Submission #17250
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How does dialogue really take place in a democratic transition?
ABSTRACT
Our aim in this paper is to examine and critically reflect the nature of the dialogic processes in
the case of a national dialogue in a project of democracy construction. The case deals with
development of a new democratic constitution subsequent to Tunisia’s Arab Spring revolution
of 2011, a process experienced and documented by the first author. We explore how dialogue
did and did not take place in the constitutional process. Theoretical interest lies in the
preconditions for dialogue, the fundamentals and functions of dialogue, and the questions of
power and power asymmetries especially from the deliberative and emancipative
perspectives.
Keywords:
Dialogue, power, democracy construction, constitutional process
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Introduction
This paper explores the dialogic processes that have been involved in the Tunisian
democratic transition since the country’s revolution of January 2011 that launched the so-
called Arab Spring. The paper focuses particularly on the ways in which political and social
actors engaged with each other during the process of drafting the country’s new Constitution
that took place between 2012 and 2014.
National constitutions are important documents that provide a formal and moral
structure for the functioning of the state and the regulation of citizens’ interactions with the
state and with each other. Events such as the constitution drafting process in Tunisia are quite
rare. While there have been many examples in recent years in which new constitutions have
been developed following rupture with a previous order, it is unusual for these to occur in a
largely unstructured environment in which there is no overshadowing authority (whether
internal or external), few preconditions for the content of the new constitution, and multiple
uncontrolled arenas of public debate. Further, the constitution-drafting process was led by
democratically-elected representatives, involved extensive structured and unstructured citizen
engagement, and asserted the primacy of democratic input over technical expertise.
The Tunisian case offers a unique insight into the autonomous construction of societal
level dialogic processes. Because the democratic transition has been negotiated largely in the
open and through multiple avenues of public debate, it has been possible to observe the
unfolding of the process and gather insights that can be applied to examine and test thinking
on the processes through which dialogue can take place, the barriers to effective participation
and the preconditions for engagement, and the stages of development of a societal level
dialogic process.
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This is an exploratory paper whose aim is to identify key themes of the social dialogue
that occurred around the transition and specifically the constitutional development process,
and to begin to explore these themes in terms of different theoretical understandings of
dialogic processes. In this regard we focus particularly on the writings of Habermas (1975;
1980; 1990) and Freire (1975; 2006) on dialogic processes.
While this paper focuses on dialogic processes rather than models of democracy, the
divergent Freirean and Habermasian understandings of dialogic processes are themselves
connected with different models of democratic processes. The Habermasian model (1996) is
closely linked with his theory of communicative action. Freire did not write extensively on
democracy but his thinking is closely bound to the challenge of the construction of a
democratic citizenship. His emphasis on the power relationships involved in dialogue
complement the work of the agonistic approach to democracy developed by Chantal Mouffe
(2013) which in turn is grounded on the thinking of Laclau and Mouffe on the construction of
political identities (Smith, 2008; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985).
Actors enter into dialogic processes bearing the marks of their previous experiences.
In the case of countries emerging from dictatorship such as Tunisia, the imprint of
authoritarian constraints on free speech and interaction is embedded within society and in
social interactions (Moghaddam, 2013). Surprisingly, while there have been many celebrated
studies of the interaction of authoritarianism and personality (Adorno et al., 1950), there has
been very little scholarly discussion of the impact and constraints placed upon dialogue when
engaged actors have been marked by their passage through dictatorship with its repression of
diverse ideas, prohibition of free discussion, and normalisation of interpersonal brutality.
Overcoming the dictatorial legacy includes not least the challenge of including victim and
perpetrator in a democratic dialogue. The paper’s exploration of the barriers to dialogue in the
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post-dictatorship environment identifies the process through which authentic dialogue is made
possible as decisive in the success of the transitional process.
Background
Since the 1980s there has been a substantial increase in the number of countries in the
world governed by putatively democratic systems. The collapse of the Soviet Union not only
led to the emergence of a number of liberal democracies in Eastern Europe but also reduced
superpower competition that had led the United States to support authoritarian governments in
Latin America, Africa, and Asia as a ‘bulwark against communism’. The so-called ‘third
wave’ of democratisation resulted in the replacement of overtly authoritarian regimes with a
range of different regimes that generally claimed to be ‘democracies’ – albeit with a variable
definition of what that entailed.
One region remained largely immune to the democratic shift; this was the Middle East
and North Africa. The region, already encountering the challenges of postcolonial state
construction, has faced existential crisis since the creation of the state of Israel and the
displacement of the Palestinian population. It underwent a number of important upheavals in
the last third of the twentieth century. Notably, Iran’s pro-Western authoritarian regime
headed by the Shah was overthrown by a popular revolution in 1979. Although this revolution
began as a broad-based uprising, it eventually resulted in the establishment of a theocratic
autocracy. Further, in Algeria, a transition towards democratic elections resulted in the victory
of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in legislative elections held in 1991. The Algerian army,
which has held a dominant position in the country since independence from France, refused to
accept the victory of the Islamist party and seized power, annulling the results of the election.
A brutal civil war ensured between supporters of the banned FIS and the Algerian state,
resulting in between 60,000 and 150,000 deaths over the next decade.
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Most countries within the Arab region continued to be governed by authoritarian
regimes, although limited democratic openings took place in several countries during the
1990s and 2000s. Many of the region’s regimes were tacitly supported by the United States
and Western European powers for a combination of various reasons. These included; as a
bulwark against the dangers of Islamic extremism as evidenced in the developments in Iran
and Algeria; in order to secure and assure oil supply to the West from the most productive
region in the world; and, as part of Western powers’ international politics towards the region
that emphasized the security of the Israel state. Israel’s security was perceived as at risk
should democratisation result in the rise of governments that might reflect and act upon
widespread popular opposition among the region’s Muslim populations towards the Zionist
state and a desire to defend the interests of the Palestinian population.
