ANALYSIS:Developing a space for democratic debate in autocratic societies is a constant struggle, writes PAUL GILLESPIE
IN MOST accounts of how societies democratise, civil society and media freedoms are closely linked and assumed to be mutually reinforcing. Democratisation is enabled by encouraging associations to develop between the family and the state, such as community groups and NGOs, trade unions, social movements and businesses. Independent media allow them communicate and mobilise, including vis-a-vis those who hold political power.
Such a view underlies the EU’s policy towards countries to its north, east and south. It especially influences the soft power focus linking aid, trade, and democracy to possible future membership or closer relations. Political conditions on human rights, freedom of association and independent media loom large.
The same applies in the EU’s relations with Mediterranean states. Formulated as the Barcelona Process in 1996 and now known formally as the Union for the Mediterranean, EuroMed, as it is called, has 16 partners in the Middle East and the southern Mediterranean. They include Turkey and three Balkan states aspiring to join the EU, together with 12 others which want closer relations stopping short of that. In addition to human rights and democratic freedoms, aid, the economy, security and immigration, priorities include ecological, maritime, educational and solar energy projects.
Political reform and democratisation in the north African and Middle Eastern EuroMed partners have gone more slowly than expected 14 years ago. Despite their diversity most are still governed by authoritarian regimes resisting change. Armies, monarchies, political dynasties and individual potentates have proved surprisingly enduring, even as economies developed, societies opened up and media became more powerful. They present themselves to the EU as bulwarks against dangerous Islamic movements, as necessary to protect oilfields, or as guarantors against social collapse and mass emigration. Thus security realism can trump or freeze the EU’s reform and rights agendas.
Media have felt the pressure of these contradictions. They are much more influential than before, representing greater economic development, social differentiation and the dramatic expansion of private and satellite broadcasting. But the impasse on political reform still leaves them vulnerable to censorship, arrest and intelligence scrutiny. More indirect types of pressure like advertising boycotts or bans on covering sensitive subjects also apply. Legislation guaranteeing access to information is lacking, the rule of law and the judges’ independence is circumscribed, public space for democratic deliberation is far narrower and states much stronger than in most EU member states.
Such were the preoccupations of a group of journalists from the Mediterranean region meeting on media freedom in Marrakech this week, brought together by a EuroMed media network. It took time to develop knowledge and trust of each other; but there are many common problems as well as specific ones that differ with circumstances, and sufficient political and professional interdependence between the two sides of the Mediterranean, to make the encounters worthwhile.
We were encouraged to maintain contacts and develop them in a spirit of common governance and mutual respect by Andre Azoulay, the Moroccan president of EuroMed’s cultural Anna Lindh foundation based in Alexandria, and an adviser to King Mohammed. He said the media “play a central role in terms of communicating the complexity and ethical realities of our shared region and working in partnership to combat the areas of regression in mutual coexistence.” A logic of identity and autonomy would allow media to combat politicians who use civilisational rhetoric to stoke up disagreements that do not have a any real cultural foundations.
The head of the EU delegation in Morocco, Eneko Landaburu, reminded us that freedom of expression is not that long established in Greece, Spain and Portugal which joined the EU after overthrowing dictatorships; there is a permanent struggle to maintain it throughout the EuroMed region, whether from financial challenges or political interference. That these are indeed common problems became clear during discussions about future co-operation between journalists and editors on issues like professional ethics, hate speech, free movement and security for journalists and on press councils and ombudsmen.
Much of the EuroMed process has been monopolised by political and bureaucratic elites, despite the gradual development of more co-operation between civil society organisations. Political, economic, security and aid resources are channelled towards existing centres of power rather than towards the political reform agendas assumed by the democratisation literature. Critical analysts of EuroMed’s actual record point out how existing Middle East and north African power holders benefit from these transfers by narrowing and capturing the civil society organisations involved.
Moderate Islamic movements tend to be excluded, for example, even though they are the most likely agents of political change in many of these societies. This is presented to EU representatives as plausible on the grounds that they harbour terrorism or oppose women’s rights, when in fact they resist other transatlantic values in the name of their own cultural identities Thus a local civilisational war is substituted for a more global one to perpetuate reactionary regimes.