Political and Constitutional Transitions in North Africa

Actors and Factors

Justin Frosini, Francesco Biagi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138816381
• eBook ISBN: 9781317597445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The transformations which are taking place in the Arab world are dynamic processes characterised by a number of variables that one can refer to as actors and factors.

The implications of the Arab uprisings are important for the world at large; the Arab world's successes, and failures, at this crucial moment may well serve as a model for other nations. Political and Constitutional Transitions in North Africa focuses on five Northern African countries- Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Libya and Algeria- examining specific institutions and actors participating in the political upheavals in North Africa since 2011, and placing them in a comparative perspective in order to better understand the processes at work. This book addresses issues pertinent to North African and Middle Eastern Studies, comparative constitutional law, political science and transitional studies and it contains contributions by experts in all these fields.

Providing a significant contribution to the understanding of events that followed the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, this book is a valuable contribution to North African Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Comparative Constitutional Law and Transitional Studies.

1 Al-Nahda: Moderation and compromise in Tunisia’s constitutional bargain

Duncan Pickard

Introduction

The new Tunisian constitution is the first in the Arab world written outside the influence of a dictator or foreign power. It is difficult to exaggerate the influence that the members of the National Constituent Assembly, the body responsible for drafting the constitution, have had on the democratic transition in Tunisia and the fate of Middle Eastern democracy. Like all, albeit few, free elections in the modern Arab Middle East, the plurality party in the National Constituent Assembly has an explicit Islamic tendency. The Party of the Al-Nahda Movement (hizb al-harakat an-nahdha) is a moderate Islamic party whose president and founder, Rached Ghannouchi, for decades has been in the vanguard of Islamic democrats. Al-Nahda as a political party is Islamic not only because it tries to achieve religious objectives through the political process, framing international principles of democracy in Islamic terms; Al-Nahda also preaches Islam as a guide for society at large. The activities of both the party and the movement of Al-Nahda are deliberately linked.

Al-Nahda’s success in the 2011 elections for the National Constituent Assembly presented an opportunity to put theories of Islamic democracy into practice, and to model the leadership of an Islamic party over a democratic constitution-making process. How has Al-Nahda conducted itself, what has been Al-Nahda’s vision for the Tunisian constitution, and how can we evaluate its leadership in the transition to democracy? The defining characteristics of Al-Nahda’s leadership in the constitution-making process have been compromise, cooperation, and moderation, as well as loyalty among party leaders across abroad ideological spectrum. Al-Nahda has had the most succinct and thoughtful position on constitutional issues, but its members have also been among the first to make concessions in the interest of consensus. Indeed, it has been Al-Nahda’s compromises that have driven Tunisia’s constitutional bargain, such as in its omission of Islamic sharia from the draft constitution and its acceptance of a semi-presidential system.

The commitment to consensus from all parties makes Tunisia distinct from other experiences with constitution-making in the Arab Spring. Egypt drafted two new constitutions after its revolution, each adopted and ratified rapidly (in a matter of days) without real public input, and under threat of judicial shutdown and military coup. Yemen has not yet had meaningful constitutional reform, and conditions of widespread illiteracy and single-party rule make such a development unlikely in the short to medium term. Syria is in the midst of civil war. Libya faces daunting security challenges that will threaten stability throughout the work of its constituent assembly. In contrast, Tunisian political leaders have envisioned a new constitution to represent the new democratic order and have orchestrated a constitution-making process to work toward that order.

No single feature of an emerging democracy makes a greater contribution to political stability than a well-formed constitution. Constitutions lay out rules that solve conflicts, establish the rule of law, and enable peaceful transfers of power. While no constitution can guarantee stability, stability is not possible without a good one. But constitutions are meant to do much more than frame balanced structures of power and establish the rule of law. Tunisians expect their constitutions to stand for the values of their revolutions. The constitution should represent society, accounting for the characteristics of each country and reflecting the shared imagination of the values and meaning of the state. It is in some ways strange to entrust one party, especially one with a particular religious ideology, with leading the process of drafting a document that has such broad obligations to fulfill.

The constitution-making process in Tunisia provides a forum for debate around the critical questions of how to balance executive constraint with political stability, and how to embody the dignity of citizens violated by dictatorship. These questions are not new to democratic transitions. Tunisia does, however, present a rare opportunity to explore complex questions facing democratic development, especially in the Arab Middle East. Tunisia’s is the first democratic constitution written with an Islamist party in the driver’s seat.