With little if any commitment on the part of the West to facilitate or encourage
democratisation, and indeed on the contrary frequently substantial support to the security
apparatus that underpinned most of these regimes, the 2000s were marked by governance
stagnation in much of the region. Undemocratic regimes retained sufficient strength to contain
sullen and sometimes restive populations. Democratic development advocates were generally
pessimistic about the potential for rapid change, and frequently pinned their hopes on
supposedly ‘reforming’ power elites (Ottaway and Hamzawy, eds. 2009; Ottaway and
Choucair-Vizoso, eds. 2008; Giddens, 2006), although in retrospect this has been widely
criticised as complicity in authoritarianism: “How did we back, use and encourage the
brutality of Arab dictators over so many years? To what degree did that cynical
encouragement of despots foster the very jihadist rage Western societies sought to curb?”1.
The Tunisian revolution that culminated on January 14 2011 surprised almost all
‘democracy experts’, although astute foreign diplomatic observers, whose perspectives were
1 Roger Cohen, “Libyan Closure," New York Times, 7 March 2011.
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exposed by the Wikileaks tapes, had for several years been warning of the growing
unpopularity of the kleptocratic elite surrounding President Ben Ali (Keller and Star, 2011).
The Tunisian revolution was quickly followed by the fall of President Mubarak in
Egypt and a series of other uprisings and popular movements across the region. The term
‘Arab Spring’ was coined, and Western leaders and press were full of gushing admiration for
the democratic movements, with generous promises of financial aid to support the democratic
transition (much of which was never delivered).
Four years later, the promise of the Arab Spring has transformed into concern about
instability and even civil war in some Arab countries, the return of dictatorship in others, and
the stalling of reforms in still more. However the Tunisian example continues to progress, the
country adopting a new democratic constitution in 2014, and later the same year organizing
democratic legislative and presidential elections that resulted in the peaceful transfer of
power.
While no doubt the Tunisian example can and should be viewed as a success in
achieving an inclusive political settlement, in this paper we are using the case particularly to
explore the challenges and barriers to democratic transformation. We seek to understand why
democratic transitions frequently encounter difficulties, and to better understand and begin to
theorize the processes involved that can permit transitions to result in long-term change
towards democratic and accountable government. Within this broader frame we are especially
interested in how dialogue acted as a mechanism for governance and the dialogic processes
that enabled the successful transformation. This is an explanatory paper that explores how the
Revolution unlocked the possibility of a form of dialogue with few preconditions and
structuring constraints, a circumstance that is quite unusual either in governance or indeed
more broadly in dialogic processes.
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The history of democracy goes back many thousands of years, with increasing
evidence that democratic processes long predated Athenian democracy (Jacobsen, 1943;
Isakhan and Stockwell, S., eds., 2011). The concept of democracy has been subject to polemic
from its earliest days, and has frequently been challenged in terms of both its essential content
and its desirability. Clearly in this paper we cannot address such a profound and complex
subject. We are assuming that while the content of democracy is highly contested, the great
majority of citizens around the world support the idea of democracy2, and that the Tunisian
revolution had as a core objective the replacement of an authoritarian and largely
unaccountable governance system with one that would reflect the will of Tunisian people.
Within this given framework, we wish to examine the processes through which the
Tunisian revolution has to date succeeded in establishing a democratic system; specifically
through the adoption of a constitution by a great majority of freely elected representatives,
and the democratic transfer of power based on elections organised in accordance with that
new constitution. We wish to explore and propose answers to a question which can be posed
in a fairly straightforward way but which is clearly very complex: “What dialogic processes in
the democratic transition in Tunisia permitted a successful outcome?”3
Dialogical framework
Dialogical processes are seen as effective means to construct shared and collective
meanings and are also considered ideal ways for management to spur individual and group
action (Roman, 2005). It has even been claimed that most substantive achievements occur
through dialogue (Logsdon & Van Buren III, 2009). In current discourse dialogue has been
2 See for example the Gallup Poll of 50,000 citizens of 65 countries in 2005 that found that nearly 8 out of ten global citizens believe democracy is the preferable form of government: http://www.voice-of-the-people.net/ContentFiles/files/VoP2005/VOP2005_Democracy%20FINAL.pdf. 3
The first author of this paper has been engaged in the Tunisian democratic transition as an international advisor since 2012. He has had the opportunity to observe the constitutional process from close quarters, and has gathered material and followed both formal debates and informal interactions. Reported comments are anonymised except where they are referenced from public sources.
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understood as a mechanism for more advanced way of exchanging opinions, producing an
outcome, enabling a flow of information, discussing concrete problems and participative
decision-making. Yet, historically the concept of dialogue relates to deliberation and
emancipation, which means shifting power from the superiors and turning the objects of
planning and decision-making into the participating subjects. The work of Jürgen Habermas
(1975; 1984; 1990) and Paolo Freire (1970; 2005) have been the most influential in current
interpretations of dialogue; both being also those who have dealt with the question of power.
In spite of similarities in developing approaches that rely on authentic engagement and
participation, the dialogues by Habermas and Freire have fundamental differences in the
process and in addressing the question of power.
Habermasian dialogue is based on his theorizing on communicative action in the ideal
speech situation. For Habermas dialogue is seen as means for participatory decision-making,
which realizes through the construction of best and most rational arguments. The ultimate
goal is to achieve and maintain consensus, which is based on shared values and the ideal of
prioritizing mutual good (the commonweal) instead of the pursuit of individual goals. In the
ideal situation all participants are equal and capable of producing reasoned argumentation,
which means dispelling power asymmetries.
For Freire dialogue is the encounter between people in order to learn and name the
world. Contrary to the Habermasian approach, power and power asymmetries are not
embedded. There are always oppressors and oppressed, although not necessarily in a
traditional sense. Access to knowledge may differ and those with “better” knowledge may
indoctrinate others and try to adjust them to their own reality (see Freire, 2005: 94, 129).
