Michelle Pace and Peter Seeberg (eds.), The European Union’s Democratization Agenda in the Mediterranean (Routledge: USA and Canada, 2010)

Year 2011, Volume: 3 Issue: 1, 111 - 114, 01.06.2011

Elif Özkaragöz

Abstract

The European Union’s Democratization Agenda in the Mediterranean is a really timely book given the changes and challenges that the Arab world in the Mediterranean region is facing today. Even though this book was written long before the 2011 revolutions in the Mediterranean, it is important to know the history of the democratization attempts in the Mediterranean region both by the internal and external actors (like the EU) to understand the events today. The European Union (EU) is one of the major external actors influencing the democratization agenda in the Mediterranean countries. In the democratization studies, there has already been a huge literature on the description and analysis of the external democracy promotion in the region. The aim of this book is described as to “move beyond an exclusively normative or exclusively realist approach…” (p.5) and to adopt an “insideout” approach rather than an “outside-in” approach, meaning that how the domestic actors in the Middle Eastern and North Africa (MENA) region reacted to the democratization efforts in MENA.

Keywords

Michelle, Pace, Peter Seeberg