EU hopes for Arab Spring fading

PARIS - Europe is watching with concern as the Arab spring turns to summer and the fast-track exit of dictators of a few months ago is replaced by mess, bloodshed and uncertainty.

In Libya, Syria and Yemen, brutal regimes are fighting for their lives, and in doing so are reviving ancient tribal tensions.

Bahrain has crushed its pro-democracy opposition. Tunisia and Egypt, still fragile, have yet to stage elections that will consolidate their revolutions and are mired in economic problems.

Few in Europe are tempted to draw a parallel between 2011 and 1989, when eastern European tyrants were toppled one after another and democracies sprang up like flowers.

Many still clamour for action, saying this is a golden chance to help North Africa and the Middle East - for decades an area of poverty and oppression - become a zone of stability and prosperity.

But this view is now coloured by awareness of the scale of the task as the death toll mounts and waves of migrants wash up on European shores.

Willpower is also sapped by the European Union's own problems, ranging from the Greek debt crisis, which threatens the euro, to the EU's dysfunction. Three competing EU offices - the European Council, the Commission and foreign affairs representatives - claim to speak for 27 nations and 500 million people.

It has been left to the old powers, Britain and France, using their clout in the United Nations Security Council to lead the diplomatic charge for a toughly-worded resolution to condemn Syria's bloody crackdown.

Militarily, too, Europe is in a bad way. France and Britain have led the war on Libya, but the cost of the conflict, nearly four months old, is creeping more and more into national headlines, and commentators are asking searchingly whether there is an exit strategy.

Of the 26 European members of Nato, only six are taking part in air strikes and one of these, Norway, has said it will quit on August 1. Stocks of smart bombs and air-to-ground missiles are so meagre that air forces have had to beg supplies off the Americans.

Departing Defence Secretary Robert Gates blasted Europe last week for what he called a flabby commitment on Libya and its ever-smaller defence budgets.

"Future US political leaders - those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me - may not consider the return on America's investment in Nato worth the cost," he warned in Brussels.

Europe is not alone in feeling powerless. Turkey, as a solid Muslim democracy, Nato member and EU hopeful, has failed to deliver on hopes that it could sway matters in Libya and neighbouring Syria.

Unable to influence events as they unfold, Europe's best role will be to provide funding, skills and trade for new regimes that emerge from the smoke and rubble, say some.

"The ongoing uprisings in the Arab world have surprised and unnerved Europe's leaders," former European Commission chief, Jacques Delors, one of the architects of EU integration, said last week in a co-authored commentary published by European Voice, an influential Brussels newsletter.

Delors said European nations had to muster many billions of dollars and weave them together in a coherent aid strategy akin to the Marshall Plan that revived Western Europe after World War II.

"A massive European aid programme is needed, one which must make use of all the available European and national tools."

Michael Emerson, of the Centre for European Policy Studies think-tank, said 3 billion ($5.24 billion) had been swiftly earmarked from EU funds and "this could make a difference" if further donations pledged nationally and multilaterally at last month's G8 summit come good.

But, he said, Europe's policy on trade and labour mobility towards its southern neighbours was in a disastrous state. Reform was needed to fix "glaring contradictions" that wall out poor countries desperate to sell to the world's biggest commercial bloc.