Freire states that dialogical encounter cannot take place between antagonists (ibid.). Dialogue
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is based on sharing knowledge with the purpose of learning from others so that all participants
can learn more together than they would individually. Knowledge gained in critical dialogue
is then the standpoint for transformation. The outcome – transforming the reality and
changing the world for better - is a joint responsibility.
In contrast to the Habermasian ideal of equality as a standpoint, Freirean equality is
based on the idea of equal right to “name the world”, regardless of the position. Freire has
faith in people, which he regards as a priori requirement for dialogue. True dialogue requires
critical thinking, which is a source for transformative knowledge. Freire stresses everybody’s
right to speak their word, to be critical and question the status quo. The word, as an essence of
dialogue, has two dimensions, reflection and action, which together mean praxis. Critical
reflection is transformative, but transformation does not happen without action. Yet, Freire
warns of emphasizing mere action, because then the word is converted to activism, which
negates true praxis and precludes dialogue. For Freire, saying the true word means
transforming the world. (Freire, 2005: 87-91).
Next, we shall seek to understand the conditions under which the dialogic processes
took place in the Tunisian case.
The Tunisian Case in the Context of Critical Models of Democracy
The Tunisian case is particularly interesting because its success can be considered to
have occurred without many of the conditions that have accompanied other recent successful
transitions. Elites and ordinary citizens of the Central and Eastern European countries of the
former Soviet bloc were fully aware of the great economic advantages that would accrue to
them through joining the European Union, a prerequisite for which was the adoption of a
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democratic system; a similar circumstance was in play for the former fascist-ruled countries
of Spain, Portugal, and Greece. A closer corollary would be the countries of Latin America,
most of which have transformed from authoritarian (and usually military) governance to
democratic systems over the past 25 years. However, whereas the democratisation processes
in Latin America occurred in approximately the same time periods and thus benefitted from a
synergy, Tunisia is the only one of the Arab countries to successfully undergo a thorough
democratic transformation; there has been no ‘domino effect’ to support Tunisia’s
transformation; indeed on the contrary the failure of many of the Arab Spring uprisings has
left Tunisia alone in clearly following the path of democratisation.
Tunisia has no democratic tradition which could be called upon to provide an iterative
anchor for the (re)establishment of a system; the country was starting from scratch.
Furthermore the country explicitly chose perhaps the most difficult road to establish a new
democracy; the creating of a democratic framework anchored in a new constitution that would
be written from a blank page, by a popularly elected constituent assembly. The new
Constitution adopted in January 2014 was not based on a single template, whether a past
Constitution or (as is the case in many former colonies) the Constitution of an influential
external power (in Tunisia’s case, this would have been that of France). There was no
preliminary ‘official understanding’ of what the new democracy should be like. So creating
the constitution - naming the democracy - meant that the different actors, including
representatives of different parties across the ideological spectrum, had the possibility to
name the world from their perspective. There was no “truth” which actors needed to accept in
order to engage in the dialogue around a new constitution, unlike many participatory
processes in which participation effectively entails acceptance of the world as seen by those
designing the dialogue (Cooke and Kothari, eds., 2001). This absence of a pre-existing
framework at the same time made progression through the constitutional process fraught with
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crises and uncertainty, but also invested the eventual constitutional agreement with an
unusually deep authenticity and legitimacy. The process corresponds closely with Freire’s
vision of a genuine process of collective learning.
Finally, and to most observers, most problematic, Tunisia is a country with deep
divisions about the type of society it should be, with perspectives ranging from radical
secularism to fundamentalist Islamist. Thus, whereas other recently democratising countries
enjoyed a fairly broad consensus on the type of democratic state that should be established,
this was not the case in Tunisia.
Democratic development is a generally under theorized area (Kurki, 2013), and is
rarely considered from an organizational perspective, although organization of a democratic
transition is perhaps the most ‘macro’ of organization change management projects. While
there is considerable debate within political science regarding the appropriate institutional
frameworks for establishing democracy, there is relatively little discussion regarding the
dialogic conditions from a transformation from an authoritarian to a democratic system. In a
post-revolutionary situation, which is inherently imbued with the risk of the re-establishment
of a new authoritarian order, the space, time and playing field do not exist to ‘design’ an ideal
deliberation; the actors, themselves emergent from their imprisonment in the dark cave of
authoritarianism, must create the new order while they are learning what it means to be free.
There is considerable debate within political philosophy regarding how democracies
should operate, and indeed what constitutes democratic dialogue. It has been long understood
that for collaborative decision-making to take place, the engaged actors need to interact
according to some type of mutuality; in other words where each feels that they are free to
contribute to the dialogue and that their contribution inheres in the final decision. The most
commonly presented explanation of the desired condition for democratic dialogue within
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contemporary political philosophy derives from Habermas’s proposition of an ideal speech
state. However, Habermas has been sharply criticised by critical post-structuralists who argue
that the ideal communicative state is a fantasy; interpersonal interactions always entail power
and indeed according to Foucault, power is the capillary lifeblood of society. Building from
this perspective, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) developed a less ambitious but more dynamic
understanding of democratic politics in which the fluidity and dynamism of power
relationships underpinned an always imperfect and conditional nature of democratic debate.
In this approach, developed through a fusion of Foucauldian, Althusserian, and Gramscian
insights, the victorious (the ‘hegemonic’) perspective is constructed on the basis of
conditional and temporary commonalities of interest established not through the victory of an
impersonal and commonly acknowledged Reason but rather through a messy and multi-
layered process of debate, alliance-building, conflict, brinkmanship and compromise.
