Conclusions: Learning from Listening? Why the EU Failed to Learn from the Arab Uprisings and Why that Matters

This book has above all shown why the EU is not a ‘normative actor’ in the Middle East and how and why EU democracy promotion fails. These efforts fail because the Union promotes the wrong kind of democracy and the wrong kind of strategies for economic growth—wrong both in the sense that these approaches do not work and in the sense that they are not what people want. This double failure highlights a paradox of EU democracy promotion: while nominally an emancipatory endeavour, de facto it undermines those very emancipatory transitions to democracy and to inclusive development which it claims to pursue. In detailing these failures, the book compares conceptions of gender, democracy and human rights. The ‘gap’ between EU images and populations’ self-conceptions explains negative perceptions of the EU—undermining its role as a ‘normative power’—and how the EU’s own narratives ‘other’ Southern Mediterranean Countries’ populations.