While the contacts set up between the EU and the oppositions should thus be contributing to circumvent the state’s grip over civil society, they are in fact suffering from the same type of prejudice: over and beyond rare exceptions, they are exclusively restricted to the «secular» actors of some «third force» which, in western policy-makers’ heroic fantasies, must inevitably arise from the close embrace between the authoritarian regimes and their Islamist oopponents. The issue raised by this mythical third force is double: a) during the last twenty years, it has been widely established as being devoid of the very rootedness in the population which would enable it to lay the foundations of any credible alternative to the current regimes; b) it is based on an interpretation of Islamist trends inevitably presenting the latter as absolutely impermeable to the dynamics of political liberalisation and «democratisation», an assessment which must be seen as very much off target and figures as the most colossal of miscalculations on the part of the western purview, and in the case in hand, ofEuropean decision-making bodies.
3.1. A state-run institutional Islam
In the Arab World, the European Union currently tends to be perceived asrepresenting societies which are more «dechristianised» than secular, which goes to make for one of its main differences with its US counterpart, apprehended as more deeply religious. This American religiosity is occasionally credited to the US constitutional system, according to which, in contrast with theEuropean model, the presence of the religious in the public arena is not a basic issue. At the core of Europe, France is accused not only of excluding the Islamic veil from school precincts but, less legitimately, of having stigmatised it over whole furloughs of public space. American religiosity is conversely criticised as fuelling the missionary entreprises of Protestant NGOs, to which must be added the latter’s often unconditional support for the State of Israel and what is deemed to be their particularly deleterious support for the foreign policy agenda of the Neocons.
In the Arab World, most institutional religious actors (muftis, ulemas, the deans of big Islamic universities like Al-Azhar) are too closely dependent on the ruling regimes to be mouthpieces for anything other than the analyses and strategies dictated by the latter. The expectations expressed towards Europe in the course of numberless interreligious dialogues and other seminaires and meetings organised with such representatives of believers from the Arab World, more particularly when it comes to analysing the causes of «terrorist violence»,systematically omit to include one of the most important, namely the iron fist of repression which presses down onto each and every one of their societies. On this terrain of «inter-religious» communication, therein lies no doubt one of the main sources for the myopia which afflicts the Union on essential issues of information, image and action.
The mortmain of the regimes over their religious authorities does not cease with the territorial limits to their own political sovereignty, in the strictest sense: it also is to be felt widely afield within Europe itself, interfering just as much in the working and hence the representativity of certain Muslim institutions there. Thus, were an «inter-religious dialogue», with the encouragements of Europe, to muster the top representatives of the Mosque of Paris, still very much under the thumb of the Algerian regime, plus the religious authorities of Algiers, Tunisia or Morocco, this would only in reality be likely to result in a face-to-face between the different facets of one and the same panoptic authoritarianism, essentially obscuring the converging expectations in this field of believers on both shores.
By renouncing volontarily to take into account the – essential – role of the ruling regimes in the build-up to what is usually qualified as «Islamic» violence, the official «religious actors» generally tend to fill the resulting void by an excessive «theologisation» of political tensions. However that may be, mobilising the latter hardly enables the EU’s institutions,and religious, cum political, or purely and simply human communities on both sides of the Mediterranean to interact productively in any significant way, except in severely curtailed and contradictory mode.
Any strategy aiming to circumvent this mortmain would entail the Union choosing to interact with religious interlocutors unhobbled by any allegiance to ruling regimes, and consequently more or less assuredly rooted within the opposition. Notwithstanding, the baleful conjunction of «muslim-speak» and an oppositional stand has generally been quite enough, up to this very day, for EU representatives to place any Muslim actor beyond the pale.
The highly paradoxical situation in which the EU has today placed itself by choosing to boycott the newly elected palestinian government pinpoints the contradictions which an accumulation of the two main biases of Europe’s stance – an excessively pro-israeli bent and the incomprehension of the nature of the alternative Arab oppositional forces – threatens in the last resort to extend to the totality of its Arab environment.
3.2. Demonising Islamic opposition forces
The same biases which constantly weaken theEuropean definition of «legitimate» arab «civil societies» comparably damage the correct identification of political opposition forces. When the Union takes it upon itself to address not only state-level actors or the official representatives of civil societies, it again gets involved in a sorting process which is highly inhibiting in terms of representativity. The first generation of so-called «secular» oppositions (the more or less historical heirs to different Arab socialisms) almost exclusively bask in Europe’s attention. The degree of this recognition is often proportionate to the quantum of energy they spend on stigmatising their Islamist competitors. More damaging still, the representatives of the forces in favour of a secular alternative to current regimes (often self-proclaimed « democrats », a label which subtly implies that the whole spectrum of Islamist trends is hermetically sealed off against such a concept) in fact can muster in their respective societies only a degree of representativity inversely proportional to that granted to them in officialEuropean circles and on theEuropean media.
