La violencia y sus razones de género contra las mujeres

In terms of democracy promotion, Chapter 4 concluded that the EU’s overall conception of both ‘democracy’ and ‘civil society’ has remained confused and vague post-Arab Spring, and that its application of the instrument of political conditionality has stayed weak in nature and is still applied largely inconsistently in cases of severe human rights violations by ENP target countries. Such an inability to overcome the many historic limitations and shortcomings associated with the goal of democracy promotion, however, were in spite of much discursive, institutional and instrumental reform on behalf of the EU and, as such, cannot be said to have amounted to the ‘substantive’ change the EU envisaged in the end. Notions of EU MS interest and norm contestation - as evidenced above - can however, be shown to have likely determined this outcome, in part, before such reform attempts had even begun, contestation then, effectively ‘constraining’ the EU’s ability to ‘substantively’ reform the goal of democracy promotion vis-à-vis the ENP.

Thus, with regards to the vague and confused nature of ‘democracy’ and ‘civil society’, the plural nature of EU MS foreign policy itself - as evidenced above - is a likely reason as to why European-wide definitions of such terms have yet to materialise in the context of the ENP (Kurki, 2015; 63). Indeed, scholars have often postulated that the EU must in fact attempt to “promote 27 different models of democracy and methods for its implementation” (Kurki, 2011) through the ENP - of which many are likely to diverge from one another in more-or-less the same manner as discussed in sections 5.1 and 5.2 previously. Indeed, much like the case of France and Germany - different foreign policy traditions among various EU MS, culminating in diverse foreign policy natures - mean that while some states concur with the largely normative character of EU democracy promotion (focus on civil-society, long-term democratisation efforts etc.), others are more likely to want to express their own developed models of democracy and their own ways of doing it - both bilaterally, but also through the ENP at the EU-level. The recent failure to establish a ‘European Consensus on Democracy’ - a programme aimed at collating and streamlining the divergent preferences of EU MS towards such democratisation efforts abroad, indeed points to less of a consensus among EU MS as it does a great deal of contestation in this regard (Wetzel & Orbie, 2011). Such conceptual contestation however, has not only led to a vague and confused sense of EU democracy promotion with respect to the ENP, but it is also probable that it has constrained the EU’s ability to implement its various democracy promotion programmes abroad.

Indeed, with respect to the EU’s still weak and wholly inconsistently applied instrument of political conditionality, such lack of ‘substantive’ reform of this instrument reflects not only the different institutional competencies of the EU and its MS with respect to implementing incentives and sanctions within an ENP context, but also echoes their respective normative- and interest-based preferences with respect to punishment and reward in the context of their foreign policies more generally. The respective differences between the EU and its MS in this regard do not necessarily imply a simple lack of political will per se in dealing with human rights abuses within ENP target countries, but more a lack of ‘common’ political will likely born out of their many respective interest- based and normative - differences in this domain (Thépaut; 2011; 11). There exists for

example, an observable three-way distinction between: (i) the preferences of Northern EU MS - whose geographical distance from the MENA region allows them to be stricter with respect to punishing democratic abuses, such states therefore having largely normative-based preferences with respect to democracy promotion, (ii) Southern EU MS - that have a particular interest in maintaining bilateral ties with mainly autocratic regimes in the EU’s neighbourhood and thus preference interests above norms in a foreign policy context, moving against EU-level sanctions on the whole and, (iii) Eastern EU MS that are instead more preoccupied with democratisation efforts in the context of the Eastern dimension of the ENP, whereby a mixture of both interest and normative concerns are exhibited, owing to their recent independence from the Soviet Union and their subsequent gradual integration into the EU foreign policy framework more generally (Thépaut, 2011; 12). The so-called ‘reformed’ concept of ‘positive’ conditionality post-Arab Spring thus appears to simply represent a ‘rhetorical-guise’ attempting to hide such divergent normative- and interest-based preferences of the EU’s MS in this particular area (Thépaut 2011, 24).

The actual extent of such contestation throughout the EU as whole, and the degree to which it may actually have a direct casual effect on the EU’s ability to reform policies such as the ENP, remains as yet unclear. The previous illustrative examples however - with respect to both France and Germany - regarding democracy promotion interest and norm contestation, and the above theoretical exploration of such linkages in this regard - point to the likelihood that such contestation may indeed have at least a ‘quasi-causal’ influence on the scope and scale of ENP reform. Given this probable supposition and the succinct manner by which the application of an amended critical security governance question has allowed us to arrive at such, a reflection on the following second component of the central research question can now be given - can security governance aspects of the policy be shown to have been relevant to this response? Simply, given the above, it is likely that they can. To conclude however, that in light of this, the goals of the ENP merely constitute a benign ‘aggregation’ of the preferences of EU MS towards them (resulting in ‘lowest-common’ denominator outcomes and emphasising a distinct lack of

supranational influence in their development) would clearly be a grave oversimplification. Nevertheless, the above illustrative examples, born out of the application of a critical security governance perspective, do undoubtedly highlight some of the difficulties that the EU faces in EU MS consensus building in a foreign policy context more generally, and in its attempts to ‘substantively’ reform the ENP specifically. Indeed, with respect to the latter, divergent EU MS normative- and interest-based preferences underlying the goals of the ENP likely limit the EU’s own room for manoeuvrability when seeking to reform key policy goals deemed both sensitive and points of contention for the EU’s MS. Such divergent and contested foreign policy natures likely constrained and therefore limited the EU’s ability to reform the ENP post- Arab Spring. What then can the above examples representing preliminary research into such probable links tell us about the reform nature of the other goals of the ENP detailed in Chapter 4? Indeed, what can the establishment of such links by way of critical security governance tell us about the utility of such an approach in EU foreign policy analysis more generally? Chapter 6 will now address each of these aspects of discussion in turn, while also serving to bring together the findings and conclusions born out of both Chapters 4 and 5 and the in-depth theoretical and conceptual considerations in Chapter 2. In this manner, we will also be presented with an opportunity to make an insightful and final closing response to the overarching, central research question guiding the present thesis, namely; how did the EU respond after the Arab Spring, with respect to reforming the ENP and can security governance aspects of the policy be shown to have been relevant to this response? .