political pacts, liberalism, and democracy: the tunisian national pact of 1988

L isa Anderson

Political Pacts, Liberalism, and Democracy: The Tunisian National Pact of 1988

MOST OF WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE ROLE OF POLITICAL pacts and pact-making in developing democracy is based on transitions from exclusionary authoritarian regimes in Europe and Latin American.’ This is not surprising; most political pacts have been concluded in Europe and Latin America, as political and economic elites have attempted to extricate themselves from the ruins of war or the reigns of tyrants. Increasingly, however, pacts have been used elsewhere as devices to mark political transitions of other kinds. In the Arab world, for example, the ultimately unhappy fate of Lebanon’s 1943 National Pact, which provided the framework of a transition to independence, did not deter pact-makers in Tunisia in 1988 from using the device in what they hoped would be a transition from a single-party regime to a more pluralist democracy.*

The modern pact in the Arab world, certainly in its Tunisian version, presents some variations on the European and Latin American theme. Far from representing a response to the collapse of the previous regime, the pact here is advocated by a government still firmly in power. Indeed, the rulers set out the initial terms of the debate and initiate the discussion. Moreover,

’ An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the Country Day Program on Tunisia, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC, 14 April 1989. I gratefully acknowledge the comments of the participants, as well as those of F. Gregory Gause.

’ As will become apparent, I distinguish political pacts from ‘national charters’ which were designed to consolidate single-party regimes such as those in Egypt in the early 1960s and Algeria in the 1970s. The Yemeni National Pact of 1982, which was largely an effort by the military regime at national reconciliation after twenty years of civil conflict, also appears to have been designed as a prelude to installation of a single-party regime, although the party has yet to be established. During 1989, however, a national pact was debated in Jordan which may bear a greater resemblance to the Lebanese or Tunisian variety, as an effort to preserve or establish pluralist politics.

THE TUNISIAN NATIONAL PACT 245

the text of the pact itself devotes more attention to procedural than substantive rights and responsibilities; social justice and economic distribution are given relatively short shrift in favour of guarantees of old-fashioned individual liberties and political rights.

Do these characteristics mean that this pact is ‘less democratic’ than its European or Latin American counterparts? What are the purposes of such a pact and what do they reveal about the nature of pacts in general and their relationship to democracy specifically? This essay reflects on these questions through an examination of the Tunisian national pact of 1988.

Before looking directly at the Tunisian case, it is worth remembering that political analysts favour the use of political pacts in establishing democratic regimes because, as Terry Karl puts it in her influential study of pact-making in Venezuela, they

. . .provide a degree of stability and predictability which is reassuring to threatened traditional elites. The rules they establish limit the degree of uncertainty facing all political and economic actors in a moment of transition and are therefore an essential element of successful democrati~ation.~

Useful as they may be in a transition, however, political pacts are not thought to be democratic in themselves. Indeed, since they are negotiated by (and presumably for) elites, they are more likely to reflect, in both procedure and substance, the power relations of the old authoritarian regime than of the envisaged democratic future. Thus, as O’Donnell and Schmitter put it:

. . .modern pacts move the polity toward democracy by undemocratic means. They are typically negotiated among a small number of participants representing established (and often highly oligarchical) groups or institutions; they tend to reduce competitiveness as well as conflict; they seek to limit accountability to wider publics; they attempt to control the agenda of policy concerns; and they deliberately distort the principle of citizen e q ~ a l i t y . ~

This does not seem to have been the case with the Tunisian pact. Although the negotiations were held among political elites, the discussions that produced the Tunisian pact, as well as the text itself, deliberately included a wider spectrum of opinion than

’ Terry Karl, ‘Petroleum and Political Pacts: The Transition to Democracy in Venezuela’, in Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead (eds) Transitions from Authoritarian Rule; Latin America, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, p. 198. ‘ Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitionr from Authoriforinn Rule:

Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, p. 38.

246 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

would be represented in the corridors of power for the foreseeable future. The Tunisian pact was designed to reassure not only the old elite, but the disadvantaged and under-represented as well, that they would not be forgotten in the political transition at hand.

