short essay

AFTER INDEPENDENCE

king or the institution of the state. There were virtually no stable mechanisms for the expression of interests or the for- mulation and implementation of policy. Moreover/ the dev- astating experience of state destruction combined with the country's continued and growing dependence on external sources of revenues to create a pattern of persistent hostility to the notion of the state, to bureaucratic organization, and the social differentiation associated with local control of a state apparatus in earlier eras.

The twenty-five years after independence were times of enormous change in both Tunisia and Libya. However de- pendent upon the international economy the two countries were to remain, the rights and responsibilities of political independence markedly altered the context in which do- mestic politics and economic activity took place. New op- portunities were presented to and new demands imposed upon the Tunisians and Libyans, and the ways in which they were met illustrated the significance of their earlier ex- perience of state formation and social structural change.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The State Consolidated in Tunisia: Economic Development and Political Authoritarianism

The consequences of consistent and continuous state for- mation were evident in the character of Tunisia's dilemmas after independence. Faced with the prospect of capturing a stable, bureaucratic state apparatus, the Tunisian national- ist movement divided, and the divergent interests of its var- ious constituencies became apparent. The capture of the state and consolidation of control by the provincial elite who formed the core of the Neo-Destour, and the extension of the administration into the furthest reaches of the realm through the "socialist" programs of the 1960s, marked the final extinction of tribal politics.

By the end of the 1970s, the state efforts at "moderniza- tion from above" produced a significant industrial sector and promoted class-based politics in the cities. In the rural areas, the government's efforts to guarantee the availability of resources to fuel their industrialization programs and its simultaneous concern to maintain the landed elite from which the governing authorities originated prolonged pa- tronage-based policy and political organization. It was no longer state formation as such but government policy in an established bureaucratic state that was the principal politi- cal influence on the social structure and political organiza- tion of the hinterlands.

INDEPENDENCE AND THE CAPTURE OF THE STATE

The prospect of independence precipitated a near-civil war in Tunisia; the high stakes involved in the imminent

230 231

AFTER INDEPENDENCE

capture of the state led to the dissolution of the consensus among the nationalist elite and the development of rivalries among the contenders for power. During World War II and particularly during the late 1940s, when Bourguiba v,ras in exile and the party was under the leadership of Salah Ben Youssef, party membership expanded dramatically. Al- though Bourguiba considered the Sahil petite bourgeoisie the "dorsal spine" of the party, the party leaders endeav- ored to incorporate all sectors of the society into the move- ment, to strengthen their case against continued French rule. Clientelist recruitment, in permitting the vertical in- tegration of numerous segments of society, enabl_ed t~e party to gather into its fold a wide variety of otherwise dis- parate groups, from the peasantry and the working class to the religious authorities and the old bourgeoisie of Tunis. Such a structure also meant, however, that a breakdown in elite consensus would pit the interests of the various con- stituencies against each other. 1

Bourguiba's strength rested in the petit bourgeois land- owners and merchants of the Sahil, and later the labor union (Union Generale des Travailleurs Tunisiens), estab- lished when the French-Tunisian union split after World War II under nationalist pressure. Ben Youssef, by contrast, found support among the religious authorities, the tradi- tional artisans and merchants of Tunis, and the old com- mercial class of his native Djerba. The underlying differ- ences in the interests of these constituencies were obscured by their common desire for independence, a desire well ar- ticulated in the otherwise vague ideology of the party.

On the eve of independence, Ben Youssef mounted a challenge to Bourguiba' s control of the party and to his

1 On Ben Youssef and the early years of independence, see Le Tourneau, Evolution politique de l'Afrique du Nord musu/man; Clement Henry Moore, Tunisia Since Independence: The Dynnmics of One-Party Government (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); and Elbaki Hermassi, Leaders~ip a~d National Development in North Africa (Berkeley: University of Califorma Press, 1972).

STATE CONSOLIDATED IN TUNISIA

accession to control of the state. Ben Youssef objected to the autonomy agreements that preceded independence, saying they were too much a compromise. For his efforts he was expelled from the party's Political Bureau. As the French moved to grant the full independence that would remove the presumed raison d'etre of the Youssefist opposition, the battle turned violent. The French, at first refusing to inter- vene, finally sent their police forces against the Youssefists, and Ben Youssef himself fled into exile. It was French mili- tary units that undertook mopping up operations in the south against Ben Youssef's supporters in mid-June, three months after Tunisia became formally independent on March 20, 1956.

