At this ominous moment — as England seems about to destroy the European Union and send economies into a spin with their vote to abandon it, when the Arab Spring threatens to turn into an Arab winter — what possible reason is there for the statue of an early Arab leader returned to its place in an Arab city to grasp our attention?
The late Habib Bourguiba, the handsome, Frenchified Tunisian revolutionary who led his country to oust the French and declare independence in 1957, remains little known to Americans.
But the man who became president of Tunisia for three decades and was never known for his modesty — he once declared, “I invented Tunisia!” — has now had his legacy revived. Is it possible that, in the doing, other important things will also be revived?
Bourguiba and his horse have been brought back this June to their old spot on an elegant downtown boulevard in Tunis, and this unusual act of state signals a change in thinking, both on where Tunisia is going and, although remotely, on where America is going and how it goes about saving the world (in great part from itself).
Bourguiba, you see, was a worldly man, but he was the personification of a specific philosophy of state and status. “He was a man of specificity and of possibility, not of diffuse and grandiose plans about things that could never be,” I wrote in my book “Tunisia: A Journey Through a Country That Works,” published in 2003.
Indeed, every historian and biographer of the melodramatic and often enchanting Bourguiba noted the extent to which he eschewed violent revolution a la Francaise, or even a la Arabesque, and embraced moderation and gradualism in developing his nation. His philosophy would come to be called “politics by stages” or a “strategy based on realism” or, perhaps most important, “evolutionary change.”
And it worked, if not wonders, to bring Tunisia into the modern world. It was in Tunisia that the Arab Spring began, of course; in Tunisia that a group of reformers only a year ago won the Nobel Peace Prize; and in Bourguiba’s Tunisia that the once-rigid Islamic political party has now accepted the formerly unthinkable multiparty state.
But his story becomes even more interesting because, in these same days as the United Kingdom seems to be headed toward collapse after their Brexit vote, we have also heard the respected former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, here in Washington to receive the Brzezinski Prize for his “strategic thinking with moral purpose,” speaking of “evolutionary change” as the answer to the gnawing questions of what should or could be America’s role in the world to come.
In his speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where Zbigniew Brzezinski is a shining light of rational scholarship, Gates spoke of how America had long wrestled with the conflict between high-minded idealism and realism in its search for how to bring democracy to others in the world.
“The Atlantic democracies came together to get the big things right,” he said at one point in his acceptance speech, “but short of total war, democracy cannot be imposed on others by force.” However, he then asserted, there are “many ways short of force.”
Bob Gates speaks so reasonably, without cant or gyration, that sometimes one does not quite grasp the extent of what he is saying. But it was suddenly clear that he was speaking about the last 50 years of American foreign policy, so often disastrous: from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan. Reforms, when they go against centuries of experience, cannot be achieved overnight, he said, quoting other philosophers.
In short, it’s time for an end to the idea of overnight revolution and time for a new era, much like the one Habib Bourguiba ushered in in Tunisia, in which step after evolutionary step is built upon, so that time and movement do not destroy what the reformers set out to build.
I would add, although he did not use the word, that it’s time for an end to “empire dreaming,” the sickness of the neo-conservatives who got us into Iraq, Afghanistan and the Greater Middle East where — have you noted? — we are still deeply stuck in the quicksands of history.
So, perhaps there IS a new era emerging. I note around Washington’s think tanks that the idea of evolution and carefulness in American actions is growing. The CATO Institute recently had a seminar on “restraint” in foreign policy, for instance.
Maybe it’s not hopeless. Maybe we can get back on our horses, too, and start to ride off into the right sunset for a change.
Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years
