Tunisian Revolutions

Reflections on Seas, Coasts, and Interiors

Julia Clancy-Smith

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781626162310
• eBook ISBN: 9781626162136
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica africana

In December 2010 an out-of-work Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire and precipitated the Arab Spring. Popular interpretations of Bouazizi's self-immolation presented economic and political oppression by the Ben Ali regimes as the root causes of widespread social despair that triggered the Tunisian revolution. Yet as Julia Clancy-Smith points out, Tunisia's long history of organized political activism and protest movements suggests a far more complicated set of processes. Proposing a conceptual framework of "coastalization" vs. "interiorization," Clancy-Smith examines Tunisia's last two centuries and demonstrates how geographical and environmental and social factors also lie behind that country's modern political history. Within this framework Clancy-Smith explores how Tunisia's coast became a Mediterranean playground for transnational elites, a mecca of tourism, while its interior agrarian regions suffered increasing neglect and marginalization. This distinction has had a profound impact on the fate of Tunisia and has manifested itself in divisive debates over politics, the state, and religion as well as women’s socio-legal status that have led to a series of mass civic actions culminating in revolution. Clancy-Smith proposes a fresh historical lens through which to view the relationship between spacial displacements, regionalization, and transnationalism.

Georgetown Shorts—longer than an article, shorter than a book—deliver timely works of peer-reviewed scholarship in a fast-paced, agile environment. They present new ideas and original texts that are easily and widely available to students, scholars, libraries, and general readers.

Tunisian Revolutions

Reflections on Seas, Coasts, and Interiors

Julia Clancy-Smith

There has been no “Arab” Spring:
The perfume of its revolutions
Burns the eye like tear gas.
—Tariq Ramadan, “Egypt: Coup d’État, Act II,” 2013

Introduction

The port de plaisance (yacht basin) in the city of Munastir abuts a promontory that still bears the skeletal outlines of a nineteenth-century Italian fabricca (fish-rendering factory); not far away are the remains of Punic, Roman, and Byzantine—as well as medieval Islamic, Spanish, and Ottoman—fortresses, businesses, and residences.¹ Clearly, places such as this in the heartland of Africa Proconsularis, as the Roman Empire called its first African colony, have attracted other empires as well as commercial and pleasure interests for millennia. Looming over the promontory today is a five-star tourist complex. When I visited the port of Munastir, now a seaside resort, with a colleague from the University of Tunis in 2009, I noted with satisfaction that the customers for the well-appointed hotels, cafés, and bars were Tunisians as well as “internationals.” But it had not always been this way. Four decades ago (when I resided in Tunisia as a Peace Corps teacher), the country’s hotel clientele had been almost exclusively French; the “locals” labored as waiters, cooks, maids, and other staff members. Nevertheless, from the late 1970s on, the tourist industry offered women some of the country’s first professional management positions; and today, this sector is one of the University of Tunis’s most popular majors for both women and men.

The extraordinary expansion of Tunisia’s middle class—among the largest in the Arab world—starting in the late 1980s has put family meals and vacations in the country’s countless shoreline resorts within reach of many, but not all, of its citizens. Indeed, the emergence of this middle class was intimately tied to international tourism as well as to worker remittances, the country’s phosphate industry, and the relocation of light manufacturing from Europe to Tunisia. Needless to say, Tunisia’s tourist industry has deeply distinguished it from its Maghribi neighbors to the east and west. One can hardly imagine a vacation advertisement like the following one for Libya even before the 2011 war: “Visitez Tarablis, pays de mer et de lumière” (Visit Tripoli, country of sea and light).

However, Munastir’s yacht basin also yielded other data. Most of the luxury vessels in port for winter appeared to be owned by transnationals, judging by their flags and names. Moreover, if one goes slightly inland, the olive groves (whose origins in the distant past can only be imagined) suggested another, quite sinister view of global investment capitalism cum travel industry. Grids of productive trees had been auctioned to the highest bidder and slated for destruction to make way for new villas built for the high-end transnational yachting class. But the 2008–9 global financial and economic crisis and subsequent political unrest severely depressed the tourist industry, which suffered a calamitous drop after the uprisings early in 2011.²

As was also true for Carthage and Sidi Bou Sa^cid, Munastir had become a potent symbol of the Ben ^cAli regime’s excesses even before the country’s Jasmine Revolution of 2010–11 because of the palatial compound there occupied by Mohamed Sakher al-Materi, the president’s son-in-law. Indeed, luxurious seaside palaces and real estate claimed by the extended Ben ^cAli–Trabelsi clans were among the first political targets after Ben ^cAli’s hasty departure in January 2011. Soon thereafter, the National Commission of Investigation into Corruption and Malfeasance (Commission nationale d’investigation sur les affaires de corruption et de malversation) began its work, opening an initial five thousand dossiers into widespread, systemic graft centered upon Mediterranean real estate and the business of tourism.

