Tuesday 13th January 2015
Chairman: Today the topic is on Tunisia. It is an interesting topic. Tunisia is described as the cradle of the Arab Spring that blossomed four years ago. The situation in Tunisia is a lot better than what is happening in Syria, Libya and Iraq. However the fundamental question remains do the powers that be, the elites in the West, the Washington consensus –really want or desire a democratic situation to develop in that part of the world or do they still want to have despotic rule by monarchs who are unelected or other dictators. That is the dichotomy which our speaker will address.
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-ts=1422327029&v=vATIPjPclMo&x-yt-cl=84838260)
More than that is the whole situation that is unfolding at this moment in the name of freedom of speech with what happened in Paris and what repercussions that has for us in London. There is also the blow back of European nations being in other parts of the Middle East -when they come back what do they do? It is a complex issue. Today we are focused on Tunisia.
Professor Charles Tripp: One of the things that interests me is that republican ideals are common in many parts of the world. What interests me is the local inflection of the republican ideal. Where does a particular French, Tunisian or Iraqi view of the republic come in? Over the past two years I have been looking at the emergence of different ideas of the republic in Tunisia. Trying to think about how different people, differently situated in Tunisia begin to think of the state they are in and their fellow citizens in the republic itself.
So it is looking at whether you can come out of a period of dictatorship and yet relate relations between citizens with whom you may have huge disagreements but on the other hand you agree on one thing that the framework of rights is the same. So in a sense you are acknowledging their right to disagree with you and you are acknowledging the framework of the republic.
What interested me about Tunisia – and Tunisia is not the only place in which it may have happened but in Tunisia it happened in a more encouraging way – what you saw in 2011 was a reclaiming of the streets. The people came out on the streets, public performances of re-appropriation of public spaces that had been largely privatized by those who were in power. That remains the case in many places. Fierce and bloody battles were fought in Tunisia and other places to reclaim those spaces. What interested me therefore was how that act of reclamation becomes something a lot more important in terms of the political project. That is what I want to talk about this evening in a sense drawing a thread between what people were doing in 2011 through direct action to the forms of debate, to the forms of indirect but nevertheless increasingly significant political actions that take place thereafter.
First of all I want to talk about the uprising itself and what that meant in terms of the re-appropriation of the public space and the re emergence of something called a Tunisian public which had never existed in most significant ways other than rhetorically as far as the rulers were concerned, but as a collectivist grouping of people with a notion of their rights towards the state and towards each other.
Moving from that what are the challenges that they faced in trying to create from that a sense of solidarity and common rights and common purpose – what are the challenges they faced in trying to create a framework for that which then regulates difference among them and which will respect the rights that they won so painfully. And to be fairly frank about some of the setbacks that they had and some of the achievements and to say that it is an ongoing process.
I am not trying to make a judgement about success – that is the one that succeeded. In politics nothing succeeds, everything fails in some form or another and one has to think is the failure going to be moderated and what consequences will there be.
So the first thing is to think about is the uprising itself. The reason I focus on public demonstration is because it seemed to be hugely important in unnerving and eventually unseating the regime in 2011 but it did three things that were hugely important in how Tunisians began looking at themselves.
First of all physically it showed that if you went out on the streets in direct action you could do something to exclude the regime. You could do something other than what the agents of the regime had managed to do.
One of the notorious features of Tunisian public life or at least life in public spheres up to 2011 was that it was minutely controlled. You could not sit and talk about anything you wanted to talk about. You could not take photographs. You couldn’t demonstrate and you couldn’t even suggest that you were going to demonstrate.
There was a famous attempt in 2009 – 2010 by Tunisians fed up with Ben Ali’s regime who decided that the only way of demonstrating difference was to dress in white. So they all dressed in white and just were in a physical space called Avenue Bourgiba which runs through Tunis. The extraordinary thing about that was that it did not take much for the police to react really viciously. The people were not shouting any slogans, they were not doing anything, they were not blocking the traffic. They were just sitting at cafe tables all dressed in white.
