Laura Guazzone

Ennahda Islamists and the Test of Government in Tunisia

After winning the 2011 elections, the Ennahda Islamist Party was the majority partner in successive coalition governments, whose poor performance – namely in the economic and security fields – disappointed the people’s high post-revolutionary expectations. Opponents accused Ennahda of incompetence, greed for power and double talk. Many of the Ennahda-led governments’ failures were due to factors beyond their control, but some did indeed depend on Ennahda’s own political weaknesses. Nevertheless, Ennahda contributed positively to the overall development of Tunisia’s political transition thanks to its moderation and pragmatism and its contribution remains paramount for the democratic consolidation of Tunisia and other political Islamic actors.

A Map and Some Hypotheses for the Future of the Middle East

Not surprisingly, the analysis of the political, economic, cultural and strategic features of the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) today, developed in the different contributions to this volume, stresses that the entire region is in the midst of deep and interlocking trends of change. Two sets of factors have caused the present state of transition: the first is rooted in local history and is the result of a long process of social, economic and political transformation that the region has undergone during the last several decades; the second set of factors derives from the dramatic changes that have taken place in the international system during the early 1990s, influencing the different regional subsystems worldwide and hence reshaping the domestic and international environment of the Middle East and North Africa countries.

Globalisation and the Restructuring of State Power in the Arab World

The dynamics of change in the Arab world today are part of a much larger global process–the neo-liberal phase of globalisation–that started in the 1980s and engendered a process of state power restructuring, both for peripheral “weak” states and core industrialised countries. Beyond national differences, the restructuring of the Arab states has implied the consolidation of neo-authoritarian political regimes characterised by fragmentation of the power structure and by an increase in informal modes of government (neo-patrimonialism, corruption), accompanied by the parallel political and economic marginalisation of large sectors of society. These less centralised and more elitist regimes are likely to be more dependent and vulnerable than their predecessors to external pressures and foreign influence.