While the Islamist tendencies tend to come from the interior, the situation is far more complicated than that. For example, the shantytowns on the outskirts of Tunis have, over the decades, been prone not to the Islamic traditionalism of a historic pilgrimage city like Kairouan in central Tunisia, but to the radical strains of political Islam, which actually challenge tradition. For it isn't only geographical differences that plague Tunisian politics, but a phenomenon like urbanization that has created an Islamist-trending underclass that feels alienated from the secular elites who are more firmly established in the coastal cities.
Then there is globalization itself, which acts as background noise to the Arab Spring in general. Globalization takes the form of Western-originated cosmopolitanism and materialism on one hand, to which Tunisia's secularists and moderate Islamists are attracted, and the form of pan-Islam on the other hand, to which more rigid Tunisian Islamists turn. (Most Tunisian Islamists are mainstream and are aligned with the most liberal of all Arab Islamist parties, Ennahda.) For in an era of instant electronic communications, Islamic ideological communities from Morocco to Indonesia can be united: so that the so-called Clash of Civilizations plays out both internationally and internally in individual states across the Arab world.
Whereas in states that have been, in terms of geography, more artificially conceived -- Syria and Iraq, for example -- stability has been guaranteed for decades by suffocating military dictatorships, Tunisia's post-colonial political history has been more subtle. Like Egypt, Tunisia is not geographically artificial and therefore did not require an extremist ideology to hold it together -- the case with Syria, Iraq and neighboring Libya. But unlike Egypt, another age-old cluster of civilization, Tunisia has not had a robust military establishment to provide order. Because it was more European, and because Bourguiba himself was sufficiently enlightened, the Tunisian military was kept small and a lot of money was instead spent on items like primary school education and rural women's literacy. When Zine El Abidine Ben Ali replaced Bourguiba in 1987, his rule was backed more by the internal security services than by the comparatively weak military. Now that Ben Ali has been toppled, the internal security services are simply not sufficiently widespread to provide order in an emergency, and the military has no real tradition of doing such a thing. Tunisia, more than most Arab societies, therefore, is dependent on political consensus for its stability.
Tunisia is, ironically, too civilized to support the kind of authoritarian military-security establishment that provides order, and yet too politically underdeveloped for stable, efficient democratic politics. Thus, Tunisia will probably stumble onward for some years with weak governments, frequent demonstrations and strikes, and a weak security environment in its interior reaches. This will dramatically hurt tourism, which for decades was a mainstay of the economy. Tunisia will not have a new form of authoritarianism imposed upon it -- a risk in other Arab states. Tunisians are, I believe, too sophisticated for that.
The best-case scenario for Tunisia is to emerge in some years as an Arab Portugal -- a country of roughly the same size on Europe's extremity, which sustained more than a decade of political unrest following the toppling of its reactionary dictatorship in 1974, before achieving real democratic and economic stability. But unlike Portugal, whose only borders are with Spain and the Atlantic Ocean, Tunisia, even were it to achieve political stability, could still be undermined by security threats such as weapons smuggling emanating from its neighbors Libya and Algeria. In this sense only, is geography not a blessing for Tunisia.
The fact that Tunisia, with all its geographic and attendant developmental advantages, faces such a difficult road to political normality, testifies to the misplaced optimism of Western elites at the beginning of the Arab Spring over two years ago. Democratic culture, more common to the West than to other parts of the world, does not instantly sprout forth. It thrives on moderation and compromise, and moderation and compromise -- even in the West -- are often hard to come by. That's why instability in the Arab world is the new normal. Tunisia, perhaps the Arab world's most hopeful prospect, proves it.