In other words what they were doing was projecting the notion that there is another Tunisia. The white did not mean anything. It was not a shroud, it did not have a Tunisian flag on it. The police – and in a sense this is a measure of how sensitive a regime like that is to anybody who does what they chose to do in a public space – reacted very violently. They chased people out of cafes. They hunted down people who were just wearing a white tea-shirt because they were convinced they were part of some huge conspiracy. Again it is the over exaggerated reactions of power which tell you how sensitive that is. It is the physicality of the occupation of public space which I think is hugely important. And I will say why it is important for the aftermath afterwards.
The second thing which was hugely important was that by going out onto the streets people communicated with each other. There was a sense in which Tunisians were encountering other Tunisians whom they might have encountered casually, but suddenly they were encountering them in the framework of a common purpose, not at a national rally, not at something summoned by the regime but at something they wanted to do themselves. It does not necessarily mean that they agreed with each other. But they saw each other and they recognised each other and themselves in each other. For the notion of citizenship that becomes enormously important. Mutual recognition and with that mutual respect becomes important.
So again one of the interesting things in the founding moments or the founding months of the demonstration was the way in which Tunisians not only physically demonstrated but also began to see each other in a slightly different form.
Thirdly they reclaimed public space symbolically by graffiti, by paintings by war art by cultural manifestations that demonstrated a very different way of imagining Tunisia. Although that is somewhat faded now anyone can go around the streets of Tunis and find these amazing and wonderful artistic interventions which suddenly make the street look something different.
This is something which has occurred in Tunisia and in other countries. What dominated the streets were huge portraits of the leader of slogans of the republic under the leader’s auspices and suddenly something very different appears, a different way of imagining what it is to be Tunisian.
I would argue that that is something that latches on to the imagination. Three powerful motivations which set in motion – and it is not just symbolic, it is not just people going out on the street and then coming back again – processes that have had a lasting effect in Tunisia. The reclamation of public spaces becomes not only a shorthand for reclaiming public rights but for establishing them in one form or another.
This was demonstrated by the targets of places in which people demonstrated. It wasn’t just the public space like Avenue De Bourgiba. It was also in front of court rooms, in front of the ministries, in front of parliament, in front of any building that was nominally public but had in fact been privatised by the regime in some form or another.
There was a notion that something had been taken from the people cumulatively over the years – whether it was by Bourgiba, or by Ben Ali – but in a sense people were coming back to reclaim it in one form or another. It was not just about space as an abstract. It was about the rights of people within that space and what they then make of it in relation to power in one form or another.
It was again that notion that you are performing the public and in so doing bringing it into being. It was a new concept, it was a new phenomena that the existing republic ironically could not cope with. It could cope with marshalled displays of support but it could not cope with that in one form or another.
And by performing it Tunisians suggested that there was another way of being the republic, another way of being Tunisian. That of course meant mobilising other networks that owed nothing to the regime. And the regime was very sensitive to this even before the uprising of 2011. Football matches had become prime places where you could rally large numbers of people and express opposition in an oblique form. But this was not lost on the regime either.
It was that notion that out there was another Tunisia and it was a Tunisia that did not conform either with Ben Ali or Ben Ali’s international supporters. It was something else that was given expression. At various moments in Tunisian history that has been apparent and I would argue again that one of the reasons why the uprisings in 2010 – 2011 were so powerful and had such a powerful resonance with many Tunisians is because this has happened before with different outcomes.
In the 1980s there were mass demonstrations and more people were killed in those demonstrations than in the 2010 – 2011. So people remembered from their parents’ generation what happened, how you did it. In a sense what the revolution was about. Equally when you think about 2008 in the mass strikes and demonstrations in the south of the country in Gassa around the phosphate mines. Again these were mass demonstrations.
There is one extraordinary moment in which the population of the town simply quits the town. Some 25,000 leave the town in protest at the intrusion of the state into the town itself. Because it was happening in the south of Tunisia in the often marginalised areas of the interior it was not taken much notice of.
