For the first year since 2011, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region was not the home of the crisis that will define 2014 for Europe. Nevertheless, the MENA region was characterised this year by conflict, state collapse, the entrenchment and persistence of authoritarian regimes, and the increasingly overt stage management of events by Saudi Arabia and Iran, in the face of which the EU (and, to a large extent, the US) saw the limits of its influence. And although Russian aggression and rewriting of the rulebook of post-Cold War geopolitics took place to Europe’s east, it nevertheless had implications for the EU’s ability to grapple with the spectrum of crises taking place to its south. Feeling keenly the threats on all sides, 2014 was the year in which Europe completed its post-2011 transition to viewing the MENA region predominantly through the prism of security. [...]
The proportion of the MENA region that is immersed in full-scale conflict has expanded this year. Syria’s civil war is now more than three years old. The UN-led Geneva peace talks in January and February fell apart without progress, and as the year drew to a close, 200,000 people were estimated to have died in the conflict, which has also produced over 3 million refugees and 7.6 million internally displaced people. The prospect of a resolution became, if anything, more complex last year, with the expansion of the grip of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) across large swathes of Iraq and Syria. Opinion is divided over whether to prioritise defeating ISIS or resolving the larger Syrian civil war, and the question of how to deal with Bashar al-Assad hangs over both. The influx of foreign fighters into the conflict, including from Europe, highlights the interplay between tensions within Europe that has been reflected in the rise of the far right, itself feeding on growing concerns about the impact of immigration, the erosion of civil liberties, and Europe’s policy towards MENA.
In 2014, Libya’s security situation also dramatically worsened, and by autumn it had descended into civil war. Summer was marked by the outbreak of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, with over 2,100 – mostly civilian – Palestinian lives lost in Gaza, and 66 Israeli soldiers and 7 Israeli civilians killed. Since the ceasefire, individual killings have taken place in Israel and the conflict has taken on an increasingly religious tone. In Yemen, which started the year as one of the few remaining hopes from 2011’s Arab Awakening for something resembling a political transition, the armed takeover in September 2014 of the capital, Sana’a, signalled the end of the national dialogue.
Many states in the region held elections with varying degrees of credibility, but few heralded genuine political change. The year 2014 in the MENA region made it clear again that elections alone do not equal democracy. Egypt held a constitutional referendum in January cementing the authoritarian rule of General Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, followed by presidential elections in May, which returned him with over 96 percent of the vote, with the Freedom and Justice Party of the Muslim Brotherhood banned from participation. Algeria held presidential elections in April and re-elected Abdelaziz Bouteflika with 82 percent of the vote, re-endorsing a head of state whose ill health allows foreign travel only to France for medical reasons. Libya held parliamentary elections in June, resulting in the emergence of two parliaments vying for control from different parts of the country. In October the Supreme Court in Tripoli ruled that the parliament elected in the June general elections was unconstitutional. Syria held presidential elections in June, returning Bashar al-Assad with 89 percent of the vote, in a manner that bordered on farce given the war echoing all around.
More positively, after worsening political sclerosis in recent years, Iraq held elections in July, with Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi achieving a consensus cabinet in October, in spite of the growing challenge in the country and the surrounding region from ISIS. Tunisia, the last transition standing in the region after the high hopes of 2011, passed another important milestone with peaceful parliamentary elections in October in which Nidaa Tounes won a clear majority, followed by presidential elections at the end of the year which returned Nidaa Tounes’ founding leader, Beji Essebsi.
Where was Europe in this picture? Its scope to play a significant role in these domestic events is clearly limited. This year has reminded us of the extent to which developments in the Middle East are orchestrated from within the region, among the triangle of GCC states, Iran, and Turkey, with even the US reacting to rather than shaping events. ISIS’s shocking advances across the sub-region in summer 2014 were in no small part made possible by initial funds from sources in the Gulf (with the ground prepared by the Western intervention a decade ago), just as the decision to move ahead with US-led airstrikes in August was eased by the agreement of the governments of these same states. The E3 (France, Germany, and the UK) have been vital participants in the nuclear talks with Iran, and Catherine Ashton’s chairing role was praised again this year, but it is no surprise that the side talks between the US and Iran have been critical in ensuring that slow progress continues. The EU has found itself in a position to support or observe rather than to determine outcomes in MENA in 2014.
Tensions with Russia did not prove as great an impediment as threatened in dealing with some of the crucial regional issues, although Vladimir Putin’s relationship with General Sisi further undermined the EU’s already faltering voice on increasing authoritarianism on Egypt. Israel chose not to take sides with regard to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Moscow showed no signs of wishing to play a wrecking role in the nuclear talks with Iran, nor did it make things more complicated than they already were with regard to how the EU positioned itself towards Assad.
These challenges to Europeans promoting their security, interests, and values in the MENA region were not new, although they have crystallised. This year, Europe’s instruments to deal with the region, limited even in times of relative peace and stability, proved inadequate in a situation where its leverage is much more limited than that of regional powers; state structures are collapsing and security threats are higher on the agenda than economic integration. Counter-terrorism has replaced supporting transitions as the watchword for Europe’s policies towards the MENA region, although this has not yet translated into a coherent security-led approach, as the Regional Security component of this chapter sets out. Member states now admit that the new environment requires not just an overhaul of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), but a wholesale new approach that no longer bases policy towards very different types of state on geography but instead genuinely differentiates and invests where Europeans can have impact. Aid levels for the overwhelming refugee crisis in the Middle East have rightly been high, but a willingness to resettle significant numbers of those whose lives have been destroyed in the wider Syrian conflict would make a real difference. In 2014, however, only Sweden and Germany have found the political courage to do this. Spillover from tensions in the region – between ISIS supporters and Kurds in Berlin and between sympathisers with the different sides in the Gaza conflict in a number of European capitals – have also shown the extent to which European foreign policy towards the MENA region has a resonance at home.
In the meantime, the existing ENP has continued to provide the basis for EU interventions in 2014, which has made decisions about where money is spent in the region appear erratic at times. The scores awarded in this chapter have gone down, because not only has the EU failed to begin the work of retooling its policies towards its southern neighbourhood, it has not even always used the existing framework in a logical way. If it continues along its current path, it risks irrelevance at a time when it needs instead to better understand and engage with the volatile region to its south.
