The Arab Spring has ended in total ruin.
I don’t just mean that it has failed to deliver the freedoms for which its authors hoped in 2011. I mean, it has, from a very low base, made life even worse in the countries it affected.Libya, Syria, and Yemen quickly descended into civil wars. Soon afterward, Egypt fell to a military dictatorship worse than that of Hosni Mubarak, who had never gone so far as to order peaceful demonstrators to be gunned down in the streets.
This was no small achievement, given the challenges that nation faced. A terrorist campaign succeeded in driving away the beach tourism that had been Tunisia’s main foreign revenue earner, especially following two devastating attacks in 2015 — one at the national museum and the second, three months later, at a holiday resort.
Why should this matter to us? Tunisia, with the best will in the world, is hardly of critical strategic interest to the West. Authoritarianism, as this column keeps plangently noting, is on the march globally. What is one more dictator among many? For example, the previous Tunisian constitution, under Ben Ali’s secular dictatorship, had prohibited relations with Israel. Ghannouchi’s followers, the supposed Islamists, understood that this was a question of day-to-day foreign policy, not basic constitutional law, and removed that clause. They went on to govern as mainstream conservatives, allowing religion in the public sphere but insisting on multiparty democracy and the supremacy of secular law.
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