CIAO DATE: 01/2013
December 2012
Danish Institute for International Studies
In this paper, Senior Researcher Helle Malmvig examines how EU initiatives for promoting democracy and political reform in the Arab World have shaped relations of power and subjectivities between the EU and Arab governments over the last two decades including the Post-Arab Spring era. The author makes two main claims: first that the liberal character of EU reform programmes has conditioned and enabled Arab resistance to political reform, and secondly that political reform has become a simulacrum that necessitates a seduction of reform both by Arab incumbents and by EU reform managers. Helle Malmvig argues that Arab governments neither have been all-powerful as often presumed by post-democratization literature, nor completely subjectified. Rather they have been able to subtly resist and counter EU reform initiatives by taking use of the EU’s liberal reform rationalities and technologies themselves. Using the liberal assumptions of ‘invitation’, ‘ownership’ and ‘gradualism’ inherent in European reform programmes has enabled Arab governments to i) select entry, ii) set conditions and iii) simulate reform. In a second move, the author shows just how the simulated character of political reform makes the EU complicit in a mutual seduction process of political reform. The EU must act as if democracy and political reform can be promoted, and Arab governments must act as if they are undertaking liberal reform. This potentially opens up a new avenue of research, the paper concludes, into the study of how democratization processes can be seduced by donors and receivers.
Resource link: Governing Arab reform: governmentality and counter-conduct in European democracy promotion in the Arab world [PDF]