Demotix/Yann Bohac. All rights reserved.
The awarding of the 2015 Nobel peace prize to the 'Tunisian national dialogue quartet' has boosted morale in the region. As writer Guy Sorman explains, the solution to the current unrest in the Arab world will not be found in reforms to Islam or in hopeless military interventions, but through to a regional dialogue that restores political and economic freedoms.
But what is the significance of the prize in the current context? The quartet’s member organisations undoubtedly helped preserve the new constitution and avert civil war, but are socially and politically distant from the principles of the 'jasmin revolution'. Minor economic and political changes to the Ben Ali regime are inadequate, and Tunisia, the pioneer of the ‘Arab Spring’, is still in part seen as ‘the exception’—as it was during the Ben Ali dictatorship—in a region devastated by foreign interventions and civil wars.