In 2010 – 11 from places like Sidi Bouzeid in the interior the dynamic comes to the centre. And so the notion that although the Tunisian revolution was not made only in Tunis there was a very strong idea that you had to go to Tunis to make an impact on the regime and its backers. But you knew and they knew that it did not just depend on the streets of Tunis. There were things going on elsewhere. There were massive demonstrations in the streets of Casreen, Sidi Bouzeid, in Manouba, in the north and elsewhere. So in many ways it was a country in rebellion.
And one of the problems is precisely because it was a strategic decision to move into the capital many people from the outside think it was just a revolution of the capital – and it was not. It was a revolution, an uprising of the country which has shown itself to some extent in the subsequent electoral politics of Tunisia itself. That was part of the display and the performance. And the performance was also organised. People talk about leaderless rebellions that this was just free form, it was completely spontaneous. Yes, there was a huge amount of spontaneity as people saw what was happening and joined in with it. But it would be very strange not to take into account the trade union movement, the networks of not so much the official union leadership which is often under question, but of those who questioned it.
So how do you mobilise people in the interior, in the south, in the poorer parts of Tunis except through trade union and neighbourhood organisations. Again one should never discount the fact that although the impression given by Ben Ali was of a regime totally in control it was not totally in control. There were whole sectors of Tunisian society that they never even touched because they couldn’t because other forms of association were taking place. One of the arguments that I put forward is that in Tunisia at least these organisations did not take the sectarian, tribal and ethnic forms that have bedevilled so many other countries after the uprising. In a sense regionalism and class was certainly there and these have to be worked out but it was not in terms of pre existing organisations. These were there already.
In many senses therefore what I am trying to make an argument about is that what looked like something that could be a flash in the pan, a spontaneous demonstration was often more organised than one might give it credit for. There was an infrastructure behind it. I am not saying it was conspiratorial but there was far more in terms or organisation and strategy than some people have thought.
Again I think this is important because of the press accounts of the Arab spring there is a kind of orientalism in reverse: the notion that these are poor peoples of the east who have been slumbering for too long in a passive way and suddenly they get up and there is a kind of spontaneous fire and its all as if it was an irrational outburst. It was not at all. Trying to understand the mechanisms of this is hugely important both for giving back to the Tunisians their agency and their dignity which is what the revolution was about. And that is worth thinking about in one form or another.
However there is the point of what happens thereafter. One of the things that interests me and what I have been working on is to try and see how you go from that expression of the republic, from that performance of the public, that physical symbolic and other forms of occupation of public space to the realisation of the republic itself.
In other words beginning to think about what is the structure of the state, the ambitions and the goals of the revolution will be realised. The revolution can be quite well summed up by three words which are freedom, justice and dignity. Each of those has both a very particular meaning for many Tunisians but also a whole series of social and political implications in terms of what that means as far as the challenges are concerned.
One of the things that I would argue from enacting the public in which notions of freedom to organise justice for those organising and rights to be respected as well as the dignity of those organising. The question is how do you go from that to realising that in any institutional form.
I would say that despite apprehensions about what might be happening something fundamentally changed in Tunisia in the revolution. Not everything changed but something changed in the balance of state society dynamics and to some extent in the balance of power itself.
What you saw in 2010 – 2011 was a massive degree of mobilisation when people began to realise what they themselves as activist citizens could do in one form or another. You saw an assertion of rights which had never been asserted in that way both individually and collectively before except perhaps against the French and then it was monopolised by an anti-colonial movement. You saw a thriving of associational life. These demonstrations were not simply spontaneous. They were the result of associational life and organisation that had been taking place for a long time already. You saw the independence of the trade unions emerging against the official leadership of the UGTT which is the main trade union configuration precisely to assert the importance of local demands, local rights and indeed the rights of the working class more generally.
These forms of bottom up organisation begin to alter the balance of power – not definitively but they create shifts that I would argue make it quite difficult for old power to re-establish itself. It will not stop trying but it is quite difficult to do. What one needs to think about is how those achievements or those features of the Tunisian revolution are capitalised on in one form or another.
The other side of it which is something that there has been apprehension about but certainly one needs to think about is the whole notion of transitional justice which became one way in which many Tunisians thought you could only realise the gains of the revolution – by instituting an effective transitional justice system. This means realising the rights of those who have been trampled on for years by the Ben Ali regime but also those in the more recent events of 2010 – 2011.
