Tuesday 15 March: Macquarie University
Joint seminar hosted by the
Department of Memory, History, Politics & International Relations, and the
Centre for Middle East and North African Studies,
Macquarie University
Sponsor: Council for Australian-Arab Relations, Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT)
1200-1330h
Abstract: “This presentation examines key policy documents on EU democracy promotion after the Arab Spring, arguing that despite calls for a paradigm shift in the way the EU approaches democracy assistance – particularly in its relation to core foreign policy priorities: security, stability, development –, the conceptual structure of these documents presents a substantively (neo)liberal model for both development and democratization. The talk will show that, first, democracy is understood as involving a balance between state and civil society; second, while the indivisibility of human rights is proclaimed, civil and political rights (and certain categories of these, at that) far outweigh social and economic rights in their importance vis-à-vis democracy in EU policy; third, that the role of socio-economic rights progressively is being marginalised as individual policy documents develop; fourth, that conceptions of civil society in these documents marginalise trade unions and other actors focusing on socio-economic rights; and fifth, that socio-economic issues gradually are being redefined as matters not of rights but of trade and aid. This fundamentally reverses the moral economy of obligations attached to socio-economic issues: from a focus on would-be democratising populations as right-bearers to their reconceptualization as morally and financially indebted recipients of charity.”