This concern with the disenfranchised does not reflect their capacity to lobby on their own behalf; on the contrary, the unemployed, the ill-educated, and the poor have no interest groups or corporate representation of their own. The national labour union represents only the employed, of course - not the 25 per cent of the active labour force which is estimated to be unemployed - and even it was weakened by government harassment and repression during the 1970s and 1980s. Rather, the Tunisian pact’s concern with the under-represented reflects that fact that the original installation of authoritarian rule had been under inclusionary or populist rather than exclusionary or obligarchical auspices: Tunisia’s was a single-party mobilizational regime for nearly thirty years.5 Qualms about the potential costs of political change were thus felt throughout the society, not only among elites.

Ironically, it is partly as a result of its inclusionary design that the Tunisian pact neglects socio-economic issues in favour of political and cultural, particularly religious, questions. The role of religion in Tunisian politics is a deeply devisive issue and this emphasis was not simply an effort to skirt questions of economic rights. Nonetheless, the relative inattention to socio-economic issues - the political liberalism as opposed to economic welfarism of the Tunisian pact - permitted appeal to the widest possible spectrum of Tunisians. Moreover, whereas, as Karl points out, most pacts in outlining economic or social prerogatives ‘institutionalize a conservative bias into the polity, creating a status quo which can block further progress toward political social and economic democracy’,6 the Tunisian pact’s silence allows flexibility in the future.

The Tunisian pact suggests that national pacts need not imply the corporatist or conservative political structures and social policies embedded in the pacts of Europe and Latin America.

The best description of Tunisia’s single party in its heyday is Clement Henry Moore, Tunisia Since Inakpendence: The Dynamics of One-Par9 Govmmmnt, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1965.

Karl, ‘Petroleum and Political Pacts’, p. 198.

T H E TUNISIAN NATIONAL PACT 247

Indeed, at least in a transition from a single-party mobilizational regime where political participation has long been conceded and where expansion of political pluralism and competition is the challenge, attention is devoted instead to the political rights and responsibilities associated with classical liberalism.

T H E CONTEXT OF T H E TUNISIAN PACT: BEN ALI’S ACCESSION TO POWER

On 7 November 1988, President Zine El Abdine Ben Ali celebrated his first anniversary as independent Tunisia’s second president. To mark the occasion, he addressed the National Assembly, reviewed a festive parade, and looked on as representatives of sixteen Tunisian political and social organizations put their signatures to the National Pact.

Exactly a year earlier, on 7 November 1987, Tunisia’s eighty- four-year-old President-for-life, Habib Bourguiba, had been declared senile and deposed by Ben Ali, his then Prime Minister and designated successor. Bourguiba’s declining mental acuity and the accompanying drift in Tunisian politics had been a source of concern for several years, but it was the President’s hostility to the growing Tunisian Islamist movement that proved his immediate undoing. After sedition trials of the most prominent Islamist figures in the Autumn of 1987 failed to produce death sentences, he had insisted on reopening their cases, allegedly prompting a plot by Islamist extremists to assassinate both him and his Prime Minister. Ben Ali and his advisers concluded that the President’s ill-health threatened the health of the body politic.

The problems in Tunisia were not merely disputes about the proper role of religion in public life, however, important as that was. Indeed, many observers felt that the debate about Islam’s place in society and politics merely reflected other more fundamental dilemmas. Certainly it was true that by the beginning of the 1980s the fruits of twenty-five years of political stability and economic development under Bourguiba and the single party he founded and led - the Neo-Destour or, after 1964, the Parti Socialiste Destourien (PSD) - were ready for harvest and some of them were bittersweet at best.

On the economic front, by the beginning of the 1980s, Tunisia appeared to have reached the end of twenty-five years of growth


by e~pans ion .~ From the dramatic increase in the size of the government bureaucracy after the French withdrawal, to the development of tourism in the 1960s and the reliance on foreign investment in the 1970s, Tunisia had been able to enlarge the economic pie without having to redivide it: a higher standard of living had been secured without structural reorganization in agriculture or industry, and productivity remained low in both sectors.