If you look at the transitional justice law it is quite indicative of the point I am trying to make – that under huge pressure of popular mobilisation but also many people in parliament believed it was necessary to have a transitional justice law. So eventually a transitional justice law was passed. And then there was the question of how it would actually operate, what would be its mandate, what would be its scope.
All sorts of curious things happened. One of the examples was that the transitional justice law with many people putting pressure on the regime should take place was transitional justice by looking at the wrongs that had been done to people in the revolution. Who was killed, who was tortured. But also looking at the decades before the revolution under the Ben Ali regime.
Politically that became problematic because some people began to say surely that will only focus on Al Nahda and the Islamist parties and the people who were victims of the Ben Ali regime. Surely we have to think of other victims and then the trade union movement said what about the trade unionists who suffered and were killed not only under Ben Ali but also under Bourguiba.
So the transitional justice law, the mandate of which you might imagine going back to 2010 – 2011 was suddenly pushed back. So it went back to 1954. One of the problems of that was that it would be seen as a way in which the transitional justice law would lose its force. If it began looking at injustices committed in 1954 it was going to take an awful long time before it got up to Ben Ali and 2010 and 2011.
People saw this as a delaying tactic. But what is interesting is that yes there were problems, there were real interests set against the transitional justice law although it would go through there were people who did not want it carried out and there were people who wanted restrictions on its mandate. Since that time there have been countless demonstrations outside court rooms in Tunisia because people were dissatisfied with the verdicts.
The verdict of a court is now a public event and people use the same tactics: demonstrations, surrounding, slogans. It draws attention to it. On social media there is a kind of bottom up critique of the whole process itself.
If people hope that by confiscations in the transitional justice law will put a spanner in the works it has simply been negated by the ways people have taken direct action and informed other Tunisians about what is happening. It has one of these elements of yes there have been attempts to reclaim power by those that are established but at the same time there have been people who have tried to undermine it.
So it is quite a good example of what I am trying to get across. Something happened in Tunisia in 2010 – 2011 which cannot just simply be reversed or stopped. But there have been attempts to do so.
There are three area that I wanted to outline because they show some of the problems and challenges ahead. Clearly it is not all rosy ahead and there are vested interests that want the revolution or the post revolutionary regime to take different course.
One is what I call the challenge of a plural public. Once you began to envisage a Tunisian public you had to realize that that public was not unified about anything except the importance of the rights of the public itself. You had to allow plurality of expression, difference of opinion to create that and that has been part of the challenge of Tunisian politics: recognizing that there are plenty of Tunisians who think very differently than you do and how to you incorporate them within the political system.
The second challenge is the challenge of what are called the faloon, the remnants of the old regime both in personnel and in habits of mind and habits of exercising power.
The third challenge is how do you fit the revolutionary regime which is trying to recast the public into some of the givens or the very powerfully established laws of the political economy in which Tunisian finds itself as a poor country in North Africa subjected to the various pressures of global capital investment and so on.
So it is a notion that even if you make changes politically how many of those changes are going to work if the political economy remains the same; class structure and foreign links. So in terms of the plural public I think it quite interesting. The challenge of a plural public became very apparent after 2011. What was going to be tolerated and what was not going to be tolerated and by whom. In many senses by reading that period: 2011 – 2012 you get very different notions of the republic and you get echoes of that clearly by the events last week in France. What should be tolerated what should be censored, where does the level of the limit of tolerance lie in one form or another.
Some of that was sharpened by fears as the government that came to power after 2011 was led by but not dominated by Al Nahda the Islamist party led by Ghanoushi. But it was in coalition with non-Islamist parties to. It excited the fears of many that a new kind of regime would emerge. So for many, although I think it is grossly exaggerated was the fear that an Islamic republic was going to emerge.
