Rory McCarthy, who knows a thing or two about
Tunisia, wrote an article under the title: “It's 2018 and Tunisians Are Still
Mad as Hell” and the subtitle: “The government's failure to improve the economy
and the lives of young people has led to a flood of protests.” It was published
on October 8, 2018 in the New York Times.
When you read the article, you get exposed to the
thing or two that the author knows about Tunisia, and little else. They are
that the country has experimented with what is commonly known as the system of
Liberal Democracy, but that the experiment failed to deliver on what the local
population was expecting, and what the foreign advocates were promising Tunisia
and the countries of the Arab Spring will be their reward.
Puzzled as to why the democratic cure to the ills
of society has failed to work in Tunisia, whereas the system works
spectacularly well in many parts of the world, you comb the article looking for
the answer to your query. Unfortunately, what you encounter is only a
discussion about the traditional political games of the kind which are played
by the political parties everywhere, and nothing to suggest an answer to your
query. And so, the question remains: What could have gone wrong in Tunisia?
What went wrong is that all those telling others
how to live their lives, have no idea what they are talking about. Worse, they
are motivated by self-serving ideologies that end up hurting the people they
advise as well as fail to serve the self. The problem is that the
self-appointed advisers have in their heads the image of a liberal democracy
that produces great wealth because it allows the citizens to criticize the
government and vote the rascals out when they fail to perform.
That theory is totally false. The reality is that
the wealth of a country does not depend on how liberal or democratic it is, but
on the history of its social and economic development. The truth is that the
Western democracies of Europe are wealthier than most nations in Asia, Africa
and Latin America because their wealth is produced by industries that use
machines. In turn, these machines are powered by forms of energy which are
hundreds of times mightier than previously known. The result is that the
industrial economies of Europe make products hundreds of times faster and more
abundantly than the predominantly agrarian economies where the energy used does
not exceed what the beasts of burden deliver.
But the underdeveloped countries that missed the
boat at the start of the Industrial Revolution are now industrializing, so why
are they not liberalizing the way that Europe did when it started to
industrialize? To begin with, it must be said that Europe did not liberalize
overnight. It took time for the process to run its course, which it did while
being disrupted by strikes, unrest and revolutions.
But more important is that a big difference
separates the experience of then and that of now. The Europeans were at the
leading edge of a new era, and had to develop industrially, socially and
politically at the same time. In so doing, they followed a process that evolved
organically, with every step made in one discipline consorting with the other
disciplines. This is not happening today because those who get on the
industrial road, are forced to accept changes which are alien to them to begin
with, and take-in the whole thing almost instantly in a process that is likened
to shock therapy.
For this reason, those who embark on a program of
rapid industrialization must be left alone to experiment and find what will
work for them unless they ask for the kind of help they know they need. But the
sad part is that you can tell from a passage in Rory McCarthy's article, that
this will be difficult to do for some self-appointed advisers. Here is that
passage:
“Now that political consensus is fraying,
inflation has surged, unemployment is high, and strikes and protests are
widespread [in Tunisia], the fragility of this vital democratic transition is
suddenly exposed. This is not the dignified future Tunisians have been
struggling for. A fresh starting point would be to reform the tax, investment
and banking laws, and to redistribute spending to long-neglected regions of the
country”.