Borderlands: Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/5/2021, SPi Borderlands OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/5/2021, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/5/2021, SPi Borderlands Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East RAFFAELLA A. DEL SARTO 1 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/5/2021, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Raffaella A. Del Sarto 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of this licence should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of Johns Hopkins University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: http://openmonographs.org/ Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947516 ISBN 978–0–19–883355–0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198833550.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/5/2021, SPi Preface and Acknowledgements As is the case with most books, this volume has a rather long history. I first started thinking about the importance of borders and core–periphery relations in Europe’s interaction with the neighbouring states in the Middle East and North Africa in 2009–2010. Back then, two of my then-colleagues at St Antony’s College at Oxford University, Dimitar Bechev and Kalypso Nicolaïdis, invited me to contribute to a volume on Mediterranean Frontiers they were editing. The result was a book chapter, ‘Borderlands: The Middle East and North Africa as Europe’s Southern Buffer Zone’, in which I first proposed to study the ties that bind the European Union and its single member states to their so-called southern neighbours by considering the latter as Europe’s southern borderlands. A research grant I subsequently obtained from the European Research Council (ERC) gave me the opportunity to do exactly that: to undertake an in-depth and systematic exploration of different aspects and dimensions of the relationship between Europe and the neigh- bouring states in the Middle East and North Africa from the perspective of expanding borders and orders within quasi-imperial relations. The research project, which ran from October 2011 to March 2017, involved a dozen research associates and research assistants, forged extremely fruitful collabor- ations with different communities of scholars, and produced various publica- tions on very specific aspects of the relationship between Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East from a borderlands perspective. This book partly wraps up the overall results of the research project, but it also delves into aspects that the project left unexplored. It also reflects my ever- evolving thinking on the multifaceted relationship between Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East, which takes issue with the concepts of ‘normative power Europe’ and ‘Fortress Europe’ alike. First of all, I am extremely grateful to the ERC for funding the research project ‘BORDERLANDS: Boundaries, Governance, and Power in the European Union’s Relations with North Africa and the Middle East’ (Grant Agreement Number 263277), as well as for their support throughout the project. My thanks also goes to the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, which hosted the BORDERLANDS project from 2011 to 2017. They provided both a wonderful working OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/5/2021, SPi vi environment and an extremely professional project administration (special thanks to Ingo Linsenmann, Elena Cau, and Mia Saugman). I cannot possibly thank by name all the great colleagues who have cooper- ated with the BORDERLANDS project in one way or another and who have continued to engage in stimulating debates on different types of empires and their borderlands, core–periphery relations, the multifaceted nature of bor- ders, and relations between the Middle East and Europe more generally ever since. The list would simply be too long, so this is a big ‘thank you’ to all of you. I would like to take the opportunity to thank once more the whole ‘borderlandini’ research team, and in particular Jean-Pierre Cassarino, Johanne Kübler, Mohamed Limam, Asli Okyay, Ylenia Rocchini, Simone Tholens, and Jonathan Zaragoza Cristiani. Your input and enthusiasm was essential. I very much enjoyed working with you and I appreciate our ongoing conversations. The book has greatly benefited from the initial comments of two anonym- ous referees contracted by Oxford University Press; I would also like to thank Dominic Byatt at OUP for his guidance and insights. Moreover, I am very grateful to Jean-Pierre Cassarino and Tobias Schumacher for providing their feedback on the manuscript, or parts of it. A big ‘thank you’ goes to Charlie Lawrie for providing an exceptional research assistance. I would also like to thank my students of the ‘Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East’ class at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), SAIS Europe, for their critical thoughts and input on this topic, and a thank you to all of my students and great colleagues at SAIS Europe. As always, a final word of thanks goes to my family and friends for all their emotional—and partly logistical—support (grazie, Tiziana!). Raffaella A. Del Sarto Florence, 4 August 2020 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/5/2021, SPi Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Conceptualizing Relations Between Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East 10 3. From European Colonial Enterprise to ‘Normative Empire Europe’ 36 4. Exporting the European Order Beyond the Border 51 5. Restructuring the Socio-Economic and Political Order in the Mediterranean Middle East 91 6. Contestation, Leverage, and Interdependence 126 7. Conclusions and Outlook 145 References 161 Index 185 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/5/2021, SPi Finland Estonia Sweden Lativa Denmark Lithuania Ireland U.K. Netherlands Poland Belgium Germany Czech Republic Luxembourg Slovakia Austria Hungary France Slovenia Romania Croatia Italy Bulgaria Portugal Spain Greece Turkey Malta Cyprus Syria Lebanon Tunisia Israel Palestinian Territories Morocco Jordan Algeria Libya Egypt Figure 1.1. Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/5/2021, SPi 1 Introduction In recent years, images of migrants and refugees risking their lives to reach Europe from the Middle East and Africa have filled the pages and screens of European media. Migration has turned into a highly politicized matter in Europe, galvanized by xenophobic movements and right-wing parties alike. Increasingly restrictive policies towards migrants and refugees, adopted by numerous European countries, have become the norm. As the Mediterranean Sea turned into a maritime cemetery, with over 20,000 migrants and refugees classified as either dead or missing on their journey across the sea between 2014 and 2020 (IOM 2020), and Europe closed its borders to people escaping war, repression, and misery, the idea of ‘Fortress Europe’ seemed to be confirmed.¹ Yet Europe’s increasingly restrictive border policies towards its ‘southern neighbourhood’ reflect just one dimension of the complex relationship between Europe—defined here as the European Union and its member states—and the countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Not only do these states in the Mediterranean Middle East and North Africa share an extensive history with Europe, with many of them still maintaining broad although often ambivalent cultural ties with their former colonial rulers. They also engage in significant cooperation with the Europeans across a range of policy areas, including trade, energy, security, migration, and border con- trols. For Europe, the countries of the Mediterranean Middle East and North Africa, and ranging from Morocco in the west to Turkey in the east (see figure 1.1) and abbreviated here as MENA,² are of vital importance due to their geographical proximity, abundance of natural resources and role as export markets for European goods and services. Given that MENA states take part in a variety of programs and activities conducted by the European Union (EU), Europe and these MENA states are thus deeply interconnected. ¹ These figures represent conservative estimates. ² The term ‘MENA’ is used in different ways in the literature. In this book, the term will refer solely to the group of states situated on the southern and south-eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, Europe’s ‘southern periphery’.