Some of the members of Al Nahda did not help their case by using that kind of language when it suited them but very few did. It was more a sense of what it excited. And what it excited was fears of a new kind of public morality, a new kind of intervention, a new kind of censorship in one way or another. But there were also the fears of another kind of republic emerging which was a lot more geared to the authoritarian model of the past. A notion that that gives you security, that gives you order and you need to do that after the revolution to keep the powers that be outside.
When you looked at 2011 and 2012 that was the nature of public debate. You had fears for the public space. What is interesting is that whether Islamist or not, the habits of authoritarian government were still very powerful. So when in April 2012 the government tried to ban public demonstrations in Tunis in the public spaces – the very spaces that made the revolution possible – there was a massive counter demonstration by people.
Again there was this notion that people were mobilized, they came out, it meant something for them. Physically and otherwise they occupied the public space and the government responded in a very typical way with tear gas and baton charges and so on but in the end it had to back down because they realized that the state would be paralyzed by the public protest at the attempt to curb public protest.
So again you could argue that something had shifted. I am not saying that it solves all problems. Something had shifted which was interesting. Equally when there were fears about the role of women and women’s rights in the new constitution that was being written in the assembly and the suggestion by some members of Al Nahda but not all that women’s rights should be amended in view of their status as women again massive demonstrations by men and women throughout Tunis and Tunisia were held and this led to the scrapping of that particular suggestion, the realization that it was politically impossible because people had mobilized against it.
We saw that in terms of artistic expression in a famous case in La Marsa which is just outside Tunis itself. There was an art exhibition at the palace which again shocked and outraged many of those who not only sympathized with Al Nahda but other Islamist groups because of the blasphemy they saw and the public horror and shock of some of the depictions of bodies and women – a bit like Charlie Hebdo. The whole point of the exhibition was to shock and to the gratification of the people who organized it – even though it meant the destruction of some of the works – there was a huge demonstration by some Salafists against the exhibition. But that allowed them to organize a huge counter demonstration against the Salafists. So there was not only a battle about public space but also public expression which again people began to try and negotiate through in one form or another.
But in both senses you could argue different sections of the Tunisian public were seeking to test the limits of the tolerance of the other. And in 2013 there were the most obvious tests which were the assassination of two prominent figures on the Tunisian left: Shurki Bel Aid in February 2013 and Mohammed Brahmi in July 2013. In both cases the very fact of assassination provoked demonstrations of something like a million strong at the funerals of these two men at different times.
Even more so in 2013 it led to the massive occupation and sit in around the parliament in protest at what Tunisian politics was becoming and the violence of it. And that, although it did not happen immediately, led to the resignation of the government and a realization by the government that the reaction to that was so great that they could not deal with it in any security form or authoritarian form. They had to deal with it by other means. So they resigned and handed over to a caretaker, a so-called technocratic government in January 2014.
So in many senses therefore the negotiation over that was carried out by the UGTT by the trade union movement. So what you see in Tunisia at the moment is the mobilization of popular power against elected representatives if something is seen to overstep the mark. But then there is the mediation through well established organizations that are trusted by both sides. Again you could argue that Tunisia is fortunate in having those things. But they don’t just come about by chance. They come about because people have worked on them and they have been accepted in one from but nevertheless there is a challenge.
So you could argue that this is an ongoing challenge in Tunisia about the limits if you agree that all are citizens and that all citizens rights are equal then what are the limits of offence and what are the limits of tolerance in that public. And clearly that is a powerful question.
The second challenge is how you deal with the faloon – the remnants of the old regime in one form or another. In January 2011 the Tunisians again exercised powerful direction action in the so-called kasba protests around the seat of government in which they effectively paralysed the whole of Tunis and then Tunisia and made it clear that the person who did succeed Ben Ali and became prime minister was Ben Ali’s prime minister – rather confusingly also called Ghanousi but not Rashid Ghanoushi – they made it clear that he could not govern any more. And again when you look at the massive power of demonstration it effectively put paid to any attempt like that.
But of course remnants and reigns of the old regime do not just survive in the formal apparatus of government and the particular concern of many in Tunis is that it survives not as in Egypt in the army because the army in Tunisia never played the role that it did in Egypt – but in the Ministry of the Interior and in the police.
