The reign of Zine Al Abidin Ben Ali and its subsequent demise reflect two defining principles in human political behaviour. On the one hand, the average person values safety and security over freedom. On the other, injustice and dispossession create intolerable dissonance in the human psyche which the individual must address first by understanding its causes and the alternative approaches to its resolution, then by identifying and eliminating the specific barriers to change or reframing them into something else (see Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, pp. 6-7). To phrase it differently, injustice and dispossession beget alienation, itself a catalyst for revolutionary change. For the ruler therefore, it is a constant balancing between these two principles. For the ruled, it is a constant appraising of priorities.
Ben Ali came to power in 1987 on the heels of an ebbing Al Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia's el Caudillo, hero of independence and founder of the modern polity. The years since his ascendency have witnessed some of the most forceful transformations in contemporary political history. The fall of the Berlin Wall ushered the crumbling of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War. To many, it was the ultimate triumph of the West over East, a tectonic shift to a uni-polar world defined by American hegemony. How else, proponents of this view argued, could one explain two Gulf wars, a decade apart, where effectively the United States unilaterally decided to unleash its smart bombs on a rather highly urbanized and mechanized Iraq taking back to a pre-industrial age? (see United Nations, Report to the Secretary General on Humanitarian Needs in Kuwait and Iraq in the immediate Post-Crisis Environment, 20 March 1991, p. 5). Political Islam, in a process that began with the 1978 revolution in Iran, rose once again to become a major actor on the world stage. The attacks of 11 September 2001 came to freeze Islam and the Muslims in images that are perceived as alien, retrograde and gratuitously hostile to Western power, interests and values.
Closer to home, Algeria imploded in a bloody civil war that threatened to engulf neighbouring Tunisia, if indeed not the entire Maghreb. Two decades later and more than 200,000 lives lost, a complete end to the violence is not yet in sight. To the East, Qadhdhafi's Green Revolution which proclaimed workers to be "Partners not Wage Earners" was in full swing, his firebrand style of politics continuing unabated. It would take decades before the trade embargoes and air blockade that had sealed most Libyans from the outside world were lifted.
At home, Tunis was shaking off its parochialism and was determined to claim as its own some of the mystique of Alger and Casablanca. Les Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage, le Festival de Carthage and other cultural manifestations continued to engender sentiments of pride and emphasize the belonging to a wider universe and the deference to a pluralistic life-style. Tunisia emerged as an anchor of Euro-Mediterranean integration, a major destination for European investment and tourism and a gateway to sub-Saharan Africa. Tunisians were starting to forget the economic malaise of Bourguiba's sunset years. Real income seemed to be ever on the rise. Poverty was gradually being limited to pockets in the countryside. With a solid middle class representing 70% of the population, pundits and politicians talked of the egalitarian nature of Tunisian society and its model of sustainable development. Gender equity statistics remained the envy of most countries. Following a balance of payment crisis in the late 1980s, Tunisia maintained a real record of macroeconomic stability and remarkable socio-economic progress, or so leading indicators by the World Bank and other multilateral agencies would like us to believe (see World Bank Operations Evaluation Department, Tunisia: Joint World Bank-Islamic Development Bank Country Assistance Evaluation). All was a picture of calm on the domestic front and, if not outright affluence, at least a modicum thereof. Broken promises of political liberalization were grudgingly ignored. That civil society and parliamentary and electoral politics were being subjugated to the interests of the ruling party mattered less. To most Tunisians, life in Tunis was labas, alhamdullah. Ben Ali was forgiven all of his sins.
