Introduction
In November 1987, Tunisia's first post-independence president, Habib Bourguiba, was swiftly removed from power via a “constitutional coup” orchestrated by the prime minister Zayn al- ͑Abidin bin ͑Ali. Bin ͑Ali gathered doctors to declare the aging Bourguiba mentally unfit to rule, and assumed the role of president following article 57 of the constitution. Over the next several months, the coup was accompanied by far-reaching promises and concrete steps toward political reform,Footnote 2 as well as symbolic gestures intended to demonstrate a new tolerance for the emerging Islamist movement. Bin ͑Ali's promises included acknowledging greater respect for human rights (including political freedoms), even if they sometimes contradicted common applications of the principles of Islam. In August 1988, he invited members of political and civil society to discuss reform in national identity, the political regime, economic development, and foreign policy. Consensus on these issues was outlined in an agreement known as the National Pact.
Academics were initially hopeful that these actions would bring about the eventual development of a more democratic political system in Tunisia.Footnote 3 Yet the first post-coup round of parliamentary elections was denounced by opposition parties as fraudulent, and over the next several years thousands of members from these opposition movements, particularly the Islamist party, were jailed. Although economic liberalization continued, observers soon realized that the authoritarian ways of the Bourguiba era had not changed under Bin ͑Ali.Footnote 4
In contrast, the events of December 2010 and January 2011 are generally labeled by both Tunisians and scholars as a “revolution.” Unlike Bourguiba, who was removed by a coup, President Bin ͑Ali fled in the face of mass protests, which the army refused to suppress. Credible elections for a National Constituent Assembly were held in October 2011. Despite many delays and near-collapses, this assembly ultimately passed a new, more liberal constitution in January 2014, founding the Second Tunisian Republic. Although it may still be premature to declare that Tunisia has transitioned to democracy, this second round of attempted political liberalization garnered more significant and lasting political reforms than the first.
What changed between these two episodes of attempted liberalization? How much did the bottom-up nature of the second event explain its relative success, and how much did surrounding conditions permit political opening to occur? The following sections discuss changes in Tunisian political life between the late 1980s and the early 2010s in order to explore these questions. In particular, the article argues that a more prominent role by regime moderates, a more developed civil society, and greater emphasis on negotiation and consensus all played a role, in addition to changes in the international context, in shaping the different outcomes of the second experience of political liberalization.
As a preliminary, it is important to note the ways in which Tunisia is distinct from its neighbors such that the changes discussed below could occur. First, the apolitical nature of its military meant that in contrast to Egypt, the army not only remained in its barracks during the 2011 uprising but also refused to take control after Bin ͑Ali left, leaving civilians (elites and civil society activists) to negotiate a solution. Additionally, the Tunisian labor union had, even by the time of the first attempted liberalization, become independent from the government, which positioned it to assume a central decision-making role in 2011.Footnote 5 Finally, as noted below, the main Tunisian Islamist movement has displayed distinct tendencies that may help explain its political success. The discussion below thus offers a framework for considering Tunisia's transitional progress after 2011 while also indirectly highlighting features of Tunisian political and social life that distinguish it from other Arab countries.