Again the concern is that through the habits of repression have not disappeared either and because of the security language used by the Ministry of the Interior and because you are the Islamist led government up to 2013 or the technocratic government after 2014 or the present Sebsi’s government or Sebsi’s party’s government after the elections of October than the fear is that the language of the Ministry of the Interior will be the language of common sense and therefore the security violations will go unpunished, the abuses of human rights will go unpunished and indeed on the contrary there may be a turning.
There was a very significant moment in 2014 when this rather bizarre campaign began in Tunisia, people wearing T shirts and on the websites and saying I to burned a police station. What they were doing was demonstrating solidarity with the people who had burned police stations in 2010 and 2011 and what was noticeable was that under the recommendation of the Ministry of the Interior the government had revoked the pardons given to people by the government that came to power immediately after the revolution and had started to prosecute them.
And so what was clear for many people was that it was a very manifestation as we have seen in a more exaggerated form in Egypt of a regime that wanted to consider anything done during 2010 – 2011 as potentially violent as being illegitimate. So you had this big slogan across the street saying revolution is not a crime. The notion that the revolution was being retrospectively criminalised was clearly in many people’s eyes a symptom of the survival of the habits of repression within the Ministry of the Interior and also within the government itself.
And again what is interesting is that the mass popular organisation, the very powerful lobbying, the huge campaign led to no prosecutions at all. You could argue that as in all politics one side was trying to try it on and then realised that they could not try it on as far as they could because they were blocked in one form or another.
Clearly in 2014 one of the things that concerns many people is that the security discourse of the regime, of the government becomes the accepted one. That is reinforced at various moments by things like attacks on Tunisian troop in the mountains in the west of country near the Algerian border, attempted assassinations, attempted acts of terrorism as well as the fact that the largest single contingent in the Syrian civil war from other Arab countries is Tunisia with an estimated 3500 Tunisians going to fight there and all the concerns about what will happen when they come back.
Security becomes understandably in one sense when you have Libya on one side and Algeria on the other, the preoccupation. The fear of many is that under this veil of security all kinds of abuses continue and will never be investigated. While people acknowledge the need for security the notion that these are still a powerful part of the apparatus of power used by the Islamist government, the technocratic government and by conservative republican government, will be to easy.
Ben Ali’s 2013 anti terror law still exists. So again there is the fear about how that will be used and abused. Since 2013 – 2014 some 2,000 people have been arrested under the anti terror law: maybe with good reason, maybe not but again there is a fear that it is being used in a way that is powerful. In 2014 about 150 religious NGOs that were identified with Islamic causes were all shut down by the technocratic government under the anti terrorism laws.
Maybe some of them were up to nefarious activities but again this fear that without consultation and debate the government can simply shut down organisations in the name of the war on terror which has been embraced by some of the foreign backers rather enthusiastically has been part of it.
What one has to think about is that in any state where a revolution has taken place you have to think what are the enduring elements of that state and one that clearly concerned many people is the endurance of the security state. It still exists with the intesticies of the state administration and no effective work as been done to root it out.
And finally there is the challenge of the political economy. In a sense whatever you do in terms or reordering the republic, trying to think of a new constitution which again the Tunisians passed in 2014 after two years of debate. This is very encouraging because it allowed many different views to come forward. What about the pressing question of the economy.
In many senses it is understandable. The rate of unemployment in Tunisia is enormous and the rate of youth unemployment is even worse, the economic prospects are deeply problematic so it makes sense to encourage inward investment, to encourage inward mobilisation of the old links between the IMF, World Bank and the private sector in Tunisia and to encourage the private sector as a powerful element as it was under Ben Ali as well. And some of the same people again. And then the question arises how much do you tolerate of this and what does it do to your country if you in a sense reformulated the republic but its economic foundations are identical. Its class foundations are identical. There has been no shift of power one might argue in that area as well. So one of the things people have tried to mobilise about is that there should be no exclusions as a result of these investment programmes and clearly one of the fears is that large numbers of people have been excluded.
