Maghreb Regime Scenarios

This article reviews three possible regime scenarios for the three principle Maghreb countries of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The three scenarios include: the Islamization of the political sphere, the continuation of the authoritarian status quo, and accelerated evolution towards democracy.

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INTRODUCTION

Ever since the days of the Greek and Roman Empires, northwest Africa has been a well-defined region—geographically, demographically, culturally, and historically. The Muslim conquest in the late seventh century A.D., followed by the region’s complete Islamization and partial Arabization, inextricably linked the area to the East; but it did not erase its own particularity, even in the eyes of their now-fellow Muslims. [TUNISIA [ Scenario I: Continuation of the Authoritarian Status Quo

This is by far the most likely of the three scenarios under consideration. After a brief initial period of political liberalization, reconciliation with long-time political opponents, and the extension of legal public space to the Islamist movement, Ben Ali reinstituted a repressive single-party rule in the early 1990s. He then undertook a series of measures to bolster and consolidate his preeminence, while emasculating all sources of opposition. Moreover, to the surprise of democratic transition theorists, policies of economic liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s did not result in the creation of power centers in possession of a greater degree of autonomy and an increased will to challenge the political status quo. Nor were the downtrodden rural populations empowered by the privatization of the agricultural sector. Rather, these new policies actually tended to strengthen corporatist clientelist and neo-traditional patterns of social and political organization, and the repression of existing civil society groups. [ Scenario 2: The Islamization of the Political Sphere

Western interest in seeing at least the beginning of a process of political evolution in Tunisia may eventually bear some fruit in the coming years. However, with the Tunisian secular opposition as emasculated as the Islamists, there is neither no one individual, nor any issue, that appears capable of galvanizing a process of genuine democratic reform. Nonetheless, one can assume that the discourse of reform, as voiced both in the West and within liberal circles in the Arab world, is being heard in Tunisia as well. [CONCLUSION

Source: The Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA)

[1] L. Carl Brown, “Maghrib Historiography: The Unit of Analysis Problem,” in Michel Le Gall and Kenneth Perkins (eds.), The Maghrib in Question (Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 1997), pp. 4-16.

[2] I. William Zartman, “Introduction: Rewriting the Future in the Maghrib,” in Azzedine Layachi (ed.), Economic Crisis and Political Change in North Africa (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1998), pp. 1-5.

[3] Morocco’s and Algeria’s combined population of over 60 million persons constitutes 75 percent of the five-nation Arab Maghreb Union. Tunisia’s population adds an additional ten million persons to the figure. The Arab Maghreb Union consists of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania. Founded in 1989 with great fanfare, amidst expressed hopes for establishing closer regional ties and a regional economic bloc, it has utterly foundered, primarily on the shoals of continuing Algerian-Moroccan differences over the future of the Western Sahara and on Algeria’s implosion during the 1990s.

[4] Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1968), pp. 177-91.

[5] This section has benefited considerably from Michele Penner Angrist, “Whither the Ben Ali Regime in Tunisia,” in Maddy-Weitzman and Zisenwine (eds.), The Maghreb in the New Century.

[6] Laurie A. Brand, Women, the State and Political Liberalization (NY: Columbia UP, 1998); Mounira M. Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Post-Colonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

[7] Stephen J. King in Liberalization against Democracy: The Local Politics of Economic Reform in Tunisia (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003).

[8] Neila Charchour Hachicha: “Tunisia’s Election Was Undemocratic at All Levels,” Middle East Quarterly (Summer 2005), http://www.meforum.org/article/732.

[9] “Tunisia,” Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005, Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, March 8, 2006, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61700.htm; “IFJ Condemns Intimidation as Tunisian Journalists Plan National Union Congress,” August 24, 2005, http://www.ifj.org/default.asp?index=3328&Language=EN; “Tunisian Commitments Unfulfilled Following WSIS II,” International Freedom of Expression Exchange Clearing House (Toronto) PRESS RELEASE, April 26, 2006, Posted to the web April 27, 2006, http://allafrica.com/stories/200604270343.html

[10] Barry Rubin, The Long War for Freedom (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006), pp. 112-14.