Role of Regime Moderates
The literature on transition from authoritarian rule to democracy suggests that the presence of a moderate faction among regime elites can lead to bargaining over the rules of governance, which permits genuine democratic reform.Footnote 6 Case studies from Latin America and Southern and Eastern Europe in particular illuminate the way regime change can occur via a “pacted transition,” or compromise among hardline and moderate regime elites that “redefine(s) the rules that govern the exercise of power on the basis of a mutual guarantee of the vital interests of each party.”Footnote 7
However, a cursory look at Tunisia's political opposition in the late 1980s and early 1990s reveals the absence of conditions that could have facilitated such a pact. The growing popular support for Tunisia's Islamist movement, the Islamic Tendency Movement (MTI), had become clear to Bourguiba since its emergence in 1981 as an official political party. Threatened by its organizing on university campuses in particular, Bourguiba during the last several years of his rule moved to imprison many of the movement's leaders and closely monitor its activities. When Bin ͑Ali took over, he recognized that restoring relations with the Islamist movement (which soon changed its name to al-Nahda) would be key to shoring up the credibility of the regime and its claim to respect pluralism.Footnote 8
Leading up to the first parliamentary elections after Bin ͑Ali's takeover in the spring of 1989, al-Nahda worked to capitalize on this new opportunity. Although al-Nahda had not been recognized as a political party due to a law forbidding religious parties, it chose to field candidates as independents rather than boycott the electoral process. The Islamist candidates’ strong performance surprised the government and led it to jail several of the movement's leaders. Meanwhile, several secular, formerly banned parties performed poorly.Footnote 9
The 1989 election clearly demonstrated that the most significant challenges to Tunisia's government came not from secular opposition parties but from the excluded regions of the interior, where more economically disadvantaged populations tended to sympathize with Islamist alternatives. Moreover, secular political elites opposing Bin ͑Ali's authoritarian policies were not strong enough to bargain or compete with regime “hardliners”—those determined to cling to authoritarianism—in order to define new rules of the game. To be sure, divisions existed between liberals and conservatives in the ruling party, particularly over how to deal with the Islamists.Footnote 10 However, as Sadiki explains, two features of Bourguiba's legacy had blocked political pluralism: a “solidaristic” brand of nationalism, which discouraged dissent in the name of stability, and pragmatism, or an emphasis on palpably improving living standards in order to ensure the regime's own legitimacy and discourage mobilization of alternative political programs.Footnote 11 This historical legacy, combined with an increasing wariness of Islamist movements, made political liberalization (and competition) a frightening prospect for many.Footnote 12
Alongside his desultory attempts to incorporate more parties into the political system, Bin ͑Ali made efforts to “renew” the discredited ruling party. For example, he changed its name from the Socialist Dusturian Party (PSD) to the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD), thus removing the Arabic reference to constitutionalism, exchanging socialist for democratic signifiers, and incorporating the “broader and looser” idea of a rally.Footnote 13 Yet other reforms, such as increasing the strength of the political bureau and recruiting individuals who had become active in organizations outside the party, had the effect of weakening opposition organizations and allowing the RCD to remain dominant.Footnote 14 Party renewal thus did not reshape Bourguiba's single-party system into a multiparty one; rather, it “succeeded in swapping the single-party rule of the PSD for the hegemonic rule of the RCD.”Footnote 15 Moreover, during the next several years Bin ͑Ali moved to reduce the influence of the party on the government and instead build a cult of personality around the president.Footnote 16 In short, due to the legacy of the inherited system and the actions of the ultimate power-holder, by 1991 there was little room among elites for effective opposition to his authority, despite his calls for increased pluralism.
In contrast, Bin ͑Ali's departure in 2011 was followed by weeks of struggle among various forces over who would take his place. Alongside “revolutionaries,” these forces included individuals from the old regime who could be described as moderates.Footnote 17 Then-Prime Minister Muhammad Ghannushi and President of the Chamber of Deputies (lower house of parliament) Fuʾad al-Mbzʿa were central to these processes.
Ghannushi and al-Mbzʿa were determined to avoid a complete collapse of the state and thus to preserve at least a degree of governing stability.Footnote 18 They initially tried to follow constitutionally-mandated procedures, as Bin ͑Ali had done. Following a nearly 24-hour period of “institutional chaos,”Footnote 19 Ghannushi appointed an interim cabinet and declared that al-Mbzʿa would assume presidential powers for no more than sixty days, until elections for a new president and parliament could be held.
