Theory application to the Tunisian case

To apply this realist-constructivist approach to An-Nahdha’s soft policy towards France, An-Nahdha's ideology and domestic political calculations must be taken into consideration. Its ideology represents a hybrid of reformism and pragmatism. Indeed, An-Nahdha has never been a revolutionary party, at least in terms of methods if not also goals. Although its leader, Rashid al-Ghannouchi, claims that his revolutionary thinking is documented in a set of unpublished papers, he admits that his "radical” positions were not always welcomed by the party’s institutions and leaders, who before the uprising, used to blame him for deviating from its official policy of leaving a margin for reconciliation with the Ben Ali regime (Jebnoun, 2014: 15-16).

Reformism and pragmatism were evident in An-Nahdha’s compromising and tolerant approach towards other parties with different ideologies before and after the uprising. For example, in June 2003, while still exiled in France, representatives of An-Nahdha and three Tunisian secularist parties negotiated and signed The Call from Tunis, which endorsed four principles of a post-Ben Ali government, namely sovereignty of the people as the sole source of legitimacy; full equality of women and men; guaranteed liberty of beliefs to all; and political neutralisation of places of worship. This commitment was reiterated in later documents and declarations of the opposition parties, including the 18 October Coalition for Rights and Freedoms in Tunisia (Stepan, 2012: 96-97), and reached a peak unfamiliar to an Islamist party in An-Nahdha’s 2016 Congress when its leader, al-Ghannouchi, told the crowd, “we must keep religion far from political struggles” (Filali-Ansary, 2016; 99). Accordingly, An-Nahdha would split into two separate bodies: a political and electoral formation and a religious, social and cultural movement.

An-Nahdha was no less pragmatic in practice during the transitional period. It joined all opposition parties and civil society organisations in forming a commission, that according to a démocratisation scholar, was “one of the most effective consensus-building bodies in the history of “crafted” democratic transitions” (Stepan. 2012: 96-97). An-Nahdha's behaviour in power was unrestrained by any policy programme or revolutionary declaration, responding to grass roots demands in general and external relations in particular. Neither was it committed to a thought-out and agreed-upon vision on how to reorganise economic and social life. Thus, following its reformism, An-Nahdha adopted no policy of exclusion, retaliation or revenge normal in post-revolution regimes. To the contrary, it permitted the parties associated with the old regime to revive and organise. Ironically, and to the disappointment of revolutionaries, this policy of inclusion eventually enabled elements of the old regime to form the Nidaa Tonnes (Tunisia’s Call) Party and return to power after winning the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2014 (Jebnoun, 2014: 26).

Consistent with this reformism and pragmatism in domestic politics, the foreign policy of An-Nahdha’s governments was unsurprisingly compromising, including towards Western states and France in particular. This lenient policy is also rooted in the hardships that An-Nahdha’s leaders and cadres had to face, following Ben Ali’s systematic oppression in the early 1990s. According to al-Ghannouchi, many of them took refuge in Western states, hence their gratitude to them after the uprising. As pragmatists, An-Nahdha leaders disregarded their treatment in those states first as a security concern, then as a humanitarian case. Although they expressed a keen interest in building good relations with their host governments as exiled representatives of a political party, those governments refused to recognise them as such and began to deal with An-Nahdha as a political body only after the uprising (ibid.: 30-32). Hence its leadership’s immeasurable indebtedness to the revolution.

An-Nahdha’s electoral victory and empowerment in 2011 was a path to recognition not only by Western governments but also of Tunisia’s state bureaucracy, which had considered the party as backward and inferior. An-Nahdha’s leaders calculated that this recognition could only be maintained if it remained in power, and to achieve this goal, they were willing to make

Tunisia—Post-revolutionary foreign policy T3 compromises with secular forces. The experience of life under dictatorship, imprisonment and exile convinced the party’s leaders that sharing power might be their only way to survive and “close off the dire possibility of renewed persecution” (Netterstrom, 2015: 121). Thus, An-Nahdha’s soft policy towards France was partly a result of compromises in domestic politics to accommodate the expectations of the secularist elite. Compared to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, An-Nahdha’s leaders were keener not to antagonise the secular forces, both in the opposition and the ruling coalition (Murphy, 2014: 251). Its coalition partner, caretaker president Moncef Marzouki, for example, had close links in France where he was exiled and was “most closely associated with the liberal democratic trend informed by his roots in human rights activism” (Miller & Martini, 2012: 61).

Indeed, relations with France was not the only foreign policy issue on which An-Nahdha compromised with its coalition partners. Other instances include relations with Algeria, Syria, Palestine and the Arab Gulf monarchies. For example, against An-Nahdha’s Islamist ideological commitment, its interim governments collaborated with Algeria’s military junta that led the 1992 coup and cancelled the elections that Islamists won overwhelmingly. These governments were also committed to a political rather than a military solution in Syria, although An-Nahda’s ideals would arguably dictate an endorsement of jihad there (ibid.: 252-253).

Undermining human agency, structuralists argue that Tunisia had to act pragmatically in foreign relations because of “the constraints imposed by resource scarcity and location in a problematic neighbourhood” (ibid.: 257). They, however, conflate foreign policy analysis and prescription. Like empowered Islamists and other ideologues elsewhere, An-Nahdha’s leadership could have opted for another foreign policy orientation, irrespective of any consequences, and the realist-constructivist approach proposed in this chapter demonstrates that its pragmatism was a foreign policy choice, not a necessity.