Neither a simple personal rivalry nor a pure class conflict, this struggle had been a clash of constituencies. The in- creased impersonality and complexity of the state bureau- cracy of the Protectorate had weakened political organiza- tion based solely on personal relationships and had led to the appearance of broad-based groups conscious of their collective interests. The Protectorate's pervasive discrimi- nation and its failure to permit open representation of the various interests of Tunisians, however, had inhibited the deveiopment of organized interest groups and prolonged reliance on individual followings as the principal mecha- nism for aggregating and articulating political demands. Bourguiba and Ben Youssef had different visions of the fu- ture of Tunisia-Ben Youssef was the greater admirer of the Arab nationalists of the Middle East, for example, while Bourguiba preferred the secular liberalism he had known in France-and these reflected the differing interests of their supporters.

With Bourguiba's victory his vision and his supporters were also victorious. Although class-based policies and pol- itics were to become increasingly important after independ- ence, particularistic discrimination was not to disappear en- tirely, for the Bourguiba government continued to favor the provincial elite in general and the elite of his home region in

232 233

AFTER INDEPENDENCE

the Sahil in particular. Moreover, the government's desire to maintain its provincial power base and to ensure contin- ued access to the surplus production of the agricultural sec- tor even while it encouraged development of other sectors of the economy would discourage formal recognition of competing interest groups at the national level and prolong the role of patronage, particularly in the rural areas. It was its control of an established bureaucratic state that permit- ted the government to pursue such policies in the face of growing organized dissent.

The first five years after independence were devoted to consolidating the control of Bourguiba and his followers over the state. Not only were Youssefist sympathizers purged from party positions, but the political and economic

. power of the strata that had been Ben Youssef's constitu- encies was undermined. Bourguiba' s supporters moved, for example, to weaken the power of the religious establish- ment and the large absentee landholders of Tunis who had supported Ben Youssef. Within six months of independ- ence, public habus lands had been nationalized, the shari'ah, or religious law, courts integrated into the national French-based judicial system, and the prestigious religious school of Zitouna mosque, where Ben Youssef had an- nounced his break with Bourguiba, placed under control of the Ministry of Instruction.

The weakening of the legal status of habus properties not only deprived the religious establishment of its independ- ent financial base but undermined the old upper class, for private habus lands had often been endowed to the benefit of the bourgeoisie of Tunis. Although, unlike the public ha- bus, the private habus were not absorbed into the public do- main, many of their beneficiaries, fearful that they would eventually be confiscated, began selling their properties, a trend that would continue through the 1960s. The dissolu- tion of habus tenure marked the decline of the old Tunis bourgeoisie and the advancement of the provincial elite from which many of Bourguiba's supporters had issued. In

STATE CONSOLIDATED IN TUNISIA

one northern region, for example, 80 percent of the habus property was bought, usually on concessionary terms, by local landowners. The magnitude of this shift in economic power from Tunis to the regional elite is suggested by the fact that well over a fifth of the total agricultural land in Tunisia was held as habus at independence. 2

Bourguiba simultaneously moved to enhance his control of the political apparatus of the state. Five days after inde- pendence, a National Constituent Assembly was elected, charged with writing the Tunisian Constitution, and Bour- guiba became prime minister. The Assembly electoral law had been designed to favor election of Bourguiba support- ers and it proved effective in doing so: by the summer of 1957, the Assembly had deposed the Bey-suspected of Youssefist sympathies-and named Bourguiba president. He announced on August 1, 1957, "I have become the fa- ther not only of Destourians but of all Tunisians."3

By the time the constitution was promulgated, Bourguiba had the state well in hand, and Hedi Nouira, head of the newly established national Central Bank-and like Bour- guiba, a native of the Sahil town of Monastir-was dele- gated the task of preventing the complete collapse of the economy in the wake of the French withdrawal. About half the non-Muslim population left the country between 1956 and 1960; many colons abandoned their lands, which were taken over by the state, while capital flight reached crisis proportions before a national currency and related controls were established in 1958. Private investment dropped pre- cipitously and agricultural production stagnated. The pub- lic sector, however, expanded dramatically: between 1955

2 Ahmed Kassab, L' evolution de la vie rurale dans les regions de la Moyenne Medjerda et de Beja-Mateur {Tunis: Universite de Tunis, 1979), pp. 538-40; Mohsen Chebili, "Evolution of Land Tenure in Tunisia in Relation to Ag- ricultural Development Programs," in Land Policy in the Near East, ed. Mo- hamed Raid El-Ghonemy (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization, United Nations, 1967), p. 190.

