The West stands captivated by Tunisia, where a month of peaceful protests by secular Arabs has toppled a dictator, raising hopes that this North African country of 10 million will set off democracy movements throughout a region of calcified dictatorships. But, it is worth cataloguing the pivotal ways in which Tunisia is unique.
Start with a map of classical antiquity juxtaposed with the relative emptiness that characterises modern-day Algeria and Libya. Jutting out into the Mediterranean close to Sicily, Tunisia has been the hub of North Africa not only under the Carthaginians and Romans, but under the Vandals, Byzantines, medieval Arabs and Turks. Whereas Algeria and Libya were but vague geographical expressions until the coming of European colonial map makers, Tunisia is an age-old cluster of civilisation.
Even today, many of the roads in the country were originally Roman ones. For 2,000 years, the closer to Carthage (roughly the site of Tunis, the capital, today), the greater the level of development. Because urbanisation in Tunisia started two millenniums ago.
Fossa regia
After the Roman general Scipio defeated Hannibal in 202 BC outside modern-day Tunis, he dug a demarcation ditch, or fossa regia, that marked the extent of civilised territory.
Tunisia is less part of the connective tissue of Arab North Africa than a demographic and cultural island bordered by sea and desert, with upwardly mobile European aspirations.
Tunisia has a relatively large middle class because of something so obvious it goes unremarked upon: it is a real state, with historical and geographical legitimacy, where political arguments are about budgets and food subsidies, not the extremist ideologies that have plagued its neighbours, Algeria and Libya. It is a state not only because of the legacy of Rome and other empires, but because of human agency, in the person of Habib Bourguiba, one of the lesser-known great men of the 20th century.
Bourguiba was the Arab Ataturk, who ruled Tunisia in a fiercely secular style for its first three decades after independence from France in the mid-1950s. Rather than envision grandiose building projects or a mighty army, Bourguiba devoted generous financing to birth control programmes, rural women’s literacy and primary-school education. He cracked down on the wearing of the veil, actually tried to do away with Ramzan, and advocated normalising relations with Israel more than a decade before Anwar Sadat of Egypt went to Jerusalem.
In 1987, while faced by an Islamic rising, Bourguiba became too infirm to rule, and was replaced by his former interior minister, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, essentially a security boss with little vision, much like the Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. Ben Ali’s strategy was to keep order, which largely meant killing and torturing Islamists and other dissidents.
But before we dismiss Ben Ali entirely, we should keep in mind that for many years he presided over a growing economy and middle class, with progress penetrating to the areas beyond the fossa regia. Because Bourguiba insisted that the army remain small and apolitical, it is now the most trusted institution in the country.
Treacherous path
Nevertheless, despite all these advantages of history, prosperity and stability, Tunisia’s path forward is treacherous.
Egypt has been effectively governed by military emergency law since 1952, with Islamic militants waiting in the wings for any kind of opportunity, even as the country is rent by tensions between its majority Muslims and Coptic Christian minority. Algeria and Libya have neither the effective institutions nor the venerable tradition of statehood that Tunisia has. Libya, should Muammar el-Qaddafi fall, would likely be much more of a mess than Tunisia post-Ben Ali.
Then there is Lebanon, with its vicious communalisms, and Syria, which has the potential to break up the way Yugoslavia did in the 1990s, given its regionally defined sectarian divisions.
As for Iraq, once the dictator was removed, tens of thousands died in sectarian and ethnic violence.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 began as a revolt against the tyranny of the Shah, but ended with a theocratic regime that was even worse.
As the situation evolves in Tunis, and as we watch other Arab capitals expectantly, we would do well to focus less on what unites these places than on what divides them. Just as Tunisia’s circumstances are unique, so are those in all the other countries. The more we focus on the particularities of each place, the less surprised we will be by political developments.