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

Preface

PREFACE The opportunity to participate in and observe a rural community in the midst of widespread land privatization and other elements of a standard structural adjustment program spurred the early research that gave rise to this book. Two years spent in the patronage-ridden Moroccan countryside had led me to question whether conventional economic reforms would necessarily lead to the creation of the self-help market-oriented society and more democratic politics presumably envisioned by the World Bank and Tunisian architects of Tunisia’s neo-liberal economic transformation. I arrived in rural northwest Tunisia in 1993 and settled in the village of Tebourba for a twelve-month stay. Initially, I attempted to take a snapshot of Tebourba’s political community. I began with participant observation and qualitative interviews of approximately forty-¤ve minutes in order to determine who controlled what resources. At this point, I worked backward to discover how people arrived at their relative power positions. A portion of the interviews explored the strategies people used to obtain these resources. I also explored village institutions of welfare and insurance for the poor and the role of formal politics, including local and national elections and the farmers’ union. I interviewed of¤cials and members of all social categories involved in agriculture. Most of the interviews took place in the ¤elds of the farms themselves and in the of¤ces of local of¤cials. A Tunisian colleague and friend helped me arrange and conduct the early interviews and aided me with the transition from the Moroccan to the Tunisian dialect of Arabic. I conducted the later interviews alone. This textured portrait of contemporary political community in Tebourba as it undertakes market-oriented changes can be found in chapter 4 of this book. The names of the people of the community have been changed to protect their anonymity. The translations from Arabic and French are my own. In order to more fully understand political community in the past in the region and the impact of structural adjustment on political community, I conducted archival and library research, consulting in particular the very useful earlier study of Tebourba by Mira Zussman. The historical perspective of my work can be found in chapter 3. Together, chapters 3 and 4 detail how state elites deliberately stimulated cultural traditionalism in order to sustain neo-liberal reforms; economic reform at the local level strengthened traditional patronage and decreased formal political participation. In my case the local view of neo-liberal economic transformation led to broader questions about the connection between economic reform and political change at the national level. Chapter 1 of this book explores the theoretical underpinnings of the generally accepted proposition that economic liberalization leads to political liberalization. Chapter 2, however, argues to the contrary that economic reform in Tunisia as a whole subverted democratic tendencies. A Social Science Research Council international pre-dissertation grant and a smaller grant from the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Affairs at Princeton University supported a six-week visit to Tunisia in early 1993. During that trip, the Tunisian scholar El-Baki Hermassi suggested Tebourba as a research site and planted the idea of a study that would piggy-back on Mira Zussman ’s earlier community study. The long period of ¤eld work conducted in 1993–94 was generously funded by a Fulbright grant.A post-doctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation provided me with a year’s funding to revise this book at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I am especially grateful to the ¤ne library staff at that institution. Julia Voelker from Georgetown University was a particularly able research assistant during the editing process. I would also like to personally thank Atul Kohli, Lisa Anderson, John Bailey, and especially John Waterbury for their bracing intellectual engagement with my work. xii ❖ Preface ❖ LIBERALIZATION AGAINST DEMOCRACY ...