Abstract
This chapter examines the degree of change and continuity observed in the context of the EU’s handling of the protracted conflict of Western Sahara in the context of the revised ENP. It argues that there has been some relative change in the EU-Western Sahara relationship regardless of the continuity of the minimalist EU official position and against preferences of the EU executive foreign policy actors. Change has mainly originated from the ‘inward turn’ (‘dialectical change’) of the conflict as such and the agency of some Sahrawi and pro-Sahrawi actors, which have pursued new international ‘low politics’ and ‘parliamentarian’ strategies, and seized opportunities opened by intra-EU institutional change as addition under the Lisbon Treaty, as demonstrated by the EP’s rejection of the EU-Morocco fisheries protocol in 2011.
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Fernández-Molina, I. (2017). The EU, the European Neighbourhood Policy and the Western Sahara Conflict: Executive Continuity and Parliamentary Detours. In: Bouris, D., Schumacher, T. (eds) The Revised European Neighbourhood Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47182-6_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47182-6_11
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