A History of Tunisian Populism: Tunisianité and its Consequences
Ten years after the 2010-2011 uprisings spread across North Africa and West Asia, Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” is widely considered the sole “success story” of the so-called “Arab Spring.” The writing of a new, progressive constitution, successive free and fair elections, and advances in freedoms of speech and assembly all orient Tunisia in the direction of democratic “consolidation.” Looking past electoral gains and other relative achievements, however, legacies of authoritarianism still run very deep throughout Tunisian state and society. Perhaps more importantly, the economic hardships for which Tunisians in the interior regions initially took to the streets—those that precipitated cross-class calls for “work, freedom, and national dignity”—are nowhere close to amelioration, let alone resolution. Successive waves of protests and social movements in response to myriad grievances—pervasive high unemployment, insecurity, corruption, misgovernance and political infighting, among others—stands as stark and constant reminders of the shortfalls of the revolution’s gains. As the venerable Habib Ayeb has pointedly remarked, jasmine is endemic to Tunisia’s coastal areas, where it is located, for the most part, along the Tunis-Sfax axis. Today, it flourishes for certain segments of society. For the underdeveloped and marginalized, there is only alfa grass.
Tunisia is a case of political rather than social, revolution, with a change in regime rather than an overturning of class forces characterizing its overall transformation. As in the “passive revolution” that followed independence and decolonization, Tunisia’s political class is struggling to achieve stability amid a continuance of the pre-revolutionary conditions that gave rise to the uprising in the first place. A combination of consent and coercion is therefore deployed in an attempt to achieve the kind of hegemony that can create and retain democracy while in many ways returning Tunisia to forms of status quo ante upon which the political class, both old and new alike, can derive consensus and compromise. And, as in the “passive revolution” that followed independence and decolonization, the invocation of Tunisian culture and identity, one constructed through discursive frames like “reformism,” “progress,” “development” and “modernity,” “consensus” and “compromise,” are adeptly deployed to gain the consent of the governed and maintain a semblance of equilibrium. Tunisian-ness, or tunisianité, is thus a powerful tool for political domination—one that feeds into a populist rhetoric, and that follows a particular legacy of and logic of state-building, nationalism, independence, authoritarianism—and now, democracy.
My Connaught Fellowship project for the “Entangled Worlds: Sovereignty, Sanctity and Soil” program asks: How has tunisianité, as a dominant form of Tunisian nationalism, been used to irrevocably alter traditional forms of identity politics of the past, and in what ways does it challenge what Derrida called “democracy to come” in Tunisia’s post-uprising, transitional future? What is the relationship between tunisianité and populism, and how has populist rhetoric cemented political victories for those who have spoken (and speak) in the name of “the people,” all the while excluding significant portions of Tunisia’s subaltern communities? Finally, in what ways have traditional forms of identity politics and progressive forms of contentious politics fought back and struggled against the nationalist project as it has been and remains imposed from on high?
My research examines the consequences of the inculcation of this dominant forms of Tunisian nationalism, or tunisianité, through populist post-independence and post-uprising regimes on two very different forms of egalitarian politics: the erasure of tribal/kinship structures under Tunisia’s first President, Habib Bourguiba, and the post-uprising challenge to centrist and status quo political forces: grass-roots mobilization and forms of bottom-up and horizontal governance structures like those of the Kasbah Square. Adapting the common understanding of populism as an anti-elitist and anti-pluralist form of identity politics to the post-colonial Tunisian context, I demonstrate the societal fissures created and exacerbated by Bourguiba’s post-independence construction of tunisianité and the method by which post-uprising politicians have conjured up the Bourguibist legacy and drawn upon the Bourguibist nation-building project as a legitimacy-building strategy to sideline both Islamist and leftist opposition.
Drawing on eight years (2012-2021) of archival research and fieldwork across Tunisia, my central argument is that the evocation of tunisianité was and is used to privilege a particular secular, modernist, centrist, and capitalist constituency, all the while marginalizing religious and traditional communities, as well as left-wing, progressive elements. I demonstrate how this strategy—what I identify as a populist “corporatism” borne of Bourguiba and his legacy (what is oftentimes known as “Bourguibism”—has deep roots that extend back to the fight against French colonialism and carry on through social and political divisions of the post-independence movement to today, and how it was (and is) used both discursively and tactically in an attempt to gain legitimacy towards the construction of hegemonic blocs following the “passive revolutions” of both the post-independence and post-uprising periods. I conclude that, while the notable achievements of the Tunisian people in ousting the Ben Ali regime and the politics that have followed from it should not be downplayed, the oft touted source of that achievement—Tunisian “exceptionalism”—should be questioned, with emphasis on tunisianité as part of a populist discursive frame that is used as a mechanism of consent, coercion, domination, and control.