3 Cited in Moore, Tunisia since Independence, p. 89.

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AFTER INDEPENDENCE

and 1960, the number of Muslim public employees rose from twelve thousand to eighty thousand. This expansion reflected both replacement of French civil servants and ef- forts to alleviate unemployment among an urban popula- tion that increased by 700,000 during the second half of the decade; most importantly, it also provided the promised material benefits of independence in the form of employ- ment for party activists. 4

Assertion of state control over military force in Tunisia was complicated by the prolonged Algerian war of inde- pendence. The French had arranged to maintain a military presence in Tunisia as part of the independence agreement, and their intransigence when pressed for new discussions reflected the utility of their installations during the Algerian war. By 1961 French refusal to discuss evacuation of the mil- itary base at Bizerte prompted an attack on the facility, which cost perhaps a thousand Tunisian lives and greatly embarrassed the Tunisian military establishment. Al- though the French eventually agreed to withdraw, it was not before a plot against the Tunisian government was dis- covered in the army. Youssefists and Communists were im- plicated, the Communist Party was banned, making the Neo-Destour the sole party in law as well as fact. 5 The Tu- nisian regime thereafter kept military spending unusually low; conscription laws provided a more than adequate pool of potential draftees for the army-eight thousand troops in 1960, twenty-two thousand in 197&-while high civilian un- employment rates guaranteed adequate volunteers for the eighteen-thousand-member domestic national guard and national security police forces. In part because the civil administration was well-established, the military was not used for political purposes like employment or large-scale domestic intelligence, and civilian control of the state's mo-

• For population figures, see Amin, The Maghreb in the Modern World, p. 75.

s On the Bizerte incident, see Moore, Tunisia since Independence, pp. 89 et

seq.

ST ATE CONSOLIDATED IN TUNISIA

nopoly of force was ensured by the low allocations to the military.

SOCIALISM: THE CONSOLIDATION

OF STATE PENETRATION

The increasing levels of government intervention in the economy that marked the early years of independence were made a formal element of the Tunisian political scene with the adoption of a development plan in 1961. At the Party Congress in 1964 the new policy was ratified and the party's name changed to the Parti Socialiste Destourien (PSD). Ah- mad Ben Salah, a young party and union activist and op- ponent of Ben Youssef, was given wide responsibility in an economics "superministry" to outline and implement Tu- nisia's development plans. 6

The ten-year perspective for 1962 to 1971, which the plans were to implement, projected an annual growth rate of 6 percent, which would have allowed the attainment of minimum income goals without major redistribution of wealth. Although structural reforms were envisioned in all sectors, they fell largely within the framework of "tunisifi- cation" and increasing state control. Redistribution of agri- cultural property, for example, was limited to nationaliza- tion of the remaining foreign holdings and establishment of farming cooperatives with state participation. Bourguiba explained Tunisian "socialism" in 1964:

[After independence] the exploitation of the people by colonization was replaced by another form of exploita-

6 On this period, see Amin, The Maghreb in the Modern World; Hermassi, Leadership and National Development; Moore, Tunisia since Independence; Lars Rudebeck, "Development Pressure and Political Limits: A Tunisian Ex- ample," The Journal of Modern African Studies 8, 2 (1970); and Lilia Ben Salem, "Centralization and Decentralization of Decision Making in an Ex- periment in Agricultural Cooperation in Tunisia," and Ezzeddine Mak- louf, "Political and Technical Factors in Agricultural Collectivization in Tunisia," in Popular Participation in Social Change, ed. June Nash, Jorge Dan- dler, and Nicholas S. Hopkins (Chicago: Ardine, 1976).

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AFTER INDEPENDENCE

tion it would be idle to deny.... Old customs, old eco- nomic structures, especially agricultural structures, and archaic modes of production encouraged the circulation of wealth under conditions that were inadmissible to one's reason and revolting to one's conscience.... Injus- tice crept in without anyone realizing that he was still being exploited as he had formerly been by foreign set- tlers.... This brought us to adopt socialism, and we de- cided to solve our problems progressively.7

Under the guise of socialism, the Tunisian state had taken upon itself this dismantling of "archaic modes of produc- tion" that "exploited" people without their knowing it. In fact, Bourguiba envisioned the creation of a modern capi- talist economy. State intervention to that end could conven- iently be portrayed as socialism, and the campaign against the noncapitalist sectors was made all the more attractive to the Tunisian leader by their earlier support for Ben Youssef, a support Bourguiba interpreted as indicating their suscep- tibility to"exploitation."

