Ten years into the Tunisian Revolution: The specificities and limitations of ‘exceptionalism’ - Longreads
▻https://longreads.tni.org/ten-years-into-the-tunisian-revolution
Not only did the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie ride the wave of the revolution that was led by the popular classes, they also opened the door wide to imperialist intervention and control over the ‘democratic transition’.
Such intervention has been clear almost since the very beginning: after influential imperialist powers in Tunisia (France and the US) were taken by surprise when the uprising erupted, they hastened to contain it.
One example of such tactics is the US Department of State’s statement on 9 January 2011, which called for respecting the will of the Tunisian people. Washington saw an opportune moment to experiment in the ‘New Middle East’5 and to ‘encourage’ a liberal ‘democracy’, as noted by Obama in his famous speech in Cairo in 2009, in order to preserve US hegemony in the region. It was therefore not surprising that Ghannouchi’s government rushed, two days later, to remove Ben Ali and appoint the neoliberal Mustapha Kamel Nabli, former Senior Adviser at the World Bank, as a new governor of the central bank. Right from the beginning, Nabli blocked leftist demands to audit Ben Ali’s odious debts and to refuse to pay them. It was equally unsurprising that the G8 would organize the Deauville Conference in France in May 2011. During this conference, major imperial powers sought to contain the ‘Arab Spring’ countries (Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, etc) by flooding their provisional governments with loans, false promises to return their looted money, and offers of aid and investments. They also sought to reassure other subordinate regimes, which had also started to witness social and political unrest, such as Morocco and Jordan.
Most alarmingly, the early embroiling of these countries in the ‘reform’ recipes that were proposed by global financial institutions, conditioned on austerity measures and loans,6 has resulted in the negative economic, social and political repercussions that we see today.