A Siege of Salt and Sand: Tunisia's Environmental Problems

The documentary about environmental and governance issues in Tunisia, A Siege of Salt and Sand, details the everyday struggles faced by Tunisians caused by two seemingly opposite factors: the sea and the desert. Climate change and rising sea levels have contributed to economic distress in the country, and the unsustainable projects undertaken by Ben Ali have not helped matters. The ousted president undertook many large construction projects, claiming that they were sustainable and good for the country when it was quite obvious to the population that this was not the case. He even created a bizarre mascot for these projects, Labib, which was meant to resemble a desert fox.

64% of Tunisia’s territory is threatened by desertification, and rising sea levels have led to the formation of salt flats where agricultural production is no long possible. One third of Kerkennah is now salt flats.

Climate change has also led to the intrusion of dangerous species that have brought disease and parasites such as Cutaneous Leishmaniasis, which is caused by the parasitic protozoa leishmania transmitted by sandfly bites. This parasitic infection causes painful lesions on the skin which inevitably lead to unsightly, permanent scars.

Sand encroachment is another major problem, and once land falls victim to desertification, the damage is irreversible. Sand drifts bury whole houses and swallow villages. The people of Tunisia have attempted to resist sand drifts and desertification by building sand walls consisting of one meter high walls topped with palm leaves, however this only delays the inevitable.

Water scarcity is also very prevalent in Tunisia, and some areas go years without any rainfall. When it does rain it is often in negligible amounts–5-10 millimeters at a time. Climate change has been such an important issue in the country that when the new constitution was drafted after the ousting of Ben Ali in 2011, Tunisia became one of three countries in the world to include climate change in its constitution.

Rentierism in the Middle East and North Africa

Rentier states and rentierism are common in the Middle East and North Africa, however it is not solely because of oil rents that authoritarian regimes are so prevalent there. Such a unilateral explanation of anything could be characterized as a vast oversimplification. There are other states in the world that have oil rents of comparable size to those found in the Middle East and North Africa. Norway’s oil rents were last measured in 2012 at 9.4% of the country’s GDP. Qatar’s oil rents accounted for 12.1% of its GDP in 2012. The difference is that oil was not discovered in Norway until 1969, more than 150 years after the constitution of Norway was adopted. The Norwegian government and economy were already well established and stable at this point. Oil was discovered in the Middle East in Persia in 1908 and in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 carved up the Middle East between French and British influence into mandates, which differed minimally from colonies. The current state system in the Middle East and North Africa is largely a result of this agreement and others made in the years surrounding the first world war. National borders and state borders do not match up as a result of this lack of self-determination, which is one of many factors contributing to instability in the region. The states in the Middle East and North Africa are all very young. Many of these states did not achieve independence from Western influence until after World War II, and in some cases not until the 1960s and 70s, as in the cases of Algeria and Iran, respectively.

European influence in the Middle East and North Africa may be one of the factors contributing to the prominence of authoritarian regimes there, specifically monarchies. European powers, especially the UK and France set up monarchies in their mandates in the Middle East after World War I. Much as the United States strives to spread democracy across the globe, these monarchical states set up governments in their own image to some extent. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 also contributed in large part to the current state of affairs in the Middle East.

The interaction of large oil rents in these states with such factors as European influence, existing instability, and existing authoritarian and monarchical regimes produces these “peculiarly pathological political outcomes.” At the time oil was discovered in the Middle East and North Africa, the mandate and colonial system was still in place and European influence maintained stability to some extent. After these states achieved independence at various points during the twentieth century, newly independent regimes had huge oil rents and new-found power without European powers keeping them closely in check.

A confluence of large oil rents, the mandate system and the resulting state system is largely responsible for the current state of the Middle East and North Africa. Some political scientists have asserted that the Middle East needs decades of interstate and intrastate war before it achieves a state system that matches national borders and overcomes the currently dominant political pathology. The European state system is mainly a result of centuries of war since the middle ages. This process of state formation was never allowed to happen in the Middle East and North Africa because of Western presence in the region.

The Problem with Democratization

There are several main problems that Anderson talks about in her article, including:

1. “Insincere rulers” who hold out democracy as their form of government, naming their states “democratic republic of...” “people’s republic of...” when in reality, these states are not in any sense of the word, democracies. In fact, the presence of the word democratic in the name of a state is a fairly reliable bellwether for the presence of an authoritarian regime.

2. Democracy is destabilizing. The United States and others have historically been perfectly willing to allow traditional autocratic rulers remain in power in order to maintain the status quo and stability. The United States’ Cold War policy of supporting Islamist regimes that would help stand against the atheist communist Soviet Union in many ways contributed to the resistance to democratization in the Middle East we see today. Islam is not inherently resistant to democracy, as we can see in Indonesia and Turkey (at the time the Anderson article was written), while Arab Muslim states seem to be the ones with the major democratic deficit. These Arab states are the ones that were most directly influenced by American Cold War policy.

3. Rentier states in which governments can effectively bribe their people into acquiescence. People pay no taxes in these states and are instead paid dividends each year by their governments, that have massive hydrocarbon wealth.

According to Anderson's argument, the United States’ involvement in the region since the end of the second world war has been and continues to be the single most potent problem for democratization in the region. The US helped to cement a system of authoritarian regimes in the region through its involvement both as it relates to the Cold War and opposition to atheist communism, as well as the maintenance of access to abundant oil resources in the region. The United States and other Western powers have been very active in the region over the past sixty years, helping to cement rentier states with authoritarian regimes.

The Arab uprisings of 2010-11 have changed matters very little in the long run. Some of the uprisings ultimately resulted in civil war, as in the cases of Syria and Libya, a failed state in Yemen, and ongoing violence and unrest in other states. Tunisia is one example of a state that successfully transitioned to democracy with a fairly good constitution as a result of the Arab Spring.