Vladimir Putin’s announcement that he would once again run for president on United Russia’s ticket in March caused equal parts outrage and resignation among Russians, many of whom (along with Western observers) saw Dmitry Medvedev’s time in office as largely a placeholder. Since Russia’s constitution at the time prohibited Putin from serving more than two consecutive terms in office as president, the arrangement with Medvedev was a coordinated and temporary transfer of power, to give Putin’s likely return to office some semblance of constitutional legitimacy.

Is the road now set for Putin to win next year’s presidential election? Should that be the case, he could potentially stay in power until 2024, a remarkably long period of time that harkens back to the lifespans of various Cold War dictators. Yet the story is complicated somewhat by United Russia’s decline in the polls. The results of this election indicated a significant erosion of support for Putin and Medvedev’s United Russia party, dropping by ten percentage points from the previous election, to just under 50% this time around. United Russia still retained by far the highest percentage of votes. The Communist Party was second, with approximately 20%. Liberal parties like Yabloko and Just Russia did not even gain enough of a percentage of the vote to receive any representation.

Prior to this election, observers had written that this election could serve as an early indicator of popular support for the future of United Russia. With the country being affected by the global recession, the economic boom of the Putin years that was driven by high energy prices and foreign investment (but little social development) has given way to stagnation. Whereas in the years of growth the authorities could count on a middle class that was largely content with United Russia’s grip on the country’s political system – so long as incomes were rising – today that is no longer the case. On Monday, December 5, more than 8,000 people rallied in Moscow for a protest against the election results. After being met by a counterdemonstration from the Kremlin-backed youth group Nashi, over 250 arrests were made. Another 15o arrests followed the next day during a second rally.

Now United Russia has increasingly been referred to as the “party of crooks and thieves.” No longer pretending to believe that the country is run on the basis of the rule of law, Russia’s politically-stifled middle class has begun to more actively voice its opposition to the state plutocracy. To be sure, there is a significant amount of economic interest factoring into this. Businesses cannot be expected to operate efficiently if corruption in the form of patronage and government racketeering prevents them from maximizing gains and minimizing losses. For it to operate most efficiently, the unpredictability of the market depends on a predictability of law and order. When that relationship is reversed and the economic aspirations of the middle class no longer correspond to reality, the result is social strife.

Political resources are so concentrated in the hands of United Russia that it is nearly impossible to believe that the outcome of the presidential election is not prewritten. But we are left to wonder if the current protests indicate that the tacit agreement between United Russia’s control of political power and the middle class’s satisfaction with economic growth is irreparably broken.

All he offers is the kind of vision that a constitutional theorist is capable of formulating: The “global community” will have to sort it out. In the midst of the crisis, he still sees “the example of the European Union’s elaborated concept of a constitutional cooperation between citizens and states” as the best way to build the “global community of citizens.”

Reading this, I could not shake the comparison of Habermas to past European philosophers like Hermann Cohen or Edmund Husserl, who on the eves of the most devastating conflicts the world had seen up till then, tried to articulate a notion of a united Europe held together by a common civilization.

However, the novelty of the movement is in danger of wearing thin in the public eye—a large part of it due to the mainstream media’s continued and myopic insistence on the “lack of a message” behind the protests. Just as problematic is that OWS movements around the country are forcefully being made to leave their occupied spaces, which have up till now played a very important symbolic role. In short, whether we like it or not, OWS is moving into a second phase of existence—from a movement premised around actual occupation into a social movement no longer tied to a single strategy.

The eviction from Zuccotti Park and all other public spaces across the country could be a blessing in disguise. Far from destroying the spirit of the protesters, as some may have prematurely predicted, it has made them all the more galvanized and resilient. Whereas many sympathizers (and critics) have increasingly raised concerns about the idea of what the occupation (or “camp out”, depending on who you ask) of a park can actually accomplish, the evictions can have the effect of spreading more protests, coordinated at an even more rapid pace than through the deliberative process in the parks and directed at a broader range of issues. But how broad and for what goal?