By 1968, it was clear that the projections of the develop- ment plans had been overly optimistic. The annual growth . rate between 1960 and 1967 was 3.3 percent, which, al- though among the highest in Africa, was little more than half the hoped-for figure. Agricultural production, bur- dened by several particularly bad harvests in the late 1960s, had not increased, and the rate of industrial growth, while high, did not compensate for the problems in agriculture. Despite the development of tourism, the balance of pay- ments deficit grew, and the country remained dependent on foreign aid for well over half its needs.

The agricultural sector had been viewed as the most promising for development; the planners had hoped to in- crease both production and employment through modern-

7 Habib Bourguiba, "Destourian Socialism and National Unity: Speech of March 1, 1966," in Man, State, and Society in the Contemporary Maghrib, ed. Zartman, p. 145.

ST ATE CONSOLIDATED IN TU NI SIA

ization of production techniques. Without, however, ex- tending public control to private commercial agriculture, these goals proved contradictory: agricultural moderniza- tion undermined full employment policies and the private sector made no effort to meet the nationally planned pro- duction and employment targets, in spite of the govern- ment-run service cooperatives at their disposal. A decision to extend the state-run production cooperatives throughout the agricultural sector, including the Sahil, led the olive- growing landholders there to object violently: demonstra- tions in January 1969 in a Sahil town led to police interven- tion, and at least one person died in the ensuing riot.

The government was faced with a choice. Had rates of production increased as dramatically as forecast in the very optimistic perspective of 1961, the income distribution goals could have been met without challenging the inter- ests of the provincial landowners. Without significant ex- pansion outside agriculture, however, genuine improve- ments in the income level of the poor could not be made at no cost to the well-off. The government had to decide whether to impose by force programs clearly unpopular with Bourguiba's major constituency or to abandon equita- ble income distribution as its highest social and economic priority.

By the fall of 1969 the decision was made. Ahmad Ben Sa- lah, architect of Tunisian socialism, was dismissed and the socialist experiment abandoned, as the government re- turned to policies favoring a mixed economy, recognizing the existence of three sectors, public, cooperative, and pri- vate, with emphasis on the last. The "socialist" programs were ended before they weakened the commercial agricul- ture of the provincial supporters of the government, but after a number of other implicit purposes of the interven- tionist policies had been accomplished. The state's admin- istrative penetration of the society and economy had been strengthened through the wide network of service cooper- atives and agricultural extension activities-most of which

239

i' · I 11.··· 1i

238

AFTER INDEPENDENCE

were retained when the expansion of the unpopular pro- duction cooperatives was halted-while the continued ru- ral exodus further eroded the noncapitalist, noncommercial agricultural sector and made available a supply of cheap la- bor. As important, however, was the creation of a newly wealthy bourgeoisie prepared to undertake domestic in- vestment.

Ben Salah' s policies had favored the growth of a new commercial bourgeoisie in construction, public works, and tourism, and they had accumulated capital during the 1960s while consumer imports were restricted. Not a few of these new entrepreneurs had been provincial landowners, and they had accumulated capital in the agricultural sector, buy- ing habus properties, for example, and increased their pro- ductivity through mechanization. They also diversified their investments beyond commercial agriculture to trans- port, construction, hotel management. Partly _because of the continued significance of patronage, they enioyed easy, often preferential, access to government and private credit. It was they who would profit from economic liberalization, and Bourguiba was to give them their opportunity during the 1970s. 8

ECONOMIC LIBERALISM AND POLITICAL

AUTHORITARIANISM

By the standards of classical liberalism, the Tunisian state remained heavily involved in the economy throughout the 1970s-the government's share in total capital investment never dropped below 50 percent-but its adoption of the rhetoric, and to some extent the reality, of private enter- prise represented a major shift in state policy. As the state withdrew from its overwhelming involvement in the econ-

s Daniel Karnelgarn, "Tunisie--Developpernent d'un capitalisrne de- pendant," Peuples mediterraneens 4 (July-September 1978): 114; see Kassab, L'evolution, and Hafedh Sethom, Les fellahs de la presqu'fle du Cap Bon (Tunis: Universite de Tunis, 1977) for illustrations of such landowners.

