The so-called Arab Spring, and the ensuing blaze that flared up in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, constituted an “exogenous shock” for the European Union. At a time of economic crisis and internal turmoil in Europe, this exogenous shock further compounded the EU’s own identity crisis. Richard Youngs puts his finger right on it: While Arab protesters voiced in the streets the same entreaties that the EU sought to promote since the establishment of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership in 1995, the EU did not directly trigger the upheaval, nor did it manage to react steadfastly to the telluric landslide that turned the MENA region upside down. The Arab Spring confronted the EU with the doomsday of its own contradictions and inefficiencies in its southern neighborhood. Moreover, its aftermath further required the EU to cope with radically mutated international dynamics, a dramatic shift in the regional balance of power, differentiated pathways to democracy in the region, and a revival of radical Islamism.

Against this backdrop, Europe in the New Middle East pledges to assess the EU’s reaction to the “mix of promise and peril” inherent to the Arab Spring, with an eye on grasping the long-term impact of the European policy response over the development of EU foreign policy (p. 2). Youngs seeks to provide “the first systematic and detached assessment” of the European response to the Arab Spring in the period 2010–14 and to evince how the EU could still deploy regional influence in the long run (p. 3).

To meet this ambitious goal, the author structures his book as follows. Chapter 2 introduces the analytical framework. Chapters 3 and 4 contextualize the status quo ante Arab Spring, in the MENA region and in EU policymaking, respectively. Chapters 5 and 6 present an “optimistic”/positive and a “pessimistic”/negative assessment of the EU’s response to the Arab Spring. Chapters 8, 9, and 11 look at emerging and ongoing regional conflicts, focusing on Syria, Libya, and the abiding Israel–Palestine conflict. Chapters 7 and 10 delve specifically into the mounting preoccupations with Islam and the EU’s evolving economic and energy interests in the region.

Chapter 2 identifies five analytical narratives to explain the evolution of EU policies toward the Middle East (p. 5). Youngs establishes a connection among “narratives,” “underlying dynamics” of the EU–MENA relationship, and “patterns of EU governance.” The five narratives are thus defined as “Euro-Mediterranean Governance,” “Exported” or “External” Governance, “Cosmopolitan Governance,” “Power-Politics, Recast,” and “De-Europeanized Governance” (pp. 10–20). While these patterns possess an undeniable heuristic value when looking at the EU’s approach toward the region, the nexus among narratives, processes, and institutional practices remains underexplored, not least as the distinction between “official EU narratives” and “academic narratives” is not clearly delineated. A clarification on this aspect could enhance the book’s argument.

Chapters 3 and 4 provide a “context setter” to chart, respectively, the “constellation of geopolitical changes and domestic reform processes” that led the EU to refashion its Middle East policy (p. 47) and the ambitions and limits of the pre-2010 “aspired template of shared Euro-Mediterranean governance” (p. 48). To capture the diversified landscape of the MENA region, in Chapter 3, Youngs offers a taxonomy of “ousted regimes” (Tunisia and Egypt), “modest reformers” (Morocco, Jordan, Algeria, and Lebanon), “resistant regimes” (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar), and “disrupted states” (Syria and Libya). This exercise promises to categorize patterns of structural changes, economic reforms, emerging patterns of political agency, tenability of changes, and the role of the military. However, it is not employed as an analytical grid to systematically organize the empirical findings in any meaningful way. Chapter 4 reveals that on the eve of the Arab Spring, EU–MENA cooperation existed “in the shadow of security concerns,” with the EU operating “in the comfort zone of ineffectual soft power” (p. 57). In this security-dominated context, the EU prioritized the containment of rising migration flows and Islamic terrorism over the pursuit of broader economic and political goals. It showed a “relatively unconditional engagement” with illiberal regimes (p. 51), and remained mostly trapped in the “surreal” inward-looking exercise to navigate the contradictions of its institutional framework of cooperation.

Chapter 5 discusses the assumption that the Arab Spring constituted a turning point, which led the EU to craft more “engaged, nuanced and reflective sets of policies” and an “incentive-based conditionality” approach (p. 60). Based on a sort of atonement posture, the policies crafted in the aftermath of the Arab Spring bore witness to both a quantitative and a qualitative leap, in terms of coherence, resources, and strategies. Negative and positive conditionality were more coherently deployed, and the EU sought to establish a systematic framework for cooperation to respond to the Arab Spring in a more comprehensive and less ambivalent way than the United States and other international actors did (pp. 80–87). However, Chapter 6 provides a counterpoint to this relatively positive assessment. An “agnostic passivity” and a “reactive caution” are said to inform a “careful and hands-off” approach on the EU’s part, one that seeks to intercept support from within and avoid direct interference (p. 90). In some cases, like in Egypt, the EU’s eagerness not to be perceived as “taking sides” was eventually interpreted as “emboldening the repression” (p. 102). Further contradictions resulted. Both the “more for more” and “less for less” sides of the equation remained “partial” and “selectively applied” (p. 95). As the EU remained instrument rather than demand driven (p. 110), it only had a limited influence over domestic actors (p. 124). Most often, realist calculations hindered the EU’s reform support and the clarity of its positions (p. 123). Hence, notwithstanding the changed scenario, the EU did not embark on a fundamental redesign of its approach to the region. The changes can thus be regarded as modest upgrades to the policies that were in place before the Arab Spring.

When it comes to assessing the post–Arab Spring scenario, therefore, Youngs acknowledges a mixed picture, characterized by oscillating rationales and performance. Both in security and economic terms, EU internal divisions once again made for a response characterized by “no single, clearly defined analytical logic” (p. 229). At best, the EU was “helpful to local aspirations without aspiring to be primary in any way” (p. 228).

The structure of the book reflects both the merits and shortcomings of Youngs’s ambitious enterprise. On the one hand, the structure only partially revolves around the analytical puzzle and framework as set out in Chapter 2. The reader is left wondering about the extent to which the suggested framework was intended to inform the structure of the book. Moreover, the “Middle East” and “MENA” labels are often used interchangeably. This has a confusing effect, not least due to the fact that the author does not clarify the geographical scope of his inquiry.

On the other hand, the book represents a timely attempt to capture the complex and fluid set of processes, actors, and relationships that influence the crafting of EU policies toward the MENA region. In this regard, it provides an impressive range of firsthand information, written in an accessible and comprehensive way for both expert and nonexpert audiences. Thus, and notwithstanding some of the shortcomings herein identified, Europe in the New Middle East offers a timely and expert overview of the different layers and dimensions that inform the interaction between the EU and the MENA region in a post–Arab Spring context.