Islamist radicalisation the challenge for euro-mediterranean relations

20 | R
OBERT 
S
PRINGBORG
 
An appropriate EU strategy has to come to terms with both the regional 
contexts within which Islamism may re-radicalise and that process within 
specific countries.  
The regional context, despite its importance, is beyond the scope of 
this chapter. Suffice it to say here that the intertwined politics of the 
MENA, a region in which evaluation of governmental performance rests 
heavily on the price of bread and other deliverables of social contracts, 
render any strategy that does not take account of these contexts largely 
moot. Progress within specific countries will be hard to make against a 
backdrop of heightening regional tensions, especially when they appear to 
result at least in part from Western interventions. Growing economic 
hardship can easily raise political temperatures to levels at which 
compromises cannot be forged. Thus, the EU needs to address these most 
salient regional issues, while simultaneously seeking to induce MENA 
governments to repair gaping holes in their social safety nets, presumably 
by offering sweeteners.  
As for specific national settings, laundry lists of objectives and 
activities intended to promote democracy are relevant, but probably not 
terribly helpful. The Rand Corporation study cited at the outset of this 
chapter includes just such a list and not a bad one at that. It urges the US 
government to “pursue realistic democracy promotion rather than a return 
to realism” and then recommends that it “apply sustained 
pressure…emphasise judicial reform and rule of law, human rights and 
transparency…avoid taking sides….safeguard security while respecting the 
rule of law…engage Islamist parties while levelling the playing field for 
other types of political opposition”.
18
 In other words, it calls for direct 
democracy promotion by protecting individuals from the state, thereby 
encouraging them to participate in politics and presumably challenge 
incumbents. It specifically includes Islamists as those to be thus 
encouraged, although it indicates a desire for non-Islamists to be re-
invigorated by the political oxygen provided in newly opening political 
space.  
These are sound, balanced recommendations, but they do not go far 
enough in the sense that they do not include an assessment of what may 
happen if indeed oppositionists are empowered by protections of 
democratic rights and how an external actor might contribute to achieving 
                                                      
18
 Kaye (2008), op. cit., pp. xiv-xv. 

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I
S THE 
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 CONTRIBUTING TO RE
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RADICALISATION
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21 
a desired political outcome. The analysis above may suggest at least how 
those issues might be framed in that it identifies the key political dramatis 
personae. Within regimes, they comprise hardliners and reformers: the 
former being based in executive branches, ruling parties and the means of 
coercion and surveillance; and the latter typically being professional, 
technically proficient types brought in by regimes to improve economic 
performance, governance quality and other state outputs. Among the 
opposition’s liberal secularists may be latent actors, as the authors of the 
Rand study clearly hope, but that has  yet  to  be  proved  because  the 
conditions under which they might flourish have yet to be created. 
Similarly, youthful activists on campuses and in Arab cyberspace at this 
stage comprise proto-political actors who may assume greater importance 
either by dint of their own efforts or because of changed circumstances. But 
at present, the opposition political stage is dominated by Islamists, albeit of 
various different types. They range from Salafists, who at least in their 
imaginations might identify with jihadists, to politically quiescent Salafists 
and Sufis, to card-carrying Muslim Brothers, to more radical Islamists just 
on the borders of acceptance by states, to an as-yet-amorphous and 
disenchanted amalgam of young Muslim activists alienated from regimes 
and despairing of the capacities and outlooks of the MB, but possibly still 
members of it out of the hope that generational change will make it more 
relevant and capable. Given this array of actors, it is possible to conceive 
many political dramas with quite different outcomes.  
The most desirable outcome would elevate the power and status of 
moderates at the expense of hardliners in both government and opposition 
forces, possibly while including heretofore largely alienated youths within 
the political system. Such a scenario is imaginable, if barely so. Regime 
moderates are weak. Hardliners are no less committed to staying in power 
and have plentiful resources at their disposal. The leadership of the MB is 
entrenched, with the reins of organisational power in its hands and a 
commitment to democracy only of a very contingent, tactical nature. 
Youths, whether Islamist or otherwise, are energetic and wired, but not 
truly organised and comparatively easily dispersed.  
Yet the makings of a political counter-culture are there, so long as 
that counter-culture has room to breathe politically. In Turkey, the rise to 
political power of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) is the story of 
coalition building among these types of actors, who operated within a 
broad Islamist framework granted space within a comparatively open 
political system. The task of democracy promoters in the Arab world is to 
work on converting the emerging political counter-culture, which does 

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