Daniela Huber

Arab Spring: The Role of the Peripheries

The emerging literature on the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ has largely focused on the evolution of the uprisings in cities and power centres. In order to reach a more diversified and in-depth understanding of the ‘Arab Spring’, this article examines how peripheries have reacted and contributed to the historical dynamics at work in the Middle East and North Africa. It rejects the idea that the ‘Arab Spring’ is a unitary process and shows that it consists of diverse ‘springs’ which differed in terms of opportunity structure, the strategies of a variety of actors and the outcomes. Looking at geographical, religious, gender and ethnic peripheries, it shows that the seeds for changing the face of politics and polities are within the peripheries themselves.

A Pragmatic Actor — The US Response to the Arab Uprisings

Abstract After the US had initially assessed the Arab uprisings as an opportunity and displayed a dual role understanding as an anchor of security and modest advocate of democracy, the second role understanding faded the more the US perceived the uprisings as a risk rather than an opportunity. In respect to practice, the US response did not show clear patterns in terms of goals or instruments it pursued, which would correspond to the development of these role understandings or to predefined geostrategic interests. Indeed, it seems that the US has switched from default to ad hoc modus in its foreign policy in the region which challenges both, the rational actor, as well as the normative actor model. Instead, it might be more appropriate to speak of a pragmatic actor who had to navigate through an array of constraints, including new realities in the MENA region on one hand and domestic and bureaucratic politics in the US on the other.

Arab Spring: A Decentring Research Agenda

This article calls for a decentring research agenda and serves as a reminder to look beyond the centres when seeking to understand attempted or accomplished processes of transformation. The Arab Spring is not a unitary whole but part of a variety of processes which differs in terms of space (diverse countries, diverse areas in countries), time (the Ghedim Izik protests in Western Sahara started in October 2010, while protests in the Rif are still ongoing), substance (demands for civil and political rights, equality rights, material claims, autonomy), strategies (from violence to apathy), involved actors (social movements, civil society organizations or individual actors) and outcomes (from regime repression to empowerment of peripheries).

The De-securitization of Foreign Policy

While the end of the Cold War heralded in a Zeitgeist of democracy and human rights in Europe, Turkey’s experience of and reactions to this ‘geopolitical earthquake’ (Davutoglu 2013a, 2) were quite diverse. Not only was its role as a bulwark against communism in the Western security alliance suddenly gone and the future of NATO and Turkey’s place in it uncertain, but also its immediate security environment deteriorated. New conflicts emerged in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and in Iraq, while the conflict with the PKK flared up and Turkey increasingly perceived the Middle East as the number one source of security threats to Turkey (Altunisik 2004). Thus, in the 1990s as Europe was focusing on democratization and human rights in foreign affairs, Turkey’s foreign relations with the region became highly securitized. The reverse happened — as Davutoglu has pointed out — after the second ‘security earthquake’ of 9/11 when the basic global conceptual framework changed to revolve around the concept of security (Davutoglu 2013a, 2), while the accelerating democratization process in Turkey helped the country to de-securitize its relations with its neighbors (Davutoglu 2013a, 4). Even though Turkey’s security environment remained troubled throughout the 2000s and beyond with the Iraq war, the Intifada, the conflict surrounding Iran’s nuclear file, and the Syrian civil war, Turkey’s threat perceptions nonetheless decreased.

The Emergence of Democracy Promotion in Turkish Foreign Policy

While democracy promotion was a pronounced part of US and EU foreign policies in the 1990s, Turkey’s foreign policy rather looked like a ‘normative anachronism’ (Robins 2003, 380) in the immediate post-Cold War period. In contrast to the United States and EU, the end of the Cold War led to high uncertainties for Turkey. Not only did Turkey’s role as a bulwark against communism end — thus making Turkey initially uncertain about its future role in the Western alliance — but Turkey’s neighborhood disintegrated: states around Turkey collapsed and ethnic conflicts in the Balkans, in the Gulf, and in the Caucasus became unlocked. In the Middle East, new geopolitical realities were created by the unipolar moment of the United States (Mastanduno 1997) which meant that Turkey’s arm’s-length approach to the Arab world was no longer pursuable. The 1990 Gulf War which revived Turkey’s Kurdish problem in its relations with its neighbors — Iraq, Syria, Iran — presented Turkey with increased security challenges that heralded in a period of activist Turkish foreign policy.

