As commentators cast around for parallels to events taking place across the Arab world, European officials have been expressing fears for the stability of the Maghreb, writes David Tresilian in Paris As popular uprisings throughout the Arab world spread to Bahrain and Libya, with hundreds of people reported killed in clashes between demonstrators and Libyan security forces this week, French commentators have been casting round for historical parallels to events in the Arab world amid disquiet at the possible effects on Europe of instability on the southern side of the Mediterranean. With reports of demonstrations also taking place in Algeria and throughout Morocco, the arrival of thousands of Tunisian migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa last week, believed to be fleeing political uncertainty and continuing high unemployment, led to tensions not only between the Tunisian and Italian governments, but also between the Italian government and its European partners. There has been concern in Europe that political instability in the countries of the Arab Maghreb could lead to increased flows of illegal migrants to European countries bordering the Mediterranean, among them Italy, France and Spain. Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni declared last week that the European Union had "left Italy alone as usual" to deal with the arrival of some 5,000 Tunisian migrants on its shores in five days, a complaint rejected by officials in Brussels. France has reinforced border controls with Italy in an attempt to prevent migrants from Tunisia crossing onto French territory amid reports that detention centres for illegal migrants in the south of the country have filled up over recent days. Speaking at a press conference last week, French Minister of Interior Brice Hortefeux told reporters that only in a very few cases would any Tunisian or other migrants be given permission to remain in France. "Any foreigner [in France] without the necessary papers will be returned to his country of origin. It is not in the interest of Tunisia to encourage or to accept illegal migration, and nor is it in the interest of Europe or France." Hortefeux said. Events in Libya have heightened European fears of continuing instability in countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean leading to the collapse of policies designed to prevent illegal migration into Europe. European officials have called on the Libyan authorities to "halt the violence against peaceful demonstrators" and open "meaningful dialogue" with opponents of the regime, in the words of EU Foreign Policy Representative Catherine Ashton. Khaled Al-Khaim, secretary-general at the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reportedly told European ambassadors in the Libyan capital Tripoli last week that if EU "interference in Libya's domestic affairs" was not halted this would lead to the country "immediately breaking off all cooperation with the European Union in the fight against illegal immigration and terrorism." Al-Khaim said that Libya would not hesitate to "nationalise European companies" in the country, should European support for the demonstrators continue. While Libya is not among the world's largest petroleum-producing countries, it does have significant untapped reserves and many international oil companies now operate in the country. World oil prices have risen significantly over the past few days in the wake of ongoing political uncertainty in the country and in the Arab world as a whole. Though events in Libya held world attention this week, the EU has been taking a lead in seeking to build relations with the post-Bin Ali regime in Tunisia, Ashton arriving in Tunis last week in a visit aimed to provide European support for the country's transition. While European officials have generally spoken with one voice in declaring their support for political and economic reforms in post-transition Arab countries, Ashton's visit and last week's comments by the French and Italian interior ministers suggest that there will be no change in European policy towards the movement of human beings across the Mediterranean. "The European Commission is in touch with Tunisia and Italy to solve the problem of illegal immigration," Ashton said, adding that the EU would be making 17 million euros available to the Tunisian government immediately to assist with this, with the prospect of a further 258 million between now and 2013. While French and European officials have been looking for ways to build relationships with the new Arab regimes, at the same time displaying nervousness at the effects on Europe of continuing political instability in the south of the Mediterranean, commentators in the French press have been standing back from events in an effort to put them into historical context. In addition to commentary by journalists and academics, there has been a mass of articles by France's intellectuals on the wave of Arab uprisings, with philosopher Alain Badiou and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco being among those providing points of view. According to Badiou, among the best-known of France's current crop of philosophical writers, writing in the French newspaper Le Monde on 19 February, while European commentators have been instructing Tunisian, Egyptian and other Arab demonstrators on the correct way of carrying out democratic transitions, it is Europeans "who have the most to learn from the current popular uprisings" in the Arab world. "We should be the pupils of these movements and not their dim-witted teachers," Badiou said. "They have revivified political principles that we have long been told are dead and done with, particularly the principle, insisted on by Marat, that when it comes to freedom, equality and emancipation, everything stems from popular revolt." Like Badiou, Roudinesco, also writing in Le Monde, drew on the French revolution in writing about the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries, though this time the reference was to Robespierre rather than Marat. "'When a nation has been forced to the point of insurrection,' Robespierre said in 1792, 'it returns to the state of nature with regard to the tyrant. How can the latter invoke the idea of the social contract, when it is he who has destroyed it? A people does not judge like a court of justice. Instead it launches thunderbolts.'" The revolutions underway in the Arab world were modeled on the 19th-century European idea of revolution as the "springtime of peoples," Roudinesco wrote, with "what is happening in the Arab world being a return to this ideal and the expression of a desire to get rid as much of dictatorships as of political Islam." Casting round for ways of understanding events in the Arab world, French commentators have turned to the wave of revolutions that took place in Europe in 1989, ending communist rule in the east, as well as to the waves of revolutionary activism that affected much of Europe in 1848 and 1789. According to Henry Laurens, holder of the chair in the contemporary history of the Arab world at the Collège de France, interviewed in Le Monde on 21 February, what linked the 1848 European revolutions to the 2011 revolutions in the Arab world, was "the demand for dignity and the absence of fear." When Lamartine spoke in 1848 of a "revolution born of contempt," his words "could just as well be directed at Mubarak or Bin Ali as at Louis Philippe," Laurens said. "The Arab regimes fell because people had contempt rather than fear of them, and the regimes had lost their legitimacy." "Whatever the future of the Arab world turns out to be, two things at least have changed" as a result of the current wave of revolutions, he said. "The first is that there has been a severe blow to the idea of the president for life, and the second is that there has been a change in the image Arab peoples have of themselves and that they project to others." This new image was that of the activists in Cairo's Tahrir Square during Egypt's January revolution, Laurens said.
