Megan Oprea’s January 15 article on The Federalist poses an interesting, but unhelpful question: “Do the mass protests in Tunisia mark the start of a new Arab Spring?”
The question is interesting in that the protests coincided (roughly) with the 2010-2011 protests that ousted President Zine al Abidine Ben Ali and kick started the Arab Spring. However, Oprea’s answer is unhelpful in its inconclusiveness: “Let’s hope that if another Arab Spring is stirring, it goes better than the first one.”
Not only is this recent round of protests unlikely to start another “Spring”, we can reasonably conclude that the outcome is unlikely to be any better than the last one.
History is repeating, just not the way we’re thinking
Oprea paints an accurate picture of Tunisia in 2011:
Back in 2011, when protests in Tunisia first began, Tunisians were motivated by economic concerns. At that time, their complaint had more to do with government corruption — particularly the largesse of authoritarian leader Zine al Abidine Ben Ali and his family in the face of high unemployment and a corrupt police force — than with austerity measures…
After several weeks of massive protests, Ben Ali dissolved the government and fled the country on January 14, 2011. A transitional government was put into place and a commission formed to rewrite the constitution. The protests — and their success in effecting change — inspired peoples across the Middle East, leading to a chain-reaction of similar uprisings.
Tunisia has been lauded as the only real success story of the Arab Spring. It had a peaceful transfer of power and held elections that were generally accepted, although corruption persisted.
Oprea uses recent history to justify her assessment of a region about to be convulsed in uprisings by looking to protests in both Iran and Tunisia. And, yes, evaluating the region on this basis painted as it is against a backdrop of civil war and regional power struggles it’s easy to see some parallels.
Making the argument stronger: If the Arab Spring occurred when the region was relatively stable (no civil wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen; no ISIS to speak of), then we should expect that ongoing instability begets more instability.
Oprea’s analysis is correct, but overlooks several critical factors in Tunisia politics and the region at large.
First, local economic conditions drove the protests in 2011 and in 2018. Though government corruption was certainly the target of protesters in 2011, the buildup of public anger was built on a trend of economic stagnation and unemployment among other factors. These conditions fueled higher prices that drove down living standards. Things obviously haven’t changed that much.
Second, a new constitution was agreed upon and enacted in 2014. This marked the high point of Tunisia’s apparent political rejuvenation. However, another round of protests against a seemingly undue level of Islamist influence in the process ensured a steering of the political system back towards the more secular establishment which Ben Ali had presided over.
So despite uprisings and a new constitution, economic condition hardly improve and a similar political establishment remains in place. Why? That is an intriguing question, and merely drawing parallels between 2011 and 2018 misses the mark. In fact, it’s here that the tendency of foreign policy observers to almost exclusively evaluate national issues in light of regional and global trends leads us astray (as it did many in the Middle East Studies field prior to the Arab Spring).
This missing contextual information points to two critical factors that augur poorly for any kind of meaningful change in Tunisian politics: The role of “reform” in MENA (Middle East North Africa) politics; and the domestic focus of the protests.
Reform to survive
The critical analytical piece Oprea overlooks is that political regimes in the region use “reforms” as a tool of political survival. In other words, social and political “reforms” entrench a regime before they change it or weaken its power.
The first example of this is the Tunisian government itself that promised economic aid to address issues many of the protests were focused on: increased wages, public works and infrastructure development.
Iran, Oprea’s other example, experienced a similar regime response when Friday prayers were used to address protester grievances as legitimate. The Ayatollah’s may not have fully satisfied their constituents, but the direct response to public grievances served a similar defusing effect.
However, neither of these countries is as deft at the reform-to-survive dance as Morocco is.
Tunisia grabs the headlines because of its connection to the Arab Spring, but similar rioting over prices and economic conditions convulsed Morocco last year. The regime’s response? A promise of reforms to address public grievances, which resulted in the removal of several “underperforming” government officials. Consequently, the protests fizzled out.
Morocco is the more interesting case because unlike Tunisia, its regime survived the Arab Spring intact, even though it too was pressured by protests and experiences ongoing flare ups.
The key here is to note that the people of the region are like people everywhere: They desire stable, secure lives in which they can live comfortably. True, conditions may get so untenable that populations conclude that the only way to improve their condition is to make it temporarily worse via uprising and civil war. However, that’s the exception to the rule and provides regimes with margin in which they can reform without changing.
To divorce these decidedly domestic needs and concerns from our analysis of regional politics is to draw unhelpful conclusions at best, or to promote faulty ideas and policies at worst.
Reforming our analysis
While Western observers, in 2011 and 2018, laud public protests and their apparent reforms as being progress towards more open societies, the reality is far more complex and less encouraging in the MENA region. We need to refine our analytical lenses if we’re going to go beyond drawing simplistic parallels.
Reform, by its very nature, fine tunes a system. In democracies, we like to think such fine tuning is progressing towards a common vision of justice and equity. That’s can be right than wrong when your political system is built on strong liberal constitutions and legal principles. However, when a political system is built around the political survival of a family, or group of elites, then reform, and the protests that call for it, stands to achieve little progress beyond restoring stability… and the powers that be.