Yet during the days and weeks surrounding January 14, 2011, protestors had begun to organize themselves through the newly created Conseil National pour la Protection de la Révolution (CNPR).Footnote 20 Chief among their demands was a new constitution; they therefore found Ghannushi's and al-Mbzʿa's preservation of the existing constitutional framework unacceptable. Protestors and interim cabinet members instead launched negotiations that eventually resulted in Ghannushi's departure and the organization of elections for a National Constituent Assembly (NCA) to write a new constitution. The negotiations also produced a new interim government that included several opposition party members and a High Authority for Political Reform (HIROR)Footnote 21 made up of impartial legal experts, representatives of political parties (except the RCD, which had been dissolved), trade unions, and other civil society organizations. The HIROR also included “national personalities,” or individuals well-known and respected in Tunisian society, and representatives of Tunisia's youth, women, and interior regions.Footnote 22
Ghannushi and al-Mbzʿa played moderating roles during their respective tenures as interim government leaders. They prevented the old regime from recapturing power but also insisted on negotiation over procedures for transition, refusing to allow the revolutionaries to take over carte blanche.Footnote 23 They took several important steps toward political reform including legalizing previously outlawed political parties, dismantling the dominant RCD, and initiating electoral reform. Ghannushi was also key in incorporating protestors into decision-making processes. The ultimate demonstration of his commitment to protecting (and maybe even liberalizing) the country rather than his own or his party's power was his voluntary resignation.Footnote 24
Following Ghannushi's resignation, al-Mbzʿa continued to act as interim president.Footnote 25 As a result of the education and opportunities for elite families that had been provided under both Bourguiba and Bin ͑Ali, the technocrats who worked alongside him were competent and experienced statesmen. Meanwhile, by channeling protestors’ energy and potentially destructive tendencies into negotiations, al-Mbzʿa's leadership helped temper some of the revolutionary fervor. The balance these two men (and the people working with them) helped achieve between respecting state institutions and heeding calls for change prevented the attempted democratization process from either collapsing into chaos or dissolving under pressure.
Al-Mbzʿa proposed that Ghannushi be replaced as interim Prime Minister by Béji Qaïd Essebsi, who had also been a statesman under Bourguiba and Bin ͑Ali but was acceptable to protestors because of his experience and his relative lack of power. Qaïd Essebsi played a neutral but effective role leading up to the NCA elections by avoiding the appearance of helping the old regime retain power while also taking steps to ensure credibility of these elections.Footnote 26
NCA elections were held in October. Al-Nahda, which had been legalized on March 1, 2011, won a plurality of seats in the assembly, and, as Boubekeur explains, the contest between revolutionary and old regime forces that usually characterizes a transition soon morphed into an Islamist–secular divide.Footnote 27 As the assembly became deadlocked over key identity issues, legislation stalled, and the economy faltered, protests against the new government mounted. Violent attacks attributed to radical groups began to rise, and the polarization between those favoring an Islamist political identity and secularists grew worse. However, in part thanks to elite compromises, the al-Nahda government eventually agreed to hand power to a caretaker government that would oversee the final drafting of the constitution and elections for a new government. In sum, unlike events after 1987, the presence in 2011 of moderate elites permitted compromises and breaks with the authoritarian ways of the past. As a result, opposition parties and genuine political competition became normal features of political life and a more representative electoral system became institutionalized.
Network of Civil Society Activists
The political opening after 2011 also differed from the attempted reforms after 1987 because of the role played by civil society. Civil society associations in Tunisia have historically struggled to autonomously represent the interests of citizen groups. Bourguiba controlled such associations through party domination of state organizations, while Bin ͑Ali used his state security apparatus to monitor, harass, arrest, jail, and torture association members, in addition to imposing legislative restrictions.Footnote 28
Two representative associations of this struggle are the Tunisian General Workers Union (UGTT) and the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH). Although neither was able to prevent Bin ͑Ali from retracting his initial promises of democratic reform, by 2011 both had become arenas for exchange of beliefs and tolerance of diversity and an effective voice in dialogue with the state.
The Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH) formed in 1977 to advocate for the adoption of universal human rights principles in Tunisian law. When Bin ͑Ali came to power, the league fell victim to his repressive measures. The LTDH, along with other human rights defenders in the Maghreb, worked with the international human rights advocacy community to lobby Western governments to pressure the Tunisian government to respect human rights.
Meanwhile, awareness of the importance of human rights was growing internationally. Authoritarian governments around the world, including Tunisia, began to notice. Waltz argues that Bin ͑Ali's government pretended to heed calls for improving its human rights performance while in fact becoming increasingly repressive, which inadvertently strengthened opposition forces.Footnote 29
The Tunisian General Workers Union (UGTT) formed in 1946 as a partner of the Neo-Dustur party (the original PSD/RCD) but later took on a more confrontational role. For several decades, the UGTT alternated between a strategy of cooperation with the government and one of pushing against it. In 1978 the UGTT staged a nationwide strike which was brutally repressed by state security forces.Footnote 30 Like the LTDH, it continued to resist state cooptation over the next three decades.
Renewed economic crisis in the early 1980s once again prompted widespread union-led strikes; Bourguiba and his government used harsh repressive measures in response, leaving the UGTT in a weakened state when Bin ͑Ali came to power. For this reason, along with the divisions between the base and the leadership, the UGTT had little ability to push back when Bin ͑Ali began to stray from his promises of democratic reform.Footnote 31
Over time Tunisian civil society activists gained experience in pushing for democratic reforms, learning to protect their autonomy, resist repression, and work with the international community to wear down the regime. Gradually these organizations also coalesced into a network of activists with a diverse array of views. An oft-cited experience is the 18 October Collective, which emerged in the run-up to the 2005 World Information Summit as an attempt to bring international attention to the lack of civil liberties in the countryFootnote 32 and the repressive legislative measures of the Bin ͑Ali government, which were justified in part by the Global War on Terror. The collective included civil society associations and opposition political parties, including al-Nahda. It brought together Islamists and leftists under a “unifying spirit”;Footnote 33 more generally, it reflected a shared sense of frustration among activists that had been growing since at least the 1970s. Through such actions, activists also gained experience in overcoming their differences in order to pursue a common goal.
Civil society associations played a visible role in the uprisings of 2010–11. The UGTT and Tunisian Bar Association opened their local offices for meetings of protestors, and the national protests that culminated in the flight of Bin ͑Ali started outside the UGTT headquarters in Tunis. After Bin ͑Ali fled, their experiences in activism allowed members from these organizations to help the new interim government represent a wide array of voices.
After January 14, these organizations joined a wider network of activists from opposition political parties and individual activists in the HIROR. Their participation served multiple functions. First, it ensured the presence of people with experience thinking about the political institutions necessary to protect individual rights. Despite their differences, this network of activists shared a strong commitment to a vision of a more democratic Tunisia. Their participation in the HIROR later helped the UGTT, the LTDH, and two other organizations (the business-owners’ union and the Bar Association) to launch and sustain the 2013 National Dialogue that ultimately drew the country out of its political crisis.
Second, the LTDH and UGTT facilitated the involvement of people from the marginalized interior regions of Tunisia in interim decision-making processes following Bin ͑Ali's ouster. For instance, in the early days of HIROR's work, the organizations’ representatives who had been appointed to the commission were tasked with recruiting more youth, women, and other representatives from the interior regions, since they had the widest networks there. This helped convince Tunisians that a new political system was not being negotiated entirely by elites.
Finally, these two organizations represent an important capacity of Tunisian civil society. They bridged Tunisia's two social divides: class and religion. Despite the country's long-standing tension between the upper-middle classes of the coastal areas and the poorer miners and farmers from the interior, the UGTT incorporated workers of different classes.Footnote 34 Likewise, the LTDH, although largely comprised of elites,Footnote 35 had historically defended the rights of Islamists against the abuses of the regime.Footnote 36 Owing in large part to Bin ͑Ali's harsh repression of free political expression and organizing, the determination of the UGTT, LTDH, and other organizations to achieve enhanced freedoms was renewed, and they were prepared to cooperate and play a significant role in reforms by 2011. With the proliferation of new organizations since 2011, civil society in Tunisia since 1987 has taken an irreversible turn toward greater significance.
