Roberto Roccu

Framing and reframing the EU’s engagement with the Mediterranean: Examining the security-stability nexus before and after the Arab uprisings

Abstract EU policies towards the Southern Mediterranean after the Arab uprisings are predominantly seen in the literature as marked by continuity with the past. This is attributed to the fact that the EU still acts with the aim of maximising its security by preserving stability in the region. By examining a range of policy areas, this special issue aims to assess and qualify this claim. Its introduction outlines our case on both empirical and analytical grounds. Empirically, it is argued that we need to offer a more detailed analysis of each specific policy area to assess the extent of continuity and change. Analytically, this introduction proposes a framework that focuses on processes of frame definition and frame enactment to explain change and continuity in the EU’s approach. More specifically, security, stability and the link between them – the security–stability nexus – are considered as the master frame shaping the EU’s approach towards the Southern Mediterranean. This is enacted along two dimensions: the modalities of EU engagement with Southern Mediterranean partners; and the range of actors engaged.

Banking on ordoliberalism? Security, stability and profits in EU’s economic reform promotion in Egypt

Abstract The framing of EU-promoted economic reforms in Egypt has been heavily influenced by ordoliberal ideas and practices, which have in turn affected how the EU interprets security and stability in the economy. This is especially visible in the EU promotion of banking sector regulations. Despite the change in approach heralded in the post-uprisings EU documents, this paper finds that what we see is only a minor reframing of the ordoliberal template, which aims at becoming more inclusive especially drawing in small and medium enterprises. However, in the light of fast changing circumstances, this supposedly new approach has not achieved its stated aims, but indeed something close to its opposite, that is: less engagement with a narrower range of actors.

David Harvey in Tahrir Square: the dispossessed, the discontented and the Egyptian revolution

Abstract Starting from the empirical distinction between ‘discontented’ and ‘dispossessed’ created by processes of accumulation by dispossession necessary for neoliberalism to succeed, this paper suggests how the broader historical–geographical framework developed by David Harvey helps us make sense of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The paper focuses on the underlying tension between the ever more frequent encroachments of ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’ within the political sphere and the persisting relevance of forms of territorial government and governance for the success of capital accumulation itself. This seeming contradiction allows us to account both for the penetration of neoliberalism in Egypt and for the different forms of hybridisation and domestication that accompanied it. It suggests that, by looking at the social consequences of neoliberalism, one can see a sharp class polarisation, with the emergence of both a private capitalist oligarchy and embryonic forms of alliance between the dispossessed and the discontented, which had a central role in the 2011 revolution. This perspective also permits us to go beyond the dominant liberal narrative of the Arab Spring focusing on demands for freedom (horreya) and democracy (dimuqratya), recovering the neglected yet vital dimension of social justice (‘adala igtimaya).

Passive revolution revisited: From the Prison Notebooks to our ‘great and terrible world’

Building on the recent fertile season of studies on passive revolution, this article argues for the (re-)increasing relevance of the concept in these times of capitalist crisis. However, it is also argued that this renewed relevance should be predicated on a narrower definition of passive revolution than the one generally used in recent debates in critical International Political Economy. Returning to the Prison Notebooks, four elements are identified here as the conceptual core of passive revolution, to which Gramsci’s admittedly varying uses of the phrase are implicitly anchored: an international precondition determining the necessity of restructuring on the national scale, a domestic precondition determining the specific form of this restructuring, a specific method through which passive revolution is effected and a specific outcome which entails achieving the passivity of subaltern classes through the partial fulfilment and simultaneous displacement of their demands. Thus redefined, passive revolution becomes a valuable instrument for grasping the challenges facing the emergence of a subaltern bloc in the current organic crisis of capitalism.

Again on the revolutionary subject: problematising class and subalternity in Gramsci on Tahrir

SUMMARY Roberto Roccu’s intervention provides a detailed reading of the concepts of subalternity, common sense and passive revolution as employed in Gramsci on Tahrir. Roccu calls for a more sustained and careful reading of how ‘subaltern agency’ is invoked and performed in revolutionary upheavals.

