Liberalization against Democracy: The Local Politics of Economic Reform in Tunisia

2. Neo-liberal Transformation in Tunisia

❖ 2 ❖ NEO-LIBERAL TRANSFORMATION IN TUNISIA Neo-liberal transformation in Tunisia accentuated a growing alliance between the state and rural and urban economic elites. During Tunisia’s period of stateled , inward-oriented growth (1961–69), the state was arguably autonomous. In its pursuit of industrialization and agrarian modernization, the bureaucratic establishment and leaders of the country’s single political party often undertook policies that advanced state elite desires for rapid modernization and greater social equity even when those aims con®icted with the interests of powerful social groups (Zghal 1973; King 1998). However, even during Tunisia’s “socialist” phase, a period when the political elite’s will to transform society was at its height, the state’s relative autonomy and commitment to its own developmental agenda were tempered in two ways. First, the state party’s leadership came from rural areas and the party was initially funded by rural notables (Anderson 1986; Hermassi 1972); thus the post-independence policy process has frequently re®ected the state’s vulnerability to the vested interests of rural elites. Second, state patronage and state policy were used to create a populist authoritarian political order, as well as to pursue modernization. Even during the socialist or statist era, development policy in rural areas, which in some developing countries aggressively sought to reduce land concentration and rural poverty, remained tepid in Tunisia. Rich colonial farms that had been converted into state lands were turned into agricultural production cooperatives administered by the state and tilled by landless laborers and the small peasantry. In the pre-colonial era these had been feudal or landlord estates , with property rights contested by rural notables tied to the Ottoman beylical regime and the tenant cultivators of the lands. These coveted farms did not go to the rural gentry in the early post-independence era; neo-liberal economic polices in the late 1980s and 1990s achieved this multigenerational goal. Redistributive land reform of Tunisian private property, necessary for the success of agricultural production cooperatives, also did not occur. During the period of gradual economic liberalization (1970–86), state policy shifted to a (re-)commitment to a private sector along with the state and cooperative sectors. The state began to evince more of a bias toward economic elites. Using their special ties with the political leadership, the rural gentry began to encroach on state lands and to take advantage of state policy to transform themselves into an urban bourgeoisie: Not a few of these entrepreneurs [a new commercial bourgeoisie] had been provincial landowners, and they had accumulated capital in the agricultural sector . . . and increased their productivity through mechanization. They also diversi¤ed their investments beyond commercial agriculture to transport, construction , and hotel management. Partly because of the continued signi¤cance of patronage, they enjoyed easy, often preferential, access to government and private credit. It was they who would pro¤t from economic liberalization and Bourguiba was to give them the opportunity in the 1970s. (Anderson 1986, 240) The 1970s and 1980s in Tunisiaweredecades of major socioeconomic changes and severe political con®ict. Mass mobilization sparked demands for political liberalization and electoral competition. Unsuccessful transitions to a national democratic regime were initiated in 1981 and again in 1987. President Ben Ali (1987–present) accelerated neo-liberal transformation in Tunisia. During his tenure, initiatives toward broad-based political competition at the national level appear to have culminated in a hegemonic party system and the revitalization of state corporatism. Rural elites and their urban offshoot form the core coalition of this new authoritarian order, and largely determine the state’s economic projects. To a degree, rural areas have been isolated from Tunisia’s experiments in multipartyism. The highly clientelistic organization of agriculture and the alliance between rural notables and state elites have perpetuated authoritarian control of the countryside, even while peasants have been drawn into participation in formal political institutions (Anderson 1986, 249). The recent accelerated free-market modernization of the rural sector in Tunisia, however, produced even more extreme imbalances in rural social power (see below and chapter 4). Rural workers and peasants face even greater hurdles to the development of autonomous organizations for interest aggregation and political expression . This chapter argues that market economic reforms in Tunisia subverted emerging democratic tendencies in the country. The following two chapters explore how the revitalization of cultural traditionalism in rural communities helps to sustain this new authoritarian order. 26 ❖ Liberalization against Democracy ❖ The Collapse of...