This chapter proceeds in three parts to describe Al-Nahda’s role in the constitution-making process, and in particular the compromises it has made along the way. First is a background on Al-Nahda, including its history, the ideology of Rached Ghannouchi, its internal structure, and some of the governance challenges the party faces in post-revolution Tunisia. Second, the chapter describes the constitution-making process in Tunisia, including the internal structure of the National Constituent Assembly, a timeline, and the approval process. The section also describes Al-Nahda’s role in the constitution-making process, the formal characteristics of its leadership, and some information on Al-Nahda assemblypersons. The third section looks at compromises Al-Nahda has made on three critical issues in the constitutional debate: the role of Islam in society, the distribution of executive powers, and the end of the constitution-making process. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on Al-Nahda’s approach to compromise as a distinguishing feature from other constitution-making processes.

History and ideology of Al-Nahda

The ideology of Rached Ghannouchi

Al-Nahda stands out among Islamic parties in the Arab world for its emphasis on moderation and synthesis with democracy. The precedent for Al-Nahda’s moderate platform can be traced to the writings of Rached Ghannouchi, the movement’s president and founder. Ghannouchi had perceived of a “Tunisian specificity” (al-khususiyah at-tunsiyah), an idea that he developed while studying the work of founding thinkers in political Islam, including Muhammad Iqbal, Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, Hassan al-Banna, and Malik Bennabi (whom he studied under personally). The Salafi orientation of many of these thinkers could not fit Tunisia, he argued, due to the profound European influence on Tunisian law and society. Ghannouchi first tried to explain the Tunisian specificity through European philosophers of economic justice. He saw compatibilities between Marx and the Qur’an in the eternal fight for social and economic justice, inspiring him to change his worldview: from a total rejection of Western philosophy in exchange for a better path offered in Islam, to an “objective interaction” between the two philosophies.¹

Ghannouchi’s political views evolved similarly, taking tenets of Islamic thought to apply critiques of the “Western model of democracy.” His central critique is that the unit of political participation is the nation-state, that boundaries and governments are required to promulgate democracy, tending toward nationalism and even racism. The Western nation-state—arrived at, in Ghannouchi’s view, via the theories of Darwin, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Weber—guarantees democracy as a virtue of citizenship in one nation, not as an inherent value of humankind. As evidence, Ghannouchi points to the brutal crimes of colonialism perpetrated by some of the world’s most revered democracies. His choice example is Tunisia, where he argues that a traditional Islamic society was first corrupted by colonialism and later by its offspring, the modern nation-state. Ghannouchi envisions countering the despotic nation-state with a new political order grounded in noble and humanistic values that preserve dignity and humanity.²

Ghannouchi sees Islamic faith in God as the right spiritual foundation for such an order but concedes that no plausible alternative to the Western model currently exists. Indeed, writing in the 1990s, he calls for a Western-style democracy in Tunisia as the best of all plausible options. Amid his critiques, he wholeheartedly endorses the mechanisms of Western democracy, including elections, parliaments, and the separation of powers. He sees these as excellent methods for operationalizing the Qur’anic concept of shura, or consultation of those who are affected by decisions. Ghannouchi firmly believes in a civilian authority that embodies the values of Islam but is answerable only to the public. There is no room for theocracy in Islamic democracy, therefore, since the public can and should criticize government policies only on the grounds of their practical soundness.³

Another feature of a Western democratic system that Ghannouchi endorses is the power of the law to constrain executive power, a role filled by the Islamic sharia. He, like most scholars of Islamic governance, argue that political leaders cannot disregard Islamic sharia, though they are limited in their application of it to the interpretation of the ulama, or body of Islamic scholars. Islamic sharia and the legal scholars who interpret it serve as a check on executive power, much in the way that courts do in European and North American democracies.⁴ His early writing on the role of Islamic sharia in an Islamic democracy is what makes him a philosopher of Islam. His party’s rejection of Islam in the new Tunisian constitution, as we will see, reflects one of the hard choices that Al-Nahda has made during its leadership of Tunisia.

Some of the difficult choices that Al-Nahda made vis-à-vis its Islamic tendency had antecedents in political opinions that Ghannouchi professed while living in exile in the 1980s. Ghannouchi had long criticized Tunisia’s personal-status code on the grounds that it outlawed polygamy. He changed his view in the late 1980s, arguing that polygamy is not a central tenet of Islam and therefore can be ignored as a policy priority if advocating for it would harm Al-Nahda’s chances of success.⁵ Ghannouchi’s reversal on the personal-status code foreshadowed his and his party’s omission of Islamic sharia in the constitution, a striking decision for an Islamic party, both reflecting Ghannouchi’sdifficulty in balancing his dual role as a political and a philosophical leader. Ghannouchi’s duality has gotten him into trouble. Critics of Ghannouchi’s philosophy argue that he often emphasizes the best aspects of either Islam or “Western democracy” while ignoring the downsides of each. His political critics take issue with how Ghannouchi emphasizes different themes or approaches to democracy depending on the audience to which he is speaking, both publicly and in private; more than once, he has been accused of contradicting himself across audiences and languages.

