As Tunisia's first president, Bourguiba consolidated control over the party and state bureaucracies by co-opting and manipulating clientele networks in ways that would concentrate power in his own hands without alienating his bases of support. Rather than becoming Tunisia's sole political patron, he set out to become its chief patron.

Bourguiba accomplished much of this through an ongoing game of political musical chairs. He intentionally gave and withdrew important posts to powerful individuals who could use their positions to service their own clienteles. In this way, Bourguiba established himself as the maker and breaker of political careers. He created tangible incentives for loyalty that consolidated his personal power much more effectively than a system based solely on repression and fear.

Bourguiba also recognized early on that protest and contestation could play an important role in the effort to co-opt individuals and organizations. In the 1950s and again in the mid-1980s, Bourguiba discretely supported worker unrest designed to undermine the union leadership. On both occasions he supported break-away unions, and then reunited the labor movement under leaders who owed their positions to Bourguiba rather than to the rank and file. He tried unsuccessfully to use this same tactic to bring the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH) to heel in the mid-1980s.

Bourguiba was not the only politician who exploited popular unrest. Indeed, the intermingling of elite politics and popular protest became a staple of Tunisian political life after the government established a prime ministership in 1969. Party elites discretely encouraged unrest as a way of discrediting competitors, then tried to negotiate alliances with the student and worker movements in order to secure a popular base for their own ambitions. Getting the militants to back off allowed politicians to demonstrate their ability to deliver social peace.

The onset of Bourguiba's health problems in 1967 sparked a great of deal of speculation and jockeying for position in a system that lacked a clear successor and a method for choosing one. In addition to relieving himself of the more technical tasks of government, Bourguiba used the prime ministership as a tool for turning this elite competition to his advantage.

At his direction, the National Assembly passed legislation that gave the president the power to select the prime minister and designated that person as the automatic successor if the president died or became incapacitated. By establishing his personal control over the succession, Bourguiba reinforced his power by creating what William Zartman aptly describes as "position politics."⁵ Rather than building alliances against Bourguiba, party barons conspired against one another to earn his favor and a chance to become prime minister. As Bourguiba aged, Tunisian politics devolved into a collective wager on his mortality. Everyone wanted either to be prime minister or to be on good terms with the person who was when Bourguiba passed on.

Through the early 1980s, this intricate political theater channeled elite competition away from Bourguiba. And while the radicalization of the labor movement in 1977 demonstrated that he could not completely control this messy game, two factors did help Bourguiba to keep social conflict from spinning totally out of control. First, strong economic growth in the 1970s supported a succession of wage increases and an extensive system of consumer subsidies. Second, the worker and student unions' reliance on public funds allowed Bourguiba to intervene in and manipulate their internal politics.

By the mid-1980s, these conditions no longer obtained. Economic deterioration eroded the government's ability to buy social peace. Bourguiba became less tolerant of labor's wage demands and cracked down hard on the union in 1984-85. The Islamic Tendency Movement (MTI)--al-Nahdha's precursor--stepped into the void created by the union repression and became the social force that politicians publicly reviled and privately courted. But the MTI was an independent entity whose clandestine organization provided few openings for external manipulation. For Bourguiba, allowing it to become the force that elites courted was too risky. His campaign to destroy the MTI set Tunisia on the course that brought Ben 'Ali to power in 1987.

Thus, the vibrancy of Tunisia's civil society and its ability to generate pressure on the state in the 1970s and early 1980s, did not reflect a deep-seated political culture. Rather, it was a product of pragmatic political choices. Bourguiba's strategy for consolidating and holding power created new opportunities for protest, and workers, students, Islamists and others tried to use them to their own advantage.

Ben 'Ali's strategy for consolidating and holding power has produced a very different state-society relationship. Unlike Bourguiba, Ben 'Ali did not rise to power at the forefront of a well-organized movement. Prior to becoming interior minister in 1986, Ben 'Ali had spent his entire career in the military and security forces. When he seized power, he stepped into the void at the center of a paralyzed political system. The deepening economic and political crisis had discredited the ruling party's traditional elite. Internal divisions and government repression had crippled the opposition parties and other organizations.

These conditions gave Ben 'Ali a degree of freedom that Bourguiba did not enjoy. He faced no organized challenge and he did not have to court or compensate powerful constituencies that had contributed to his rise. Most Tunisians were simply relieved to see Bourguiba ushered offstage with minimal trauma.