This essay argues for a longue durée approach to Tunisia’s unfinished revolutions. As a small excerpt from a larger project in progress, it raises five seemingly disparate questions in search of a coherent framing narrative:

1. When and why did Tunisia become a Mediterranean playground for transnational elites, while its “interior” (the south, border, and central regions) suffered increasing neglect and marginalization?

2. Where and what is the “interior,” and how can environmental history deepen understandings of social movements, power, and divergent regionalizations?

3. How did women and gender configure two fundamental identities promoted by the newly independent Tunisian state—secular modernity, and a unique Mediterranean personality?

4. Why was Tunisia, whose prospects for democratic pluralism had seemed the brightest among postcolonial Maghribi states, governed by a populist, single-party regime from 1956 until 1987, and subsequently by a brutal kleptocracy that plundered national resources and further gutted civil society?

5. Finally, if the demands, symbols, targets, and practices of today’s mass civic actions draw deeply upon the past, what historical torque do the precolonial and colonial eras exert?

The intent here is less to propose definitive answers to these five questions than to imagine alternatives to the linear nationalist narratives that for the most part continue to serve as the default “container” for North African histories in the contemporary period.³ Of late, historians and social scientists have come to problematize many conventional (and comfortable) analytical units used in their professions, notably the ideas of the nation-state and of empire. Related concepts—such as distance, scale, and region—have also come under intense scrutiny, generating new thinking on transnationalism and territorialization.⁴ Following that lead, this essay explores the historical implications of “coastalization,” the progressive (and ultimately unsustainable) concentration of anthropogenic pressures and activities on increasingly vulnerable seas, oceans, and coastal environments worldwide.⁵ Some of the greatest threats to the Mediterranean—fossil fuels, pollution, and tourism—have converged upon Tunisia with exceptional force. The ecological crisis in the Gulf of Gabes has earned it the sobriquet “the shore of death” because of its unprecedented outbreaks of environmentally induced illnesses, disappearance of species, and habitat destruction.⁶ And the Tunisia–Lampedusa crossing for refugees and/or workers seeking a haven in Europe has become not only a major global human trafficking highway but also a passageway to a watery grave.⁷

For the most part, research on coastalization is mainly driven by the “hard” and interdisciplinary sciences, notably ecology studies, which focus upon urgent contemporary problems, such as hyperurbanization and/or transglobal migrations, and their diverse, often unanticipated, environmental consequences.⁸ However, the prehistories of coastalization and its imbrication with states, dominant cultures, and social processes remain largely of secondary interest. For the Maghrib, the shifts of political and economic clout to the Mediterranean or Atlantic coasts have eclipsed ancient inland cities, such as Constantine, or royal centers of Moroccan legitimacy, like Fez and Meknes, to the benefit of Rabat, Casablanca, Tangier, and Algiers. For Tunisia, the notion of coastalization might appear the least useful, historically speaking. The core of Ifriqiyah (and before that Carthage), which often encompassed eastern Algeria and the maritime zones of western Libya, has for the better part of two millennia remained on the littoral, principally in the Tunis–Carthage–Cap Bon triangle, adjacent to the Sicilian Channel and the central Mediterranean. Nevertheless, the “interiors” also mattered to the state and ruling elites, to the wealth and health of cities, to religious authorities and dissidents, and to trans-sea trade and commerce.⁹

In this essay coastalization represents both an analytical perspective and a heuristic principle that beckon scholars of Mediterranean histories to paradoxically travel far from the alluring, relatively well-documented littoral and into the social worlds of the agriculturalist, farmer, and pastoralist of the semiarid zones before, during, and after colonialism. This perspective/principle reveals how projects, both state-driven and otherwise—such as congresses, transnational education, women’s rights, tourism, and international games, beginning in the colonial period (1881–1956)—tipped the balance toward the Mediterranean and away from the plains, mountains, and oases. At the same time, analyzing the transformations of the past two centuries within a framework that is both historical and environmental suggests the complex convergences that produced what is now unsatisfactorily labeled “globalization.”¹⁰ It should be explicitly stated from the outset that the present essay concentrates on topics and time periods that have attracted less scholarly attention or were eclipsed by the colonial and/or nationalist narratives.

Preludes and Postscripts: Of Baguettes and Social Protest

The masses of protesters “armed” with baguettes in Tunis’s streets in January 2011 during the Jasmine Revolution appeared to signal that economic grievances and household security were principally at stake. However, this myth in the making was quickly dispelled for the international media; the brandished bread actually symbolized quite the opposite.¹¹ Tunisians could no longer be appeased, as the Ben ^cAli regime and its allied international financial interests had hoped, with consumer culture and middle-class comforts, the latter of which had been sorely undermined by the stupendous venality of the president’s family members and party cronies, along with their corporate sponsors. Indeed, after 1990 this venality had gone from “artisanal” to industrial as the neoliberalized economy had opened up vast opportunities for methodical fraud that filled the coffers of foreign banks. State repression, combined with widespread social acceptance of more-or-less voluntary political servitude, undergirded this systemic corruption. Nevertheless, the concepts of “repression” and “corruption” represent an unsteady lens for understanding authoritarianism in the absence of adequate historicization or context.¹²

