European partnership for democracy, EPD

Europe, the US and Middle Eastern democracy. FRIDE.

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Tensions between the United States and the European Union since the 2003 war in Iraq affected many arenas of Middle East policy, but perhaps none has come to encapsulate those tensions as much as the quest to advance democracy in the region.

In this paper, Tamara Cofman Wittes and Richard Youngs look beyond the highly charged, Iraq-related deterioration in the transatlantic relationship in order to assess the real similarities and differences in the two actors’ democracy promotion strategies in the Middle East. The authors suggest several concrete steps that European and American governments should take to build upon their shared strategic framework and thus forge a new partnership on behalf of Arab reform.

If European and American policymakers wish to move beyond the ructions of recent years, they can and should focus on their points of relative similarity as a foundation from which transatlantic cooperation in the Middle East can, cautiously, be built.
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http://www.fride.org/publication/554/europe-the-us-and-middle-eastern-democracy