Tunisia: Understanding Conflict 2012 - Johns Hopkins School of ...

proposed goal (as in the previous event of similar significance, the post-1993 Sovereign
National Conference in 12 African states), a few Arab states’ finishing the race would
sustain its validity. Here too Tunisia stands out, at the (current) end as well as at the
beginning of the race: Its progress to date has been exemplary, even assuming all the
vagaries of normal politics.
Nothing in the statistics indicates that the intifadat would begin in Tunisia.
Tunisia has its recently declining economic figures, its predatory privatization, its youth
bulge, its aging and constitution-tampering dictator, its corrupt and arrogant government,
and its precursor strikes and demonstrations, but none of this in a quantity that would
single it out from its neighbors. It seems that in the midst of this common situation, the
Tunisians simply had enough—ras le bol—as they say in the French idiom, and the well
publicized self-immolation of a typical underemployed, insulted youth on 17 December
2010 made the bowl overflow.
Tunisia had its experience of popular explosions—in the mid-1950s leading to
independence in 1956, in 1978 over government attempts to control the General Union of
Tunisian Workers (UGTT), in 1984 over structural adjustment bread price rises and
conspicuous consumption—and its Islamist-associated violence crushed by the regimes
of founding Leader Habib Bourguiba and his successor who ousted him in 1987, Zine El
Abidine Ben Ali. The resulting quarter-century of repressive corruption may not have
been the worst of the Arab World, but it was enough to set off a popular reaction that
swept the country from the rural interior to the urban coast and gave an inspiration to
similar populations in Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and, better contained, in Morocco,
Jordan, and Kuwait.
In its intifada, however, Tunisia has other characteristics that set it on its
exemplary path. First was a tradition of constitutionalism as the first Arab country to
have its own constitution, in 1861. Second, was a group of politicians who were willing
to negotiate themselves out of power after the autocrat had left, providing gradual,
constitutional steps to a new order. Third, was a small, apolitical army dedicated to
external security alone and refusing orders to shoot on its own populace. And fourth was
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