In a sense, the revolution could have broken out anywhere. Years of both organized and spontaneous acts of civil disobedience all over Tunisia preceded the events of December 2010: public hunger protests, self-immolations, syndicalist agitation, and professional strikes in which lawyers increasingly participated.¹³ Indeed, by the turn of the millennium, among the most desperate youth a “culture of suicide” had developed that utterly shocked Tunisian society.¹⁴ It was a cruel irony that the United Nations had declared 2010–11 the “Year of Youth.” Yet the final combustive gesture—which was made by a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi (or Muhammad Bou ^cAzizi)—erupted in Sidi Bouzid, a place of no great importance to the outside world or even to many Tunisians, whose identities and interests lie mainly on the coast or overseas. Until 2010 Sidi Bouzid, both the town and the governorate of the same name, attracted few tourists and little notice from Tunis, the country’s largest city and capital. However, the region’s water resources, nourishing a local food export sector for European markets, had suffered privatization by the Ben ^cAli regime to cash in on escalating industrial and residential demand in Sfax, Tunisia’s second-largest city.¹⁵

Given that water is an increasingly scarce global commodity, privatized water became even more expensive for family farmers in regions such as Sidi Bouzid. Moreover, “the main centers of water consumption are situated within the coastal region, while water resources are mainly located in the North and in the interior of the country.”¹⁶ By the turn of the millennium, the widening rifts between the disadvantaged inland regions (which, despite their diversity, risk being reduced to a caricature with the very notion of “interior”) and the urban, cosmopolitan Mediterranean rim could no longer be concealed, much less denied. Today, 80 percent of current national production is concentrated in the coastal areas from Bizerte to Djerba. The provinces of the country’s southwest and center-west—which are home to 11 million, 40 percent of the population—only claim 20 percent of its gross domestic product. Indeed, some participants in the Constitutional Assembly put forth proposals in 2012 that they viewed as interrelated: The first demanded that the 1956 Code of Personal Status continue to govern women’s rights and status; the second sought to address the problems of the interior.¹⁷

In the young, but already deeply troubled, twenty-first century, geographers are now sounding the alarm about the specter of coastalization: the hyperconcentration of human activities and state resources on, or adjacent to, the world’s major waterways. But this phenomenon, which can be readily perceived in North Africa and around the Mediterranean perimeter, has antecedents from long ago. Thus, we might begin our narrative sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, when the waning of the so-called Little Ice Age (c. the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) brought climatic changes. These transformations intersected with new forms of imperialism, the dramatic expansion of Mediterranean ports, profoundly altered relationships between cities and their traditional hinterlands, and the erosion of village economies and cultures.¹⁸

Coastalization: Agriculture, Colonialism, and the Granary of Rome

The strategic location of the Carthage–Cap Bon area on the Sicilian channel and its rich agrarian resources had made it a key node in trans-sea exchanges for millennia. By the modern era, Tunisia’s economy had been integrated into trade routes and markets located well beyond the Maghrib and the Ottoman Empire.¹⁹ Tunis alone maintained direct commercial ties with the entire Mediterranean Basin, in contrast to the other North African ports, which traded in more restricted zones, such as the Tetouan–Tangiers–Gibraltar corridor. By the late eighteenth century, 60 percent of Tunisia’s foreign commerce was with Europe; Marseilles, Malta, and Leghorn were the top three partners.²⁰

In large measure, this was the consequence of the European revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, during which Tunisia had provided foodstuffs and livestock to overseas markets. After 1815, and particularly with France’s 1830 invasion of Algeria, Tunisia’s coastal provinces and their hinterlands became more firmly enmeshed in trans-Mediterranean, transatlantic, and global exchanges. Indeed, France pressed hard on the beys (regional princes or rulers) to export the “surplus” from agriculturalists in order to feed its huge African army during the decades-long pacification of Algeria. But by then the revolutionary boom years were over. In response, the Husaynid Dynasty (1705–1956) imposed state monopolies on olive and cereal production from the 1820s on, and thus sold future harvests to European buyers—with utterly disastrous results. As crops failed due to recurring droughts, and foreign grain traders reaped profits, Tunisia’s economy slid into a long recession, which ironically was due to its deep involvement in Mediterranean commerce.²¹ However, little-understood climatic changes in the Mediterranean subregions may have triggered drier growing seasons that endangered rain-fed crop cultivation, particularly in agriculturally marginal zones.²²

At the same time, both the governing classes and commercial interests gradually turned their backs on the peoples inhabiting Tunisi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• Preludes and Postscripts: Of Baguettes and Social Protest
• Coastalization: Agriculture, Colonialism, and the Granary of Rome
• Coastalization and Globalization: Tourism, Profane and Sacred
• Mediterranean Women, Politics, and Islam
• Mediterranean Games, Politics, and Dissent
• From Sidi Bou Sa‘id to Sidi Bouzid: Targets and Symbols
• Conclusion
• Notes
• The Author
• Illustrations