Democratization. Fourteen Roman characters that imply leaping from the ashes of disparity into equality. From servitude to ownership. Evolution, in our shared vernacular, towards a system proved by the success of the West. The formula for this perfect synthesis of rule is downloadable. Often, it employs mega-loans tied to adjustments of local policy. The world has seen the formula's effects in the rubble of Yugoslavia, debt-ridden sub-Saharan Africa, Marshall's Plan, and the emerging powers in southern America and Asia. In the Tunisia example, the acceptance of the formula has not produced the promised democratic results. In Liberalization Against Democracy, author Stephen J. King argues the country’s case challenges the assumptions of market-orientation and structural adjustment.An assistant professor of government at Georgetown university fluent in Tunisian and Moroccan Arabic and French, King spent a year in the rich farmland of north-central Tunisia called Tebourba. Along the Medjerba River, he interview farmers, landowners, “below-zeros,” and officials to gauge the effects of Tunisia’s embrace of neo-liberal market reforms. He found three decades of adjustment destabilizing farmers while supporting a one-party system dependent on rural and urban elites.
Rather than producing the diverse political dialogue inherent in democracy, Tunisia’s liberalization adapted feudalism for the 21st century. Before the French Protectorate and an independent Tunisia, farmers of the Tebourba region, descended from the Andalusian exodus after the Reconquista, lived on rural fiefs under the Ottoman beylical regime. “Ancient real possessors of the soil cultivated the land while being subjugated by a class of notables. These peasants frequently lived in tent villages while growing cereals, raising livestock, and tending to olive trees, sometimes under sharecropper arrangements like the khammesat system.” (55)
Khammesat split the harvest, the other four-fifths going to compensate the land owner. King found the system changed perceptibly under the French and then early independent Tunisian control, but that the neo-liberal market reforms gradually brought back this unequal, undemocratic system of the haves and have nots.
When Habib Bourguiba and the Destour Party won independence from the French in 1956, there was a promised diversification of political power, and many observers felt Tunisia could take a regional lead towards democracy. Bourguiba and his financial minister set up many farmers cooperatives to empower and enrich tillers of the fields in a socialist experiment. The cooperatives organized farmers to grow, plant, share and lobby for resources together. They were successful for tool-less farmers, but occasionally stripped titles from tenants without documentation for their inherited land.
Tunisia gradually let go of the cooperatives, in part to balance deficits incurred by industrialization of the nation’s economy, King charges. To increase the productivity of the land, Tunisia’s second and current president Ben Ali and his ministers privatized much of the cooperatives. The land was sold cheaply and nearly exclusively to large landowners with social or business connections to the regime. This was the source of much grumbling in King’s year in the Medjerba valley. Small sums were charged to large landowners while middle and low-class farmers looked over. Without the cooperatives, small farmers had to borrow to rent tools and purchase supplies, fell into debt, and many sold their titles. Now many live under a system similar to the khammesat, in “below-zero” poverty, renting land their ancestors owned. A common story in the saga of the Third Wave.
King wrote: “The neo-liberal transformation that we are witnessing needlessly concentrates rural assets and hinders the ability of the majority of rural dwellers to deal with their problems, cooperate with each other, and cope with political authorities and economic elits during a period of major asset redistribution.” (132)
The resurgence of a feudalistic farming society coincided with a revitalization of a welfare system based on Islam. Like their ancestors, farmers now rely on yearly donations from wealthy patrons and mosques to buy basics like heating oil and tools. The state actively manages this religious system by organizing religious officials, zakat payments, and elite patrons. The farming and welfare systems support each other, like the beylical system and in the stead of an economically empowered populace: the promise of structural adjustment.
King stridently criticizes the “corporatist-authoritarian” government of Tunisia. Pluralism has been permitted as an “orbital cloud of opposition parties that cannot significantly affect the hegemonic role of the [Rassemblement Constitutional Democratique (RCD)]" (139). The regime’s supporters are the beneficiaries of structural adjustment: rural land owners with lands formerly cooperative and urban elites with subsidized industrial and service corporations. Potential for serious opposition, and political factions of democracy, lay in labor and Islam. Either coerced or crushed, both do not currently threaten the regime.
With students and Muslim organizations, the Union Générale Tunisienne de Travail (UGTT) led challenges to Bourguiba’s power at the end of the 1980s. After the economic crisis of the 1990s destabilized their bargaining power, King laments the UGTT’s leadership brokered a power-sharing agreement with the government. The potential and popularity of an Islamic political party was apparent in Tunisia’s first election after Bourguiba. While President Ben Ali won and assumed power in 1987, the Islamic party al-Nahda won 14 percent of the vote. Afterwards they were repressed, members jailed while the staunchly secular government pointed west towards Algeria and shook their heads: “Not here.” To stave off potential opponents, the electoral map was gerrymandered to immobilize organized dissent: “The regime tailored the election law to reconcile the rhetoric of democracy with a parliament consisting entirely of members of the RCD” (32).
Liberalization Against Democracy is an examination of globalization’s legacy with farmers in a river valley in Tunisia. King’s book is not a popular history of Tunisian politics, nor an accessible introduction to political economy. To be fair, it is not billed as that, but his story can wax chaotic. The best part is a series of quotes from Tunisian farmers, landowners and officials. Their words should force a sense of deja vu with observers of globalization’s wake. In their testimony, King finds lessons, and maybe keys, to a new era of globalization.
9780253215838
Liberalization Against Democracy
Local Politics of Economic Reform in Tunisia
by Stephen J. King