Unlike in the ideal of a more linear, deliberative approach, the agreement, the
hegemonic order, is always qualified and temporary, not least because any process no matter
how inclusive is marked by power relationships, will leave some feeling partly or completely
excluded, and will be subject to continuing renegotiation including moments of qualitative
break. However, this model of ‘agonistic democracy’ is differentiated from authoritarian rule
and violent transformation by the acceptance of all actors of the Other’s right to exist and to
speak (Mouffe, 2013). The character of democratic as opposed to authoritarian systems could
be represented on a continuum in which the most democratic systems are those permitting the
greatest variety of different opportunities for construction of hegemony (meaning a wide
range of democratic processes within a polity), as well as relative ease of reconstructing
hegemonic alliances. In contrast, in the authoritarian system such as that of Tunisia under Ben
Ali, a monolithic elite hierarchically organized under Ben Ali exercised overwhelming
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hegemony over decision-making and repressed, physically if necessary, alternative
perspectives.
The challenge of the democratic transition in Tunisia, therefore, was to move from
untrammelled hierarchic hegemony to dynamic and interactive process of decision-making.
This endeavour, particularly without external factors rewarding a democratic outcome,
required the development through democratic dialogue of a system for democratic decision-
making. Thus it was a process that more or less had to be invented as it went along.
The Post-Revolutionary Context for Democratic Construction
Democratic traditions first of all need to consider what parameters to place around the
democratic space. Most countries in transition to democracy face major questions regarding
who should be permitted to participate in the new system. Typically, those closely associated
with a former authoritarian regime are excluded for a period of time; this was the case in
Tunisia where senior officials of the former Ben Ali regime were excluded from running in
the first democratic elections of October 2011, but permitted to run in the next elections of
October 2014. Although the appropriateness of former regime officials holding elected office
remains a source of considerable debate in Tunisia, this is addressed within the arena of
democratic debate.
A much thornier and more existential question surrounds the epistemological extent of
the democratic space. Some actors explicitly place themselves outside the democratic space.
For example, some Salafist parties such as Ettahrir4 rejected participation in the democratic
process as they argued that this was contrary to the revealed truth of the Islamic religion.
Their generally pacific opposition to democracy did not present a major problem for the
4 Roua Seghaier, “Hizb Ettahrir challenges Tunisia’s draft constitution”, Tunisia Live, Jan 7 2013, accessed at: http://www.tunisia-live.net/2013/01/07/hizb-ettahrir-challenges-tunisias-draft-constitution/.
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transition5. A much more important issue was the extent to which more mainstream Islamist
perspectives, and particularly those of the large Ennahda (Renaissance) Party, can be
accommodated within a democratic order.
The Ennahda Party, led by the Islamist thinker Rachid Ghannouchi, has been formally
and explicitly committed to democracy since its foundation in 1989. At the same time, the
party’s roots are in the tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamist
movement founded in Egypt with the objective of turning Egypt and the Muslim world away
from what its early leaders saw as the decadence of Western society and Western oppression
of the Muslim and Arab communities. Whether Muslim Brotherhood parties sought to
achieve power through the ballot box, as was typically the case, or through physical
confrontation with the oppressor, as has been the case at various times for the Palestinian
Hamas movement, the Brotherhood at least in principle has promoted a comprehensive
transformation of Muslim societies to follow an ‘Islamic’ path. A key objective for many
Muslim Brotherhood parties (although abandoned by Ennahda as an objective during
Tunisia’s post-revolution constitutional negotiations) has been to base the legal system on
Islamic sharia, the justice system prescribed in the Koran.
Opposition to the Ben Ali dictatorship was composed of two main strains of thinking;
a secularist and largely left-wing opposition with perspectives ranging from social democratic
to Marxist, and an Islamist opposition. While in the first years after independence the left was
perceived as the major threat by Ben Ali’s autocratic predecessor Bourguiba, and subject to
substantial repression, by the end of the Bourguiba period and the assumption of power by
Ben Ali, the Islamic movement was identified as the main threat to the autocratic power.
5
In common with many other countries including in Europe, Tunisia also faces a significant threat from jihadist terrorists. A main objective for them is to provoke a security crackdown that will result in the suspension of democratic freedoms and thus ‘prove’ that democracy is undesirable. They have been unsuccessful to date in achieving their objectives in Tunisia.
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Ennahda and its predecessor, the Movement of the Islamic Tendency (MTI) was subjected to
severe repression and most of its leadership was imprisoned, forced underground, or exiled.
Some elements of the leftist opposition were tolerated although no serious opposition was
permitted and the state exercised a stranglehold over public communications which was used
to overwhelm opposition voices. With the rise of jihadist movements from the 1990s (the first
major bombing of Western interests an attack against American troops in Yemen in 1992), the
Ben Ali regime conducted an incessant and virulent communication campaign associating
Islamism with terrorism, a perspective underlined by the bloody civil war between Islamists
and the government that stretched through the 1990s in neighbouring Algeria. Thus the
association between Islamism and terrorism was inculcated in every Tunisian citizen during
this period. However, this came at a price; for those not inclined to accept the government
script, Islamism became seen as the main alternative to the corrupt authoritarian rule. The
double-edged sword of the repression of the Islamists was that all those resisting dictatorship
were classified as Islamists; the secularist journalist and Ben Ali opponent Tawfik Ben Brik
reports being arrested and interrogated in 1999 by the police who told him that while he was
“the most important intellectual in Tunisia”, he had “the same structure of thinking as the
Islamists”6
The roots of a possible democratic transition came about with the October 18 2005
Movement, which began as a hunger strike of leaders of key opposition forces, highlighting
abuse of human rights and freedom of speech in Tunisia, timed to coincide with the World
Summit on the Information Society organized in Tunis in November 2005. The hunger strike
regrouped both Islamist and secular political opponents of the government, as well as leading
civil society activists. While not all opposition parties agreed to participate (for example the
Communist Party declined), the movement included representation from Ennahda through to
6 Tawfik Ben Brik, « La convocation », Nouvel Observateur, May 15 2014, accessed at http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/monde/20140515.OBS7277/tunisie-la-convocation.html.