STATE CONSOLIDATED IN TUNISIA

omy, announcing, as the director of the Investment Pro- motion Agency put it, that "the role of the state is to permit the private sector to function," 9 it also began to evince a more explicit capitalist class bias as the urban industrial sec- tor expanded. Bourguiba nonetheless continued to manip- ulate the personal and political followings by which many of the political elite guaranteed their power throughout the 1970s.

The initial reaction of that elite to the fall of Ben Salah and to the new policies of economic liberalization was positive, and it was accompanied by hopes of political democratiza- tion: single-party rule was widely thought to be inappro- priate to a liberal economic regime. Bourguiba did not, however, move to give up his considerable powers. By the end of 1971, he appointed the Monastir-born president of the Central Bank, Hedi Nouira, prime minister, and at the Party Congress of 1974 the government opposition to polit- ical liberalization was unmistakable. Bourguiba, who had reached the end of his constitutionally allotted three five- year terms, was elected president for life, a position he had previously declined, and seven signatories of a declaration deploring arbitrary decision-making were expelled from the party, to join a number of former Political Bureau mem- bers who had left the party since the late 1960s. 10

The promotion of the private sector associated with Hedi Nouira's tenure as prime minister produced, at least for the first half of the 1970s, a positive aggregate economic pic- ture. Between 1970 and 1976 Gross Domestic Product grew 9 percent a year, well over double the rate of the 1960s, while the government's share in total new investment in manufacturing dropped to half of the 85 percent it had held in the 1960s. Foreign private investment was encouraged by the very liberal investment codes of 1972 and 1974, and be-

9 Quoted in Kamelgarn, "Tunisie," p. 115. 10 On these developments, see Elisabeth Sterner, "Le lX' Congres du

Parti Socialiste Destourien," Maghreb-Machrek 66 (1974).

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AFTER INDEPENDENCE

tween 1969 and 1974 the country ran its first balance-of-pay- ments surplus, as the trade deficit was offset by services and capital inflow.11

The picture worsened late in the decade-in 1977 growth in GDP dropped by half and unemployment doubled-but even earlier, discontent with the policies of the government was evident, as student and labor groups backed frequent demonstrations and strikes. The government refused to change its position, signaling its attitude in April 1976 when the constitution's call for freedom, order, and justice was revised to place order before freedom.

Wildcat strikes by both private and public sector workers protesting the low wages designed to attract foreign invest- ment continued throughout 1977. Outbreaks of violence during a strike in Ksar-Hellal, birthplace of the Neo-Des- tour, precipitated the first intervention of the Tunisian Army to quell civil disturbances. Although the strike had not been sanctioned by the UGTT, the union leader and PSD Political Bureau member Habib Achour supported the workers, and the UGTT became the rallying point for op- position to the regime. In January 1978, as Achour resigned from the party's Political Bureau, the union's National Council issued a statement condemning N ouira' s economic policies as favoring capitalists-Tunisian and foreign-to the detriment of the national interest.

The country's first general strike was called for January 26, 1978, to protest the government's arrest of several union militants. The strike turned to rioting as the police, army, and the little-known PSD militia clashed with students and workers: The death toll of what became known as Black Thursday was officially given as forty-seven, although many unofficial sources put it as high as two hundred. Over three hundred people were given sentences of up to six years' imprisonment, and Habib Achour was sentenced to ten years at hard labor.

11 International Monetary Fund, Surveys of African Economies, 1977.

ST A TE CONSOLIDATED IN TUNIS IA

Prime Minister Nouira remained steadfast in opposing ~aves :award democratic politics. Addressing a group of Journalists only a month after the January strike, he said: "Pluralism for us is just the icing on the cake .... England, the mother of Parliaments, arrived at its own version only ~fter several centuries. Tunisia has had just twenty years of mdef:~ndence, it i~ still a political baby. I am not advocating a political apprenticeship of several centuries, but at least we should have some apprenticeship."12 N ouira' s refusal to permit the political competition that would legitimize the regime's economic liberalism satisfied no one.