Inclusion, Negotiation, and Consensus
Lastly, negotiation and consensus played a much more important role in 2011 than in 1987. Several scholars note how changes in Tunisian society since independence, such as the diversification of identities and values stemming from class stratification and demographic changes, meant that the two pillars of Bourguibism, nationalist ideology and the patronage/clientalist system, had withered by the 1980s.Footnote 37 This led directly to Bin ͑Ali's initial call for economic liberalization, greater respect for human rights, and political pluralism.
Yet inclusive reform was difficult given the centralized, authoritarian structure of Tunisia's political system. In his analysis of the political reforms following Bin ͑Ali's accession to power, Vandewalle argues that the new president “outpaced his own party and the opposition parties’ ability” to be part of a more pluralistic system. For example, on questions such as economic redistribution and equity, the alternative programs proposed by opposition groups were insufficiently developed, and the central state's traditional mode of unilateral action predominated.Footnote 38 It was by these means that Bin ͑Ali's regime wore down the opposition, further demonstrating the absence of a framework that would permit actual political pluralism to emerge.Footnote 39
The experience of the National Pact clearly illustrates this point. This pact, negotiated and signed within a year of Bin ͑Ali's coming to power and intended to demonstrate his commitment to pluralism, merely served to further the regime's cooptation and dominance of its opponents. Anderson has noted the ways in which the weakness of the entire system vis-à-vis the ruling party and state apparatus, including the “absence of political actors with autonomous social and economic power,” prevented the National Pact from representing a “compromise or bargain among equals.”Footnote 40 The possibility of national consensus to serve as a starting point for democratic institution-building was thus, again, limited.Footnote 41
Contemporary scholars similarly note the way Bin ͑Ali's intention to develop inclusionary processes and systems backfired and resulted in an exclusionary one.Footnote 42 Murphy (invoking Anderson) explains how the National Pact put such emphasis on agreeing on a single vision for the country that the question of how to resolve their conflicting or contradictory positions was postponed.Footnote 43 A series of other liberalizing reforms surrounding the National Pact process were done in the same unilateral fashion and were soon retracted, reversed, or abandoned. Overall, Bin ͑Ali's declarations of political liberalization fell short, in part due to this absence of genuine inclusion, negotiation, and consensus.
Between 2011 and 2014, lead actors again used a discourse of “consensus” as Bin ͑Ali had. In HIROR, for example, consensus was adopted as a central operating principle: in order to craft interim legislation, a team of legal experts drafted texts which the larger commission would debate and, once a general consensus had been reached, adopt through formal vote. Although this principle virtually disappeared under the NCA and its appointed governing coalition, it was revived again with the National Dialogue of 2013. A consensus committee was also created within the NCA, in which all contentious points were discussed until agreement was reached.
This second attempt at facilitating political opening through consensus was in part helped by the nature of the power transition in 2011. Rather than being unilaterally imposed, Bin ͑Ali's removal was the result of agreement among diverse actors around a single point. Moreover, stemming from its behavior during the protests, the newly formed Conseil National pour la Protection de la Révolution, with its representatives from the interior regions and other marginalized parts of society, became part of the first interim government. Such groups insisted on being included; they did not need to wait to be invited. And once they all found themselves together around the same negotiating table, they realized that unity in the form of compromise—not imposed consensus—was the only way forward.Footnote 44
Tunisians are proud of their long history and culture of negotiation and dialogue and often point to their evasion of armed struggle during this uncertain period.Footnote 45 In fact, Bin ͑Ali's intention to reach consensus through dialogue and negotiation may not have been empty rhetoric. Rather, a historical insistence on unity had prevented competing voices from having opportunities to create dialogue and reach genuine consensus, at least for the first thirty years following independence.
