Tunisia's Endangered Exception: History at Large in the Southern

Politics. Rivista di Studi Politici www.rivistapolitics.it (5), 1/2016, 53-68 @ Editoriale A.I.C. - Edizioni Labrys All right reserved ISSN 2279-7629 Tunisia’s Endangered Exception: History at Large in the Southern Mediterranean Norbert Bugeja Abstract This article explores some facets of the relation between Tunisia’s post-independence political bequeathals and the legacy of a political memory that, today, is being sabotaged and rendered fugitive, not least through the acts of terror that have recently hit the country and crippled its tourist economy. Arguing that Tunisia’s democratic trajectories are at stake today and risk being “orphaned” of their history of reformist precedents accrued over the past one hundred and fifty years, the author reflects on the current political state of play in Tunisia and makes a case for a restored dialectic of interchange with specific luminary tenets of Tunisia’s late- nineteenth and early-twentieth century enlightenment movement. The engendering of political subjectivities in post-revolutionary Tunisia and the piecing together of its multi- faceted national imaginary require today what Balibar would term a «differentiation» of the change towards a non-despotic democratisation brought about in 2011. Keywords Reformism - Political Memory - Ijtihad - Tunisian Exception - Destourian Thought There can be no other place in the world where you grasp better than you do here the curious parallelism between the soldier’s watch and the mystic’s deliberate dreaming […] why shouldn’t it be the site of a harmonious accommodation between the abiding presence of a spiritual outlook implanted in its countryside and the modern world’s passion for change? (Duvignaud and Kahia 1965, 13, 21) Mais, en nous, résonnent encore le chant âcre de la déraison, l’ample folie des eaux vives et l’astre aveugle de la foi. (Majed 2013, ch.10) 54 Politics. Rivista di Studi Politici (5), 1/2016 On the 16th of January of 2016, the impoverished, rural west-central town of Kasserine in Tunisia was home to a very distressing event – the latest in a series of its kind that happened elsewhere in Tunisia after 26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire on December 17 2011 at Sidi Bouzid, another of the country’s towns with the highest rates of unemployment and lowest average income per capita. This time round, the incident in Kasserine, (itself a hotbed of anti-despotic sentiment during the Jasmine uprising that ousted Zine el Abidine bin Ali) involved Ridha Yahyaoui, a 28- year-old unemployed man who was turned down when he applied for a position with the Tunisian public service. In a moment of profound anguish, Yahyaoui scaled an electrical pole and electrocuted himself (The Economist 2016). Ridha Yahyaoui’s self- immolation occurred in the wake of a number of other suicide attempts in Kasserine and elsewhere – acts of despair that stemmed from the dire fiscal situation Tunisia finds itself in today, after its already weather-beaten tourist economy received a strategic blow following last year’s terror attacks on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, at a tourist beach resort in Sousse, and in central Tunis itself, just off the capital’s main avenue. In a brief statement to Reuters news agency, Yahyaoui’s father Hathmane pointed out that «Ridha killed himself because he lost hope […] I have lost my son, but I warn the authorities, my son will be the new Bouazizi and his death will create more protests for work and dignity» (Amara 2016). The emerging statistical data on the state of Tunisia’s economy in 2016, does, at first glance, seem to lend plausibility to Yahyaoui’s desire for a “new Bouazizi” and a new wave of «street-level politics» (Brennan 2015). The country’s current unemployment rate stands at more than 15% – worse than the unemployment situation prior to the 2011 uprisings. Around a third of young people in Tunisia today are jobless. New graduates need an average of six years to obtain a steady job and, according to World Bank figures, half of all Tunisia’s graduates are still unemployed at 35 years of age (The Economist 2016). On-the-ground sources now suggest that over 400.000 Tunisians have lost their jobs in the tourism sector as a direct result of cancelled holiday bookings in the wake of the Bardo and then the Sousse shootings – and counting. Directly or indirectly, tourism in Tunisia accounts for about 15% of GDP and 14% of the total workforce (The Economist 2016). But, much as Yahyaoui’s and others’ gestures of despair are symptomatic of this bleak economic turn, the public response to them was a far cry from the nationwide sense of empowerment triggered by Bouazizi’s self-immolation five years ago. Sentiments in Tunisia today are divided even with regard to Bouazizi’s own act and the ensuing convulsions – political, economic, social and constitutional – it unleashed. Ambivalent responses to the current situation are strong – as is the implicit interrogation of various facets of the discursive inheritances and political legacies that have characterized the post-independent nation, some of which have