One of the biggest challenges any growing social movement has to face is striking the proper balance between broadening its base of support by becoming more inclusive, and streamlining its message into a clear program with which all participants can more or less agree. While OWS has consciously done all it can to remain consensus-based, transparent, and non-hierarchical, there is a danger that these terms can become conflated into a debilitating suspicion of organization as such. Likewise, there is a tension between following the ideals that have brought the participants of a movement together, and having to make tactical and strategic decisions that are inevitable in the messy world of politics. To these questions there is no easy or programmatic solution. But that is also why it makes them all the more important to raise and grapple with.

The eviction from Zuccotti is forcing OWS to confront the question of long-term strategy. It is by far the biggest and most difficult test that a movement can face in its early stages.
The fact is that OWS is being presented today with a historic opportunity to organize widespread but latent public discontent into a truly influential and transformative movement. But in order for this to be done, the participants need to think about how to establish a reliable and consistent network of organization and long-term planning. This strategy could be directed toward tasks like canvassing local communities to spread information about social inequality, conducting public outreach in the form of teach-ins and workshops, continuing to build strong relations with labor unions and local places of worship, and developing an even stronger presence on university campuses. These suggestions do not exhaust the possible options by far. The point is simply to illustrate that, in this second phase of OWS, what was once the primary tactic—occupation of a public space—now must be expanded into a plurality of tactics.

Yet alongside this plurality, it is also important that OWS does not lose sight of its own goals, allowing them to be parceled into contending factions by competing interests. Neither should philosophical differences be allowed to divide the movement at the expense of pragmatic and tactical decisionmaking and planning. A clarity and forcefulness of message should not be compromised in favor of particular interests when the goal is to affect long-term change in how politics is conducted in our society. For that end, what is needed is persistence and a strategic increasing of pressure and demands. Transforming a nation’s political culture is a slow effort where perseverance, foresight, and planning are just as valuable as autonomous direct action. Here we would be wise to remember Rudi Dutschke, who following Gramsci, once said: “Hegemony is the long march through the institutions.”

I haven’t read Judt’s books besides Postwar, so I can’t evaluate Riley’s claims. Considering the extent to which Judt’s reputation came to precede him in his final years, Riley’s final judgment is critical: “In effect, it was his talent, limited but real, as a polemicist and a pamphleteer that disqualified Judt as a historian of ideas, much as he liked to claim the loftier calling.”

This marks my first contribution to an edited volume. While it’s a previously published piece, I’m still very glad it was apparently good enough to make the cut.

One thing to mention is that over the summer I had a short reflection essay published in Dissent about my experience studying abroad in Poland. Although I do not think it is one of the best things I’ve written, I’m glad it has received a modest amount of praise from those who read it.

At this point, it seems that the old ruling elite, in the form of Ben Ali’s Constitutional Democratic Rally party, are still entrenched in positions of power. However, over at Informed Comment, Juan Cole notes that Ghannouchi has entered into negotiations with leaders of two opposition parties, the Progressive Democratic Party and the Democratic Forum for Labor and Liberties. Cole further states that other parties, namely the Tunisian Communist Workers Party of Hamma Hammami, the Congress for the Republic, and an-Nahda (Awakening– the Muslim fundamentalist party) have not been contacted for the formation of a new government.

Since all the media accounts I have read over the last few days barely focus on the history of Tunisia, only going so far back as to mention Ben Ali’s takeover in 1987, now would be a good opportunity to briefly review this neglected aspect of the story.

Like many nations in the Middle East, modern Tunisia came into existence out of the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. The French occupied the country in 1881, not only to secure the Algerian frontier but also for financial and geopolitical reasons, to prevent the growth of Italian influence in the region. Two years later, France assumed Tunisia as an official protectorate, taking responsibility for administration and finance. European business interests played a large role in the governing of colonial Tunisia, controlling the local councils which advised the governments on budgets and financing. Increased European settlement led, by 1915, to one-fifth of the land being owned by the colons, mainly large landowners who expropriated peasants, depriving them access to capital and the protection of indigenous landowners they used to enjoy.