There is an activist organisation called Al Zewola which in Tunisian dialect means the poor and they have gone around not only putting graffiti and manifestations but there is a famous slogan that they painted: Tunisia – neither secular nor Islamic but it should be a revolution for the poor. In a sense there is the notion that in this debate about secularism and Islamism one significant group of Tunisians has been excluded. They are the disadvantaged, the marginalised and the poor in Tunisia in one form or another.
Quite interestingly after the elections of October 2014 and there is not yet a government formed as a result of that but there is a prime minister charged with forming a government, in the new parliament there was a consensus except for some of the dissenting leftist parties, for a new package and a new budget law. It was not only a law that dealt with the budget but with private public partnerships, bankruptcy and the question of competition. In doing so it fulfilled all the conditions of the IMF and the World Bank.
So for many Tunisians looking at that this it seemed to be a replica of what happened before and the hope is that it will happen under different circumstances and therefore it will not lead to the kleptocracy that existed under Ben Ali.
But nevertheless the feeling that all parties agree to this, one could say that is encouraging as all parties agree and there is a consensus but on the other hand one could say what about those whose voices are less represented in parliament.
And finally that brings one to the question of the parliament itself. Elections took place in October and the turnout was about 68% which is quite good. But what is significant is that the turnout for 18 – 24 year olds was something like 15%. So these are the people who made the revolution. They are the ones who are out on the streets and had their vote for the first time as a result of the revolution but they are the most disillusioned and alienated. There are activists among them but there is a fear that the formal institutions of the republic which are trying to a capitalise on the reclamation of public rights is actually being ignored or turning away from, or people are turning away from it in one way or another. What is interesting about this is the fear of alienation which is not uncommon in established democracies as well. In a sense it is something one has to think about.
In the result of the parliamentary elections the Nidaa Tounes which is the party that was founded by Assessi who has now been elected president of the republic came out as the largest single party but with 86 seats out of 217 unable to form a government without a coalition. And the next largest party was Ennahda with 69. The north and the coast votes for Nidaa Tounes and the south and the interior votes for Ennahda. It is not exactly that way. But Certainly when you get to the presidential elections where the runoff was Essebsi representing an old Bourgiba notion of the republic. I don’t want to be agesit but at 88 years old as the figure head of the youth revolution it is a little improbable. But he gathered in the runoff 55.68% against Marzouki who was the acting president since 2011 who gathered 44.3%. If you looked at the elections spread it is a clear divide between the north and the south of the country, between the interior and the coast and people worry about that in Tunisia. Not for ethnic, sectarian reasons they might worry about in Syria or elsewhere but because of the distinctions and differences between an impoverished south and interior and a rich and disdainful north. Some would say that reproduces a pattern of power that has been existing in Tunisia ever since the French protectorate.
So at one level something hasn’t changed in the sense of demographics of power. So what one has to think about is whether the new republic can actually deal with that in one form or another. Now one has to be quite careful about it. A new prime minister has been charged, Habib Essid who is an independent and a minister under Ben Ali and as minister of fishing and environment. You might say this is rather benign but he also served as minister of the Interior when Essebsi formed a short administration in 2011 after the revolution. But he served as the security adviser for the prime minister Jabali who was the El Nahda prime minister.
So what is interesting is that although some people see him as the representative of precisely the old regime that emerges he comes out of this as a result of an agreement by all parties. He was not pushed by one side only. One could argue that this is quite encouraging. There is a degree of consensus that you have to form a stable administration in order to convince investors to invest in Tunisia.
So out of the kind of challenges faced but equally out of the nature of the uprising what can one see coming out of this. There are three conclusions worth thinking about. One is the challenge of moving from the performance of the public to the realisation of public rights. The performance of the public is in a sense you take on the police immediately and you can moblise the public but public rights means taking on the structures of power within the state. It means changing the way in which the police looks at the system. Changes in the way in which the police deals with the citizen. Change in the way in which the courts deal with the citizen. It is looking at the ways once you move the realisation of the public off the streets you move into institutions and you are bound to move into a degree of obscurity.