returned to possess – Norbert Bugeja 55 Tunisia’s Endangered Exception: History at Large in the Southern Mediterranean and often to haunt – the political sphere that emerged after ben Ali’s fall and the subsequent collapse of the country’s first freely-elected government, led by the Islamist Ennahda Movement party, in January 2014. In this article, I would like to explore the question of political memory and its dialectic of interaction with Tunisia’s present, fledgling democratic formation. This relation is underpinned by a constitutionalist ethos that today looks increasingly nomadised, and risks being “orphaned” of an eminent history of reformist precedents accrued over the past one hundred and fifty years. The article will, therefore, seek to revisit the specific state of play outlined some years ago by Larbi Sadiki, namely, that in Tunisia «The mirror images between past and present struggles are dazzling. The liberation ancestry’s moral flame, emancipatory passion, and resistance against colonialism are deeply etched in Maghrebi common memory» (Sadiki 2008, 110). Vertical interchange and a memorial precedent Various strands of critical, historiographical and cultural-anthropological thought on the modern and contemporary Mediterranean have repeatedly flagged transactional relations of trade, barter, bilateral diplomacy and other forms of reciprocity as salient paradigms that have characterized relations and defined and redefined historic cross- border and cross-regional rapports along the littoral1. But to dare transfer the question of a tried-and-tested “horizontal” reading of the geopolitics of reciprocity in the Mediterranean region onto a postcolonial discursive plane confronts us with a specific problematic. The region’s current desolation in relation to its antecedent and familiar ideological discourses increasingly requires specific modes of harnessing the region’s dynamics of interchange as a matter of tapping the trans-temporal intersections between past and present practices through which the political has been and is being worlded2. To speak of a postcolonial Mediterranean today entails, amongst other labors, the delicate task of diversifying or at least expanding the range of significance of this historic paradigm – of interchange as also a cross-temporal political relation – to accommodate a patently vertical reading of it: a dialectical trade-off between the memory of past (pre- and post-independent) political legacies, and the flux of a present that is as yet to pronounce and commit itself firmly in their regard, one that is now patently seeking to negotiate its path through the pitfalls and the disenchantments occasioned by the political past’s on-going revenants. 1 The activity of exchange, trade and reciprocal commercial and other relations is variously exemplified and engaged with, for instance, in Fernand Braudel’s epic work on the region’s geo-human strata and, later, discussed by Nicholas Purcell and Peregrine Horden’s in their The Corrupting Sea as well as David Abulafia’s more recent The Great Sea. 2 An intriguing study in this regard is Wendy Brown’s Politics out of History, where she lays out in detail the notion of a “postprogressive” political time (Brown 2001). 56 Politics. Rivista di Studi Politici (5), 1/2016 As Iain Chambers has argued in Mediterranean Crossings, his work on the postcolonial Mediterranean, «the horizontal plane of representation remains perpetually vulnerable to a vertical axis where we are pulled into the sedimented depths of time where bodies bleed, birth and death occur, lives are lived» (Chambers 2008, 11). The vista on the present-day political state of play in Tunisia offered here arises precisely from the need to approach the question of the country’s post-colonial Mediterraneity as a multi-lateral and cross-temporal political dialectic that subscribes to what Étienne Balibar has discussed as the «heteronomy of heteronomy» of political modernity (Balibar 2002, 1). In present-day Tunisia, this double-heteronomic relation takes the shape of a discursive agonism between the country’s post-colonial and post- independent trajectory on the one hand, and the ongoing unstable post-regime moment on the other, spawning in the process a dialectics wherein, to quote Balibar’s own explication «the conditions to which a politics relates are never a last instance: on the contrary, what makes them determinant is the way they bear subjects or are borne by them» (Balibar 2002, 1). How does one begin to grasp the dynamics of such a dialectic of interchange in terms of its ongoing engendering of political subjectivities in the current Tunisian transition, wherein the anteriority of political memory itself informs a sustained effort to grasp the modes of political possibility it holds forth, even as it stands up to their very scrutiny? This question takes us directly to the popular designation of post-2011 Tunisia as l’exception Tunisienne, a notion largely taken to signify Tunisia’s relative successes in beginning to re-construct a constitutional and representative-democratic polity in the wake of bin Ali’s ousting.

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