The original article was published on the Middle East Research and Information Project‘s website on July 10th, 2015
The Tunisian transition away from the dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has indeed been successful in many respects. Tunisia managed to enact a new constitution and establish new democratic institutions, with relatively little violence, as a dynamic public sphere emerged. Tunisia is also the first country in the Arab world where an Islamist party, Ennahda, assumed power and then gave it up in response to popular demand. After winning the 2011 elections for a transitional Constituent Assembly, Ennahda acknowledged defeat in the parliamentary contests of October 26, 2014, in which the secular party Nida’ Tunis (NT) got the most votes. The Islamists’ equanimity then allowed for a peaceful transfer of power between outgoing and incoming executives after the presidential race that December.
The narrative of “Tunisian success”—often portraying the country as an “exception” or a “model”—nonetheless invites criticism. All the praise of Tunisia has begun to function, in both Arab and Western discourse, as a damper on legitimate complaints about the course of the post-Ben Ali transition. The encomia are often based on the patronizing assumption that Tunisia’s achievements are “good enough” for an Arab country, or on the Western-centric consideration that it took France and America two centuries to achieve several of the democratic goals that underpinned their respective revolutions.
In the wake of the Sousse attack, many commentators and political actors have expressed understandable concern for the short-term economic consequences—with tourism likely to collapse—and for the consolidation of the country’s democratic gains. But the overall narrative of success has survived. The initial assessments explain the Sousse killings as an attempt by radicals under the banner of the Islamic State, or ISIS, to sabotage a duly elected and secular-minded government. The other ways in which the attack might be understood—as an extreme expression of despair on the part of many Tunisian youth, as evidence of poor police preparation—are mentioned but in muffled tones.
In a declaration mere hours after the killings, President Beji Caïd Essebsi denounced social movements, labor strikes and the grassroots campaign known as winou el petrol, which calls for transparency and accountability in the use of public funds, implying that all these activities have somehow made Tunisian ground fertile for terrorism. Essebsi drew another straight line between freedom of expression and terrorism in his speech on July 4, the day on which he announced his decision to reinstate a state of emergency. The state of emergency law—which dates to 1978, the year when Ben Ali, then the country’s top gendarme, quashed a general strike—gives extraordinary powers to provincial governors, who answer to the Ministry of Interior. The Habib Bourguiba-era statute allows governors to ban strikes and protests, to monitor the press and publishers, and to close down mosques, restaurants and civil associations. Tunisia lived under emergency law from January 2011 to March 2014, which did not prevent the flourishing of the public sphere. But the reenactment of this law in what is supposed to be a post-transition period, and under a government whose dominant party, NT, based its entire election campaign on “national security,” comes across as both an admission of failure and a threat to hard-won civil liberties. Depending on how it is used, the law may even endanger democracy and pluralism in Tunisia.
In other words, while it may be true that ISIS is trying to subvert the Tunisian success story, as liberal commentators say, the obstacles to the Tunisian experiment have much deeper roots than a temporary vulnerability to terrorist outrage. The hurdles are related to the formation of the success narrative itself.
Read the full article on MERIP’s website