One of the things that is really encouraging is not only that you could argue that the streets are not going to be forgiving – they have the capacity to mobilise but also one of the things that struck me in Tunisia is the amazing number of scrutinising organisations – not only scrutinising elections but scrutinising the conduct of every single member of parliament and people charged with power.
There is an organisation called Bawsala and one of its sub parts is Marsad. There is also IWatch and there is the Jomaa Meter which is a meter that is supposed to measure what the technocratic president said and what he actually did. The notion that no one who rules in Tunisia is free of scrutiny anymore. That is when sinister things happen. The problem is that when this scrutiny has yet to get inside the Ministry of Interior, has yet to get inside some parts of the state.
So even though the elected officers and local government and the budget are open to more scrutiny than they ever have been in the history of Tunisia and they provide people with much more capacity there is still a notion that there are parts of the state that remain obscure and hidden and therefore one has to be wary of them. You could argue that is a concern in our own states as well about who observes what and who observes the observers, who guards the guardians. It is a common problem and is something that is quite sharp in Tunisia but I would not despair of it when you look at the ways in which Tunisians have organised against it.
The second is the problem and Tunisians have encountered this. I was making the point that although there are public demonstrations in the streets which keep politicians on their toes and reminds them of a public out there that can make a huge noise and difficulties for them. It can also reinforce those who argue for the importance of law and order above all things.
It can be a double edged sword. You can mobilise people on the streets, you can draw attention to grave injustices but you sharpen not only the reactions of the ministry of the interior but the sort of general consensus of the people outside the Ministry of the Interior who allow them to get away with it.
In a sense Tunisians are beginning to see that side of public demonstrations as well. That it is no longer seen as one thing. It is now seen by some people as a threat to order deserving of more repressive authoritarian measures.
And the third challenge is not something unique to Tunisia which is in a sense harnessing enthusiasm and maintaining public commitment. One of the great features of classical republicanism is the obligation it places on all citizens to be active, the activists. It argues that no republic can thrive unless everyone is aware of their rights and therefore active in the defense of those rights. But that is very tiring and it takes a lot out of your day and routine and boredom set in as they do in many places.
There is also the notion of politics, leave it to the politicians. Why should it be for us. Trying to maintain that activist commitment and momentum although you can do it in certain areas and in certain associations is a really troublesome thing and a really difficult thing and if you don’t do it of course then there is a danger that other forces emerge. One of the things that I witnessed was the difficulty and the problem of trying to get people to register on the electoral roll – to turn up in 2014. So they kept on extending the deadline.
In 2011 they had the same problem and there is a wonderful short clip on u-tube of a film of a group of Tunisians who wondered how do you recreate the enthusiasm of the revolution and they did it in this wonderful technique. On the walls of the old citadel they put up a huge portrait of Ben Ali the fallen dictator. This was in October 2011. And the film is wonderful because it shows ordinary Tunisians in their busses and taxis looking at this portrait and getting more and more enraged. They asked: ‘Has he come back? What has happened?’ And they get more and more furious and in a sense reperform what they had been doing in January and tear down this huge portrait of Ben Ali from the walls of the citadel. And behind it is this equally enormous poster which says :’tyranny never sleeps – go out and vote – go out and register.’
So in a sense it was trying to remind people that if you sleep, if you take your eye off the ball they don’t. So again this is one of the concerns in Tunisia and elsewhere – that mobilisation of popular enthusiasm, mobilisation of popular scrutiny, mobilisation of public activism is something that may be transitory, it is something that may be ephemeral. One of key questions is how do you keep mobilising that: how do you keep using that to reinforce the republic.
What interests me finally about this is that it is not just the idea of the republic that is being debated but how do you defend the republic, how do you act out the republic. That in a sense is one of the great challenges for Tunisians in the future.
* Charles Tripp is Professor of Politics with reference to the Middle East and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research interests include the nature of autocracy, state and resistance in the Middle East, the politics of Islamic identity and the relationship between art and power. He is currently working on a study of the emergence of the public and the rethinking of republican ideals across the states of North Africa. Together with other colleagues in the department he has been one of the founders of the Centre for Comparative Political Thought at SOAS. His publications include Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2006); A History of Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2007) His most recent book is The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2013)