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the far Left and including politically moderate opposition parties7. The organizations
supporting the hunger strike founded a movement with a broad agenda for a democratic
transition in Tunisia. The disparate and often mutually suspicious opposition was beginning to
coalesce around nodal points of commonality (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 112). The agenda
was built upon an agreement on 8 common democratic principles8.
The immediate success of the 2011 revolution demonstrated failure of the
authoritarian hegemony. However the failure of the old system did not guarantee the success
of an alternative. A new hegemony based upon democratic articulation had to be constructed.
The challenge in achieving this was enormous. Not only was there no precedent for a
negotiated political system in the country, anti-Islamist perspectives remained influential, not
only among those who continued to consciously and explicitly support the regime, but also
among those who considered themselves to be democrats and leftists. Indeed, this cleavage
and ambivalence towards collaboration with the Islamists on a democratic project had already
appeared immediately after the publication of the platform of 8 democratic principles. In
February 2006, five years before the 2011 Revolution, 105 Tunisian intellectuals and civil
society activists signed a lengthy open letter questioning the October 18 Movement’s
“alliance at all costs” of Leftists opponents with Ennahda , accusing Ennahda of continuing to
promote the establishment of an Islamic state that would extinguish democratic freedoms:
“Even while it is declaring its commitment to the peaceful resolution of political conflicts, the
7 Reporters sans frontières, « A quelques heures de la clôture du SMSI, le "Mouvement du 18 octobre" met un terme à sa grève de la faim », November 18 2005, accessed at http://fr.rsf.org/tunisie-a-quelques-heures-de-la-cloture-du-18-11-2005,15536.html. 8 Collectif 18 octobre à Paris Pour les Droits & les Libertés en Tunisie, « Plate-forme politique pour une action commune », 2006, accessed at
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Tunisian Islamist movement continues to support the instigators of civil wars and assassins of
democracy in the Muslim world”9.
Some of the signatories of the open letter participated in the creation in 2006 of an
alternative to the October 18 Movement, the “Democratic Coalition” made up of
representatives of a mixture of legal and unrecognised Leftist and secularist parties and
associations headed by Mohamed Harmel, the leader of the Tunisian Communist Party, which
had been allowed to hold some nominal parliamentary seats by Ben Ali. A harsh critique of
this latter initiative presented it as motivated by a desperate attempt to “stop by any means a
rapprochement between some of the independent Left and the Islamists”, and even “a
conscious act of collaboration with the authoritarian regime” (Geisser and Gobe, 2007).
Harmel had indeed in 1998 described his relationship with the Ben Ali regime: “we have
moved beyond the Manichean conception of an absolute antagonism between the government
and opposition, because we have a national government that is in the process of achieving
great reforms…” (Cited in Beau and Tuquoi, 2011: 77). The difficulties in forging a
democratic alliance between the Islamist and Leftist wings of the opposition coincided exactly
with the intention of the regime: “the logic of the system is absolute bipolarisation, the
Islamists or us” (Beau and Tuquoi, 2011: 177).
Islamists were consistently associated directly with terrorism, although the mainstream
Ennahda Movement had long since rejected recourse to violence (despite the thousands of its
members subjected to imprisonment, torture, and exile). Islamist politicians were accused of
having “A project to transform us into docile soldiers of the war machine planned for the
future Islamist crusade” (Labidi, 1998: 77). The regime continually published lurid accounts
both of the supposed terrorist activities of the Islamists, and of their moral turpitude: “80% of
9 “A propos d’une derive”, Collective letter to the Collectif 18 octobre à Paris Pour les Droits & les Libertés en Tunisie, February 2006, Nachaaz (Dissonances), available at http://nachaz.org/index.php/fr/textes-a-l-appui/politique/102-2012-09-11-12-11-20.html?showall=&start=1.
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barbus [bearded ones] have AIDS”. Human rights activists were accused not only of
complicity with the ‘terrorists’, of corruption, but also of being prostitutes. An enormous
conspiracy was behind all opposition to the dictatorship, founded on an unholy alliance
between Islamist extremists and Israel’s security service, Mossad (Beau and Tuquoi, 2011).
By the early 2000s Western powers were beginning to question the incessant propaganda
machine of the Tunisian regime. However the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade
Centre were a Godsend for Ben Ali; proof that his position was correct: “The Islamists have
to be eradicated. That’s what I have done in Tunisia. You criticised me. You see now that I
was right”.
The Tunisia of the day after the successful revolution of January 14 2011 was marked
by the internalisation of two generations of propaganda of the former dictatorship, not to
speak of the inheritance of the previous French colonial rule (and before then, several
centuries of Ottoman empire rule). While most Tunisians were delighted to be free of the
corrupt dictator and his entourage, the construction of a democratic order would be a
challenge in a society that had never had the freedom to construct a common project from the
bottom up, and which was deeply imbued with the thought style (Fleck, 1979) of the former
dictatorship.
Fathali Mogaddham has focused his attention on the psychological impact of
dictatorship (Mogaddham, 2013). Drawing particularly on the social psychology of Vygotsky
(1978), Mogaddham argues that individuals are fundamentally social creations. The
construction of identity occurs in relation to existing society through a process of
interobjectivity, that is the individual’s identity develops within the framework of, and in
interaction with, existing society (Latour, 1996: 235). Mogaddham notes that, unfortunately,
many societies that overthrow dictatorships and embark on democratisation regress either
abruptly or gradually back into authoritarianism. This is explained to a large extent because of
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the internalised practices of dictatorial rule. Each society ruled by a dictatorship has specific
characteristics that underpin the order. Merely removing the hierarchical kingpin of that
system does not change the institutionalised dynamics of the system. Societies ruled by
dictatorships are inherently characterised by an absence of open dialogue. Further, they tend
to be marked by considerable mutual distrust, because mechanisms of mutuality and solidarity
are impossible in a dictatorship where success or even survival are based on loyalty to the
leader. Mogaddham further argues that in most dictatorships the bulk of the population does
not ‘support’ the leader by conviction, but is merely cowed by the overwhelming force of the
regime, the unity of the regime-supporting elite (built on its own self-interest), and the
apparent impossibility of change.
