Tunisia and the Social Compact

This past month I travelled to Tunisia, a model of economic development in Africa. It is touted as the most competitive economy in Africa and in the Middle East. From a Western institutional perspective, Tunisia is certainly the darling of the "middle income group" of nations. Or so say the World Bank, the IMF, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and the European Union. I'm sure a few others have chimed in that aren't listed here. Tunisia is relatively stable. Tunisians themselves lack the aggressiveness, nervousness or opaque reserve of their neighbors in the Maghreb. They are civil to one another and to foreigners. When driving in Tunis, they often wave a thank you to another who lets them into a lane. Pedestrians smile and give a thumbs up when a driver waits for them to cross the street. This is such a contrast to Cairo. (And to many large American and European cities, for that matter.)

And yet, Tunisia is not a democracy. Far from it. Since independence in 1957, the two regimes in Tunisia (under Bourguiba until 1987 and until now under Ben Ali) have only grudgingly allowed political access to their rivals. They have mercilessly crushed radical opposition groups and have effectively contained or coopted dissident movements. There is no freedom of speech in Tunisia. Even bloggers are imprisoned and, some say, beaten and tortured. Less than two weeks ago, the offices of a lawyer who is currently serving as the Secretary for the Tunisian League of Human Rights (LTDH), the oldest local human rights group in the Arabic-speaking world, were torched. Rumor is the security services are the perpetrators. Hammami has been working for two months on a report on the state of the Tunisian justice system for the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. The report was to be presented at a seminar sponsored by the organization in Paris this weekend.

At the same time, few societies in the Middle East and North Africa are freer. This is true in particular for women, who enjoy near-equal status in modern Tunisian society. They still lag behind men in the UNDP's Human Development Index, but to make a comparison with a country like Saudi Arabia, for example, is ludicrous. If women are the true barometer of the health of a modern society, then Tunisia is very much on the right track. I was sitting with my wife at a cafe called the Marabout, when we had the opportunity to talk with the owner, who was a woman. (We were visiting a coastal town in the north called Bizerte, which is home to the bulk of Tunisia's Navy and Air Force.) We mentioned to her how different Tunisia was compared to other Arabic-speaking countries we have visited. She replied, simply, "C'est un manque de misère." We also mentioned that we had rarely traveled in a country in which women seemed so equal to men. I asked, rhetorically, whether that wasn't due to the efforts of Bourguiba. She replied with a pride and intensity I will never forget. "C'était la grace de Bourguiba" that had given them their rights.

Tunisia enjoys a standard of living not widely seen outside of Europe and the United States -- there are countries in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America that are richer, but with much greater internal disparities in political access, wealth, and health. Unlike the Gulf countries, Tunisia does not enjoy the windfall that comes with higher crude prices. It's economy does not depend on oil exports. In fact, its entire energy sector amounted to just 1.5% of GDP in 2005. It has not had the luxury of rents or remittances to the extent that other countries in the region have had. It has had to diversify and to modernize. The efforts of the élite to bring average citizens along with them on the "road to prosperity" are evident. They have certainly done a much better job than their counterparts in Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, and other giants of the African continent. So it is not surprising that work-a-day Tunisians forgive them for their foibles, for their corruption, and for their heavy-handedness with their political rivals.

And so it also came as no surprise when I heard the vast majority of the people I talked to express their support for the current regime, even in the remote regions of the South. The standard line was that people preferred stability and security to chaos. They preferred a dictatorship to a democracy where radical Islamists are in power. This is code for what is referred to in diplomatic circles as "the social compact." It explains, at least in part, why Tunisia has not yet transitioned to democracy despite Ben Ali's promises. It explains the fear -- the genuine fear --that the majority of Muslims in Tunisia have of what is perceived to be a resurgence of Islamic extremism and militancy in the region. They have even gone to the extent of removing the three-term limit to Ben Ali's presidency, and raising the maximum age from 70 to 75. They did it in a constitution referendum in 2002. He will run for a fifth term in 2009. The campaign posters are already decorating the sides of apartment buildings.

I suppose one could take the cynical approach and say they were just doing what they were expected to do in a closed system (read: dictatorship). Or one could say the voting was gerrymandered. One could even say, as one diplomat has insinuated, that all those people were just telling me what I wanted to hear. Maybe they were. I have to believe that not all of those people, not even most of them, were masquerading. We in the West assume that only multiparty democracies can succeed. Historically, other systems have been just as successful and stable. In fact, democracies are more likely than other political systems to make war -- not on each other, but on "the evil other." On the flip side, non-democratic systems have been more stable. It looks as though, for now, the people of Tunisia have made their choice for the time being. The question is whether the West, in its feverish efforts to "democratize" the "other", will respect Tunisia's incremental process.