Throughout the first seven months of the Arab Spring, starting with the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010, the EU clearly revealed itself as both an actor and spectator by resorting to both activism and passivism in a seemingly erratic fashion. Against this background and based on the EU’s recently adopted Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity with the Southern Mediterranean, this article aims at understanding this dualism more precisely and shedding some light on the EU’s rather anachronistic foreign policy behavior in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in recent months. The article identifies five dichotomies, all of which contribute to the situation in which the EU continues to be torn between being a relevant political actor in the MENA region and a simple spectator that continues to be overwhelmed by local and regional political developments.

Foreign policy and security have been significant issues for the European Union since its foundation, and the EU’s role in the maintenance of international peace and security has been discussed intensively. This article explores the international role and approach of the EU in this area in the light of arguments in the relevant literature and official statements of the EU. It goes on to investigate whether the EU has succeeded in developing policies corresponding to its international role and approach in the 21st century within the framework of policies in regard to the Second Gulf War; the issue of Iran’s nuclear activities; and the Arab Spring. Additionally, the effects of these three issues on the international role of the EU and on its approach towards the maintenance of international peace and security are also studied. In considering that the US has the leading role in all these three issues as the hegemonic actor, the article explores whether the EU could be an attraction centre in the international community as an alternative to the US via a self-determined international role.

In this paper, I discuss EU and member state externalization of the handling of non-EU, irregular migration flows. Following a historical and theoretical Introduction, I address in section “European Reactions to the Migration Flows Following the Arab Spring” the migration consequences of the 2011 North Africa revolutions, focusing particularly on how they provoked an EU migration policy crisis. Then, I show in section “Migration Policy Development in the EU: Fortress Europe or Strategic Incoherence?” how this was an outcome of the ineffectualness and strategic incoherence of EU immigration policy. This is ironic because the EU is criticized—incorrectly, I claim—for having developed a well-oiled non-entrée regime that skirts human/immigrant rights obligations by externalizing interdiction, detention, and processing of irregular migrants to countries with lower detention standards and higher human rights abuse rates. In section “The Member States’ Role in the Externalization of European Migration Policy”, I demonstrate that when such externalization policies are enacted, they are less due to EU action and more a function of member state decisions. I show that EU periphery member states are responsible for the most problematic policies partially because constraints on EU-level policy making incentivize these member states to erect “Fortress Europe” through their own devices.

Starting from an analysis of the main features of the EU’s existing Mediterranean policies and specifically of the European Neighborhood Policy and the problems concerning its implementation, this article analyses the proposals for the revision of the ENP and the launch of a Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity with the Southern Mediterranean countries. It argues that while it is too early to judge whether the EU and its member states will be able to help the Southern Mediterranean countries change their political and economic systems and consolidate their democracies, two outcomes of the new approach already seem well defined: first, the unequal balance between the Eastern and the Southern dimension of the ENP seems to be have been redressed. Second, the pendulum of the EU’s Mediterranean policy has again swung towards bilateralism at the expense of multilateralism, and this approach is likely to continue if one considers the increasing heterogeneity of the countries in the region and the difficulty of conceiving of the Southern Mediterranean as an integrated space.

The central objective of this article is to contribute to studies on EU counter-terrorism discourse by bringing the “external dimension” in. To that end, it borrows concepts of the Discourse-Historical Approach and provides an in-depth linguistic examination of the international aspect of the EU’s counter-terrorism discourse. The article identifies good governance and the Arab “Spring” as two central themes of this discourse and illustrates the linguistic means in which the two topics are made “natural” and “normal” by reference to counter-terrorism. The analysis also discusses the political and normative effects of EU discursive construction of counter-terrorism.