The potential for democratic construction is also impacted by the continual
condescension of the population under the dictatorship. Authoritarian regimes substitute the
repetition of moralistic slogans for a public discourse built upon dialogue:
“Another manifestation of the immobilisation of thought and time that occurs in
a dictatorship such as that in Tunisia is to treat the population like a backward
child who needs the steady hand of parental authority at every step. The
thousands of banners displayed at every street corner and the mindless political
directives invade public space and remind the citizen at every step to consider -
with consternation, disgust, and fascination -- the continuous process of
infantilisation of which he is the object”.10
Citizens in post-revolutionary societies bring their lived history to the table of
democratic construction. They are marked by the pathologies of the dictatorship from which
they have emerged. Not only does the post-revolutionary citizen need to learn how to reach 10 Amna Guellali (2012), “Temps, Révolution et transition”, Nachaz, revue numerique tunisienne, 1, accessed at http://www.nachaz.org/index.php/en/revue/2012-n-1/37-dossier1/75-temps-revolution-et-transition-par-amna-guellali.html.
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decisions on the governance of society democratically for the first time, she also needs to
interact with other actors who have been castigated as the enemy Other for her whole life.
Given this history, it is not surprising that debate has frequently reproduced the simple
binaries of the dictatorship. The runoff presidential elections of 2014 pitted a seasoned
administrator supported by many of the apparatchiks and beneficiaries of the former regime
against a long-time opponent of the dictatorship supported by most Islamists include some
from the radical fringe. The debate frequently descended into the overt implication of each
side that their opponent represented a torturer of the old regime on the one hand, or a Salafist
jihadist on the other.
If the accusations of each side were entirely without substance, the simplification of
the debate could be surpassed. But the stereotypes enjoy a certain plausibility. For those who
suffered under the dictatorship whether through direct repression or social and economic
exclusion by the ruling elite based in the capital and wealthy coastal regions, the presence of
figures from the dictatorship on one side is undoubtedly disturbing and evokes a visceral
reaction that can be easily exploited by the populist discourse of his opponent. On the other
hand, the Islamist movement’s roots include aspects of rejection of Western Reformation
values upon which the ‘enlightened’ post-independence regime in Tunisia was based,
including for example the equality of women and a relatively wide space of personal freedom
in comparison with other countries in the region. While the leadership of the mainstream
Islamist Ennahda has firmly committed to respect democratic values and universal human
rights, discordant, extremist voices are still present in the movement. Decades of repetition of
the ‘Islamist danger’ has left its mark and is easily resuscitated as the nightmare scenario.
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The Constitutional Development Process
In the immediate aftermath of the 2011 revolution, an interim government of former
senior Ben Ali regime officials held power for a few weeks, but was faced by increasing
popular contestation. The original idea of simply organizing new elections was not acceptable
and there was a strong popular demand to build a new democratic order from scratch through
the election of a National Constituent Assembly (NCA) whose role would be to draft a new
constitution that would reflect the will of the people and assure democratic rights and
freedoms11. This temporary parliament was elected on October 23 2011 using a proportional
representation system, in elections judged free and fair by national and international
observers. The Ennahda Party won 89 of the 217 seats with about 37% of the popular vote.
The rest of the seats were divided between 19 other parties and 8 independents. A government
was formed between Ennahda and two smaller, centre-left parties with a moderate secularist
orientation.
The decision to elect a constituent assembly was somewhat controversial particularly
among the legal elite, particularly because Tunisia, home to the Arab world’s first constitution
in 1861, has a well-developed constitutional justice expertise and even hosts the International
Academy of Constitutional Law. These concerns were exacerbated when the NCA elections
gave Ennahda a plurality and the ability to drive, if not to control, the process. Fears grew
among secularists that the constitution drafting process would result in an Islamisation of the
state, especially as the provisional government under Ennahda leadership failed to effectively
deal with (or in some minds, was complicit in) a number of Islamist extremist actions
including an attack on an art exhibition and on the American school, as well as permitting the
11 Isabelle Mandraud "La Tunisie va connaître de vraies élections libres", Le Monde, 20 April 2011, accessed at http://www.lemonde.fr/tunisie/article/2011/04/20/la-tunisie-va-connaitre-de-vraies-elections-libres_1510254_1466522.html.
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visit to Tunisia of some extremist clerics who promoted regressive social practices including
Female Genital Mutilation, child marriage, and polygamy12.
The Constitution-drafting process was initially intended to take one year. Six
constitutional committees were established, one for each core chapter of the new Constitution.
Popular consultations were included in the process, and parliamentarians formed committees
that visited all 24 governorates of the country and gathered input from citizens. A series of
drafts were produced during 2012 and 2013 and released for public input. There was a
passionate ferment of public debate, with the newly free and ideologically diverse media
reporting any and all perspectives, disagreement, and rumours.
From the beginning the process was characterised by polarisation, and power
asymmetries, with different actors each tending to feel that they were the one without power.
The Islamists, who had been subjected to thirty years of repression under the old regime, felt
that they were threatened by representatives of the former regime and its police state.
Conversely, there was considerable distrust regarding the motives of Ennahda among
secularist opposition members and organized civil society, including the powerful UGTT
trade union movement. The secularists felt that they were faced with an ‘alien’ force; an
opponent convinced that it was speaking with the force of God on its side, one that wore a
‘uniform’ (Islamic dress such as the hijab) and for whom loyalty to its political party far
exceeded the relatively loose and transitory political alliances typical of the secularists and the
political Left. Frequently, there was a rejection of the human equivalency of the other;
conversations between secularists about Islamists culminated in denigration of their
appearance, “they are all ugly”, “they pretend to be virginal but they have the worst morals of
all under that veil”. On the other side, outspoken secularists were threatened by accusations of
12 Hedia Barakhet, « Tournée du «Cheikh» Nabil El Aouadhi - Ces prédicateurs qui nous divisent... », La Presse, January 30 2013, accessed at http://fr.allafrica.com/stories/201301300902.html.
