Экономические науки/2. Внешнеэкономическая политика

Фадва Бен Брахим

Уфимский государственный авиационный технический университет, Россия

How the Tunisia revolution played an important role for the countries in develop benefits from this new situation

As we knew Arabic revolution or as many countries called (ARABIC SPRING) because they thought it will bring success, democratizes, and the development to this countries but as usual the opposite was.

We don’t know yet why, what happen, and who is the really beneficiaries of it.

Iam not remind about which countries was but I will remind only why this revolution happened, all this countries was living in dictatorial politic system and after more than 20 years they decides to resolved but instead of resolve they find themselves in new wars and not just revolution.

Many countries benefits from this situation not only Europe or unites state but Arabic countries too.

We start speak from touristic way before Egypt and Tunisia they have almost the highest percentage of tourist but know we find Dubai and morocco.. Not only because of securities events which happened recently but also those countries tried to make cheaper prices to attracted the interesting and also the media which they helped them a lot and you readied some time all this countries she is responsible if any touristic from any countries had problem in revolution countries.

We will start speak about what happened in Tunisia , certainly remains a bright spot, relatively speaking. In this small country, where the 2011 revolutions began, Islamist rule was averted and a liberal democracy that allows the left and trade unions to organize openly has been achieved, albeit with no serious measures to deal with the poverty and economic oppression that were at the root of the 2011 revolution.

I will look more closely at some of these developments across the region. But before doing so, I want to address two widespread limitations that have characterized much of the response to the Arab revolutions on the left.

The first limitation is seen in the denial that these were even revolutions at all, despite the fact that in the remarkable year 2011 three governments actually fell (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya) and three more were seriously challenged (Bahrain, Yemen, Syria). Some longtime Marxists have argued that these were not revolutions because they did not change the class structure of society. This is a very narrow definition of revolution, which is at variance with Marx’s own view of different types of revolution, one of them “the merely political which leaves the pillars of the house standing,” and the other “a radical revolution,” attaining or at least aiming at “general human emancipation”. The Arab revolutions were somewhere in between these two types of revolution, mainly expressing political (democratic) aims, but also expressing class and economic ones, especially in Tunisia and Egypt.

The second limitation has taken the form of the premature burial of the Arab revolutions. When Islamist groups won elections in fall 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt, some were quick to say that the Arab Spring had already turned into the Arab Winter. That may be true today, but not everywhere and it was certainly not the case in 2011. For example, from 2011 to 2013, Tunisia deepened its democracy by placing the Islamists on the defensive after radical jihadists assassinated 2 leftist leaders. In Egypt too, the hour of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood was rather brief, as the military took advantage of mass discontent with the Brotherhood, including on the left, to stage the coup that reverberated against the left as well as the Islamists. At a more general level, the spirit of the Arab revolutions continues to reverberate throughout the region and more widely around the world

At a regional level, what the Arab revolutions achieved that cannot be put back into the bottle is the upsetting of a decades-old dualism in which nominally secular authoritarian regimes legitimated themselves by pointing to retrogressive Islamist authoritarianism as the only real alternative. At a global level, the Arab revolutions illustrated for a new generation the suddenness with which mass movements of millions can arise, overthrowing seemingly entrenched regimes in a matter of days.

Liberal Democracy in Tunisia under a New Constitution

In what amounts overall to a very bleak period for the Middle East four years after the 2011 revolutions, another positive development needs our attention, the establishment of democracy and constitutional rule in Tunisia. This small country, the first to rise up in the 2011 revolutions, has also been the most resilient in terms of maintaining some of the original goals of 2011. However, this resilience has been limited to the political level, that of democratic and human rights, and does not extend to the social sphere, to the central demands also raised in 2011 for an end to poverty and unemployment.

As in Egypt, Islamists and their allies came to power in the first post-revolution elections in fall 2011, but the Tunisian Islamists of the Ennahda Party were less dogmatic than the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Moreover, the military was far weaker — and the trade unions and the left stronger — than in Egypt. Still, it took massive street protests in 2013 after the assassinations by Salafists of two leftist leaders, Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahimi, to force Ennahda to retreat and to allow a more secular and feminist Constitution to be written and enacted in fall and winter 2013-14.