In the aggregate, this growth seemed to have produced a remarkable success story: per capita income had risen in constant dollars from $300 in 1956 to $1,300 in 1983, despite the simultaneous doubling of the population to seven million people. The income distribution was very uneven and worsened during the 1970s; unemployment was unofficially estimated at 50 per cent among men under 25 years-old. By the 1980s, the growth rate had dropped to 4.5 per cent and it looked as if further growth would require austerity and probably structural overhaul to right the imbalances in the economy. Agricultural production needed to be raised through land reform, the archaic tax, credit, and finance structures needed revision, and consumer goods subsidies, which absorbed a quarter of the government budget, had to be lifted. These measures, so easy to advocate, were exceedingly difficult to implement. The bread consumers who relied on the wheat subsidies, the business people who contributed to the estimated 80 per cent tax evasion rate, the land-holders who controlled the 3 per cent of the farms which covered half of the country’s agricultural land all constituted powerful constituencies for the status quo.*

Not surprisingly, these economic changes and the dilemmas they produced found expression in politics, even if only obliquely in the one-party regime that prevailed through the 1970s. As the original elite aged, the economy became more differentiated and society correspondingly more complex. The ability of the party leaders to represent all of the increasingly divergent interests

’ Bourguiba founded the Neo-Destour in the 1930s and he and it led the nationalist struggle against French rule, ultimately winning independence in 1956. This treatment of the political circumstances on the eve of Ben Ali’s accession draws upon my more detailed discussion in ‘Democracy Frustrated: the M’zali Years in Tunisia’ in Reeva Simon (ed.) The Middle East and North Aff-ica: Essays in honor of J. C. Hurewitz, The Middle East Institute of Columbia University, 1989. ’ Hassine Dimassi, ‘La crise economique en Tunisie: un crise de regulation’, Maghreb-

Machrek, 103, janvier-mars 1984; Financial Times, January 5 - 9, 1984.


within society diminished. Some of the movements that challenged the ruling party, like the Mouvement des Democrates Sociulistes (MDS), were offshoots of the party itself, created by liberals who saw the once vigorous party as moribund, serving less to moblize the people than to control them. Other movements, like the Mouvement de tendance islamigue (MTI), reflected the political maturation of a generation for whom the old slogans of the struggle for indepencence were tiresome history while Islam provided a vibrant idiom for their hopes and

By the early 1980s, Bourguiba seemed to realise the depth of the malaise and seemed ready to respond. In announcing that the National Assembly elections of 1981 would be freely contested, he is said to have remarked, ‘I gave them pluralism. . . They will not be able to say they had to wait for the death of that fascist Bourgiba’.’’ As it turned out, although a number of new political tendencies gained legitimacy during the ensuing political contest, political pluralism was not to be institutionalized in electoral democracy during the prime ministership of Muhammad M’zali (1980 - 86) when it was widely thought to have had a good chance. Instead electoral fraud, growing corruption, increasing talk of the possibility of military intervention and pervasive popular cynicism characterized most of the era. Small wonder that many people, particularly the young and disadvantaged, turned to the MTI. Organized in the hope of contesting the elections of 1981, the movement saw its leaders arrested shortly before the campaign was to have started. Throughout the 1980s many of its prominent figures were in and out of prison or exile, and growing political violence attributed to Islamist extremists marred Tunisia’s tourist trade.

By 1987, Bourguiba’s attention to politics and policy was flagging and his interest seemed piqued only by the sordid circumstances of his divorce from his politically powerful wife and by the growing strength of the Islamist movement. M’zali’s successor as prime minister, the economist Rashid Sfar, found himself unable to cope with the country’s intractable problems in part because the political elite was preoccupied with morbid and unseemly jockeying for position in the anticipated presidential

grievances. 9

’ Susan Waltz, ‘Islamist Appeal in Tunisia’, Middle Easl Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4,

’* Quoted in Francois Poli, ‘L’engrenage democratique’, Jeune Ajrique, 1088, 11 Autumn 1986.

November 1981.


succession. As Interior Minister, former brigadier-general Ben Ali maintained a low profile, faithfully executing Bourguiba’s unpopular commands to arrest Islamist militants, although when he was appointed prime minister in October 1987, there was widespread concern that this was merely a thinly disguised military coup, under the unwitting auspices of a president long known for his commitment to civilian rule.”

Thus, by the time Ben Ali took over as president, Bourguiba had seemed on the verge of destroying the very institutions which he himself had done so much to build. Tunisia was striking in its many similarities with another time and place, described in a recent discussion of the role of political pacts in paving the way to democracy:

[The regime’s] institutions lacked all authority and credibility. The regime’s authorities were largely discredited because of their inability to counter terrorism effectively or to face the economic challenges, their complicity in brutal repressive practices, or their participation in the financial scandals that had come to light in the last few years, and which extended even to some members of the dictator’s immediate family and entourage.

