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GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
If we look at the problems of government in the independent
countries of North Africa in an order of ascending difficulties,
We find that Tunisia made the transition from dependence to
independence with a minimum of shock and discontinuity, and
has functioned since with remarkable smoothness.
Arrangements had already been made during the autonomous period
for elections to a Constituent Assembly and these were held on
March 25, 1956, only five days after Franco-Tunisian protocol
recognizing Tunisia as an independent state had been signed.
The neo-Destour ticket, a national union front grouping
together labor, commercial and agricultural organization, won
an overwhelming victory (97 per cent of the vote). The AS-
but he resigned shortly to become Premier of the first Tunisian
assembly was convened and Bourguiba elected presiding officer,
government.
The principal task of the Assembly was to draft
a constitution, but as it got down to work it became evident that there
was strong sentiment among the deputies and throughout the
country to change the regime from a monarchy to a republic.
In fact, the eventual disappearance of the Beylical system had
long been planned by Destourians and taken for granted by
most Tunisians. There had never been any deep feeling among
the people for it, although it had been accepted without rancor.
But the whole political evolution of Tunisia, from the earliest
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days of the nationalist struggle, had taken place outside the monarchy, which had remained a fossil institution incapable of inspiring affection or admiration. The neo-Destour had been the focus of national life and Bourguiba the national hero.
Accordingly on July 25, 1057, the Assembly unanimously passed a resolution abolishing the monarchy and proclaiming Tunisia a republic Premier Bouguiba was entrusted with the duties of head of state until the constitution was ready. That was not until June 1950, and national elections were not held until November that year, so that for two years Tunisia functioned provisionally with Bourguiba as head of state and head of government without a legislative assembly in existence. This meant a heavy concentration of power in the hands of one man, and it is significant that almost all the social reform legislation was promulgated in the period between 1956 and 1959 by executive decree and bears the stamp of the presidential personality.
The constitution as adopted established Tunisia as a republican state, with Islam its religion end Arabic is language, which forms a part of the "Greater Maghrib." The choice of regime was influenced both by American ideas-Bourguiba has always been an admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he resembles
in many ways-and, negatively, by the example of the Fourth Republic in France, the weakness of which was fully demonstrated while the document was under study. Thus a presidential regime was chosen which gives much power to the executive but provides a legislative check as well. The President is elected directly by universal adult suffrage for a period of five years and can hold office for three terms. Like the American president, he appoints his cabinet (whose members are tided Secretaries of Sate rather than Ministers), is Commander-in chief of the armed forces, declares war and makes peace, and ratifies treaties with the agreement of the Assembly, The President can introduce legislation which then takes precedence, can issue orders in council while the assembly is not in session,
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subject to certain restrictions, and, finally, can take exceptional measures if the safety and independence of the Republic are threatened.
Compared to that, the prerogatives of the Assembly are somewhat restricted. Its members are elected at the same time as the President for five years, and all deputes represent the country as a whole instead of a particular district. The Assembly can pass bills over presidential veto by a two-thirds majority on second reading, bur is most telling power is that of fixing the final figures of the budget In practice the legislature has been overshadowed during the seven years of Tunisian independence by the executive, but that is not too unusual in the first stages of a new country which is tempted to dramatize the national will in one personality, especially when the magnetism of that individual is such that it is impossible to imagine the country without him.
Grouped around the presidency is the executive office, beginning with the cabinet which bas been staffed with little change by members of the neo-Destour. The Secretary of State to the Presidency functions as a vice-president and is also responsible for national defense. The forces under his command include a small army of about 20,000 men, which has enhanced its reputation in the Congo, a naval contingent for coastal defense, a parachutist police unit, a few officer pilots, and the gendarmerie.
Military service is compulsory, but the rate of rejection is high and many trainees are enrolled in a civil corps which has done excellent work in the economic development program.