Security and Stability Reframed, Selective Engagement Maintained? The EU in the Mediterranean after the Arab Uprisings

Abstract This conclusion provides a comparative survey of the main findings of this special issue and suggests avenues for further research. It shows that the security–stability nexus through which the EU approaches the Southern Mediterranean has experienced some measure of reframing in the wake of the Arab uprisings. While leading the EU towards a more inclusive approach, this partial frame redefinition has on the whole translated into forms of highly selective engagement. This conclusion suggests that this mismatch between the change in frame definition and its enactment in different policy areas can be accounted for with reference to four factors: institutional sources of policy rigidity, time lag, issue politicization and the willingness of Mediterranean partners to engage with the EU.

Ordoliberalizing the Neighbourhood? The EU's Promotion of Regulatory Reforms in Egypt: Ordoliberalizing the Neighbourhood?

While the EU has long been promoting economic reforms in neighbouring countries, scant attention has hitherto been paid to its regulatory efforts. This paper addresses this empirical gap with reference to the EUs promotion of regulatory reforms in three economic sectors in Egypt: agriculture, banking and telecoms. It finds that these reforms are significantly, if selectively, informed by ordoliberal principles and practices. Two theoretical implications of this finding are explored. On the one hand, while this substantiates the institutional isomorphism hypothesis, for which the EU tends to export its own models elsewhere, the selectivity with which this occurs demonstrates greater instrumentality than usually maintained in this literature. On the other hand, understanding ordoliberalism as a variation within the neoliberal template shaping restructuring in Egypt, this paper moves beyond binary views of regulatory co†operation and competition and thus also enriches debates on the EU as a global regulator.

Inequality and Poverty in the Neoliberal Era

It is undoubted that inequality has come back with a bang in the wake of the global crises of the past decade. This is true with respect to advanced capitalist countries and to developing and underdeveloped countries alike. In the former, this renewed attention is perhaps best highlighted by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) becoming a widely read and discussed bestseller. In the latter, the role of real and perceived inequalities is best exemplified by the calls for social justice at the heart of the revolutionary and protest movements in various corners of the Global South, from Egypt to Brazil to Turkey (Mason 2012). Indeed, those very international economic organizations (IEOs) that had been relentlessly promoting liberalizing policies have come to appreciate the potentially damaging effects of high levels of inequality (Ostry et al. 2014; Dabla-Norris et al. 2015).

Postscript: Back to Square One? Considerations on Egypt’s Uncertain Future

To make a long story short, the fall of Mubarak could not have happened as it did without the economic reforms of the 1990s and 2000s, informed by neoliberalism and articulated with pre-existing forms of social relations. This does not mean that the socio-economic transformations provoked by these reforms were in themselves both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the 2011 revolution to occur. However, even though counterfactuals are always a risky business, a constellation of social forces such as the one that emerged in the run-up to the revolution would have probably never existed without the devastating social consequences produced by neoliberal reforms. Without these it becomes very difficult to envisage the emergence of the embryonic alliance between middle classes and working classes, as it is hard to imagine the army disengaging from a regime they had a major part in to side at least temporarily with the protesting masses. And whereas global crises of various sorts as well as examples coming from other Arab countries certainly played a role, they found an extremely fertile socio-economic ground to prosper, leading to the overthrow of an autocrat who had been in power for nearly 30 years.

The Egyptian Way to Neoliberalism? IMF, World Bank and Reforms in Egypt

Through the analysis of the interaction between national and international institutions, this chapter reconstructs the international political economy of reforms in Egypt under Mubarak. While it provides room for showing how reforms were delayed, diluted and at times opposed, the method of articulation allows us to see that two decades of reforms had decidedly transformed the Egyptian economy in a neoliberal direction.