Nevertheless, faced with a divided opposition, and short of financial and organization resources as well as of a solid social following, the remaining segments of the ruling coalition still retained their monopoly of the repressive apparatus, controlled the largest portion of the ideological apparatus, and could rely on a large part of the civil bureaucracy, as well as on an army recruited during the Civil War that was suspicious of democracy and firmly loyal to Franco’s memory. It was this unequal and unstable equilibrium between democratic and antidemocratic elements that initially framed the transition process in Spain.“

Obviously, Tunisia was not Spain, nor was Bourguiba Franco - as Bourguiba himself prophesised, in Tunisia, ‘they did not have to wait for the death of that fascist. . . ’.

There were more profound differences as well. Bourguiba left a legacy of decayed but no less genuine populist mobilization in the PSD. His was not a corporatist regime, but a single-party mobilizational system and this early commitment to inclusionary policies would be important later in shaping the National Pact. The Tunisian political elite had come to political maturity not in a

I ’ See L. B. Ware, ‘Ben Ali’s Constitutional Coup in Tunisia’, and Dirk Vanderwalle, ‘From the New State to the New Era: Toward a Second Republic in Tunisia’, in Middle EastJownal, Vol. 42, No. 2, Autumn 1988.

I’ Jose Maria Maravall and Julian Santamaria, ‘Political Change in Spain and the Prospects for Democracy’, in Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead (eds), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Southern Europe, op. cit., p. 80.

THE TUNISIAN NATIONAL PACT 25 1

bloody civil war but in a nationalist struggle which had unified more than it divided the people. The younger generations expected to be included in the system and, though they had been frustrated, they had not abandoned the expectation. The ruling ideology of Bourguiba’s Tunisia was inclusive, socially if not politically democratic. If the government was somewhat paternalistic and patronizing, it was not formally illiberal; although Bourguiba’s last years had done much to tarnish the open participatory image of the regime, the popular commitment to the principle was undiminished.

POLITICAL REFORM AND T H E NATIONAL PACT: BEN ALI’S FIRST YEAR

Much of Ben Ali’s first six months in power were devoted to consolidating his control and putting his mark on the regime. He dramatically reduced tensions which had built up around Bourguiba’s militant secularism by going on a pilgrimage to Mecca shortly after coming to power and the call to prayer was soon broadcast on state-controlled television and radio. He honoured his promises to respect human rights and the rule of law by suppressing special tribunals, ending presidency-for-life, releasing what would prove to be essentially all the political prisoners in the country, some three thousand people, before the year was out, and expanding press freedom, causing independent and opposition newspapers and magazines to proliferate. l 3 Ben Ali also presided over the renovation of the PSD, renamed the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Democratique (RCD), and by the end of his first year in office, the party claimed that 40 per cent of the cadres had been replaced and the average age of the membership had dropped to the mid-30s.14

These initiatives represented a substantial change in Tunisian politics, as was apparent to all, and Ben Ali enjoyed enormous popularity among both the Tunisian intelligentsia and the people on the street. Dramatic as they were, however, these reforms did

*’ On the reforms of Ben Ali’s first year, see the special issue of Le Maghreb, ‘Bilan et Perspectives’, No. 125 ,4 November 1988; and FranGois Soudan, ‘Ben Ali; la democratie, c’est h i ’ , Jeune Afrique, No. 1454, 16 November 1988.

’‘ Personal interview with RCD Secretary-General Abderrahirn Zouari, Tunis, 5 November 1988,


not require the involvement of any but a small handful of the president’s advisers. Certainly new members were flocking to the RCD, and as the leader of the party, Ben Ali could not have been dismayed, but as leader of the country and, more important, as an advocate of a pluralistic vision of society and politics, he needed a device that would permit even those who opposed his policies to pledge their allegiance to the country and articulate a common vision of politics and society within which they might disagree on specific policies.

This, of course, was the purpose of the National Pact, proposed by the President in an open letter inviting discussion published in Tunisian newspapers on 5 August 1988. Ben Ali identified four areas in which the outlines of consensus should emerge: national identity, the political regime, economic development, and foreign policy.