On the regional level, the country is divided into thirteen governorates, with each governor assisted by an elected advisory council. These have limited powers but provide a useful testing ground of local opinion. It is in the competence of its regional administration that Tunisia has particularly distinguished itself. On the whole the governors have been able and conscientious younger Destourians, and a neat balance between centralization and decentralization has been kept. The governor
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Statement. This is almost, but not completely, true, and it may be getting less so very recently. But it is often hard to separate the two, and although Tunisia is not in any sense a one-party state with totalitarian harshness, it does have the unexciting air of a country in which one party is very dominant indeed. Aside from the neo-Destour today, there are only the Communists with a minuscule following, some young independents of the left, and the unorganized conservative remnants of the old Destour. Individuals sometimes quarrel with Bourgwiba personally or break with party doctrine, but they have almost always returned to the fold, and no real foyer of opposition has developed since the ben Youssef split in 1955 and early 1956.120
Once again the smooch social contours of Tunisia must be given credit. The party owes much of its success, frankly speaking, to the quality of the men who make up its top and medium leadership. The advantages of the age of civilization in the country begin to be seen; the relative richness of human resources in Tunisia compared to many new countries is something it can be proud of and an asset which has been a leading factor in the country's successful adjustment to the modem world. The backbone of the neo-Destour hes come from the hard-headed merchants of the Sahel, dour and practical peasant individualists, artisans and craftsmen, the brightest lights among the professional classes in the cities, with a dosage of intellectuals to give it sauce. Its cornerstone has been, rather than the brilliant verbosity of many political movements, a quiet, pragmatic flexibility, and it has followed the rule that the art of politics is to know what is possible. From this spirit emerged the gradualist techniques of Bourguiba, to advance step-by-step, never to break contact with the interlocutor, to continue negotiating at all times, and to compromise tactically but never on principles.
The top party leadership is homogeneous, too; some might almost say inbred. Most of the high officials are graduates of the Sadiqi College, and there is a nucleus from the specialized
schools in Paris, particularly che Ecole Libre des Sciences Poli
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tiques. A clubby and familial atmosphere prevails among them.
They see much of each other; it is not uncommon to come across half a dozen important government figures lunching together for no special reason other than that Tunis is small and their society is limited. (The extraordinary difference between the school-tie government of a very little county like Tunisia and the normally impersonal administration of a large country like the United States may not at first strike most Americans but it is a vital political reality.) Bourguiba's place at the top of this intimate hierarchy has never been disputed since the early 193o's, and he is now consecrated as the first citizen of the country, even though criticism of some of his actions is heard on a rising scale. His popularity with the average Tunisian maintained by a boundless energy, numerous public appearances, regular radio talks, and a fine popular touch-is still great, although it has somewhat declined since the Bizerte fiasco in 1961. The ill-conceived plot against the life of the President at the end of 1962 is less symptomatic of this than is the vague popular discontent owing to the slowness of economic progress and the growing realization that Bourguiba is not infallible. Still, there is a general recognition, even among intellectuals who often show impatience, that it was he who first lit the lamp in Tunisia and kept it burning at all times.
Around him is a group of distinguished men touching fifty years of age: Mongi Slim, now Foreign Minister after having served as President of the United Nations Assembly; Bahi Ladgham, in theory the second man in the country; and a half a dozen other old companions-in-arms. But they are aging and a new generation is behind them, men arriving at forty, of whom the able Minister of the Interior, Taieb Mehiri, is an example. With others, like Masؤ±noudi, Bourguiba has quarreled over religious and personal issues, or like ben Salah, over the degree of socialization in the economy, but most of these disputes have ended in reconciliation, that word which always comes back in a discussion of Tunisian affairs.
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If it is hard to see the party breaking apart from within, another danger faces it, that of withering away through indifference.
To qualify this, it should be said that this is nor an immediate danger and that the neo-Destour, more successfully than most parties, has crossed the bridge from being a revolutionary force directing national energies toward a clearly defined 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 problems 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 summon 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 élan 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 nor get very far neither did it bring down more
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than minor sanctions. Quite recently there has been a noticeable tightening of authority and an increased severity in punishments. Whether this is a temporary phenomenon or not will be more clearly seen when the present term of he President comes to an end in 1g65s--a time when many of the problems mentioned above: authoritarianism, the conflict of age and power groups, and the results of economic sacrifices, seem likely to come to a head. The present paternalism can be justified, and seems to be accepted by the people, on the grounds that the President's energy and vision have pushed and cajoled the country into progress which it would not have made on is own. The people tend to be inert, something which is at once a strength and a weakness, bur the danger is that continuing paternalism will make them more inert. On the other hand Tunisia has been buttressed by other rare values. Its longstanding social cohesion has been translated into political unity, and, as the result of long and patient indoctrination since the mid-1930's by a highly organized political formation, national values have permeated all important sectors of the country.