Founding of Al-Nahda

As Ghannouchi was developing his philosophies in the 1970s, he and a group of colleagues were quietly building support for an illegal organization they called the Islamic Tendency Movement (MTI), based largely on Ghannouchi’s writings. The MTI was a loose coalition that began to have greater significance in national and local politics as the socialist policies of President Habib Bourguiba began to fail. The MTI advocated Islam-based solutions to Tunisia’s problems as well as a liberal political system, including parliamentary elections. In 1981, after police discovered the group’s founding manifesto, Ghannouchi authorized a referendum among the membership to determine whether the group should release the manifesto publicly. The movement voted 70 percent in favor of going public. The Shura Council certified the referendum, and on June 6, 1981, the MTI released its Founding Manifesto. The manifesto committed the movement to the democratic process, free elections, political pluralism, and the peaceful alternation of power. MTI’s Islamic contemporaries, the revolutionaries in Iran, denounced the manifesto as having been infiltrated by Western values.⁶ MTI’s leaders wanted to model the democratic system of government within their own party and have governed it as a democratic institution since its founding. According to the manifesto, there are four sources of power: the president, the executive committee, the Shura Council, and the general assembly. More than ten members have served as president, who is elected every three years by the general assembly.

Bourguiba legalized political parties beyond his own Neo-Dustour in 1981 after large demonstrations in Gafsa, which shattered his traditional alliance with the national labor union. Bourguiba did not legalize the MTI, however. The MTI’s violent demonstrations in protest of Bourguiba’s decision gave the government an excuse to arrest hundreds of its members and label it a terrorist organization with ties to Iran. MTI members continued to be arrested throughout the 1980s for their membership in a banned organization. Bourguiba was overthrown in a bloodless coup in 1987, with his prime minister, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, taking power. Ben Ali entered office with promises of democracy and released most political prisoners, including 600 MTI members, and later freed all who had been convicted of “crimes against public rights.” Ben Ali pardoned Ghannouchi and allowed other members to return from exile.

Ben Ali relaxed other restrictions on political life. He recognized more political parties and extended the freedom of the press. But Ben Ali refused to legalize the MTI, even after it changed its named to Al-Nahda (Renaissance) to comply with Ben Ali’s public view that no party should claim to represent Islam since the religion belonged to all Tunisians as Muslims. Ben Ali did allow Al-Nahda members to run as independent candidates for the Chamber of Deputies, the national legislature, in April 1989. These candidates did not win any seats, but did win 14.5 percent of the national vote and as much as 30 percent in the cities of Tunis, Gabes, and Sousse.⁷ Al-Nahda’s turnout numbers, which might have been officially suppressed, are more impressive when compared with those of the Movement of Democratic Socialists (MDS), a secular coalition that was also allowed to front candidates in the 1989 elections. The MDS won hardly any votes at all, leaving little doubt that the only credible opposition to Ben Ali was Islamic.

The success of Al-Nahda’s membership shocked Ben Ali and drove him to place further restrictions on political Islam. In a speech commemorating the second anniversary of his rule, in November 1989, Ben Ali said that the government would not allow any parties to “combine religion and politics.” Al-Nahda boycotted the 1990 local elections in response. Nevertheless, many Al-Nahda members ran and thirty-four were elected—the first time that Ben Ali’s party did not have absolute control of local councils. Government-Islamist relations worsened over the following years, with student protests, strikes, a new resurrected ban on headscarves in universities, and the closing of Al-Fajr, the Al-Nahda newspaper.⁸ Hundreds of Al-Nahda members were arrested, with some accused of plots to overthrow the government. Military leaders were imprisoned based on allegations that Islamist forces were infiltrating the government by way of the military. It is estimated that the government hauled in more than 8,000 detainees between 1990 an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Al-Nahda: Moderation and compromise in Tunisia's constitutional bargain
• 2 Egypt: A constitutional court in an unconstitutional setting
• 3 The pilot of limited change: Mohammed VI and the transition in Morocco
• 4 Actors and factors in Libya's revolution
• 5 Algeria: The outlier state?
• 6 Transitions from authoritarian rule following the Arab uprisings: A matter of variables
• Index