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Colonialism is silently inscribed in the genes of the European integration project since its origins. This is demonstrated by the incorporation of Algeria – as part of France – in the European Comm...

While the EU has long been promoting economic reforms in neighbouring countries, scant attention has hitherto been paid to its regulatory efforts. This paper addresses this empirical gap with reference to the EU's promotion of regulatory reforms in three economic sectors in Egypt: agriculture, banking and telecoms. It finds that these reforms are significantly, if selectively, informed by ordoliberal principles and practices. Two theoretical implications of this finding are explored. On the one hand, while this substantiates the institutional isomorphism hypothesis, for which the EU tends to export its own models elsewhere, the selectivity with which this occurs demonstrates greater instrumentality than usually maintained in this literature. On the other hand, understanding ordoliberalism as a variation within the neoliberal template shaping restructuring in Egypt, this paper moves beyond binary views of regulatory co†operation and competition and thus also enriches debates on the EU as a global regulator.

In the wake of the global financial crisis and, more recently, the Eurozone crisis, historical materialist approaches have received a new lease of life in International Relations (IR) and Internati...

The framing of EU-promoted economic reforms in Egypt has been heavily influenced by ordoliberal ideas and practices, which have in turn affected how the EU interprets security and stability in the economy. This is especially visible in the EU promotion of banking sector regulations. Despite the change in approach heralded in the post-uprisings EU documents, this paper finds that what we see is only a minor reframing of the ordoliberal template, which aims at becoming more inclusive especially drawing in small and medium enterprises. However, in the light of fast changing circumstances, this supposedly new approach has not achieved its stated aims, but indeed something close to its opposite, that is: less engagement with a narrower range of actors.

This conclusion provides a comparative survey of the main findings of this special issue and suggests avenues for further research. It shows that the security–stability nexus through which the EU approaches the Southern Mediterranean has experienced some measure of reframing in the wake of the Arab uprisings. While leading the EU towards a more inclusive approach, this partial frame redefinition has on the whole translated into forms of highly selective engagement. This conclusion suggests that this mismatch between the change in frame definition and its enactment in different policy areas can be accounted for with reference to four factors: institutional sources of policy rigidity, time lag, issue politicization and the willingness of Mediterranean partners to engage with the EU.

Memory-making and the use of memory is always political, and more visibly so in times of crisis, conflict and transition. The current situation in the Middle East and North Africa is no exception t...

Discussions on case study methodology in International Relations (IR) have historically been dominated by positivist and neopositivist approaches. However, these are problematic for critical IR research, pointing to the need for a non-positivist case study methodology. To address this issue, this article introduces and adapts the extended case methodology as a critical, reflexivist approach to case study research, whereby the case is constructed through a dynamic interaction with theory, rather than selected, and knowledge is produced through extensions rather than generalisation. Insofar as it seeks to study the world in complex and non-linear terms, take context and positionality seriously, and generate explicitly political and emancipatory knowledge, the extended case methodology is consistent with the ontological and epistemological commitments of several critical IR approaches. Its potential is illustrated in the final part of the article with reference to researching the socioeconomic dimension of transitional justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

SUMMARYRoberto Roccu’s intervention provides a detailed reading of the concepts of subalternity, common sense and passive revolution as employed in Gramsci on Tahrir. Roccu calls for a more sustained and careful reading of how ‘subaltern agency’ is invoked and performed in revolutionary upheavals.

Building on the recent fertile season of studies on passive revolution, this article argues for the (re-)increasing relevance of the concept in these times of capitalist crisis. However, it is also argued that this renewed relevance should be predicated on a narrower definition of passive revolution than the one generally used in recent debates in critical International Political Economy. Returning to the Prison Notebooks, four elements are identified here as the conceptual core of passive revolution, to which Gramsci’s admittedly varying uses of the phrase are implicitly anchored: an international precondition determining the necessity of restructuring on the national scale, a domestic precondition determining the specific form of this restructuring, a specific method through which passive revolution is effected and a specific outcome which entails achieving the passivity of subaltern classes through the partial fulfilment and simultaneous displacement of their demands. Thus redefined, passive revolution becomes a valuable instrument for grasping the challenges facing the emergence of a subaltern bloc in the current organic crisis of capitalism.

