A Defensive Neorealist Assessment of EU’s North Africa Policy

North Africa is Europe’s immediate neighborhood, hence is of strategic importance for European security. While Mediterranean Africa plays an important role in trade and economic issues for the Union; migration, terrorism, energy security and the issue of failed states have become the main security problems of the region through the post-Cold War era. Closely linked to that, the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010/11 triggered a troubled transformation process in North Africa, where the consequences and aftermath of the events seriously threatened European security and other important interests in the region. This has coupled with the rapidly expanding role of new rising powers, Russia and China in particular, fostering a new multipolar regional context in North Africa where the US and the EU have already had a competition in redesigning the architecture of the region, notwithstanding the considerable interaction and cooperation between the two. As a consequence, the years after the start of the Arab Spring has brought the survival issue to the fore of the Union ever more, evident in its foreign policy position to overcome these challenges. In search of balance, it has persistently sought to preserve its status quo in its Mediterranean South, seeking to survive, at the same time hesitant about its hegemonic ideals over the region. The paper aims to apply a systemic theory, namely defensive neorealism on the EU’s foreign policy behavior in North Africa by examining its aims and interests on the region over years based on power calculations and future intentions under the international systemic pressure. It suggests that the EU has arguably taken a defensive and soft power-projection attitude into the region hence it is balancing its aims and security interests towards its southern Mediterranean neighbors. In retrospect, the method of the paper is the application of a theory (defensive neorealism) to a specific case (the case of the EU’s relations with North Africa) to investigate how the empirically observable behavior of the EU in the region can be explained through this theoretical lens.