The EU fears its credibility is at stake as it seeks to weigh growing concerns about the crushing of dissent in Tunisia while preserving a controversial migration deal with the north African country, according to a leaked document.
The EU fears its credibility is at stake as it seeks to weigh growing concerns about the crushing of dissent in Tunisia while preserving a controversial migration deal with the north African country, according to a leaked document.
In the 60s and early 70s, Spain, Portugal, Greece were all authoritarian dictatorships. The western European countries effectively cut off links with them and applied pressure. When the people of each of them overthrew their dictatorships, EEC/EU membership was used as a stabilizing force, and as an aspirational milestone for full democratization.
The EU of the 2010s could have played such a stabilizing role in Mediterranean countries after the Arab Spring. Tunisia had a budding democracy. If the Europeans had taken it seriously and extended a hand for some kind of EU association/integration (like Iceland, Norway or Switzerland), it might have done for them exactly what it did for Spain, Portugal, Greece.
Instead, the Europeans decided to hyperfocus on the symptoms of immigration and embraced democratic dumping. So long as the dictator in Tunis, this homunculus called Kais, stops the migrants, he gets to do whatever he wants. Just so racist northern European hicks don’t vote far right. Well, guess what, they still vote far right and the migrants stilll keep coming.
Europeans just don’t seem to be able to wrap their little brains around the simple fact that they need to treat Africans as people who deserve to aspire to democracy and progress in their own countries too.
Good comment.