Who Promotes Democracy? The Protagonists

While democracy promotion is often perceived as a new foreign policy phenomenon, it has actually ebbed and flowed throughout history alongside democracy itself. This chapter briefly follows democracy promotion’s history with a short overview on historical democracy promoters such as Ancient Athens, as well as the French and British empires, before it moves to contemporary democracy promoters, concretely three generations of them: the United States, Europe, and non-Western emerging democratic powers.

A Decade of Crisis in Central and South America

While Central and South America had never been subject to direct North American colonial rule as in the other two case studies of this book (the Ottoman and European empires in the Middle East and North Africa), since the Monroe Doctrine and its corollaries (G. Smith 1994) it has nonetheless been seen as within the unquestioned sphere of influence of the United States — the ‘unofficial empire’ (Poitras 1990, 106) where no foreign intervention was accepted. Material security interests behind this claim to the hemisphere were manifold. The Caribbean and Central and South America constitute the direct neighborhood of the United States which it wants to keep allied. The Caribbean and Central America especially are often referred to as the ‘third and fourth border’ of the United States due to their geographic proximity. Connected to this is the interest to keep the sea lanes free, most importantly the Panama Canal. In addition, but maybe less importantly, the United States has military bases in Central America and imports some strategic raw materials like oil, copper, and bauxite from the region and even though their amount does not seem vital to US security interests, George Kennan once called them ‘our raw materials’ (in P. H. Smith 2000, 126).

The Return of Democracy Promotion to US Foreign Policy

When the United States entered the stage of world politics in the early 20th century, democracy promotion played an important role in its foreign policy agenda, especially toward its neighborhood. Only with the advent of the Cold War did a foreign policy agenda emerge that preferred stability over values and the fight of communism over the promotion of democracy. This period of realpolitik which had its peak during the Kissinger era, ended when President Jimmy Carter entered the White House. His was the first US administration that incorporated human rights and democratic freedoms systematically into US foreign policy toward Central and South America.1 Only in the last year of his presidency did this agenda decline, specifically toward Central America. Carter was voted out of office and President Ronald Reagan initially returned to realpolitik in the neighborhood.2 Human rights or democratic principles appeared neither in Reagan’s rhetoric nor policy practice toward the neighborhood. Surprisingly, however, in the second year of his first term, democracy promotion suddenly started to make inroads into US foreign policy again, first characterized by a confusing back and forth, but becoming more coherent in the mid-1980s. This section now examines in detail how the substantive content of democracy promotion, as well as the types of action to promote democracy varied and developed in the last decade of the Cold War.

The Formation of a Democratic Role Identity, Its Hype, and Subsequent Stumbling

This chapter observes the internal and external roots of the EU’s democratic role identity, as well as the crucial role the other plays in activating it. It argues that the formation of this identity was not only useful for the EU to create attachment to the Union, but it also formed in the 1990s in a euphoric international environment where democracy became a Zeitgeist. In wake of the successful enlargement process this identity skyrocketed but subsequently entered a bumpy road since it was not activated by the other in the Mediterranean region — a situation that might change again with the Arab uprisings.

Why Is Democracy Promoted? The Argument

The first two chapters answered the who promotes what questions, but why is it that democracies promote democracy abroad? What triggers democracy promotion and what hinders it or, more precisely, what encourages and pushes and what constrains democracies to promote democracy abroad? This is the main puzzle of this study, the nature of which this chapter explores in theoretical terms.