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

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Essay

The Digital Disruption

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

Increased connectivity allows for the spread of liberal, open values but also poses a number of dangers. To foster the free flow of information and challenge authoritarian regimes, democratic states will have to learn to create alliances with people and companies at the forefront of the information revolution.

Snapshot

Morning in Tunisia

Michele Penner Angrist

Last week's mass protests in Tunisia were less a symptom of economic malaise than of a society fed up with its broken dictatorship. Should the other autocratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa be afraid?

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

Essay

The Tunisian Way

Habib Bourguiba

Thirty-SEVEN years of fighting, thirty-three years of Destourian leadership, ten years of independence: a propitious moment to draw up a balance sheet, to illuminate the ideas behind our actions. When I go back in my mind to the 1930s, and compare the Tunisia of those days with Tunisia now, I am filled with optimism and rejoice to think of what my country and my people will be by the end of this century, or even before. Colonized, humiliated, crushed by centuries of decadence and anarchy, their resources exploited by a foreign minority who tried to assimilate them and destroy their identity, the Tunisians responded to my call and became one man, to face a long, hard and unequal struggle. Finally, they won, and in victory gained not only the dignity of independence but also the necessary conditions for progress and development. We find in that struggle legitimate reasons to be proud, a source of inspiration and proof of the effectiveness of our approach.

DEBORAH JEROME: Good afternoon and welcome, all, to this Council on Foreign Relations media conference call to discuss Tunisia and the popular uprising against now-ousted President Ben Ali, who was shuttled off to Saudi Arabia on January 14th.

I am Deborah Jerome. I am the deputy editor of CFR.org. And here to answer your questions are Jared Cohen, an adjunct CFR fellow, who, among other things, has written about how technology can empower citizens in repressive regimes; and Steven Cook, a CFR senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies. Steven, by the way, has been following the events in Tunisia on his blog, which is called "From the Potomac to the Euphrates," and it is well worth checking out. You can find it on the CFR.org website.

I would like to kick this off with a multipart question for both of you. Even though things are still unsettled -- there is already a lot of talk about the possibility of Tunisia's example spawning a wave of similar uprisings in Egypt, Algeria and other countries. But I am curious to know what you think is the likely outcome of the so-called "Jasmine Revolution" in Tunisia itself. Is it likely that Tunisia will see the emergence of a pluralist, stable democracy?

And Jared, social media clearly had a role in fanning the flames of Tunisia's protests. Does it have a role in building a new and better government?

STEVEN COOK: Thanks very much, Deborah. And thanks to everybody who is spending some time with us this afternoon to talk about Tunisia.

Deborah, to answer your questions in order, I think I would say: Maybe, maybe, and maybe. We have just gone through phase one of the Tunisian uprising, and that was the ousting of longtime strongman, President Ben Ali. Now is the hard part. And transitions from one type of political system to another are contingent. They are not linear, and may not necessarily end up as liberal democracies. They can end up as narrower, nastier dictatorships. And how the interim civilian leadership deals with this six-month interim period in organizing elections, and importantly, how the Tunisian military establishment, which has been thrust into a critical role in Tunisian politics--how they deal with this transition period will tell us a lot about the future trajectory. But at this point, it is unclear what is going to happen.

The opposition is, obviously, not satisfied with the unity government, and are clearly trying to press their advantage in demanding not only, obviously, that Ben Ali go, but that there be a fundamental restructuring of the Tunisian political order. That would be extraordinary. And we will have to see how long this kind of stalemate will go on before the military acts or the civilians crumble under the weight of these demands.

In terms of a wave for the rest of the region, clearly, the Tunisian situation is being watched very, very carefully. I will let Jared talk about how Twitter and Facebook and Al-Jazeera covering these events wall-to-wall have had an effect on the region writ large. But clearly, opposition groups in places like Algiers, Cairo, Amman, and others are seeking to learn lessons from the Tunisian uprising.

I will be in Cairo next week, and January 25th is National Police Day in Egypt, and there are calls for massive protests in front of the Interior Ministry. Now, there are always protests on Police Day, but it will be interesting to see whether events in Tunisia have given these annual protests a certain amount of momentum. I certainly would expect that they would.

At the same time, the regimes in the region are also drawing lessons from Ben Ali's fate. And I would imagine that--in fact I would bet that--the Egyptians, for example, will try to make accommodation for some demands from below, while continuing to use the iron fist against their own opposition.

So this is exhilarating, it is extraordinary, but there is no real reason to believe that the region is going to be swept by similar uprisings. Revolutions are rare, and all the factors and variables need to come together all at the same time to make what happened on January 14th happen. And of course, President Ben Ali made a series of mistakes that enabled his ouster.

With that, I think, Jared, why do not we get a sense of how social media was or was not affecting the situation in Tunisia and around the region.

JARED COHEN: Thanks, Steven. And just to echo Steven's comments earlier, I am really appreciative of everybody jumping on this call.

Let us start with what technology did not do; technology did not cause the revolution in Tunisia, technology did not drive the revolution in Tunisia. We all know there are high food prices, discontent with Ben Ali's government, a variety of other factors.

But what is interesting is that everybody wants to label this as: was this a Twitter revolution; was this not a Twitter revolution? The reality is, there is no such thing as a Twitter revolution. The reality is this is just what revolutions look like now.

Throughout history, whenever you have had a revolution, a smart movement uses smart tools, right? So a smart movement will utilize whatever tools it has at its disposal. And these are the new tools of the day, and so any movement that is trying to be effective is going to leverage these tools as much as possible.

And so what we have entered into is a situation in which revolutions are using more sophisticated tools than the ones we remember from 1989 or even the one that we remember from the early 2000s.