Interestingly, there was some confusion at the outset over precisely what the National Pact was intended to be. For some, it was like the Egyptian National Charter of the 1960s or the Algerian National Charter of the 1970s: a detailed reflection of wide-ranging policy debate that accompanied the creation (in the case of Egypt’s Arab Socialist Union) or revival (in the case of Algeria’s FLN) of the ruling single party, pre-empting moves towards political pluralism. For others, including its principal advocate and architect in the government, social scientist and presidential adviser Moncer Rouissi, it was to be more reminiscent of Spain’s Pact of Moncloa, a brief and general agreement on principles among political and social elites which would symbolize, summarize, and perhaps extend popular consensus. l5 Early enthusiasm among those - particularly university intellectuals - who hoped for national soul-searching in dozens of town meetings waned by the beginning of the autumn, when the parties who would eventually sign the Pact sat down to their private talks. By then the composition of the team that debated the Pact had dictated that the Spanish model would prevail.

The participants met repeatedly during the autumn, hammering out the text. Although there was no organized or officially reported popular discussion of the terms of the Pact, the Tunisian press kept up a running commentary, providing reports on what were said to be early drafts and advocating provisions in

l 5 Personal interview with Moncer Rouissi, Tunis, 6 November 1988.


editorials. l6 According to several participants, the discussions themselves were sometimes heated, as might be expected of so diverse a group. The eventual signatories of the Pact included representatives of the six recognised political parties, including the RCD, MDS, the Tunisian Communist Party, and several smaller parties including two which had been granted recognition only in Se~tember . ’~ A representative of a seventh tolerated party led by Ahmed Ben Salah, the former minister with whom the socialist policies of the 1960s are associated, participated in the discussions but did not ultimately sign the document. In addition, representatives of a number of other organizations participated in the debates and signed the Pact: the national labour commission; the Union of Industry, Commerce and Manufacturing, representing business interests; the National Union of Farmers; the National Union of Women; the League for the Defence of Human Rights; and the national unions of engineers, lawyers, doctors and pharmacists. Finally, and formally signing only on his behalf, was an individual associated with the Islamist movement.

T H E TUNISIAN NATIONAL PACT

On the second of the Pact’s thirteen pages, after a preamble extolling Tunisia’s glorious history, particularly the valiant struggle for independence and republican heritage - an important if oblique acknowledgement of Bourguiba’s legacy - and reiterating the democratic principles enunciated by President Ben Ali when he took power, the text described the signatories:

. . .concerned to establish traditions of loyal competition, and convinced that we have a legitimate right to differ which signifies neither sedition nor division, we declare our supreme objective to reaffirm the foundations of the state, the state of all Tunisians. . .

I‘ See, for example, the remarks of the Secretary General of the Tunisian Communist Party, Mohammed Harmel - eventually a signatory of the Pact - in ‘La Tunisie a besoin d’une nouvelle forme de solitarit6 national’, Reulitds, No. 164, 24 - 30 September 1988; and Salah Zghidi, ‘Premitre lecture du project du pacte national’, Le Mughreb, No. 124, 28 October 1988.

These were a socialist party and a liberal free enterprise party. See ‘Les nouveaux parties: l’echiquier politique s’elargit’, Reulith, No. 162, 22 September 1988.

All quotations from the National Pact are my translations from the French text distributed at the signing ceremony on 7 November 1988.


It is revealing that even before they describe the ‘foundations of the state,’ the signatories insist upon the right of dissent. This sets a tone of classical liberalism which is reiterated throughout the document.

The most important of the ‘foundations’ of Tunisia’s state is its ‘national identity’. The text of the National Pact on this point is unambiguous. The section starts with the assertion that the ‘identity of our people is a specific Arabo-Islamic identity. . . ’. Although homage is later paid to the legacy of Carthage and to the necessity of being open to other languages and civilizations, particularly those of modern science and technology, Arabic is identified unequivocally as the national language. Many Tunisians had come to feel in recent years that Bourguiba was inappropriately infatuated with the West and that the country’s Arab and Islamic heritage had been wrongly disparaged. The renewed pride in Arabic and Islam expressed in the Pact addressed this concern.