The widespread support for the union's demand for worker representation in the policy-making councils of the go_vemment illustrated the extent to which capitalist enter- pnse had grown in Tunisia since independence. Although most of the private industrial investment had come from overseas as a consequence of the investment laws of the early 1970s, employment in manufacturing had doubled between 1966 and 1976, and by the end of the decade, in- dustry was to account for over a third of GDP. N ouira' s fail- ure to acknowledge the participation of the working class in the cap_italist ~evelopment of the country suggested a lack ?f confidence m the local bourgeoisie's ability to maintain its own domination. His policy soon began, however, to threaten the interests of that very bourgeoisie as those who did not benefit from the policies of the government-in- ~eed, we:e not represented in its councils-began to ques- tion not srmply the policies but the regime as a whole. 13

. During Nouira's tenure as prime minister, the commer- cial and industrial bourgeoisie born in the 1960s had pros- pered. Indeed many Tunisians remarked on the appear- ance of an indigenous grande bourgeoisie, housed in

12 Quoted in Kathleen Bishtawi, "Glowing Embers: Tunisia at the Cross- roads," The Middle East 42 (April 1978):27.

_ 13 Abou Tarek, "Tunisie: La sate11isation," Les temps modernes 375 (1977);

Nicholas S. Hopkins, "Tunisia: An Open and Shut Case " Social Problems 28,4 (1981). ,

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AFTER INDEPENDENCE

ostentatiously expensive villas of the beachfront suburbs of Tunis and profiting from the ,,government's policies of en- couraging foreign investment and private lending from abroad, as well as from its efforts to maintain "labor peace." The benefits of the development of the 1970s fell dispropor- tionately to the already wealthy: the rural-urban income disparities accentuated, and at the end of the decade over 30 percent of the population fell below the poverty line es- tablished by the World Bank. The unemployment rate dur- ing the late 1970s was put at 12 percent, but that did not in- clude the very serious disguised unemployment in the rural areas and among recent migrants to the cities, many of whom eked out livings on the margins of the service sector. It also did not include the 230,000 Tunisians registered as working abroad-a figure which was equal to the total in- dustrial work force at home-nor the thousands of unregis- tered workers abroad, particularly in Libya. Moreover, many of the highly educated students faced dismal job prospects at home, since the expansion of managerial and professional jobs was not proceeding as fast as the educa- tional system was turning out qualified job seekers. 14

The agricultural sector stagnated during the 1970s, as the government policies favored the urban population. The creation of the Caisse Generale de Compensation, which provided government food subsidies, benefited the urban working class to the detriment of the rural poor by artifi- cially depressing the prices of agricultural produce. Agri- cultural credit policies were designed only to prevent fur- ther concentration of landownership-4 percent of the landowners controlled 40 percent of the land-and did not permit small owners to improve their productive capacity materially. The government's interest in extracting re- sources from the agricultural sector to fund industrial ex-

14 See Kamelgarn, "La Tunisie"; Jean Poncet, "Les structures actuelles de !'agriculture tunisienne," Annuaire de L'Afrique du Nord 14 (1975); and Youssef Alouane, L'emigration Maghrebine en France (Tunis: Ceres Produc- tions , 1979).

STATE ·co1'150LIDATED IN TUNISIA

pansion ensured that the landowning elite maintained its position as it diversified; and it contributed to the perpetu- ation of patronage in the rural areas. Access to the food- stuffs donated by international aid programs among the ru- ral poor was limited, for example, to PSD members, a policy designed to guarantee the party's dominance among those rural dwellers whose larger interests were not served by the government. 15

In part because it perpetuated the organizational struc- tures of patronage in the countryside, the failure of the gov- ernment to respond to the demands of the rural poor pro- duced protest couched not in terms of the economic grievances of a class but in the idiom of social justice char- acteristic of a neglected constituency or an abandoned clientele. The failure of the regime to permit the political participation of the working class represented in the UGTT created an alliance of convenience between the disadvan- taged in the agricultural sector and the disenfranchised workers. As the neglected in Tunisia looked for a political voice, they turned to an Islamic indictment of the govern- ment's integrity and a call for social equity.

The Islamic fundamentalist or renewal movement had taken shape in Tunisia in the early 1970s. 16 Although many observers suggested that the government had tacitly en- couraged its activities as a counterweight to left-wing critics of the private enterprise policy, the Muslim revivalists could not long serve the purposes of the new bourgeoisie. They opposed the continued foreign influence in the econ- omy and society, decried the reliance on tourism-the country's major earner of foreign exchange-and objected to the secularization policies associated with Bourguiba since his early battles with Ben Youssef. There was little

15 Khalil Zamiti, "Exploitation du travail paysan en situation de depend- ance et mutation d'un parti de masses en parti de cadres." Les temps mo- dernes, 375 (1977).

