Sharon Pardo

The past few years have been marked by a series of crises not only in the European Union (EU) but also in its immediate southern Mediterranean neighbours.1 The December 2010 protests in Tunisia captured the popular imagination and spawned a wave of uprisings across the Middle East and the Maghreb countries, which the international media dubbed the Arab Spring. Demanding political and economic reforms, the peoples of the Middle East and the Maghreb swept away the old regimes and began the hard challenge of forging a new political reality. The protesters across this region not only affected their domestic politics but also challenged their immediate neighbour to the north, the EU. The Arab uprisings called into question the distinctiveness and the exceptionalism of the EU, which scholars variously label ‘civilian power’ (Duchene, 1972) and ‘normative power’ (Manners, 2002). Through their silence, and their historical support of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, the EU and the member states’ normative power seemed acquiescent in the suppression of human rights and freedoms. Experts and commentators have already started to discuss and analyse the gap between the EU’s normative stance on the Middle East and the member states’ practices in this region. This gap has put the credibility of the EU under strain, with particular emphasis on the idea of the EU as a normative power (Peters, 2012; Lucarelli, 2013).