Interestingly, however, although Islam is given considerable attention, it is an Islam very liberally interpreted. The text calls on Tunisia to re-establish the rdle avant-gardiste once played by the centres of Islamic learning and scholarship at Kairouan and at the Zitouna mosque in Tunis. The emphasis is on the themes of @ad (independent reasoning, a source of Islamic law usually considered by traditionalists to have been closed half a millennium ago) and on the modernist reform movements that led to the creation of Western-style educational institutions in the nineteenth century. By invoking these schools as well as the name of Khayr al-Din, a prominent nineteenth-century political reformer, the Pact conveys a subtle but unmistakable vision of Tunisia comfortable within, but at the modernist edge of, the Islamic world.

Thus the Pact’s position on the Code of Personal Status is portrayed as consistent with historical precedent. This Code, one of Bourguiba’s proudest achievements, guarantees women equal rights with men in matters of marriage and divorce, thereby outlawing polygamy. It is the most radical such legislation in the Islamic world and although it is sometimes justified as expressing the spirit of the law or the intentions of the Prophet, it directly contradicts the letter of the Qur’an and the provisions of the shari’ah (Islamic law). As a result it has become a cause ce7e‘bre in recent years as the Islamists made its repeal an important symbolic element in their campiagn. In retaining the Code, the Pact accords primacy to liberal and egalitarian principles even as


it allows the Islamists back into the fold. The fear that renewed recognition of Tunisia’s Islamic identity constitutes an abandonment of a liberalism that first appeared in Tunisia well over a century ago is addressed squarely in the repeated evocations of Tunisia’s liberal definition of Islam:

These reforms [in the Code of Personal Status] that aimed at liberating and emancipating women conform to a very old aspiration in our country, founded upon the sound principle of ijtihad and on the objectives of the shari’ah and they constitute proof of the vitality of Islam and of its openness to the demands of the times and of evolution.

The tradition of Islamic reform is also effectively evoked in the section on the ‘political regime’, which begins with the observation that Islamic reform movements have historically opposed absolute or arbitrary power and called for the rule of law. Arguing again that the contemporary political debates in Tunisia are part of a long and respectable history, the text points out that a modern constitution was first promulgated in Tunisia over a hundred years ago. The current problems are thus attributable, so the text argues, to neither the absence of a legal tradition nor the lack of democratic spirit among the people but to ‘the single party system, the marginalization of institutions, the personalization of power, the monopolization of authority’.

To ensure that these errors are not repeated, the Pact upholds an absolute commitment to safeguard human rights, forbids torture and corporal punishment, prohibits arbitrary force whether exercised by the state or by private organizations or individuals, and guarantees freedom of opinion, expression, press, and religion. This last freedom introduces a revealing elaboration, for the corollary to the individual’s freedom of religion is explicitly said to be the government’s freedom from religion: ‘there is a pressing duty to keep houses of God out of political struggles and sedition so that the mosques remain entirely consecrated to God’.

The right to form political parties and associations is guaranteed subject to the law, the requirements of democratic society, public order, and the rights of others. Moreover, it is expressly stipulated that parties must be free of any foreign allegiance. This not only responds to allegations that the Islamists enjoyed moral and material support from revolutionary Iran, but it also limits the foreign relations of communist and Arab nationalist parties. As Lebanon so dramatically illustrates, domestic political competition in the Arab world has frequently provided an arena for regional conflict. Advocates of democracy


are therefore particularly concerned with ensuring that domestic competition is not subverted by regional conflict.

Democracy is described as founded upon diversity of opinion and organization and as requiring acknowledgement of the popular will as expressed in periodic, free, regular elections. The majority draws from these elections the right to exercise power, with the proviso that opposing opinions and the rights of the minority are respected. The political neutrality of the military is described as the ‘sine qua non’ of democracy, and political parties, while charged with the task of political education, are excluded from substituting themselves for state institutions. The fears of military intervention that had begun to circulate in the latter years of Bourguiba’s presidency are thus addressed directly but perhaps more interesting is the characterization of political parties. Many observers believe that the task of disentangling the RCD, so long accustomed to being not simply the dominant but the sole political party, from the state administration is among the most difficult and pressing items on the Tunisian political agenda.

