Introduction

Most actors and commentators across the West were caught by surprise when anti-government protests started in Tunisia and then spread across the Middle East and North Africa in the winter of 2010–11. The events became known as the Arab Spring, the Arab revolutions or, as will be used in this volume, the ‘Arab uprisings’.

This sense of surprise when the uprisings started applies to the institutions of the European Union and its major allies in the region – the US, France and the UK, with their dense network of contacts, embassies and intelligence operatives. Nor, as will be discussed below, did any of the big NGOs or mainstream media working and reporting on the Middle East and North Africa emit clear warnings on the prospect of such an event. Even once the protests started in Tunisia in the third week of December 2010, the rapidly growing discontent in both Tunisia and Egypt initially went largely unreported in Western media as well as in reporting from the big NGOs, some of whom were at the time largely focusing on the impasse in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This volume, amongst others, asks to what extent and when ‘being surprised’ is to be expected, and when it indicates failures in intelligence collection, analysis, communication or receptivity. In this chapter it will be argued that only after investigating in detail which characteristics of the Arab uprisings were particularly surprising to the European institutions and to what extent, and whether these degrees of surprise were spread evenly across analysists and decision-makers, is it possible to properly explain why the Arab uprisings were so surprising. In keeping with the aims of this volume, this subsequently serves to identify to what extent the surprising nature of the Arab uprisings, and any potential errors made in anticipating this event by the European Union, were excusable given the complexity and diagnostic difficulty of the Arab uprisings, or whether they point to broader structural problems and shortcomings in the European intelligence-policy nexus.

Such an improved understanding of who was surprised, about what, and when, allows for a better evaluation of the EU’s performance.