EU Public Diplomacy Towards Egypt, Arab Spring

Marwa Fikry Abdel Samei, Assistant Professor of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University in Egypt, has recently published a new article. The piece, The European Union’s Public Diplomacy towards the Arab Spring: The Case of Egypt, appeared in volume 10, issue 2 of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. Looking specifically at Facebook messages written and disseminated by both the EU delegation to Egypt and the European External Action Service (EEAS), Samei analyses what these posts reveal about Europe’s perception of and position towards Egypt as the Arab Spring unfolded. She concludes that the EU, in maintaining a “gap between its actions and its rhetoric,” missed a key opportunity to establish its normative power in the region. In turn, she observes that because the EU continues to maintain its pre-Arab Spring policies towards Egypt, that is “why the EU is currently a target of attack by all parties in Egypt, and why its public diplomacy efforts have — so far — failed."

The full article is available here.