Submission #17250
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‘takhfir’, apostasy, a particularly menacing and dangerous accusation because it can be
interpreted as an invitation to murder the person13.
The debate focused particularly on the identity of the state. During the election
campaign Ennahda had committed not to propose sharia law as the basis for the new
constitution, however Ennahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi equivocated on this in early 2012
under pressure from hardliners within his party, causing uproar among secularists. Eventually
Ennahda decided not to pursue sharia and to maintain the first clause of the old constitution
which states that the country’s religion is Islam but that the state is republican14. Another
identity issue on which there was a very high level of contestation and mobilisation was the
question of gender equality. While the broad idea of equality was accepted by mainstream
parties including the Islamists, conservatives within the NCA including some members of
Ennahda attempted to include a clause in the constitution that stated:
"The State assures the protection of the rights of women, her social gains, on
the basis of complementarity with the man within the family and as associate of
the man in the development of the homeland".15
While, again, Ennahda dropped the idea of complementarity (which had provoked
division within the party) in favour of an unequivocal constitutional entrenchment of gender
equality16, the sense that there was a consistent and repeated effort to Islamise the state and to
roll back the modernist gains of the post-independence periods continued to enrage secularists
13
After one notorious incident, secularist MPs insisted on inclusion of a clause in the new Constitution that makes it illegal to accuse someone of apostasy : « Constitution tunisienne : l'opposition obtient l'interdiction de l'accusation d'apostasie », Jeune Afrique, 6 January 2014, accessed at http://www.jeuneafrique.com/Article/ARTJAWEB20140106081515/. 14 “Tunisia's Ennahda to oppose sharia in constitution”, Reuters, March 26 2012, accessed at http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USBRE82P0E820120326. 15 Sarah Diffalah, « Les femmes seulement "complémentaires" de l'homme ? », Nouvel Observateur, 9 August 2012, accessed at http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/monde/20120809.OBS9325/tunisie-les-femmes-seulement-complementaires-de-l-homme.html. 16 Dominique Lagarde "Nous avons fait preuve d'un certain laxisme face aux salafistes", L’Express, 21 September 2012, accessed at http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/monde/afrique/tunisie-nous-avons-fait-preuve-d-un-certain-laxisme-face-aux-salafistes_1162293.html.
Submission #17250
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and deepened mistrust. The assassination of a leading leftist politician in February 2013
worsened tensions and led to massive street protests by secularist forces, who accused the
Ennahda led government of at least laxity towards Islamist extremists, or even of complicity
of some of its leaders in the assassination. Nevertheless by June 2013 a fourth constitutional
draft was published upon which there was broad consensus apart from about ten points of
disagreement, and the Assembly plenary began debate on the Constitution, leading towards a
vote of the Assembly, with a two-thirds majority required for adoption. However, the
assassination of a second leftist leader on July 25 2013 led to an explosion of citizen outrage,
daily mass demonstrations in front of parliament, and an opposition boycott of the NCA,
leading to the suspension of the Assembly’s work for the last half of 2013. The opposition did
not restrict itself to protesting the assassinations but in addition demanded the resignation of
the Ennahda led government and agreement both on changes to the Constitution to protect
secularism, and on the process for organization of elections immediately after constitutional
adoption.
The National Dialogue
While there were widespread fears that the showdown would degrade into widespread
violence or even a coup d’état, the crisis actually led to a broadening of the debate beyond the
NCA and onto the streets. Initially two forms of legitimacy opposed each other; the
legitimacy of the elected parliament (which was called into question by protestors because the
parliament had exceeded its originally planned year to draft a constitution) and the popular
legitimacy of the street, which claimed to reflect the original spirit of the 2011 revolution.
After several months of blockage, a third actor inserted itself into the debate; four major
Tunisian organizations including the leading trade union central and the main employers
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association, which came to be known as the Quartet17. The Quartet, which could be described
as reflecting a corporatist legitimacy of organized Tunisian society, launched a process known
as the National Dialogue. The Dialogue initially entailed separate consultations with all the
political parties represented in the Assembly, as well as other major social actors. The process
of agreeing what the Dialogue would be about, and establishing preconditions for the
Dialogue to begin (particularly the principle that once the Dialogue had concluded the
government would resign and be replaced with a ‘technocratic’ government charged with
organising elections) took several months of tense shuttle diplomacy, accompanied by varying
levels of street mobilisation on both sides, before the different actors were able to even sit
down together in the same room and discuss the content of the Dialogue. It was notable that
the great bulk of energy was devoted to the establishment of mutual confidence based on
respect for the legitimacy of the other rather than on the specific policy content. The points of
policy disagreement on the content of the constitution, while significant, assumed a secondary
role. All the actors, even those vehemently committed to one camp or another, concurred that
‘once we can agree on the terms for a dialogue, the actual constitutional debate can be
concluded very quickly’. The core question that had to be addressed was how the different
sides could trust each other. For the secularist opposition, their fear needed to be assuaged
that an Ennahda-led government would make use of its control of the state apparatus to assure
victory in elections and its permanent continuation in power. For Ennahda, they wanted
confidence that if they let go of power, they would not find themselves back in prison as in
the Ben Ali era, or as was then occurring in Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood
government had been overthrown by the army and its leaders were being arrested and activists
slaughtered. At the same time, the actual process of dialogue proved to be both inclusive and
ultimately extremely effective.
17 The UGTT trade union central, the UTICA employers’ association, the Tunisian Human Rights League, and the Tunisian Bar Association.
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By the time that agreement had been reached on restarting debate at the NCA on the
constitution, on the resignation of the government and its replacement by a technocratic
government, and an election process and timetable, it was the beginning of January 2014.