Starting from the empirical distinction between ‘discontented’ and ‘dispossessed’ created by processes of accumulation by dispossession necessary for neoliberalism to succeed, this paper suggests how the broader historical–geographical framework developed by David Harvey helps us make sense of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The paper focuses on the underlying tension between the ever more frequent encroachments of ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’ within the political sphere and the persisting relevance of forms of territorial government and governance for the success of capital accumulation itself. This seeming contradiction allows us to account both for the penetration of neoliberalism in Egypt and for the different forms of hybridisation and domestication that accompanied it. It suggests that, by looking at the social consequences of neoliberalism, one can see a sharp class polarisation, with the emergence of both a private capitalist oligarchy and embryonic fo...

It is undoubted that inequality has come back with a bang in the wake of the global crises of the past decade. This is true with respect to advanced capitalist countries and to developing and underdeveloped countries alike. In the former, this renewed attention is perhaps best highlighted by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) becoming a widely read and discussed bestseller. In the latter, the role of real and perceived inequalities is best exemplified by the calls for social justice at the heart of the revolutionary and protest movements in various corners of the Global South, from Egypt to Brazil to Turkey (Mason 2012). Indeed, those very international economic organizations (IEOs) that had been relentlessly promoting liberalizing policies have come to appreciate the potentially damaging effects of high levels of inequality (Ostry et al. 2014; Dabla-Norris et al. 2015).

There is little doubt that the EU has played a key role within the wider constellation of forces pushing several Arab Mediterranean countries on the path of economic reform since the late 1980s. This is particularly clear in the case of Egypt, where the EU has been able to differentiate itself from international financial institutions and main donors in two crucial respects. On the one hand, it has proposed integration through a gradualist approach to economic reforms. On the other hand, within the wider process of multiscalar restructuring, the EU has tried to entrench its own model of integration through re-regulation in its periphery, promoting EU standards in several key areas ranging from agriculture to banking to telecoms.Following from these processes, Egypt has been asymmetrically integrated in the EU’s economic ‘sphere of influence’, a process which in turn has contributed to three fundamental forms of differential integration within Egypt. One is most obvious and has a sectorial nature, with some parts of the Egyptian economy highly integrated with, and others effectively prevented access to, the EU market. The second form of differential integration is socioeconomic, and has seen outward-oriented sections of the Egyptian elite capturing most benefits of integration, with the wider population shouldering most of its costs. Lastly, differential integration has also had a political dimension, as increased access to the Egyptian economy has heightened the stability bias in Brussels, as well as the reliance on Mubarak’s ruling elite before the revolution, thereby strengthening the marginalisation of opposition groups, both secular and Islamist, and in turn their resentment towards the EU.While the sectorial dimension of differential integration was clearly part and parcel of the EU’s project, the socioeconomic and political dimensions, though arguably unintended, have made the Egyptian public and its elites in the post-Mubarak era much less receptive to the incentives offered from Brussels. This is suggested both by the preference Morsi demonstrated for doing business with Turkey and Qatar, and by Sisi’s decision to deepen economic ties with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait rather than the EU.

Through a focus on the main economic think tanks and the 2002 congress of the ruling party, this chapter discusses how neoliberalism increasingly became a guide for economic policy-making. However, the failure of neoliberalism to penetrate into wider society witnesses the inability on the part of the new business class to go beyond the ‘economic-corporate moment’ and fulfil its hegemonic potential.

This chapter establishes the rationale for developing an approach to the political economy of reforms based on Gramsci’s thought. Particular emphasis is placed on the method of articulation, which provides a more reliable basis than that offered by existing neo-Gramscian approaches to the study of the constitution, consolidation, reproduction, transformation and at times crisis of hegemony in authoritarian contexts.

