ABSTRACT
The Euro-Mediterranean partnership was designed to establish a liberal peace on Europe’s Mediterranean borders via the export of economic and political reform, via soft rather than hard power, quite different from the failed US attempt at military hegemony. In fact the Euro- Mediterranean project created reproduced the power imbalance between core and periphery and enabled the resulting arrangements to serve European interests first. Second, the incongruence between Europe’s export of neo-liberalism (with its associated inequalities in MENA states) and the attempted export of ‘democracy’, which helped de-legitimize MENA states, was exposed by the Arab Uprising, which helped create a MENA states system of failed or more repressive states, rather than a liberal peace. Europe reaped what it sowed in the form of massive refugee flows, terrorism and instability. What went wrong?