16 Souhayr Belhassan, "1:Islam contestataire en Tunisie," Jeune Afrique 949--51, 14--28 March 1979.

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AFTER INDEPENDENCE

common ground between the rising bourgeoisie and the renewal movement; once Nouira's opposition to working- class participation in Tunisian politics was abandoned, gov- ernment tolerance of Muslim political activity quickly van-

ished as well. In February 1980 Prime Minister Nouira suffered a stroke,

and in April Bourguiba replaced him with Muhammad Mzali, a former minister of education and, like his prede- cessor, a native of Bourguiba' s Sahil hometown, Monastir. His cabinet included several of Nouira's liberal opponents, who rejoined the PSD, and his appointment was widely in- terpreted as signaling a relaxation of the political authori- tarianism associated with Nouira. 17 He moved quickly to defuse some of the major sources of discontent: the 1982 budget and the Five-Year Development Plan issued the same year both gave evidence that the government was moderating its promotion of private capital, as direct gov- ernment investment was to increase by 30 percent over the previous year, and a chastened Habib Achour was permit- ted to rejoin the leadership of the UGTT.

In contrast to the 1960s, however, the partial reentry of the government into the growth sectors of the econo~y was not accompanied by a return to socialism as a legiti- mating ideology. The capitalist sector of the economy was much stronger, thanks in part to significant foreign involve- ment, and the government neither needed nor wanted to incur its displeasure. Instead, Mzali advocated taking the political risk Nouira had never countenanced, urging that the state's commitment to capitalist development be matched with political democratization.

Bourguiba, apparently concerned that the criticisms of the Muslim groups threatened the stability of his regime, acquiesced in the experiment. The National Assembly elec- tions of November 1981 were to be openly contested. The

1? Middle East Economic Digest, 18 December 1981; Abdelaziz Barouhi, "Un nouveau dauphin," Jeune Afrique 1008, 30 April 1980.

STATE CONSOLIDATED IN TUNISIA

UGTT and the Neo-Destour ran joint lists in a "National Front," and three other groups were permitted to present candidates. The announcement of the elections, made in April 1981, suggested that any group winning over 5 per- cent of the vote would be permitted to form a legal political party. As Bourguiba reportedly remarked before the elec- tion: "I gave them pluralism.... They will not be able to say that they had to wait for the death of that fascist Bour- guiba."18

Even at the outset, pluralism was not for everyone. It was designed to weaken opposition to the government by re- moving one of the major political grievances against the re- gime. Indeed, it apparently permitted the regime to move against its most immediate, and perhaps most dangerous, opponents well before the elections. In May, several lead- ers of the Muslim renewal groups established the Mouve- ment de Tendance Islamique, with an eye to contesting the November elections. In September, after anti-Bourguiba speeches were reportedly given in mosques, the regime cracked down on the fundamentalists: sixty-eight were ar- rested, tried, and convicted of defaming the president, and sentenced to up to twelve years in prison.

Even before the Muslim movement was disbanded, there had been no doubt that the National Front coalition would win the overwhelming majority of the Assembly seats. The UGTT, in internal elections widely acknowledged to have been fair, had returned a governing council solidly pro-Des- tour, and most of its local and regional representatives were party loyalists. Nonetheless, the campaign was hotly con- tested and the opposition leaders were permitted to give publicity to their views in newspapers and radio and tele- vision appearances.

The election itself proved to be a disappointment. The National Front and its independent allies swept the Assem-

1" Quoted in Fran~ois Poli, "L'engrenage democratique," Jeune Afrique 1088, 11 November 1981.

246 247

AFTER INDEPENDENCE

bly seats; not a single opposition candidate was elected. The opposition groups alleged widespread irregularities, and Mzali himself acknowledged that there may have been occasional instances of coercion, saying, however, that they had not substantially influenced the outcome. It appeared that elements of the PSD had had second thoughts about the experiment on the eve of the elections and had arranged for no group to receive the 5 percent required to establish a recognized political party.

