Youth as a New ‘Foreign Policy Challenge’ in Middle East and North Africa: A Critical Interrogation of European Union and US Youth Policies in Morocco and Tunisia

Abstract

It is not only since January 2011 and the so-called ‘youth revolutions’ that youth has become a key concept through which Europeans and Americans are viewing the Arab world. Since the 2000s, youth has increasingly entered European Union (EU) foreign policies in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and the revised neighbourhood policy has in fact devoted an entire section to youth unemployment. But are EU policies contributing to the inclusion of youth? Based on discourse analysis and a comparative approach with US policies, this article argues that the EU and the United States have framed youth exclusively in relation to their ideal vision of a liberal order in the region as an asset, challenge or threat. This has in turn justified foreign policies which are pushing for a further liberalization of the labour market in these countries and which reproduce gendered images of young Muslim men as terror threats and threats to women, young Muslim women as victims and non-productive. While the Arab uprisings have resisted this discourse and practice of Western actors, they have not succeeded to change them; Western policies remain resilient.

Introduction

“…Have relations really changed substantially, or is there actually more continuity than usually assumed? In other words, does the EC/EU really represent a discontinuity from Europe's colonial past (Pace and Roccu, 2020;Huber, 2020)? To paraphrase Arundhati Roy, is "colonialism really post-?…”

“…"As military forces and direct colonialism became unsustainable in post-World War II international politics, the EU used aid as a foreign policy device to maintain its influence in the Global South". These practices are embedded in a larger social and cultural fabric in which the Middle East continues to be portrayed as exotic or dangerous, and gazed upon through gendered lenses in which men are construed as violent and women as passive victims to be saved by Western (wo)men, including through military intervention (Huber, 2017; see also the two chapters by Jünemann and Muehlenhoff in this handbook).…”