ROTTERDAM // The European Union has stepped up its response to the Arab uprisings by creating a task force for the Southern Mediterranean.
The move is geared towards guiding development aid and it comes after pledges of financial support at last month's summit of G8 leading economies. But it also comes as doubts about such aid are being voiced in several quarters.
"If development is appropriated as uniquely European and it is slotted into this European mind-set, that might be problematic because it could replicate lots of the old problems," warned Larbi Sadiki, an expert on the Middle East at the UK's University of Exeter.
The EU's task force will bring together diplomatic and economic representatives and is aimed at the wider development of the region. But the presence in it of the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) could mean that the emphasis will be on old-fashioned development aid.
The EU's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, set out the task force's mission by saying in a statement on Tuesday: "It will improve the coherence of our assistance to civil society, to democracy-building and to economic reconstruction through funds from the EU, the EIB and the EBRD."
The EBRD was instrumental in the 1990s in transforming Eastern Europe's economies, among others.
The EU has pledged US$1.24 billion (Dh4.55bn) in extra aid to North Africa and the Middle East between 2011 and 2013 as well as additional funding through the EBRD and the EIB. G8 leaders last month mentioned $20bn in aid, without clarifying exactly where that would come from.
Experts and activists writing in widely divergent places, from op-ed pieces in the Financial Times to British anti-debt campaign groups' websites, are enumerating the risks of such aid. The worry is mainly that the money will come with strings attached, that it will lock the new governments into financial arrangements that will keep them dependent on foreign powers and that the recipient governments are not ready to handle such assistance.
Mr Sadiki warned that the two most likely recipients at the moment, Egypt and Tunisia, do not yet have representative governments that can decide about aid priorities. He was worried that the aid could once again end up strengthening particular groups over others and encourage autocracy, as it has in the past.
"There is here an ethical obligation that the Europeans don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past, that the Europeans don't want to give the money to just anybody," he said.
Some take a more radical approach and argue that instead of offering more aid, existing debt should first be cancelled. Tim Jones of the Jubilee Debt Campaign in the UK wrote on the group's website: "If western powers really want to help Egypt's economy in a time of transition, rather than control it, they should offer debt cancellation and grants, not loans with strings attached."
Egypt has an external debt of more than $30bn and pays $3bn annually to service it, he wrote. "Repayment of debts and their interest drain money out of a country," he concluded.
Writing in the Financial Times, Saifedean Ammous a professor of economics at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, also argued that Egypt and Tunisia might be better off without aid. "Indeed, given the strong relationship between donors and the deposed regimes, it is not impossible to imagine free elections producing new leaderships that reject new funding, aiming instead to reduce or eliminate foreign aid and debt," he speculated.
But such a radical departure from the past may be hard to achieve for these countries, as they struggle with the economic cost of transition and with the economic problems that caused much of the unrest in the first place.
Part of the solution may lie in more regional assistance. "Where are the Arabs in all this?" Mr Sadiki asked. He said he had hopes for the proposal raised by Qatar last month for the establishment of a Middle East Development Bank, along the lines of the EBRD.
As for the Europeans, they were on the right track, he said. But "the reasoning right now should be to pause and get answers from the locals on what kind of development they want".