The section on ‘economic development’ is revealing largely in its omissions. It calls for the guarantee of democracy through development designed to satisfy basic needs, described as adequate food, decent housing, education, culture, health, and work. Far from offering specific policy suggestions, however, the text relies largely on exhortation: citizens are called upon to be persevering, creative and optimistic. They are urged to pay their taxes and the government is asked to serve as a good example of devotion to duty and service in the public interest. The only substantive proposals are retention of both the public and private sectors as having important roles in the development of the country; pursuit of agricultural development through technological modernization (land reform is conspicuous by its absence); concentration of productive enterprises in the previously disadvantaged regions of the country. Both employers and employees are to be made aware of the gravity of the country’s circumstances and asked to be prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.

The move away from Bourguiba’s francophile orientation in foreign affairs that was apparent soon after Ben Ali came into office is reiterated in the brief final section on ‘foreign relations’. This change ranks with the renewed respect for human rights as having virtually unanimous support in Tunisia. Few Tunisians would dispute the text’s emphasis on the desirability of Maghribi and eventually Arab unity, its wholehearted support of the


Palestinian cause, its reiteration of Tunisia’s active role in the Arab League, Africa, the Islamic world, the United Nations. Homage is paid to those who sacrificed themselves in the independence struggle and the Pact ends with a promise to safeguard the country’s independence.

POLITICAL PACTS: THE COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

A political pact has been defined as ‘an explicit. . .agreement among a selected set of actors which seeks to define (or better, to redefine) rules governing the exercise of power on the basis of mutual guarantees for the “vital interests” of those entering into it’ 19 . They can be important devices in political transitions because both the transition itself and the outcome, if it is democratic, are fraught with uncertainty. Indeed, as has often been remarked, democracy institutionalizes uncertainty by making government reliant on procedures, like elections, the outcome of which is by definition indeterminate. Both because the participants in a political transition are likely to be unaccustomed to uncertainty, and because they may believe that they risk losing previously acquired rights, a pact can be very reassuring. As a procedure, it limits uncertainty by establishing common interests and setting boundaries, while substantively, the participants may insist on explicit substantive guarantees.

Is the Tunisian National Pact a mechanism, as described by O’Donnell and Schmitter,“ that reduces competitiveness, limits accountability, controls the agenda of policy concerns, distorts the principle of citizen equality? Does it, moreover, inhibit flexible and equitable response to social and economic change?

With some qualifications, the answer to both questions appears to be no. Of course, the Tunisian National Pact does represent an effort to control the agenda of policy concerns, although in its emphasis on Islam it is clearly responding rather than merely dictating to a social movement that developed outside the ruling circles. Otherwise, however, it promises a widening of the arena of competition and an increase in accountability, and it celebrates the principle of citizen equality. Indeed, it is significantly more inclusive in both its text and its signatories than is the poltical

Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule,

ibid., p. 38. p. 37 .


regime. If the absence of any real economic agenda in the Pact was a concession to a government still grappling with the country’s profound and profoundly complex economic dilemmas, the explicit condemnation of single party rule was a bitter pill for the ruling RCD, even in its newly rejuvenated guise. The Communist Party agreed to the clause protecting private property and the Islamist representative to the retention of the Code of Personal Status. The concessions were significant, as were the potential benefits.

President Ben Ali is not only the leader of Tunisia, but also the head of its government and the chief of the RCD. His position symbolizes the difficulties of disentangling the Nation, the State, and the Party when the Party created much of what is the modern nation-state. The transition from a single-party to a multi-party regime requires a clear-cut distinction between the nation-state and the ‘founding party’ and an explicit endorsement by the ruling elite of the right of dissent. The National Pact serves both as a symbolic representation of the nation-state - explicitly different from, broader and more tolerant than, the platform of the RCD - and a formal acknowledgement of the ‘legitimate right to differ which signifies neither sedition nor division’.

Within six months of the signing of the Pact, Tunisians went to the polls in National Assembly and presidential elections. President Ben Ali ran as the presidential candidate of all the parties; his actual party, the RCD, swept all the Assembly seats thanks to an electoral law designed to discourage representation of minority parties. Supporters of the MTI - renamed the Purti de lu renaissance, to meet the government prohibition of the use of ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic’ in the name of political parties - won almost 14 per cent of the vote nationally and up to 30 per cent of the votes in major towns and cities, including Tunis, despite the fact that the government did not formally legalize the party. Mestiri’s liberal MDS candidate won less than 4 per cent of the vote and complained of fraud although most observers said the polling went reasonably smoothly.

