Deconstructing "Ideal Power Europe"

Deconstructing Ideal Power Europe: The EU and Arab Change criticizes the dominant discourse on European foreign policy, which represents the EU as a force for good in world politics. Using a poststructuralist approach, it deconstructs the EUs representation as an ideal power through an analysis of European foreign policy on the Southern Mediterranean before and after the Arab uprisings. In this endeavor, it displaces three major discourses which construct the EU as ideal: the postmodern and post-sovereign EU, the EU as a model/a virtuous example, and, the EU as a normative power discourses. The major argument of the book is that the ideal power Europe meta-narrative is especially produced and reproduced in the EUs approach towards the Southern Mediterranean, and, it manifests itself through the rhetoric of responsibility and universality in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings. The book also provides an analysis of how the ideal power Europe meta-narrative feeds into and legitimizes European governmentality in the world, in general, and, in the case of the Southern Mediterranean after the Arab uprisings, in particular. Arguing that the depiction of the EU as postmodern/post-sovereign, as a model/an exemplar, and as a normative power pertains to the representation of a regulatory ideal, it elucidates how the EU pursues hegemonic practices in the Southern Mediterranean. It further manifests how the EUs governmentality is marked by a securitized, depoliticizing, and technocratic approach which feeds into and gets legitimized by the dominant discourse on European foreign policy; reproducing the EUs ideal identity vis- -vis its imperfect Arab other.