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  • Europe in the New Middle East: Opportunity or Exclusion? by Richard Youngs
  • Rory Miller (bio)
Europe in the New Middle East: Opportunity or Exclusion?, by Richard Youngs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 253 pages. $80.

The merits of this well-written book are soon stated. It is informed and informative on Europe’s Middle East engagement. Europe in the New Middle East also showcases author Richard Youngs’s wide-ranging expertise on regional and subregional matters, in particular the political and socioeconomic development of the Gulf Cooperation Council and its member states. Most importantly, the book is very timely in using the Arab Spring as the starting point to answer some of the perennial questions about European Union foreign policy: How has Europe, in the form of the EU, and its member states, attempted to assert itself in the politics of the Middle East? Has it succeeded in transforming economic power into political influence? If not, why not and how should it engage in the future?

Where this book adds most value is in its suggestion of “five analytical narratives” (p. 4) to shed light on the evolution of European policies in the Middle East. The author argues convincingly in his introduction that taken together these narratives — “Euro-Med governance,” “Exported governance,” “Cosmopolitan governance,” “New realpolitik,” and “De-Europeanized governance” — help us understand the relationship between Europe and the region. What follows in chapter 2 is an interesting examination of these governance models that provides a useful contribution to theoretical literature that goes beyond the usual “realist/normative” framework.

This book also does a good job in showing how EU policy-makers introduced a wide range of political and socioeconomic reforms during the Arab Spring that were a qualitative improvement on previous efforts. That said, as the author expertly shows, the EU was all too often overly cautious and driven by long-standing inclinations to prop up the status quo as its constituent parts looked to promote their own interests across the Middle East.

There are also some issues that prospective readers should bear in mind. Though published in the highly regarded Oxford Studies in Democratization series, this book is not really a cutting-edge exposition on either Middle Eastern democratization or Europe’s role in that process. Most books are too long and could benefit from being shorter. This book would have benefited from being longer. Too much of it is dedicated to background, context and overviews. Chapter 3, for example, provides a [End Page 322] country-by-country summary of the state of play in the post–Arab Spring Middle East and North Africa. Chapter 4 provides, what the author calls, a “brief context-setter” (p. 48) for post-2010 events. This is followed by two further “overview” (p. 60) chapters (4 and 5), which taken together examine the success and failure of the EU and its member states in promoting political change in the region during the Arab Spring.

This tendency toward overview over deeper analysis is even more noticeable in the case study chapters. Those chapters on radical Islam (7) and Syria and Iran (8) are long enough to do a decent job exploring the issues at hand. Those on the Libya conflict (9), economic and energy interests (10), and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (11) are not. Overall, the case studies all too often read like roller-coaster surveys from a European perspective of what has been happening across the region over the past four years. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for analysis. For example, the author claims in the chapter on Israel/Palestine that by focusing further on “high politics,” the Israeli, Palestinian, and American positions during the Arab Spring left no room for Europe to promote a different agenda. What is not explained in any depth is that this was also the reality prior to the Arab Spring. Given this, it would have added more value to have drilled down deeper to explore why the Arab Spring failed to change the interests and priorities of the local parties and Washington and why Europe was unable to maximize the opportunities presented by the regional turmoil to influence the Israeli-Palestinian...

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