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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