Yet, it should not be concluded that in today's Tunisia, negotiation, consensus, and genuine inclusion are automatic. Boubekeur argues that efforts to reach a compromise and overcome the Islamist–secular divide in 2013 came at the expense of addressing fundamental issues over which the two sides disagreed.Footnote 46 (This is vaguely reminiscent of the National Pact and even the 18 October Collective.)Footnote 47 She points to the ways al-Nahda was forced to accommodate and make concessions on some of its fundamental principles in order to avoid being excluded from power once again.Footnote 48 Similarly, certain efforts at inclusion during the aftermath of 2011 were nearly stillborn, such as the disappearance of youth representatives from the Qaïd Essebsi cabinet within a few months of their appointment.Footnote 49 In sum, Tunisia's second attempted regime change saw a much more prominent, although far from guaranteed, role for negotiation and consensus.
Changes in the International Context
Finally, shifts in the international context helps to explain the different outcome of the 2011 protests. First, the bloody war between the government and Islamist opposition in Algeria during the 1990s and early 2000s gave the Bin ͑Ali regime grounds for justifying its repression of al-Nahda. This repression both strengthened Islamist opposition to the regime and helped sharpen the divide between Islamists and secularists (which re-surfaced following Bin ͑Ali's downfall) by helping generate fear of an Islamist takeover.Footnote 50 Although widespread suspicion of political Islam had not disappeared, the end of the Algerian war and the distance of events such as the 1979 Iranian revolution gradually weakened secularists’ reasons for maintaining such fear.
In this environment, al-Nahda, which had already been recognized as “stand[ing] out among Islamic parties in the Arab world for its emphasis on moderation and synthesis with democracy,”Footnote 51 could cautiously reengage in electoral politics after Bin ͑Ali had left and his party had been dissolved. It is unclear whether al-Nahda's leadership in 2011 drew direct lessons from examples of Islamist parties such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 2005, the Palestinian Hamas in 2006, or the Algerian FIS in 1990, who had tried to contest elections, only to be met with repression and/or exclusion. What is certain is that the party, perhaps aware of lingering fears of an Islamist takeover across the region,Footnote 52 showed a willingness to compromise and build consensus with secular parties that may have contributed to its success in the NCA elections. This reinforces the point that region-wide changes helped create conditions for a more moderate outcome in 2011.
Second, the global economic environment of world recession and falling oil prices both encouraged Bin ͑Ali's neoliberal reforms and allowed resentment—particularly of his increasingly corrupt waysFootnote 53—to foment. These sentiments were reinforced by the direct and indirect support of major Western powers for these policies.Footnote 54 The strengthening of a national economic sentiment over time was another factor unifying Tunisians around genuine political change. The rapid outbreak of armed conflict involving Islamist extremist movements in countries such as Libya and Iraq further encouraged Tunisia's Western partners to embrace its secular–Islamist compromise.
Conclusions
This article has shown how three aspects of Tunisian political and civic life have changed after 1991 and helped to permit a more thorough political opening starting in 2011. The enhanced opportunity for regime moderates, strengthened civil society, and focus on negotiation, inclusion, and consensus permitted the passage of a new constitution in 2014. That constitution sets the framework for a significantly more liberal political system. However, this political opening has not necessarily led to the emergence of a political system in which all parts of Tunisian society feel genuinely included.Footnote 55
This trajectory raises an important question for those concerned both with Tunisia's future and with political theory. In a society that has seemingly abandoned violence as a means of resolving political conflict,Footnote 56 yet has perhaps overemphasized national unity at the expense of true democratic pluralism and competition, what does it take to avoid reverting to an authoritarian system? Has Tunisia missed opportunities to sufficiently include all voices in the process of reform, or will time prove that the framework for a genuinely inclusive and democratic system is in place? Continued observation of the Tunisian experience will reveal the robustness and limitations of the foundations of political liberalization discussed here.
