European Donors in the Arab World: Redistribution of Resources and Roles

Abstract

The article explores official development assistance flows from European countries to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and highlights certain specifics and the logic of redistribution of resources and roles between the largest European donors throughout the 2010s – since the Arab Spring, which transformed the political landscape of the entire region. This trend is explained by uneven dynamics of the donor activities of three states with a direct access to the Mediterranean – France, Italy and Spain ‒ and other countries. This dynamic seems to be caused by differences in domestic economic and political environment and dissimilarities in motivation and strategy which manifested themselves in allocation of resources between MENA and other regions, humanitarian and non-humanitarian assistance, various sectors, sub-regions and recipient countries. The Arab Spring made these dissimilarities even more acute and created an illusion of a conscious 'division of labour'. However, leading European powers – Germany, France and the United Kingdom – compete actively with each other as well as with non-European actors. A wide range of new and unexpected challenges such as a recent destabilization in the countries to a lesser extent affected by the Arab Spring (Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon and Iraq), escalation of tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean, a devastating explosion in the Beirut port etc., notwithstanding mid- and long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, might make this competition even more dynamic.