Tunisia: What prospects for the future?

In order to peer into what the future might hold for Tunisia, we need to first drill deeper into the question of how the democracy that was built in Tunisia can be understood in relation to the revolution that acted as its proximate cause.

In a recent book, Tunisie: Une revolution en pays d’Islam, Yadh Ben Achour analyses the revolution that laid the groundwork for the new Tunisian democracy, and correctly argues that this revolution cannot be compared to any of the major revolutions that came before it: the English Revolution of the midseventeenth century or the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century: “Tunisia,” he comments, “has invented a type of revolution that has absolutely no precedent in history” (Ben Achour 2016, 7; my translation).

The picture we get of the defining features of a revolution is the picture that historians construct in light of their ideologies and assumptions, a case in point being the Marxist reading of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution (see, for example, Mathiez 1922 and Soboul 1962). There are multiple causes behind any revolution, and historians key in on those that best comport with their outlook. And so, accordingly, the Tunisian Revolution is amenable to multiple interpretations. As Ben Achour asks:

Was this the revolution of the economic, social, and political periphery against the centre? Was it the revolution of the tribes moved to action by the Khaldunian esprit de corps grounded in 'asabiyya? [...] Or that of the small landholders and street vendors in the heartland, like Bouazizi, reacting to land expropriation? [...] Was it a secular revolution or a religious one? (Ben Achour 2016,14)

Drawing on Hegel’s philosophy, Ben Achour proceeds from a view of history as a dialectical movement in which the present must always reckon with the past. On this approach, the religious phase based on identity ties played a key role in the Tunisian Revolution (ibid., 20). And indeed the revolution put the issue of secularism front and centre. The outcome was a constitution that cannot in any sense be described as theocratic, and it could even be argued that the Islamist parties in Tunisia arc themselves pivoting towards secularism.

Every revolution is underpinned by a political logic and dynamic peculiar to itself. In view of the distinctive traits of the constitutional debate in Tunisia— and particularly in view of its concern with the relation between law and religion—it would be fair to say that the Tunisian constitution laid the foundation for what might be described as a “constitutional democracy inflected with an Arab-Muslim identity”—a unique form of government that has no equivalent in the Western canon.

What emerged with force in the Tunisian Revolution was a post-authoritarian Islam whose main thrust came from its rejection of the authoritarian regime. Indeed, as Redissi (2017, 14) comments, “Islam is in its ‘essence’ antiauthoritarian” (my translation). But while post-authoritarianism led to a break with authoritarianism, it did not break with tradition. Hence the specific brand of Islam-inflected constitutional democracy that emerged from the Tunisian Revolution—a blend of ingredients resulting from a compromise struck between a modernist attitude and a conservative one rooted in Islam.

It has also been suggested that what came into being was a form of government anchored in a new kind of legitimacy: the legitimacy of compromise (Nachi 2017, 33). Compromise was the final point of convergence for all the forces that took part in the Tunisian constitutional revolution, and it is also the answer to the question of why Tunisia is the only country in which the Arab Springs had a successful outcome. Indeed, as mentioned, two projects were competing: a modernizing one and a conservative or Islamist one. It was in the context of this competition that this historic compromise solution was achieved, averting the risk of polarization, and it was achieved through an active pluralism (ibid., 20) predicated on the need to recognize difference, taking account of the plural principles and forms of life shaping Tunisian society.

The revolution brought into focus the problem of the relation between Islam and modernity, this on account of the two conflicting forces that have long been shaping Tunisian society: the secularist ones that have progressively been gaining strength, and those that are pushing against them, namely, the forces of fundamentalism and radical Islam. The secularists have had to reckon with the distinctiveness of Tunisian society, with its history and identity, whose roots in large part trace back to Islam and the Islamic civilization.

Two antithetical visions were therefore in contention in the revolution: one that was calling for a radical break with the past, and another that was instead geared towards national reconciliation. So a debate took place in which these two visions were staking out their positions: ranged on one side of the field were those whose project was modernist (badatln)—receptive to Western culture with a view to building a secularist state (Dawla madaniyd) within a constitutional framework—while on the other stood those whose project looked to Islam and the Arab nation as their lodestars (ibid., 30). The foundation for the compromise was set when the secularists accepted that the Islamist party al-Nahda should take part in the political process, and al-Nahda in turn accepted the idea of negotiating as way to break the stalemate that lasted from 2011 to 2014 (ibid., 32).