The retention of an electoral law expressly designed to favour the biggest party suggests the difficulty of moving from a single- party regime to even a dominant-party regime. As head of the RCD and beneficiary of the Bourguiba era, Ben Ali is not a political ‘outsider’, however much he may have been a technocrat rather than a politician. His close ties to the military and security apparatus, the ruling party, and the Interior Ministry administration reassured the old guard and, however quickly he


may move in the direction of democratization, he will not dismantle the old regime before he is confident that the foundations of his ‘new era’ have been well laid.

In spite of these problems or, more likely, in anticipation of them, the National Pact offers a promise to enlarge the number of participants, to embrace new groups - even including, as it happened, newly recognised political parties in the discussions - to increase competitiveness, to expand accountability - indeed, to delegate to non-governmental parties and organizations accountability and responsibility for civic education, religious freedom, economic sacrifice - and to guarantee citizen equality. It is evidently a promise that the government does not feel it can fulfil immediately - witness the subsequent elections - and that is one of the reasons the promise itself is important. Moreover, Ben Ali made it quite clear that he did not intend it to be merely empty words: in reshuffling his Cabinet the day after the elections he appointed the head of the Tunisian League of Human Rights - long a bane of the Bourguiba government - and a prominent former member of the executive committee of the MDS to

The liberal cast of the Tunisian National Pact reflects the fact that of the two elements of democracy identified by Dahl - contestation and participation“ - it is contestation, not participation, which is the novel and difficult element in the Arab world. Whether one attributes it to the strong egalitarian traditions of Islamic political theory, to the imperatives of the nationalist struggle against European imperialism or to the demands of nation-building and the creation of citizenship after independence, the principle of egalitarian participation had long been acknowledged by elites and masses alike. Indeed, as Michel Camau has pointed out, after independence in North Africa, individual liberty was subsumed in the national agenda.

All identify their liberty or rather their liberation with the construction of a society where poverty and external dependence will have disappeared. Thus they do not ask that those in power maintain an equilibrium among different options nor preserve their liberty but to take support from their profound solidarity to attain their liberating ~bjective.‘~

important posts. 21

” Souharyr Belhassan, ‘Tunisie: Les “nouveaux” a pied d’oeuvre’,Jeulae Afrique, No.

’* Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Parficipatzon and Opposition, New Haven, Yale University

23 Michel Camau, La Nation de Deinocratie dans la pensee des dirigeants maghrebins, Paris,

1481, 24 May 1989.

Press, 1971.

Editions du Centre de la Recherche Scientifique, 1971, p. 18.


Democracy was understood as participation in a collective enterprise, not a political mechanism to guarantee individual liberties or to foster government accountability. Thus political disagreement was initially perceived as treasonable dissent. Unlike the corporatist systems of Europe and Latin America, where differences among social groups were anticipated - indeed welcomed - as part of the structure of the political realm, if in distinctly illiberal arrangements, in the postwar Arab world such differences were denied, and as they became stronger, repressed.

In the course of the several decades after independence, society has become more differentiated, as class, regional, generational differences have grown more striking, and the government’s ability and willingness faithfully to reflect unanimous support has correspondingly declined. Thus have the regimes in the Arab world found themselves confronting and, usually reluctantly, acknowledging demands for individual liberties and political rights of belief, expression and dissent.

The Tunisian National Pact constitutes an effort to reiterate and celebrate the solidarity of the Tunisian people - their fidelity to their Islamic heritage, their pride in the nationalist struggle - while admitting and, indeed, encouraging the existence of pluralism of ideas and interests. Far from introducing a conservative bias into subsequent political relations, this pact may be better understood as an effort to foster the tolerance of dissent and opposition which is a cornerstone of democratic politics. That the Pact itself is only a first tentative step in that direction should be apparent; there are many pitfalls in any transition of a regime. What is significant is not necessarily how far the National Pact has taken the Tunisians, but the direction in which it points.

political pacts, liberalism, and democracy: the tunisian national pact of 1988

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