Whereas the ‘dark side’ of globalization usually takes the form of offshore accounts and money laundering in the financial centres of the Anglosphere (Gamble 2003; Talani 2012), the main implications of global economic integration are manifested in remarkably different ways in the capitals of developing countries. Cairo is no exception in this respect, particularly as the financial core of the region has in the past decade shifted decisively towards the Gulf sheikhdoms (Elsheshtawy 2006). As outlined by other contributors in this second part of the collection, the informal sector, and how migrant flows contribute to it, appears as the aspect most visibly affected by globalization in the developing world. Informality, with a specific focus on the housing sector and the labour market, also constitutes the main focus of this chapter.

This chapter focuses on the distributional consequences of economic reforms in Egyptian society, showing how an entrepreneurial elite managed to amass an outstanding amount of wealth, and to translate it successfully in political power. However, the attempt at consolidating authoritarian rule under new economic foundations — what is termed here neoliberal authoritarianism — was likely to fail from its outset. This is because of the discontent created both within regime and in society at large by the rise of the capitalist oligarchy.

After surveying the literature on the causes of the Egyptian revolution, the introduction outlines the main argument of this book, suggesting that economic reforms implemented since the late 1980s created an ever greater polarisation within the regime and in society at large. In so doing, these reforms created some of the socio-economic preconditions for the popular uprisings leading to the fall of Mubarak.

By recasting the discussion in broader historical and geographical terms, this chapter advances two arguments. Firstly, while neoliberal reforms under Mubarak certainly accelerated this process, a gradual unravelling of hegemony on the national scale was already taking place at least since the 1970s. Secondly, both the global food crisis and the global financial crisis are better seen as triggers which interacted with the socio-economic devastations produced by two decades of reform. This turned a latent hegemonic crisis into an actual one, thus making the 2011 revolution possible.

To make a long story short, the fall of Mubarak could not have happened as it did without the economic reforms of the 1990s and 2000s, informed by neoliberalism and articulated with pre-existing forms of social relations. This does not mean that the socio-economic transformations provoked by these reforms were in themselves both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the 2011 revolution to occur. However, even though counterfactuals are always a risky business, a constellation of social forces such as the one that emerged in the run-up to the revolution would have probably never existed without the devastating social consequences produced by neoliberal reforms. Without these it becomes very difficult to envisage the emergence of the embryonic alliance between middle classes and working classes, as it is hard to imagine the army disengaging from a regime they had a major part in to side at least temporarily with the protesting masses. And whereas global crises of various sorts as well as examples coming from other Arab countries certainly played a role, they found an extremely fertile socio-economic ground to prosper, leading to the overthrow of an autocrat who had been in power for nearly 30 years.

The conclusion attempts to systematically outline the method of articulation and its links to the key Gramscian concept of hegemony. It then discusses how this approach provides a deeper yet more nuanced understanding of the causes of the Egyptian revolution. More specifically, neoliberal reforms are to be seen as a necessary, but by no means sufficient, condition for the popular uprisings leading to the fall of Mubarak to occur.

Through the analysis of the interaction between national and international institutions, this chapter reconstructs the international political economy of reforms in Egypt under Mubarak. While it provides room for showing how reforms were delayed, diluted and at times opposed, the method of articulation allows us to see that two decades of reforms had decidedly transformed the Egyptian economy in a neoliberal direction.

EU policies towards the Southern Mediterranean after the Arab uprisings are predominantly seen in the literature as marked by continuity with the past. This is attributed to the fact that the EU still acts with the aim of maximising its security by preserving stability in the region. By examining a range of policy areas, this special issue aims to assess and qualify this claim. Its introduction outlines our case on both empirical and analytical grounds. Empirically, it is argued that we need to offer a more detailed analysis of each specific policy area to assess the extent of continuity and change. Analytically, this introduction proposes a framework that focuses on processes of frame definition and frame enactment to explain change and continuity in the EU’s approach. More specifically, security, stability and the link between them – the security–stability nexus – are considered as the master frame shaping the EU’s approach towards the Southern Mediterranean. This is enacted along two dimensions: the modalities of EU engagement with Southern Mediterranean partners; and the range of actors engaged.