EU Actorness in the Middle East: An Enterprise Doomed to Fail?

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has attempted—with some success—to play a more assertive role in global politics, to affirm and project its normative power and to genuinely play the geopolitical role that its size and economy would warrant. However, there has been at least one region of the world where the EU’s efforts at projecting its actorness, influence and normative clout have consistently failed to produce any meaningful results—the Middle East. This chapter aims to investigate why countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia or even Turkey have barely been susceptible to the geopolitical influence of the EU, regardless of whether one looks at the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the failure of the Iran nuclear deal, Saudi Arabia’s human rights record or Turkey’s brushes with authoritarianism. Is the paradigm of liberal democracy, whose tenets the EU’s foreign policy has upheld for a long time, still a viable option? Or would it perhaps be time to revisit the paradigm of neorealism in order to see whether this might lead to a more assertive EU geopolitical footprint in the Middle East? Is this current diminished role a consequence of China’s and Russia’s presence and influence in the region?