Protests against the economic reconciliation bill. Chedly Ben Ibrahim/Demotix. All rights reserved.
Tunisia’s January 2014 constitution clearly anchors sovereignty in democracy: the people exercises sovereign authority over its representatives, and the state makes sovereign decisions about its place in the international community. But the new constitution hasn’t quite succeeded in establishing such a democratic sovereign. It’s as if the 2014 elections sealed people’s agency, as if the democratic process was conveniently frozen at the point when it best suited old hands. Today, when the people take to the streets to call for their political or economic rights, the government responds with patronising speech, and the police with violence.
The destiny of the country now seems to depend largely on negotiations between an international oligarchy and the national plutocracy. A recent Washington Post op-ed shows this dynamic at work. The “partnership” between Tunisia and the U.S. proposed by the authors relies exclusively on high-level dialogue and top-down directives. One of the authors chairs the US-funded Tunisian American Enterprise Fund (TAEF), which manages the very investment money that he argues should be increased. Never mind that a US Government Accountability Office report found TAEF lacked “vetting requirements designed to prevent illicit use of the fund”—it appears that popular sovereignty is just a nuisance when business is at stake. Rather than a partnership between peoples, supposedly well-intentioned international actors are merely proposing a new way of linking business elites across national boundaries.
