Democracy promotion and security logics at play: European foreign policy in the Middle East

European foreign policy towards the MMENA region has shifted in the past two decades, from a more comprehensive approach, as the one represented by the Barcelona process, to the European Neighbourhood Policy. This shift had several implications for the kind of democracy to be promoted: from a comprehensive, holistic conception of democracy, the ENP espoused a more limited reading, mainly focusing on rule of law reforms in the judicial system and refraining from adopting even soft forms of conditionality. Also, in terms of democratization strategies, it implied a mixture of the standard modernization thesis and sequentialism, two approaches sharing the postponement of political democracy as a secondary goal. Both trends were further enhanced by the adoption of the 2008 Union for the Mediterranean. The revision of the ENP following the Arab Awakening signals the re-framing of discourses on conditionality and democracy, towards a more political understanding of reforms albeit with limited changes in terms of the ways to get there.