In tracing the establishment, trajectory, and eventual fall of one of the Arab world’s most infamous autocracies, this book attempts, and largely succeeds, in serving several important and useful purposes. Anne Wolf details how Zine al-Abdine Ben Ali’s “legal coup” against the aging and infirm, if legendary, President Habib Bourguiba in 1987 was consolidated into an enduring personalistic regime, outlining an autocratic playbook that is far more subtle than the conventional emphasis on repression and violence. Ben Ali’s regime, like all autocracies, evolved over its several decades, both ideologically and institutionally; Wolf chronicles the slow but steady decay of the institutions of rule—notably the ruling party—as Ben Ali’s family became more powerful and personal ties more valuable. This created fissures that were critical to the regime’s demise; her focus on the regime itself is a useful and compelling corrective to romanticized versions of the popular uprising that led to the fall of Ben Ali’s regime.
Wolf draws not only on a wide variety of written and video sources but also, most importantly, on a wide-ranging set of interviews with players and protagonists across the political spectrum—from opposition figures, including noted human rights activists, to regime insiders, including Ben Ali’s personal pilot and his favorite daughter (the wife of one of his putative heirs apparent), as well as prime ministers and party leaders, party hacks, and regional dissidents: Wolf seems to have talked to just about everyone. Indeed, the book explores the depth and detail of the regime’s inner workings and begins with several pages identifying the dramatis personae.
Wolf puts this insider information to good use, revealing aspects of the inner workings of autocracy that are usually obscured. Arguing that Ben Ali employed “ideological lobbyists” (p. 53) to develop what she calls a “correctivist frame” (p, 47), she shows the importance of seductive ideas. Thus, the coup, cloaked in legalism, was portrayed as merely returning to or revitalizing a regime with a distinguished legacy. This was—and is—a plausible story, not just in Ben Ali’s Tunisia but also in Sisi’s Egypt and even in Xi’s China. Wolf suggests that this approach was cynically cooked up in the (vastly expanded) presidential palace; yet, there was much more of the trial and error, uncertainty, and lack of coordination that Wolf attributes to the regime in its dying days. After all, “even many regime insiders said they did not know how much pluralism Ben Ali initially had in mind” (p. 49). As the disarray that attended the end of his regime suggests, planning is rarely the only or even the most important cause of a political effect.
That said, by the time Ben Ali’s regime was consolidated and his opponents sidelined, the party renamed and retrofitted for his purposes, a cadre of “lumpen activists” (p. 94) recruited to act as enforcers, and a public relations machine fired up to sell the country as a modern, technocratic miracle on the Mediterranean friendly to women’s rights and tourist revenue alike, Ben Ali was set to enjoy more than a decade of relative calm. Ideas of pluralism fell by the wayside, replaced by the far more expedient embrace of antiterrorism and economic growth, thereby lifting pressure for any genuine democratic reform.
Academic studies of the Middle East pioneered the notion of “authoritarian upgrading” to account for the unusual resilience of the region’s autocracies during the post–Cold War “Third Wave” of democratization, and the first decade or so of the Ben Ali regime seemed to reflect such a process. He and his associates captured the ruling party and became increasingly proficient at high-tech surveillance. However, Wolf shows that, like many of its regional counterparts, the regime grew increasingly self-absorbed and inattentive as the ruler aged. Indeed, among the many merits of this book is its insistence on the accumulation of small-scale changes in an apparently stable autocracy that ultimately contributed to its surprising weakness when pushed by popular protests in 2011. Ben Ali squandered much of his political authority in promoting his family’s business interests; by the mid-2000s, the children and in-laws of his notoriously acquisitive second wife had their fingers in business interests across the economy.
By the early 2000s, aging autocrats began to confront their inevitable demise across the Middle East and North Africa. Jordan’s King Hussein replaced his brother as crown prince with his son shortly before he died in 1999, and ostensibly republican Syria saw a transition from father to son when Hafez al-Assad died in 2000. Grooming sons, as both Egypt’s Mubarak and Libya’s Qaddafi also appeared to be doing, was increasingly common—and increasingly resented by the regimes’ old guard. Ben Ali’s only son, born in 2005, was too young to be a plausible successor, but by 2010 two sons-in-law were amassing political allies and personal wealth at a brisk clip, much to the dismay of party stalwarts and traditional economic elites.
As Wolf shows, when popular expressions of frustration at economic stagnation and growing unemployment grew into protests against the regime at the end of that year, local party officials did little to counter them; some even joined in the demonstrations. Economic grievances against the president’s family meant that business elites sat on their hands, and the uprising soon spun out of control. Here Wolf gives ample and appropriate attention to contingency. The panicky decision making that led Ben Ali to leave the country with his family highlights the role of individual agency and chance: although Ben Ali planned to fly back to Tunis the next day, his personal pilot returned without him after seeing a TV broadcast of the prime minister’s announcement that Ben Ali was “temporarily incapable of exercising power.”
Without gainsaying the role of the popular protests in bringing down Ben Ali’s government, Wolf shows that cracks in the regime created openings that the protesters could exploit. In this, the Tunisian story is not unlike its Egyptian and Libyan counterparts—and is a marked contrast to Syria, in which a younger ruler rallied a more robust and cohesive regime to resist a popular revolt. Better appreciating the role of the elite in shaping when and how the president left office certainly helps make sense of subsequent events, in Tunis and elsewhere.
Ideas are useful mobilizational tools; regimes change over time; elite bargains unravel. Wolf has persuasively illustrated the importance of these apparently simple propositions in explaining politics in autocracies. Although she might have made more of the contingent character of many of the processes she describes—What if the signatories of the National Pact had been less gullible or if Ben Ali’s wife had been less engaged?—she conveys in fascinating detail the decisions on which the establishment, resilience, and demise of the Ben Ali regime rested. In doing so, Wolf deepens our understanding of politics and policy making in authoritarian regimes.
