In the wake of the recent Arab revolutions, the European Union (EU) has sought to provide genuine and substantial support to a range of Arab social movements in the region's emerging polities. Yet the EU's recent democracy-promotion efforts represent a puzzle for earlier critical approaches to the relationship between Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which argue for the existence of hegemonic patronage linkages. We argue, however, that the EU's attempts at democracy promotion in the MENA region may be understood through a governmentality framework, despite the limitations of such an approach. Specifically, the EU is actively promoting neoliberal policies in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in order to foster a mode of subjectivity that is conducive to the EU's own norms and interests. What we observe are not just innocent attempts at democracy promotion, but a form of politics and economics that seeks to subject the agency on the 'Arab street' to EU standards. We conclude by going over the radical plurality of the Arab street, and show how it was in fact earlier neoliberal reforms by their former regimes that created the conditions of possibility for the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.

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cities which were crushed by severe police force and a witch-hunt of activists and social media users. In the aftermath of such violent state response, the Gezi protestors first adopted singular forms of action, such as the 'standing man' and 'standing womanindividuals standing silently for hours at a public site where group manifestations were not permitted. Then, impromptu popular assemblies called 'park forums' started to be organised by local people in different neighbourhood parks across Istanbul, as well as in other cities including Ankara, İzmir, Adana, Mersin, and Eskişehir, where ordinary Turkish citizens gathered to discuss their daily problems, rights and freedoms, as well as trajectories for future collective action after the public insurgency. Just like the public uprisings which had already taken place in Egypt, Bosnia and Ukraine, the popular assemblies in Turkey challenged mainstream practices of democracy, the ones that start and stop at the ballot box. In fact, popular assemblies are usually organised when people feel that corporate interests, religious convictions, authoritarianism and/or militarism begin to dominate the elected governments (Davis 2007). In these circumstances, people want to voice their dissatisfaction directly on burning issues such as corruption, state violence, unemployment, authoritarianism, ecological disasters, or urban gentrifications and not through the intermediary of their political representatives (Melucci 1996; Della Porta and Diani 2006; Goodwin et al. 2001). People may also feel that their political representatives are part of the socioeconomic and political problems that they are signaling. Thus, events like popular assemblies, forums, plenums, especially in the ways in which they create alternatives for conventional parliamentary politics, emerge as innovative democratic practices (Antic 2014; Legard 2011; Roos 2013). Public uprisings as alternative forms of democracy have a long and variegated tradition. Latin American post-neoliberalism practices such as presupuesto participativo (participatory budgeting), municipios autónomos (autonomous municipalities) and usos y costumbres (indigenous customs and practices) (Wolff 2013