What are the challenges EU is currently facing in the Mediterranean in the aftermath of Arab uprisings? Literature intensively focused so far on failure of EU’s promotion of norms and values towards this particular area. The added value of this paper is to analyze the main weaknesses of EU’s ideational projection upon its Southern neighbors in a comparative perspective with Arab donors active in the area. Indeed, assuming the Mediterranean as a chessboard for international actors to spread their influence in the region, Gulf countries are considered potential competitors of EU to impact socio-political development. This study focuses in particular on the notion of “civil society assistance” and its conceptualization declined according to different types of donors. On one hand civil society support has always been at the forefront of EU’s activity of democracy promotion in the area and one of the core issues of Normative Power Europe theory; on the other hand Islamic donors are increasingly diffusing their presence in the region through a peculiar attention to certain sectors and actors of civil society which are part of an intense network of civic activism. These different mechanisms of diffusion subsume different interpretations about the nature and role of civil society conceived by different donors, thus entailing a scenario of clash of norms and values. Which donor could have a more effective penetration on the ground? Eventually, the ultimate scope of this research, still under scrutiny, is to understand the qualitative relationship between different donors’ idea of civil society, depending on donors’ culture identity and the potential dynamics of Arab civil society’s activism.
