyone who has read the highly realistic egyptian docufiction novel The Yacoubian Building [1], (or seen the film made from the latter).
The elections were «reasonably democratic», as commented by Paris (unrebuked by the EU) in November 1995, at the term of just such another blatantly rigged Algerian election. France raised its voice to quite as baldly attest that Tunisia was an «exemplary experiment in modernisation», without once being naysayed by Brussels. That true Human Rights consist essentially in «the right of access to food» (with the ‘double entendre’ that democratic freedoms are less urgent), was also specified by the French Head of State, in his comments on the hunger strike undertaken in December 2003 by the Human Rights lawyer, Radhia Nasraoui, in order to denounce President Ben Ali’s securitanian radicalisation – providing another illustrious laureate for the Louise Michel Award in 1988 [2].
Thus the oppositions to Arab regimes which have ratified « association agreements» with the EU (like Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria), solemnly laying down the «essential» character of the respect for Human Rights [3] , but subsequently violated on a daily basis, though never sanctioned, perceive this double talk to be the very symbol of EU duplicity, whose moral discourse is deemed to be no more than smoke and mirrors for a cynical priority granted to short term interests.
In 2005, the «livid wrath» of two tunisian Human Rights militants, Sihem Bensedrine and Omar Mestiri, eloquently encapsulated this terrible paradox of the policy-making double bind of the Union:in their book Europe and its Despots, they denounce the «criminal hypocrisy of EU officials» and demonstrates that «Human Rights violations and corruption are, to varying degrees, the common traits of those regimes to which Europe constantly lends its political and economic support, from Morocco to Syria, via North Africa and Egypt [4].»
2.2.2. Manipulated Civil Societies and State-sponsored NGOs
While the EU has been slow to take onboard the extent of the price to be paid for the unpopularity of the state vectors of its policies, it has not succeeded in establishing contact with more representative non-state actors: whether represented by opposition forces, «religious actors» or «civil societies», paradoxically the latter can also suffer from an identical fragility.
In the Arab World «civil societies» undergo two types of attempts at restrictive appropriation. The authoritarian regimes have usually managed to get them under their thumb, depriving the very concept of any teeth. This «internal» highjacking is accentuated by the fact that Europeans have themselves often tended to restrict the notion of civil society to the so-called «secular» actors, excluding more or less subliminally a whole spectrum of Islamist opposition forces, intellectuals and associations emanating from or merely susceptible of sympathy with this aspect of the political landscape. When it stops talking state-level, more often than not, Europe only learns to talk to its «own image and likeness.» Its selection of spokespeople to be designated as «secular» has more often than not been undertaken without taking much trouble to verify their degree of proximity with the regimes concerned -as long as they speak to theirEuropean interlocutor, in one of the languages he knows (in other words, all and any, as long as non-local), and employs the «terminology» he is familiar with, to say whathe wants to hear.
However respectable it may well be once its limits are circumscribed, this very small, but vocal minority element currently reassuringly flatters its western counterpart with the idea that the latter still holds a monopoly over Arab societies’ potential for modernisation. And in order to protect its quasi-monopoly over representation towards the international environment, it also actively engages in boosting the process of demonisation and exclusion of its Islamist rivals. Comforted by this radical fringe of the «secularised» intelligensia, which globally speaking is nonetheless far from being reducible to such a stance, Europe tends quite systematically to capitalise on such associative expressions of civil society, even when they stand very low on representativity: too often they only need to bandwagon as «feminists», «left-wing» or «secular» for theirEuropean interlocutors to shed all circumspection concerning their roots in the population or even their possible chumminess with authoritarian rulers – to the point of being occasionally instrumentalized or even created ex-nihilo by the regimes themselves with the sole aim of fuelling and exporting the discredit of another (widely representative) category of their political opponents.
Under the NGOs’ flying colours, within the Arab World (but not only), all sorts of entities and products have been in circulation, including what some victims of authoritarian regimes have derisively baptised «OVGs [5]», which might be translated as «TGOs», (i.e. «Truly Govermental Organisations»). From Tunisia to Morocco, via Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the latter have come off the assembly line «custom-built» and «context-oriented», according to the current communications needs identified by the regimes in their relations with foreign powers or donors, whether to tone down their authoritarian image, keep the funding flowing, or discredit and thoroughly discourage any competition from real NGOs in the bargain. In this way, the EU’s generous support for NGOs, and through them for the «civil societies» concerned, all of which should be allowing it a freer hand in its approach, very often morphs, through the channel of such «TGOs», into extra aid and empowerment for the ruling regimes.
The well-documented case of Tunisia provides a particularly revealing example of practices which are however by no means case-specific, and can easily be extrapolated to virtually all the countries in the zone. On June 26, 2004, during the meeting of the preparatory commission for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Hammamet, the authorities there again displayed, with a view to effectively muzzlingindependent associations, their undeniable talent in the upstaging of vassal organisations of this kind, sworn to their allegiance. The regime’s proficiency in siphoning off aid originally destined to civil society is well established: «The delegation of the European Union in fine only funds associations coopted along the lines of 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 Cooperatuion 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 [6]»
The Euromediterranean Civil Forum and NGO platform, whose aim, within the Barcelona Process, is to bypass the monopoly of states and institutionalize horizontal exchange between civil society organisations, have themselves not succeeded in slipping the knot of this contradiction, an issue never yet floored in open debate. In the view of most of those who are excluded de facto, the Forum figures as an entirely alien entity to wide swathes of the intellectual and political constituency. The actors closest to the Islamist opposition forces are rarely, if ever, associated with such meetings, and those in favour of a positive evolution soon come up against the over-exposed media lobbying of a small, but active minority of civil society, working hand in glove with the so-called «eradicators», and has succeeded in disqualifying in the eyes of theEuropeans the least trace of any political legitimacy on the part of their Islamist challengers.