At the same time, however, Ben 'Ali realized that this freedom from the entanglements of traditional party politics could be an important handicap. This brings us to a point that is central for understanding Ben 'Ali's authoritarianism. Battling an-Nahdha clearly has been the government's single greatest preoccupation over the past ten years. But this is precisely the kind of contest for which Ben 'Ali is eminently qualified. From the 1970s on, he had supervised Bourguiba's successive crackdowns on labor, students and Islamists. This experience, and those of other countries in the region, suggested a simple, sober lesson. The Islamists would become a serious threat to his position if he followed Benjadid's example in Algeria and offered them access to the ballot box. But if he played to his strengths and remained committed to destroying an-Nahdha, he could probably win.

A revival of position politics, on the other hand, would have posed a much more serious threat. Many longtime party barons resented Ben 'Ali for preempting their own plans for stepping into the presidency. From the beginning of his rule, Ben 'Ali feared that one of these established politicians, or one of his own ministers, would use their networks in the party, the state bureaucracy, and other organizations to undermine him. As a relative newcomer to ruling party politics, Ben 'Ali lacked the social bases and patronage networks so vital to Bourguiba's style of political management. He did not have the political resources to referee and manipulate effectively an ongoing competition between powerful politicians and the social actors they rallied to their camps.

To protect his own position, Ben 'Ali has tried to do two things. First, he has worked to prevent state and party officials from developing into the centers of power that they became under Bourguiba. He abolished the office of party director--a position of considerable power in the 1970s--and reduced the autonomy of his ministers. His dismissal of Hedi Baccouche in 1989 demonstrated that Ben 'Ali has no tolerance for a prime minister who shows any sign of becoming a power in his own right.⁶ Throughout his cabinet, Ben 'Ali has carefully selected individuals who are technically competent but come from nonpolitical backgrounds or lack extensive connections in the ruling party or the state bureaucracy. He is involved in the operations of individual ministries much more deeply than Bourguiba ever was, and he has used frequent cabinet shuffles to prevent ministers from establishing lasting clientele bases.⁷

Second, Ben 'Ali has worked diligently to break the tie between elite and popular politics that was so vital in the 1970s and 1980s. Ill-equipped to play position politics, he has tried to ensure that "civil society" remains unavailable as a political weapon.

Initially, Ben 'Ali relied on old-fashioned co-option, exercised with considerably less finesse than his predecessor, to put the opposition parties and other organizations on short leashes. Outright repression became more important after evidence emerged in 1989-90 of a broad opposition front built around former Prime Minister Mohammed Mzali and other longtime Destour politicians. In April, 1990, the political bureau of a group calling itself the Tunisian National Salvation Front issued a communique claiming to represent all opposition groups inside and outside of Tunisia. The communique condemned with equal vigor the government's repression of everyone from Bourguiba to the POCT and an-Nahdha. It called on all democrats, regardless of ideology and affiliation, to unite in a common effort. From his new headquarters in London, an-Nahdha's leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, made a similar commitment to building a broad opposition front that would push Ben 'Ali to establish a meaningful, multi-party democracy.

This challenge became Ben 'Ali's chief concern. He became--and remains--terribly afraid that this front, headed by former politicians with extensive ties throughout the country, is conspiring to unseat him. Ben 'Ali fears that this front will establish alliances with an-Nahdha, the LTDH, militant portions of the labor and student movements, the legal opposition parties and anyone else who might provide a useful striking arm against him. From his perspective, then, a strike, a student demonstration, or an opposition communique could be much more than it appears to be. Because any kind of contestation could be organized and manipulated by the opposition front it must be repressed.

This repressive strategy has stunted Tunisia's formidable civil society in two ways. Most obviously, it has elevated the risks of engaging in protest and made collective action much harder to organize. Beyond this climate of fear and intimidation, Ben 'Ali's effort to break the connection between elite and popular politics has also created a profound strategic malaise for the organizations that long constituted the bedrock of associational life. As elsewhere in the region, the struggle for meaningful autonomy from state control has dominated the lives of workers' and students' unions, human rights groups, women's groups and Islamist organizations in post-independence Tunisia. At the same time, though, these organizations have always understood that the line between state and civil society is blurry at best. For more than 30 years, establishing alliances with individuals and factions of the governing elite and playing on tensions within party and state bureaucracies was a fundamental part of these organizations' strategies for influencing government policy. The dissolution of these ties, the end of position politics as it operated for so long, has left Tunisia's traditionally vigorous civil society adrift.