Observed close up, the relay of the nationalist generation has in fact locally been taken up everywhere by their Islamist successors. The latter, by reinjecting into the political discourse the terminology of «endogenous» Muslim culture have in quite a trivial and ordinary way merely extended to the cultural and symbolic field the process of getting into an «arms’ length»relationship with their former colonisers, which their fore-runners had themselves begun. Notwithstanding, Europe has up till now completely failed to rationalise its perception of this political generation, or to establish even minimal channels of communication with the latter, consequently entailing a drastic shrinkage in its own knowledge and recognition of the most salient feature of its current Arab environment.
Despite some praiseworthy exceptions (the representatives of the EU have managed to establish and conserve their contact with the Lebanese Hezbollah, by not severing its cooperation ties with the Ministry of Energy, when one of the latter’s members was appointed at its head), theEuropean overview of the Arab World’s expectations filters through a very reductive prism: the voices of the ruling regimes swamp those of civil society, and those of very weakly representative secular oppositions mask that of an entire generation of Islamists.
Among the ranks of the Islamists, Europe is unsurprisingly accused of seeking until today to locate a mythical «third force» purportedly capitalising on the ressources of virtuously shunning both the (military) «plague» and the (Islamist) «cholera» This one way European political vision is summarized by an exiled algerian academic as follows:
« This ‘neither plague, nor cholera’ thesis has afflicted Europe with a undeniable political «blindness.»
Blinkered by an ideological vision often bordering on islamophobia (as certain highly official reactions during the Cartoon crisis have shown), a prism amplifying its ancestral phobias, […] , like General de Gaulle in the 1950s, forlornly in pursuit of an illusory «Third Way», Europe has closed a blind eye to the evolution of Algerian and Arab reality, whichboth dictate that its legitimate interests will be better served by the true representatives of the populations concerned, which truly representative forces of society will sooner or later manage to bring to power.»
3.3. Barcelona and the programmed dead end of the Palestinian government boycott
In the Arab context, today the EU no longer disposes of the counterparts, relays and ressources enabling it to realistically prepare for the challenges entailed by these countries’ ongoing and future political transitions. The indiscriminate ostracism of all oppositional – or even, in the case of Hamas, governmental – political expression from the Arab World, whenever its authors have recourse to the vocabulary of Muslim culture, is deemed by a large majority of the opposition, and not only Islamists (and so by an immense majority of the citizens of this region of the world), to be among the core causes of one of the worst failures ofEuropean diplomacy on record: that, now clearly established, of the « Barcelona Process », concerning which most observers now agree should be considered as already null and void.
Europe’s incapacity to apprehend the relatively banal historical process which may serve to explain the emergence of these forces and their currently pivotal rôle in the Arab political constituency lies at the heart of this setback. The EU not only repugns to recognize the significance of the moderate Islamist opposition groups’ embeddedness within the population, but worse still fails to discern their modernising potential – in all the fields of political liberalisation, including the strengthening of individual rights for both women and men – as at least equivalent to that of the «secular» actors in the rest of the political spectrum.
On the other hand, for two years now, several US Democratic think-tanks have come round to this point of view which considers «moderate Islamists» as the «key to Arab reform», to echo the title of an article by Amr Hamzawy, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace [8]. Before any degree of significant reform can take place in the Arab World, he essentially asserts, «the US and EU must initiate relations with moderate Islamists, which is not so prickly as it might seem, because these Islamists have taken on board democratic rules and shown themselves to be a very real support for the Rule of Law.» This is in particular attested by the multiple alliances set up by Islamists throughout the Arab World, from Lebanon (where his most christian General Aoun has gone into partnership with the shi’ite Hezbollah) to Yemen (where, during the September 20, 2006 presidential election the socialists made an alliance with the Yemeni Rally for Reform, a formation closely tied to the Muslim brothers), via the parties to the exemplary Pact of Sant’ Egidio, signed in January 1995 between the whole spectrum of the Algerian opposition.
When the effects of the pro-Israel gravitational pull and the incapacity to rationally relate with the Islamist trends snowball, the worst outcome can and does take the form of a boycott of the legally elected government of Palestine and the highly contradictory message which it emitted for the Arab oppositions. Through persisting in refusing to recognize the existence of a political generation, by short-selling its principles in favour of an emphasis on the economic ressources and the prospective markets of its Arab counterparts, by sacrificing the principles of the political long term on the altar of the financial and electoral short term, Europe has quite plausibly durably debilitated the impact and the efficiency of its exchanges with its Arab and Muslim environment. Incapable of identifying such counterparts except among authoritarian ruling elites or in the fragile periphery of societies which beam back the flattering image of its own universal likeness, the EU stands in jeopardy of ending up in permanent discord with a whole region of the world.