Time has also been useful; Tunisia had a generation to ripen before plunging into independent life and this maturity now shows. For these reasons, although it is likely that a period of uncertainty is ahead in the not-too-distant future, when one considers the proved Tunisian capacity for accommodation and the ability to subordinate petty problems of the moment to the pursuit of the principal goal, there is much reason to be hopeful.
In Morocco, a large and more complex country than Tunisia, the transition period just after independence was more unsettled but since then there has been more variety and movement in the texture of political life. Until 1953 two forces had shared the leadership of the nationalist movement: the palace and the Istiglal Party. After their temporary effacement, a third force came on the scene, the so-called "resistance," made up by the various terrorist groups in the cities and the Liberation Army in the countryside. The story of independent Morocco reduced
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to its simplest political terms has been the sorting out of relations between these forces and the search for a system in which each will have its proper place. This was first exemplified by
the struggle into the national political structure, and later by the growing polarity between the throne and various political groups, with each seeking a mandate from the Moroccan people for the eventual shaping of a new framework. After the King had become the symbol of national resistance in 1953, there was an assumption in many quarters that he would on his return stay aloof from any political involvement, that he would reign and not rule, and that he would remain the representative of a precious but precarious national unity. The prestige of the monarchy was overwhelming and its latent power immense, as it still is. But between 1956 and i96o that prestige was transformed into active political power as well, although the step was not taken until the inability of the normal political organizations of the country to produce a needed stability had been demonstrated. the problem of incorporating all the undercover elements of
At the beginning of 1956 Morocco faced a host of problems, but none was more pressing than the insecurity and turbulence which reigned in both town and country. The several resistance movements which had come into being after 1953 had grown up, as it were, on the streets without proper guidance.
They had siphoned off, especially toward the end of the underground period, most of the active and aggressive young men in the country. With the return of normalcy many of these were unwilling to return to ordinary jobs or, in many cases, unemployment and dreary poverty, and they turned to gangsterism, extortion, and various kinds of illegal activities. The field was almost clear because Morocco was dependent on French security forces, which were reluctant to intervene in purely Moroccan affairs, until the national police was formed in May 1956. Even as late as that summer, however, the police had to fight pitched battles in Casablarica with the Black
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Crescent, one of the underground groups that had Communist affiliations. Individually the resistants were heroes, however, and the movements were judiciously signaled out for praise in royal speeches although less favorably viewed by the Istiqlal, which did not intend to lose the fruits of its generation-long campaign. Only gradually was urban order restored as the police got the upper hand, and as some of the resistants themselves were incorporated into the police while others drifted back to their ordinary occupations which the assurance that they would be given a gamut of veterans' benefits and special consideration.
The reintegration of the Liberation Army in the countryside
was more delicate. In the spring of 1956 it was continuing attacks on French outposts and government offices, and presented
a serious threat to order in rural areas where dissidence was an
old habit. If the new state was unable to control all its territory, there could be serious consequences. A Royal Army was created, mainly with volunteers who had served with French forces and on the basis of personal and tribal loyalty to the King. It was possible to integrate some of the rank-and-file of the Liberation Army, who themselves came from rural backgrounds, into the Royal Army after careful screening. But the Liberation Army had also recruited urban resistants and political leaders whose ideas did not seem suitable to the force the palace was building up, and so good parts of it were never incorporated. Regrouped in the far south of the country, they were patronized for a time by Allal Al Fassi and his wing of the Istiqlal, which began making claims to large pars of the Sahara in French and Spanish hands, and they unsuccessfully tried to seize Ifni from the Spanish in November 1957, a move which was meant to emphasize the intransigence of their outlook-for they had originally considered themselves part of a unified force meant to liberate all North Africa and had close ties with the Algerian rebels-and embarrass the government. Although this was the last major enterprise of the Liberation Army, it lingered on in
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the southern border regions and caused minor incidents until French troops were withdrawn a year later. Late in 1957, however, ex-leaders of the Liberation Army formed a new political party, the Popular Movement, which stressed a vague doctrine of "Islamic socialism," and has shown strength in rural and Berber areas in which the Army had previously operated.