Yet as the new millennium progressed, it became clear that Tunisian society was re-examining its options and re-arranging its priorities. The immediate explanation for this I would like to posit here lies in the convergence of two major factors. A protracted economic crisis just not exposed the stark and widened gap between the haves and the have-nots in the country, but also turned its mood gloomy and fearful of the future. The rise of the emerging economies of East Asia and the former Soviet bloc threatened Tunisia's role as an offshore centre of light industrial production. Faced with a more competitive world environment, the country was caught unprepared. Neither its infrastructure, social, physical or otherwise, nor political and civil institutions were ready to confront the challenge. The dominant role of the European Union in the economy, being the source of more than 67% of capital inflows to the country and the majority of its tourism revenue, rendered it particularly vulnerable to shock waves emanating from the North (ibid.). With mass protests on the streets of Athens, Dublin, London, Madrid, Paris and Rome, the Germans questioning whether Germany is "doing away with itself," or the French whether "France is Finished," Europe was hardly in a position to come to the rescue or even to turn a blind eye to a wave of Tunisian immigrants arriving on its shores. (See The Economist, "The Redistribution of Hope," 18-31 December 2010). The increasing saturation of employment in the services and agricultural sectors and the relative low absorptive capacity of the industrial sector further exposed the country's inability to deal with the multitude of the young and university graduates joining the workforce every year. While the more fortunate among the job seekers became the proletariats in the country's factories, others joined the ranks of what is known as the semi-prolétariats de service, the cab drivers, the concierges, the peddlers, the gang recruits, etc., whose knowledge of the street and its opinions and allegiances made them particularly useful for the political machine of the ruling party (see Claude Dubar and Salim Nasr, Les Classes Sociales au Liban, 1976, pp. 177-178). Still the majority was relegated to become the "unclassified urban poor," the faceless crowd or what is called in French the menu peuple whose emergence and living conditions were not unlike those of the sub-proletarian presciently defined by in Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.
As the decade came to a close, the fast modernizing Tunisian society therefore was increasingly challenging its political institutions. Seething with the anger of the dispossessed and of those trapped on the fringes of society, the youths and the disenfranchised were ready for revolution. The experience of deprivation and progressive 29 June 2006). In their dark hours and moments of need, the Tunisians looked to their leadership and found one that has degenerated to an Arrested authoritarian stage whose idioms of stability and fighting Islamic fundamentalism rang of cynicism and will serve nothing but to perpetuate an even more rigid status quo.
Of course this is to not say that Ben Ali's mantra of stability no longer found resonance among the multitude of Tunisians, that those who took to the street demanding his ouster believe that is no need for strong government or that there is no such thing as an Islamic fundamentalist "threat" in Tunisia.
If anything, the call of most in the opposition for calm and an orderly transition period, indeed their agreement to join hands with previous Ben Ali aficionados has precisely those concerns as subtext. The Tunisians did not revolt against Ben Ali who took charge, accepted responsibility and made decisions on their behalf. Nor did they discredit him his successes, the period of social and economic expansion that he presided over, or when he crushed an Islamic movement bent on transforming their country into an Iranian style theocracy, albeit perhaps too harshly for their liberal convictions. Rather, the Tunisians rejected Ben Ali the Tyrant who seemed so oblivious to the material and emotional needs of his citizens, dismissing their achievements, hopes and aspirations for a better life. They rejected the cynical manipulator who exploited their fears to his own ends and concluded a Faustian pact with an al Qaeda-obsessed world which would give him/his family a free hand to pillage and plunder without accountability. To the Tunisian multitude at this point in history, it was ne plus ultra, the call to liberty and the opportunity to shape its own destiny was above all considerations. In 1984 the streets of Tunis erupted in a "Bread Riot" that only stopped after the ailing Bourguiba himself announced the reversal of the price increases that had been introduced on bread and other staples. In an article, "Tunisia: Bourguiba lets them Eat Bread," dated 16 January 1984 that could have indeed been scripted in January 2011 Time magazine describes some of the very cleavages that have continued to stir Tunisian society for nearly three decades. Major disturbances also occurred in April 2000 when a three-day strike by professional drivers (taxi-drivers and long-distance cab and lorry drivers) in Tunis was followed by demonstrations by students, unemployed youths and other disaffected sections of the population on the outskirts of some large cities and in many surrounding small towns throughout the country. Despite a news blackout that made it difficult to assess the full extent and details of the protests, the combination of forces that were drawn to the streets prompted the French Le Monde to describe the events as "the first warning shots aimed at President Ben Ali" (as quoted in Brian Smith, "Two weeks of Protest in Tunisia," World Socialist Web Site, 14 April 2000). Ever the flic and the Opportunist on the other hand, Ben Ali could not have learned from this history to inform his own policies.
Majed Halawi, a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University.