From this point, the process moved extremely quickly and in general very smoothly. The
National Constituent Assembly established a ‘compromise’ committee that addressed articles
in the proposed constitution that did not have consensus. The committee, which represented
all the parties of the Assembly, hammered out agreements, while the Quartet continued to
hold National Dialogue meetings that permitted a broader input into points of disagreement
both in the constitutional process and on broader policy and governance matters. The
Assembly made significant changes to the last Constitutional draft which mainly had the
effect of strengthening human rights protections. The gender equality provisions in particular
were significantly strengthened, setting a progressive example in the region and beyond; and
this time the majority of Ennahda women deputies and Ennahda deputies as a whole voted for
the strengthened clauses, a dramatic shift from the terms of the debate in 2012. After clause
by clause voting, the final constitutional draft was voted on January 26 2014, only three
weeks after debate had begun in the plenary. The new Constitution was adopted by 200 votes
out of 216, with support from across the political spectrum.
Conclusions
The Tunisian democratic transition and constitutional development process provides a
remarkable and quite unusual example of a societal level dialogic process. The particular
conditions in Tunisia in which an open process was able to develop from the aftermath of the
2011 revolution through to adoption of the Constitution in 2014 reflected specificities of
Submission #17250
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Tunisian society, the historical context, the relative absence of external interference, and the
absence of internal actors sufficiently powerful to assume power and close down dialogue.
These unique conditions created a kind of laboratory for examining how a democratic
system can be constructed through dialogue. We chose to explore the Tunisian democratic
transition through two different ideal types of dialogic processes; that of Habermas with his
concept of communicative action and Freire founded on sensemaking through collective
learning.
The first phase of the constitutional development process from the installation of the
National Constituent Asembly to the assassination of Mohamed Brahmi in July 2013 can be
seen to have followed a deliberative approach to constitutional design. The Assembly’s
elected representatives organized themselves into politically balanced working groups and
held hearings throughout the country, to which citizens and organized civil society were
invited. A series of drafts was developed that reflected numerous points of consensus and an
evolution towards international norms in terms of human rights protections and democratic
content. By contemporary global standards for constitutional development, the processes
followed were exemplary. At the same time, the outpouring of protest and passion after the
July 25 murder demonstrated the insufficiency of this process.
The suspension of the work of the National Constituent Assembly represented a
watershed that in retrospect can be seen as the end of the phase of “planned” consensus
building (the Habermasian phase), and the beginning of a phase of unplanned, chaotic, often
conflictual but ultimately successful dialogue through mutual naming of the new democratic
order (the Freirean phase). The ‘contained’ consultations of the pre July 25 2013 period, built
upon a traditional notion of electoral legitimacy and citizen consultation, had failed to reflect
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the necessity of a democratic order being built through passionate engagement and the
genuine forging of common identity.
The real conditions of Tunisia after the revolution were not those where the
Habermasian notion an ‘ideal speech state’ could be realised. After decades of the shadow of
dictatorship, the suppression of mutuality, the fostering of distrust and the heaping of calumny
on the Other, Tunisians needed to be engaged with passion that necessarily overflowed the
framework of representative democracy and planned consultation; they needed to feel, close-
up, the pain, the fears, and the dreams, the humanity of the Other. This could never be
achieved through an ‘ideal speech state’ and communicative reason; implausibly aloof for the
construction of a democratic order in a post-revolutionary state.
The Freirean notion does not require an initial ideal state but rather depends upon the
engagement of all actors in a sustained interactive process of dialogue which necessarily
involves challenges to the authority of each participant. The Freirean model of dialogue
recognizes that power imbalance exists in all human interactions and that the dialogic process
is about ensuring that everyone is able to speak and feels that their voice is heard. While the
originally planned process did involve citizen input, this managed consultation did not reflect
the depth of passions and that each side had different ways of ‘naming the world’ to use
Freire’s terminology. This difference in naming is particularly important in the Tunisian
context where, contrary to other recent democratic transitions such as in Eastern Europe or in
South Africa, there are significant differences in vision of the world. Until each side had the
opportunity to name its world, it was not possible for them to think about a consensus. The
long period of citizen mobilisation and dialogic preparation in the second half of 2013
represented essentially the playing out of the naming of the world. It is instructive that with an
adequate time allowed for that naming, the actual, formal agreement occurred rather quickly.
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Clearly the successful Constitutional process does not resolve or eliminate difference;
Tunisians continue to view and name their world differently according to their divergent
ideological, religious, and geographical identifications; democratic construction is not a one-
time only process. Difference and mistrust remains, and was reflected in polarised debates
during the elections of 2014. However once the Constitution was adopted, elections were
organized smoothly and transparently before the end of 2014 as prescribed in the
Constitution. Although these were only the second free elections ever held in the country
(after those of 2011), there was universal acceptation of the results, and the transfer of power
to a parliament and government dominated by secularists but with a substantial representation
of Ennahda in parliament18. There were strong signals that major policy decisions would
continue to be made through multi-layered and inclusive processes based on the principle that
compromises would be made to ensure broad consensus on the final decision.
Tunisia remains a relatively fragile democracy, with the need to address significant
regional inequalities at the same time as facing major economic and fiscal challenges in the
context of continuing crisis in Europe, by far its biggest market. The threat from terrorism, as
well as civil war in neighbouring Libya, remains acute. It is possible some shock will occur
that the fledging system cannot sustain. Even if that should turn out to be the case, the
experience of the four years since the Tunisian revolution provides an extraordinary wealth of
learning on both democratic transition and dialogic processes. In the current context of
widespread debate and tension regarding the place of Muslims and the religion of Islam
within democratic systems, the Tunisian example may have considerably wider implications.
18 The exact makeup of the incoming government and its inclusion or otherwise of Ennahda members was still being negotiated as this article was completed on January 13 2015.
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