(Im-)Mobility Partnerships: Challenges to EU Democracy Promotion through Mobility in the Mediterranean

In the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings, the EU’s relations with the Southern neighbourhood were reframed in the light of a new elan of democracy promotion, epitomised in the communication on a partnership for democracy and shared prosperity (Commission 2011). The underlying logic of this approach was to leverage the building and consolidation of democracy and rule of law through EU ‘conditional’ support for Mediterranean partners in terms of ‘money, mobility and markets.’ This paper aims to critically analyse cooperation on mobility within this framework of democracy promotion, focusing on the case of Mobility Partnerships (MPs) in the Southern neighbourhood. MPs and the migration and mobility agreements that are being negotiated challenge the very idea of the EU as a ‘promoter of democracy’. When it comes to a trade-off between cooperation with authoritarian governments to ensure stability and democracy promotion, the EU tends to prioritise the former. The paper explores the stability-democracy dilemma, focusing on what Cassarino (2007) defined as ‘reversed conditionality’. Being cooperation on democracy and mobility a process of ‘strategic interaction’ (Van Hüllen 2015), it is reasonable to assume that EU’s neighbours are not passive receivers of democracy promotion, but they have ‘agency’ in negotiating policy tools and leverage their strategic role as guarantors of stability in the EU neighbourhood in order to obtain more ‘money, mobility and markets’. Looking at the content of MPs with some key Southern neighbors (Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan) or ongoing/suspended negotiation of MPs (Lebanon and Egypt) from this ‘reversed’ perspective allows to draw some relevant considerations on the extent to which EU’s policy tools as the MPs are constrained into this stability-democracy dilemma and, thus, the extent to which the EU is able to promote democracy in the Southern neighborhood.