After the restoration of public order, which was completed by the end of 1956, Moroccan political life blossomed. Since independence there have been six governments, four of them political cabinets and the last two formed and presided over by the King. The first government of Si Bekkai lasted until October 1956, bat was under constant attack by the Istiqlal, which wanted all the cabinet posts instead of a mere majority.
In fact, the cabinet was a governing institution in name only at this time because of the unlimited nature of royal power, and the separate political activity which flourished in the palace with all its ramifications, plus royal control of the Army and the police. When the second, all-Istiqlal government was formed, the King retained Si Bekkai, personally loyal to him, as head of government and formed a crown council to handle certain matters that he did not want to go through the cabinet.
Thus, the Istiqlal did not ever have full power and it was, moreover, beginning to show signs of internal strain. The enthusiastic support it had received from a majority of the people just after independence was giving way to disillusionment as the economy slowed down and the standard of living dipped. Also there was a basic cleavage between the old-guard leadership which had come from and represented more conservative circles and a minority group headed by Mehdi ben
accused the party of having lost contact with popular reality and which turned to the urban proletariat for support. The quarrel was noticeable in 1957, when the tone of party publications controlled by each faction started to clash. After the Istiqlal ministers had resigned and brought down the second
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Bekkai government, the conservative wing of the party formed a government under the stewardship of Balafrej. This lasted from May to December 1958, and made an indifferent record.
It was: a period when events in the Middle East like the Iraqi Revolution made the palace sensitive, while labor disorders increased in the cities. Late in the year an uprising in the Rif.
Stemming from both economic and political discontent was forcefully put down by the Royal Army led by Crown Prince (now King) Mulay Hassan. It was also a time when intra-party disharmony came to open rupture. The movement was forced to resign and, after three weeks of consultations, the King chose a cabinet directed by one of the leaders of the opposing faction, Ibrahim, although members were to serve, according to royal decision, on a personal and not party basis.
The purpose of this cabinet was to prepare for elections and resign, but in fact it lingered in office well over a year, during which time political confusion reached a climax. The Istiqlal split into two segments, and in the summer of 19s9 the "progressive" wing, as it turned itself, organized a new party, the National Union of Popular Forces (UNFP), which united Istiglal secessionists, dissidents from minor parties, and leaders of the Moroccan Labor Union (UMT). Chaos was the only description of the events of early 196o. The government refused to resign voluntarily and signs of impatience and hostility multiplied from the palace, particularly from the Crown Prince, who was politically very active. To compensate for the defection of the UMT, the Istiglal had formed 2 rival labor union which did not attract a large clientele, but private political and union strong-arm squads brought a return of violence to the cities. The government was powerless since the palace had control of the security forces, and it refused to intervene. The situation was such that in fact the leaders of the government were the chiefs of the opposition, and an uprising in the Atlas was attempted not against bur in favor of the government. To check further degradation, the King stepped
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in to end the mandate of the Ibrahim government. He announced in a nationwide speech that he was assuming control of the government hinself with the Crown Prince as Vice premier, and asked individuals of all tendencies to help him form a cabinet of national union. All groups except the UNFP agreed to participate in this stabilization effort.
Since 196o Morocco has been governed as well as reigned over by its monarchs, Muhammad V until his sudden death in February 1961, and Hassan II thereafter. In that interval, although there have been few changes in political structure, a clear division has emerged between the palace and its supporters in groups representing conservative and rural elements, and the opposition entrenched in the industrial cities along the Atlantic coast, where in municipal elections in 196o (the only elections yet held in Morocco) its candidates won a majority.
The monarchy is the point of departure for any understanding of modern Morocco, and it is more than just one of many political ingredients. The 'Alawite family has ruled for three centuries and has by now forged a strong affective bond between itself and the people, which makes the throne as close to the heart of the continuing tradition of the nation as possible. Thus the King, who wields power not only as the malik, or temporal executive, but also as imam, the spiritual leader of the Moroccan Muslim community, is the evocation of the national personality,. His popularity among simple and rural people approaches adulation and if in the cities there is a newer, sophisticated view of him as a political figure, he can still never really be looked on by any Moroccan as an ordinary individual. The decision of the royal family to step into the arena of politics was a fateful one. It raised cries of arbitrariness and "personal power" from the UNFP opposition, and caused discussion in many circles, but until now there has been no sign that any other force in the country is capable of assuring national solidarity.
Until the end of 1962 Morocco was an absolute monarchy in
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