In December 2010 a young man set himself on fire in Tunis. He was protesting against the brutal treatment he suffered at the hands of the police who seized the vegetable cart providing his sole income. This act of desperation has quite literally started a fire first within the country, than in the entire Middle East and North Africa region; it continues to inspire protest movements in authoritarian regimes far beyond it.

More than a year on the protests dubbed the Arab Spring have revolutionised the countries where they took hold. Dictators like Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak have been ousted from their countries and are being put on trial; Libya’s Gaddafi was killed in the armed rebellion that swept his country. Tunisia and Egypt have just held their first free elections. The aftershocks of these events have forced local authoritarian regimes (notably in Morocco and Yemen) to introduce certain reforms. As cosmetic as many of these changes can be, their introduction proves that the fear that popular protests instil in authoritarian regimes is very real.

The achievements of protesters are theirs and theirs alone.  The international community, both in Washington and Brussels, stood by, calmly observing the bloody clashes on the streets of Tunis, Cairo and Tripoli, quietly hoping for the rebellions to die own and for the return of business as usual. Barak Obama dithered on condemning the Mubarak regime even in the face of a popular uprising, thus exposing the US foreign policy in the region as nothing to do with support for democratic and human rights values. The EU’s Catherine Ashton refrained from outwardly condemning the outgoing regimes until it was evident that their fall was inevitable, which meant that a volte face was required for the sake of appearances.

The ‘stability’ provided to the region by autocratic rulers has always been seen as convenient by the international community. The repressions against millions of the region’s people were a small price to pay. Today the discourse is changing. In the past year, the Arab Spring has become a hot topic in the salons of Brussels, with tens of conferences, seminars and events organised by all imaginable political entities to discuss the ‘way forward’, a ‘new approach’ and a ‘fresh start’ for the EU in the region. There now seems to be a consensus that ‘stability’ can never be achieved through undemocratic or authoritarian means. These ideas are being proclaimed particularly loudly by voices from the post-communist member states, who have apparently been saying this all along. Evidently, they have not done this loud enough, as no-one can recall hearing them mention the plight of the MENA region before, or even knew they were interested in those of the EU neighbours that were not placed towards the east.

Creating a stable and participatory civil society, with deeply enshrined democratic values in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa will be a long journey. It is one that the EU can certainly assist in by providing funding to civil society actors, technical assistance and twinning projects transposing best practices from member states. But this should be done on the principle of neutral assistance, free of expectations for positive outcomes and for the strategic placement of EU interests in the region.

Unfortunately, those who are now offering themselves up to tutor the nascent civil societies of North Africa in how to be great democrats are hoping that this will lead to the restoration of the ‘stability’ as well as the creation of a dominant role for the EU in the region. This is at best a repetition of the mistakes of the supporters of authoritarian regimes and at worst a hypocritical preservation of vested interests. Making the ‘stability’ and preservation of Euro-Atlantic interests in the MENA region the goal of EU efforts, could, if successful, create docile and easily manipulated governments, which while compliant to all of the demands of the international community, would fail to put the interests of their people first. And that, of course, would be business as usual.

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