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also adopted many resolutions supporting political prisoners and calling 
for their political amnesty. In 1963, the SDDC (Spanish Democrats’ Defence 
Committee of the Labour Party) recommended to the British government 
that the latter launch a boycott on Spanish goods, discourage British 
tourists from visiting Spain and British firms from investing in Spain, and 
reject the deepening of ties between Spain and the EC. These 
recommendations held sway in particular during periods of Labour rule, 
when the UK stopped arms sales to Spain, froze collaboration with the 
Spanish government and opposed the resumption of negotiations between 
Spain and the EEC in 1976. 
In the case of Georgia or Ukraine, external pressure was not as far-
reaching as in Spain but it was nonetheless considerable. In 2003, prior to 
the elections in Georgia, former US Secretary of State James Baker met 
President Edward Shevardnadze and delivered a letter from President 
George W. Bush stressing the need for free and fair elections, and 
proposing a formula for the representation of different parties on the 
electoral commissions to ensure fair and transparent results. The 
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank stated they would 
halt their projects in the country unless the government seriously revised 
its policies towards the opposition. Following the rigged elections, the US 
State Department declared that the results “do not accurately reflect the 
will of [the] Georgian people, but instead reflect massive fraud”.
32
 The 
OSCE and the Council of Europe also denounced the results. 
In Ukraine, the Center for Strategic and International Studies 
organised a high-level delegation visit to Kiev – including senior, former 
US government officials Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Hunter and Thomas 
Pickering – warning that the presidential elections should be free and 
transparent, and making clear that the future of US–Ukrainian relations 
and Ukraine’s integration into Euro-Atlantic structures depended on this.
33
 
The US’s strategy was to keep the regime interested in the West, while 
underlining that the development of democracy and therefore free and fair 
elections were a cardinal objective of US–Ukrainian relations. The rigged 
elections were then unanimously denounced by all international 
                                                      
32
 C.H. Fairbanks, Jr., “Georgia’s Rose Revolution”, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 15, 
No. 2, 2004, pp. 115-116. 
33
 Wallander (2005), op. cit., p. 1 

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organisations and observer missions. After the elections and during the 
Orange revolution, the West intervened through heavy mediation led by 
the presidents of Poland, Lithuania and EU High Representative Javier 
Solana. Also in Georgia, following the 2003 elections, Washington applied 
substantial pressure, with then Secretary of State Colin Powell strongly 
advising Shevardnadze to resign. Once Mikhail Saakashvili came to power, 
the US administration welcomed the new regime, declaring its support and 
assistance.
34
 
Following from this, the final lesson is the need to exert significant 
pressure on the authoritarian regimes in which Islamists and other 
opposition actors operate. Elaborating Western policies of engagement 
becomes meaningful only if the West puts pressure, through positive or 
negative conditionality as well as dialogue, on incumbent regimes, just as it 
did in Spain, Georgia and Ukraine. Unless effective pressure is exerted in 
words as well as action, opposition actors – no matter how capable and 
well trained they may be – will remain unable to seize the political ground 
necessary to set in motion genuine change. Moreover, as long as the 
deafening silence of the West against the repression and violations 
committed against opposition activists persists, Islamists and Middle 
Eastern societies writ large will simply continue to view Western 
democracy talk as cheap. 
Conclusions 
This chapter has deliberately downplayed the role of religion – intended as 
a fixed framework of belief and action – in mass Islamist movements, 
emphasising instead their nature as political subjects operating as 
opposition actors on the fringes of authoritarian state contexts. While 
acknowledging the concerns as well as the competing goals of Western 
actors in the region, which often downscale their commitment to 
democracy promotion, we have nonetheless taken this self-declared goal at 
face value. With these premises in mind, we have delved into an analysis of 
engagement with Islamist actors in the Middle East, setting out three 
possible objectives to be pursued through such a policy. We have then 
drawn from precedents of Western forms of engagement with European 
                                                      
34
 Grey and Volkov (2003), op. cit. 

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opposition actors operating in authoritarian contexts, in the search for 
lessons to fulfil these objectives. 
In drawing these lessons, we have acknowledged the importance of 
ideological and political affinity between European opposition actors and 
their backers in Western Europe and the US. And it is here that, to close the 
circle, we would like to reintroduce the role of religion. As noted above, a 
critical difference between our case studies and Islamist actors is the 
existence of peer groups in Europe and the US. Whereas Spanish socialists 
were ideologically tied to the Socialist International and trade union 
movement, and Ukrainian or Georgian liberals to their Western European 
and American NGO, governmental and foundation counterparts, the same 
cannot be said about Islamist actors. Their natural friends in Europe or the 
US would be either European Islamist groups, with little or no political 
power, or Christian democratic groups, with whom an effective alliance is 
hard to foresee principally because of the perceived divide generated by 
religion. It is thus here that the role of religion in politics is reaffirmed, by 
separating groups across Europe, the US and the Middle East. 
Notwithstanding the fundamentally different political, social and economic 
contexts in which they operate, these groups may actually share more 
similarities than we are prepared to acknowledge at first sight. Both 
espouse a liberal economic outlook coupled with political and social 
conservatism. By contrast, the differences that separate them are perhaps 
overestimated by the imagined divide created by religion. If these 
reservations are set aside, both the EU and the US, and most pointedly 
European and American civil society actors, can extract important lessons 
and best practices from other precedents in Europe’s history to be applied 
mutatis mutandis to the critical case of political Islam. 

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