Apart from the small Communist Party, all the individu- als and groups who participated in the elections had begun their political careers as prominent members and factions of the Neo-Destour. The supporters of the deposed and exiled Ahmad Ben Salah ran lists as an offshoot, known as MUP II, of the party he founded in exile, the Mouvement de l'Unite Populaire; the liberals who left the party in the late sixties and early seventies, led by former Defense Minister Ahmed Mestiri, had organized as Social Democrats and they presented lists throughout the country. During Nouira's tenure, the party leadership had attempted to por- tray these movements as defections from the PSD that re- flected only the personal ambitions and followings of dis- appointed power seekers. This claim, that the division within the elite was merely a consequence of personalistic clientelism, was an effort to justify authoritarian policies by discrediting the regime's opponents and suggesting the "political immaturity" of the elite. 19 In fact, the organiza- tion of Tunisian interest groups as factions within the party had been as much a consequence of prolonged single-party rule as its cause. By the 1980s, the government had appar- ently decided that these factions better served its purposes outside the party rather than, as had been the case in the past, to make any effort to reintegrate them into the fold.

w Clement Henry Moore, "Clientelist Ideology and Political Change: Fictitious Networks in Egypt and Tunisia," in Patrons and Clients in Medi­ terranean Societies, ed. Ernest Gellner and John Waterbury (London: Duck- worth, 1977).

STATE CONSOLIDATED IN TUNISIA

Although the mixed results of the experiment in democ- racy left a number of issues in Tunisian political life ume- solved, the government appeared to be willing to continue, if hesitantly, the move toward pluralism: it was neither pos- sible nor necessary any longer to equate "all Tunisians" with "all Destourians." As ex-party members, the MUP II and the Social Democrats were, like the party itself, com- mitted to the path of secular modernization-if somewhat less enthusiastic about unbridled private sector capital- ism-and the appearance of pluralism could defuse much of the articulate dissatisfaction with the regime.

Most importantly, although the defections had drained the ruling party of many of its urban petit bourgeois and in- tellectual supporters, the elections-and the election irreg- ularitie&-had demonstrated that the PSD remained un- challenged in the rural areas. The party's strength in the counhyside was not due to its explicit policies, which had long before proved to favor the urban sector, but rather to the continued bias in regional development toward the Sahil and to the exclusive access of local party functionaries to state patronage. The electoral strength of the PSD in freely contested elections would rest on its ability to use the advantages of incumbency to maintain control of the coun- tryside. As a consequence, patronage could be expected to remain a primary vehicle for political organization in the ru- ral areas.

The capture of the state by an elite linked by common economic interests had led to the creation of a genuine rul- ing class and in turn to the development of articulate class and interest group identities as the industrial sector grew. The links of the ruling class with the rural elite, however, fostered politics of "modernization from above," which took the country quite far in industrialization but inhibited the thoroughgoing reorganization of the agricultural sector and perpetuated patronage-based authoritarian control of the countryside. This was no longer a reflection of the proc-

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AFTERINDEPENDENCE j I

ess of state formation; the establishment, extension, and ra- tionalization of the state apparatus had been effectively ac- complished. Political and social organization reflected instead the policies through which the state elite structured its relations with its allies and opponents in society.

CHAPTER TWEL_VE

The State Avoided in Libya: From Rentier Monarchy to

Distributive Jamahiriyyah

Unlike Tunisia, Libya came to independence without a sta- ble state apparatus. The succeeding quarter century dem- onstrated both the social structural consequences of the ab- sence of a stable state bureaucracy and the influence of substantial external revenues in postponing the develop- ment of such an administration. In stark contrast to the Tu- nisian experience, Libya's history of independence wit- nessed little stable political activity on the basis of class or dientelism, despite the country's high level of integration into the world capitalist economy, and exhibited a consis- tent avoidance of bureaucratic state structures.

INDEPENDENCE AND THE RE-CREATION

OF A POLITICAL ARENA

During the 1920s and 1930s, many of the surviving Lib- yan leaders who opposed Italian rule had sought exile else- where in the Arab world, from where a number of them ac- tively, if ineffectually, conducted a war of words against the Italian occupation. A Tripolitanian-Cyrenaican Defense Committee was established in Damascus, under the lead- ership of Bashir al-Sadawi, who had been a member of the Tripolitanian delegation to the Sanusi leader Idris in 1922, and groups of emigres established themselves in Tunis, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, and Egypt. Idris had sought exile in Cairo in 1922, where he continued to enjoy cordial relations with the British authorities throughout the interwar period.

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