Feminists also played an important role from 2011 onwards in combating any attempt to roll back the fairly strong women’s rights gains achieved since Tunisia won its independence from France in 1956. At least around gender, much of the Tunisian constitutional debate took place on the streets as feminists vehemently opposed a 2012 draft paragraph written by Ennahda supporters that described men and women as “complementary” rather than “equal.” According to sociologists Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh, “Women’s organizations, which historically did not exert significant influence on the state in Tunisia, have been exceedingly important to debates about the constitution… All of a sudden, constitution writing emerged as an integral part of the new ‘politics from below’ in which different groups expressed their opinion, sometimes vehemently.” This is very different from the top-down enactment of women’s rights provisions under the pre-2011 regimes and it suggests that the new gender rights in the 2014 Constitution will enjoy a deeper level of support within society as a whole (Charrad and Zarrugh, “Equal or complementary? Women in the new Tunisian Constitution after the Arab Spring,” Journal of North African Studies 19:2 [2014]). A very small LGBT movement has also emerged publicly, and it is campaigning discreetly to decriminalize homosexuality, now punishable by up to three years in prison (Frédéric Bobin, “En Tunisie, le combat fragile des homosexuels pour la reconnaissance,” The 2014 Constitution enshrines a host of democratic and human rights for citizens in relation to the state. It also establishes the principles of gender equality and parity in terms of political representation. In the sphere of religion, it prohibits the accusation of apostasy (takfir), a common tactic of religious extremists that amounts to a call for someone’s assassination. These are very significant gains indeed. They are not, however, without their limitations, even on gender. As French scholar Edith Lhomel notes, while women are granted political and economic equality, “these advances unfortunately do not pertain to the private sphere” (Espoir de la Constitution tunisienne,” Esprit 3-4 [2014]).

The biggest gaps appear in what the Constitution does not even address seriously, the socio-economic sphere. With unemployment and recourse to informal labor at catastrophic levels, young people have been immigrating across the Mediterranean to Europe in droves, often at great risk. Some youth have been drawn to radical Islamist groups, which have profited from the chaos in Libya and the availability of funding from Gulf Arabs to set up training camps in Libya. These Salafists, most of whom now express loyalty to ISIS, have recently bragged of their role in the assassinations of the two leftist leaders in 2013. More recently, they have staged two terrorist attacks on Western tourists, in March and in June. These have claimed dozens of lives and will only increase economic misery by damaging the country’s important tourism industry.

The March attack occurred just six days before the leftist World Social Forum in Tunis, which led to the fear that many organizations would pull out at the last minute. Instead, there was “an avalanche of messages” stating that virtually all of these leftist organizations would attend, “more than ever, in a spirit of solidarity with the Tunisian people.” The opening demonstration of the WSF ended at the Bardo Museum, the site of the attack, under the slogan: “The peoples united, for freedom, for social justice, for peace, and in solidarity with the victims of terrorism and all forms of oppression” (Pierre Beaudet, “Le Forum social mondial, un outil toujours essentiel pour les mouvements et les luttes: Entrevue avec Gustave Massiah”).

Thus, Tunisia has set up a somewhat liberal democratic republic in which feminists, trade unions, and the socialist left can organize openly, something that is hardly the case in most of the region. This has by no means brought about the original revolution’s social justice aims.

Two sets of elections were held in the fall of 2014. In the parliamentary elections, the Nida Tounes Party — a coalition of liberals, nationalists, former officials from the regime of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, and some parts of the left — came in first, but without a majority. The moderate Islamist Ennahda Party placed a close second, while the openly socialist Popular Front drew about 6% of the vote. The first round of the presidential elections had a similar result, with the second round giving a clear majority to Nida Tounes leader Beji Caid Essebsi, who was by then supported by most of the non-Ennahda parties, including the Popular Front, which saw the Islamists as the greater enemy. Essebsi, an 88-year-old politician who served under independence leader Habib Bourguiba, retired from politics in the early 1990s, during the first years of Ben Ali’s rule. In the immediate aftermath of Ben Ali’s overthrow in 2011, Essebsi became interim prime minister, but was for a time eclipsed by Ennahda.

The recent terrorist attacks on tourists have led to a crackdown by Essebsi’s government, with some stringent new security laws that undermine civil liberties enacted. At the same time, social unrest persists. As Nadia Marzouki and Hamza Meddeb report: “Since the formation of the government in February 2015, strikes, demonstrations and occupations of work places have been incessant. Members of the health sector, schoolteachers, railway workers, civil servants have organized numerous protests and strikes. Since March 2015, strikes in the mining region of Gafsa have completely blocked all economic activity in the surrounding area. Recently, clashes occurred between unemployed youth and police forces in the city of El Faouar in the South West of the country. The protesters reclaimed their right to employment and the development of their marginalized region, where many oil companies are installed without endorsing any social or environmental responsibility in the development of the area. As representative of the middle classes, the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT) appears increasingly unable to deal with these protests and to channel the social claims of the disenfranchised lower classes, who feel excluded from political representation and from enjoying the benefits of the revolution” (Marzouki and Meddeb, “Tunisia: Democratic Miracle or Mirage,”

On the one hand, this kind of unrest shows the severe limits of the new political order that has been established in Tunisia, one that is still clearly within the framework of capitalism. On the other hand, it is only through these kinds of actions that the revolution begun in 2011 can be deepened into something that fulfill those aspirations at their deepest level by challenging that very capitalist order.

The democratic process in Tunisia is very encouraging. Regime change took place almost with no victims compared with Egypt, Libya and Syria. The elections brought to government a moderate, enlightened Muslim party, which raised the fears of secularists but is trying by all means to assure its opponents that it is open to sharing power, accepting peaceful transition of power through the election polls and building a civil state.

BIOGRAPHY

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