The United States and North Africa
If it is hard to see the party breaking apart from within,
another danger faces it, that of withering away through indir
ference. To qualify this, it should be said that this is not an
immediate danger and that the neo-Destour, more successfully
than most parties, has crossed the bridge from being a revolu-
tionary force directing national energies toward a clearly de-
fined goal to playing the role of a formally organized political
party supporting a government which overshadows it and has
pre-empted many of its functions. There are at least three prob-
lems here: one is the difficulty the party has in recruiting new
members and maintaining interest at local cell levels; a second is
the diffuse nature of the party structure, which was desirable
when flexibility and the capacity to survive political repression
was important but is not now adequate to the needs of a state
which feels it must control and direct a complex socioeconomic
battle on many fronts; and a third is the result of having many
talented party members in government jobs which inevitably
take all their energy. Certainly a crisis in party-government
relations has been smoldering for several years, and now there
is an incipient crisis in the popular response to the party. Efforts
to solve the first by reinforcing central authority over regional
party federations do not seem to have been too successful, and
as to the second, it is notorious that the party is unable to sumn-
mon up mass enthusiasm; that is a task which has to be left
to the magic of the presidential appeal. It is too early to say
that there is a crisis of generations in Tunisia, but it looks as if
the next five years or so will determine whether the elan that
has so far carried the country along can be maintained as power
moves into the hands of another age group.
It is not easy to sum up political nuances in Tunisia. The
state is paternalistic and verges on authoritarianism without
openly espousing totalitarian methods. Up to now it has been
a relatively free country without much sense of oppression;
almost anything could be criticized save Bourguiba, and if
criticism did not gec. vary for neither did it bring dowo more
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