RUTHFULLY YOURS

The message that “we will see” is not what readers turn to pundits for; yet it has to be said before proceeding to general observations on the advance of Islamism through the “Arab Spring.” Everything I know about the world tells me that what looks like good news often proves lethally bad; and sometimes vice versa. On balance, pessimists place much safer bets.

We have now had the first open general election in Tunisia, in recorded history, won fairly decisively by what the media describe as the “moderate Islamist” party, Ennahda.

It was among the more humane Third World dictatorships. This is because those who participated in it seem chiefly to have occupied themselves in making money. Corruption is not good, but it is the least among the many evils to which tyrants are prone; and when it is the consuming focus of their efforts, they are inclined to leave other things alone. They will suppress liberties only to the degree necessary to advance their own financial interests.

Tunisia had, for instance, one of the freest media environments in the region, and the beginning of a semblance of a free-market economy, with conscious government efforts to unknot the strangulating cat’s cradle of socialist regulation that had been woven by its founding dictator (the celebrated Habib Bourguiba). The country is still encumbered with counter-productive state enterprises, but had experienced spurts of dramatic growth in the spaces around them.

It was considered a fairly reliable place by foreign investors; and foreign investment does have the effect of raising living standards, or at least wage incomes. Tunisia has been left by its dictatorship with an economy that includes the manufacture of car parts, as well as oil and phosphate extraction. It was a regional model of economic liberalization, achieving many of the things which, for instance, Hosni Mubarak failed to achieve in Egypt, with better opportunities.

One of the marks of economic advance is, alas, a plunging birthrate, and in this respect Tunisia has been at the cutting edge of the Arab world. The demographic doomsayers of the West have overlooked this phenomenon. The same trends that swept the rest of the world are now sweeping through the Muslim realms; last, perhaps, but hardly least with a view to the more distant future.

And, one or two-child families make a huge difference to the form of “Islamism” that is likely to take hold. Tunisians, like Europeans, have become focused upon personal material comfort. The very selfishness that follows from this, subverts any religious appeal. And a competitive economy has the paradoxical effect of enhancing national feeling against religious universality, for people identify with their country as a corporate unit.

The alternative before Tunisia’s electorate was a well-organized Islamist party, which cannily identified itself with economic liberalism and social continuities; and a slew of rather dated, left wing parties, identified with no positives and only vaguely with anxieties over Shariah.

At the crudest level, this reflects the situation throughout the Arab world. Islamism presents itself as the only possible future, given political cultures in which secular parties only point toward the “Nasserite” and economically disastrous past. Opposition to Islamism comes from the ideological leavings of past dictatorships, and there has never been an opportunity for secular parties to develop except under this unfruitful shade. Islamism now fills the ideological vacuum left by socialist failures.

But Tunisia may be unique in its relative freedom from the tribal rivalries that rack every other Arab state. It is relatively small, and its population relatively homogeneous. Through relatively high emigration to, and frequent re-immigration from Europe, it is also Europeanized to a greater degree than its neighbours. The Ennahda party has been able to cite the Turkish model with real plausibility. It will now preside over what looks like an intelligently-organized constituent assembly to draft a “moderately Islamist” constitution, with further elections to follow. Good luck to them.

There are no comparable advantages in neighbouring Libya, where the interim government has surprised its gullible NATO allies by making a bid for a Shariahbased constitution, before anyone has had the luxury of voting.

There, and elsewhere, the strength and brutality of tribal rivalries will mould Islamism into more coercive forms. I shudder to think what will emerge in Libya, where the model of Somalia now seems most plausible.

And I shudder to think what will happen in Egypt, where the choice is already between a successor military dictatorship, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter aspires not only to rule, but to recover Cairo’s ideological hegemony in the Arab world. Egypt’s army has already abandoned Mubarak’s timid programme of economic liberalization, and the Muslim Brotherhood shows little inclination to take it up.

© The Ottawa Citizen