Morning in Tunisia

14CommentsJoin

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.

Review Essay

Free Markets, Free Muslims

Jon B. Alterman

Vali Nasr's impressive book concludes that the triumph of free markets in the Middle East can defeat extremism and promote social liberalization. But just how will this happen?

Author Interview

Q&A With Steven A. Cook and Jared Cohen on Tunisia

Steven A. Cook and Jared Cohen

Stephen Cook and Jared Cohen answer questions about the protests in Tunisia.

Snapshot

The Psychology of Food Riots

Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas

The connection among rising prices, hunger, and violent civic unrest seems intuitively logical. But there was more to Tunisia's food protests than the logic of the pocketbook. The psychological element -- a sense of injustice that arises between seeing food prices rise and pouring a Molotov cocktail -- is more important.

Snapshot

Let Them Eat Bread

Annia Ciezadlo

For years, Arab dictators used food subsidies -- and cheap bread -- to keep their subjects quiet. But when prices rose, the very thing that regimes used to ensure obedience became a symbol and a source of revolution.

This article appears in the Foreign Affairs/CFR eBook, The New Arab Revolt.

Last Friday, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia after 23 years as president. He was driven out of the country by the cumulative pressure of a month of protests, sparked by a young man's economic despair and subsequent self-immolation. Much of the reporting on the demonstrations has emphasized Tunisians' economic grievances: unemployment, inflation, and the high cost of living.

But material difficulties were not the central driver in pushing Ben Ali from power. After all, economically motivated riots broke out in Tunisia in the early 1980s but did not bring down the government of then President Habib Bourguiba. And Ben Ali's promises in the middle of the most recent unrest to boost employment and cut the prices of basic goods could not stop the momentum of the protests.

On a more fundamental level, Tunisians are protesting dictatorship. They have had just two presidents since the country's independence from France in 1956. The first was Bourguiba, who led the independence battle against the French and then erected a secular, single-party authoritarian regime. The second was Ben Ali, who engineered Bourguiba's ouster in 1987, when it appeared that Bourguiba had grown too old and detached to govern effectively. Despite his early rhetoric emphasizing political pluralism, Ben Ali cracked down against free speech and any potential dissent. He cited the danger posed by the country's Islamists, who gave some cause for concern over the extent to which, if elected, they would respect democracy and the relatively equal rights Tunisian women had achieved after independence. During the 1990s, he eliminated the Islamist movement and consolidated an even darker and more repressive dictatorship than that of Bourguiba. Ben Ali retained Bourguiba's governing political party, renaming it the Constitutional Democratic Rally. The name was a cynical choice, for Ben Ali's Tunisia would come to have zero press freedoms, a censored Internet, monitored phone and e-mail communications, and only token opposition in a toothless parliament.

Yet these were not necessarily the features of the regime against which tens of thousands of Tunisians demonstrated last week. Ben Ali's was a particularly insulting dictatorship. The state-run media participated in grotesque displays of hagiography and helped produce a cult of personality around the president, whose portrait hung everywhere. The media lauded his initiatives as unambiguously and gloriously advancing the interests of all Tunisians, with Ben Ali the ever avuncular and enlightened ruler.

The reality was much more grim: dissidents were tortured and everyday Tunisians struggled to build livelihoods, while the families of the president and those connected to him enriched themselves and flaunted their wealth. The Ben Ali regime was contemptuous of its citizens, treating them as too unsophisticated to entrust with freedoms -- and betting that they would be too meek to call the regime to account for its excesses.

This calculus held, however tenuously, for more than two decades. Few saw last week's events coming. In this regard, the fall of Ben Ali had much in common with the street protests that swept communist rulers from power in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. No one predicted those governments would collapse, either -- yet in 1989, the world witnessed what Timur Kuran, the Duke professor and economist, would later call "now out of never." Kuran argued that under such dictatorships, citizens are required to act in public as if they are content with the status quo. If they do not, the wrath of the security apparatus falls upon them.

But people bear an internal cost -- to their sense of autonomy and personal integrity -- of pretending that the status quo is acceptable. And when the cost of pretending becomes intolerably high for a few citizens, sudden and surprising mass protests can erupt. The actions of these few can trigger similar actions by others, who, when they see how many others feel as they do and are willing to show it publicly, join in the opposition. The larger the number of protestors becomes, the more others are willing to join them.

When Mohamed Bouazizi, distraught after authorities shut down his vegetable stall for operating without a license, set himself on fire in the city of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010, the act was so dramatic -- so beyond the parameters of normal experience -- that for some Tunisians the costs of continuing to behave as if they approved of Ben Ali became unbearable. These were the first protestors, who rioted in the streets of Sidi Bouzid. Their actions triggered bandwagoning by thousands more who joined the demonstrations, emboldened by the sight of their fellow citizens daring to confront the regime.

As Ben Ali flew to exile in Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi assumed temporary command of the state; he quickly stepped down and ceded power to Fouad Mebazaa, the head of Tunisia's parliament. Mebazaa has assembled an interim coalition government and claims that new elections will be held in the coming months. Yet instability remains, with the military increasingly moving to confront and sideline the police and security services loyal to Ben Ali.

It is not yet clear how, or even if, the political dust will settle. Officials in the ruling party, the executive branch, and the security services have an enormous stake in the status quo and will try to preserve it. It appears that elements of the military pushed Ben Ali to depart the country, perhaps in the hope that sacrificing him and making modest concessions to the demonstrators -- new elections, broader press freedoms, more leeway for the opposition, and so on -- will suffice to restore order and leave the status quo more or less intact.