Matt Gordner<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ten years after the 2010-2011 uprisings spread across North Africa and West Asia, Tunisia\u2019s \u201cJasmine Revolution\u201d is widely considered the sole \u201csuccess story\u201d of the so-called \u201cArab Spring.\u201d The writing of a new,\u00a0progressive constitution, successive free and fair elections, and advances in freedoms of speech and assembly all orient Tunisia in the direction of democratic \u201cconsolidation.\u201d 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\u2014those that precipitated cross-class calls for \u201cwork, freedom, and national dignity\u201d\u2014are nowhere close to amelioration, let alone resolution. Successive waves of protests and social movements in response to myriad grievances\u2014pervasive high unemployment, insecurity, corruption, misgovernance and political infighting, among others\u2014stands as stark and constant reminders of the shortfalls of the revolution\u2019s gains. As the venerable Habib Ayeb has pointedly remarked, jasmine is endemic to Tunisia\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 \u201cpassive revolution\u201d that followed independence and decolonization, Tunisia\u2019s 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 \u201cpassive revolution\u201d that followed independence and decolonization, the invocation of Tunisian culture and identity, one constructed through discursive frames like \u201creformism,\u201d \u201cprogress,\u201d \u201cdevelopment\u201d and \u201cmodernity,\u201d \u201cconsensus\u201d and \u201ccompromise,\u201d are adeptly deployed to gain the consent of the governed and maintain a semblance of equilibrium. Tunisian-ness, or tunisianit\u00e9, <\/em>is thus a powerful tool for political domination\u2014one that feeds into a populist rhetoric, and that follows a particular legacy of and logic of state-building, nationalism, independence, authoritarianism\u2014and now, democracy.<\/p>\nMy Connaught Fellowship project for the \u201cEntangled Worlds: Sovereignty, Sanctity and Soil\u201d program asks: How has tunisianit\u00e9, <\/em>as a dominant form of\u00a0Tunisian nationalism, been used to\u00a0irrevocably alter\u00a0traditional forms of identity politics of the past, and in what ways does it\u00a0challenge what Derrida called\u00a0\u201cdemocracy to come\u201d in Tunisia\u2019s\u00a0post-uprising, transitional\u00a0future?\u00a0What is the relationship between tunisianit\u00e9 <\/em>and populism, and how has populist rhetoric cemented political victories for those who have spoken (and speak) in the name of \u201cthe people,\u201d all the while excluding significant portions of Tunisia\u2019s 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?\u00a0<\/p>\nMy research examines the consequences of the inculcation of\u00a0this dominant forms of Tunisian nationalism, or tunisianit\u00e9,<\/em> through populist\u00a0post-independence and post-uprising\u00a0regimes\u00a0on two\u00a0very different\u00a0forms of egalitarian politics: the erasure of tribal\/kinship structures under Tunisia\u2019s first President, Habib Bourguiba, and the post-uprising challenge to centrist and status quo political forces: grass-roots mobilization and forms of bottom-up\u00a0and horizontal\u00a0governance\u00a0structures like those of the Kasbah Square.\u00a0Adapting the common\u00a0understanding 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\u2019s post-independence construction of\u00a0tunisianit\u00e9<\/em>\u00a0and the method by which post-uprising politicians have conjured up the Bourguibist legacy and drawn upon the\u00a0Bourguibist\u00a0nation-building\u00a0project\u00a0as a legitimacy-building strategy to sideline both Islamist and leftist opposition.<\/p>\nDrawing on eight years (2012-2021) of archival research and fieldwork across Tunisia, my\u00a0central\u00a0argument is that\u00a0the evocation of\u00a0tunisianit\u00e9<\/em> was and is used to privilege a particular secular, modernist,\u00a0centrist,\u00a0and capitalist constituency, all the while marginalizing religious and traditional\u00a0communities,\u00a0as well as left-wing, progressive elements. I demonstrate how this strategy\u2014what I identify as a populist \u201ccorporatism\u201d borne of Bourguiba and his legacy (what is oftentimes known as \u201cBourguibism\u201d\u2014has 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 \u201cpassive revolutions\u201d of both the post-independence and post-uprising periods.\u00a0I 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\u2014Tunisian \u201cexceptionalism\u201d\u2014should be questioned, with emphasis on tunisianit\u00e9 <\/em>as part of a populist discursive frame that is used as a mechanism of consent, coercion, domination, and control.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 A History of Tunisian Populism:\u00a0Tunisianit\u00e9\u00a0and its Consequences \u00a0 Matt Gordner \u00a0 Ten years after the 2010-2011 uprisings spread across North Africa and West Asia, Tunisia\u2019s \u201cJasmine Revolution\u201d is widely considered the sole \u201csuccess story\u201d of the so-called \u201cArab Spring.\u201d The writing of a new,\u00a0progressive constitution, successive free and fair elections, and advances in freedoms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-1762","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1762"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1822,"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1762\/revisions\/1822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entangledworlds.utoronto.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}