While the peasant population suffered under French rule, the colonial period had a significant impact in cultivating native elites, who, through taxation, legal codes, and military power, were given a new state through which to exert their influence on the rest of the population. The identity developed by elites came to be closely aligned with the idea of the nation state, and eventually led them to turn against the colonial administration in the fight for national independence.

By 1907, the first true nationalist group, the French-educated “Young Tunisians,” began calling for a change in French policy in order to give the natives greater access to education, opportunities in government service, and agriculture. However, they did not call for immediate French withdrawal and Tunisian independence. Despite the emergence of native elites concentrated in the urban areas, throughout the first decades of the twentieth century the agrarian sector continued to serve as the basis of Tunisia’s monarchy. Because the nationalist-republican ideology at the forefront of independence movements in the Middle East did not penetrate into the countryside, uprisings such as the one in 1938, led by the radical Tunisian Neo-Destour Party (founded by future president Habib Bourguiba), were unable to sustain the high degree of public mobilization needed to win independence.

During the war years the French continued to maintain a strong grip on the country. When the ruler Bey Muhammad al-Munsif called for the restoration of Tunisian independence, he was deposed by the French on the grounds of being a Nazi collaborator. Tunisia was the final German stronghold in North Africa, abandoned in May 1943 under pressure from advancing British armies.

In the years immediately after the war, as an ideological alignment between nationalism and Islamism became more prominent in the region (Algeria is the clearest example), the Islamic public came to call for civil freedoms as well as state sovereignty. The Neo-Destour party carried the support of the Free French during the war into its postwar push for independence, mobilizing alongside with the newly founded trade union federation. In 1952 Bourguiba was arrested, sparking a movement of active resistance and clashes with European settlers. The weakened French government opened negotiations with the Neo-Destour and granted Tunisian independence in 1956, with Bourguiba becoming president in the following year.

Having finally gained independence and becoming a republican state, Tunisia, along with other former colonies like Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, tried to maintain a policy of ‘positive neutrality’ between the competing Cold War superpowers. The educated elite of the Neo-Destour party and the trade unions continued to dominate the government in the post-independence years. However, reflecting a general pattern across the Middle East that coincided with the lost credibility of nationalist republicanism after the Arab defeat of 1967, Islamism became more prominent in Tunisia during the 1970s.

The 1980s saw a period of social strife, as the West’s new neoliberal consensus meant a greater influence of the International Money Fund and the World Bank in the politics of Middle Eastern states. In reforming Tunisia’s foreign debt, the country had to make an agreement with the IMF, adopting reductions in the subsidy of food. In this new environment of austerity and the doubling of bread prices, the peasants in the south of the country protested in December 1983. The revolt spread to other cities, including Tunis, with government buildings, shops, and banks being targeted by the irate protesters. The army struggled to regain control, taking nearly a month to quell the situation. A further series of student strikes took place in 1987.

On November 7, 1987, Ben Ali (then the country’s Prime Minister) overthrew Bourguiba, the country’s first and only president who had been in power for thirty years. Ben Ali prohibition of Islamic parties like the popular Movement of the Islamic Tendency from participating in the parliamentary elections of April 1989, highlighted the continuing detachment of the country’s ruling elites from the Islamic public discourse that was widely circulating among the grassroots opposition. Islamists unsuccessfully demonstrated against the new government. The IMF and the World Bank, encouraged by the promise of stability and secularism represented by Ben Ali’s takeover, granted the new government $270 million loan.

Since that time, Tunisia had been seen by American and European policymakers as a stable state with an educated middle class. However, all reports suggest that the years of nepotism and corruption under Ben Ali have frustrated the aspirations of many Tunisians seeking financial and political security commensurate to their background. The official unemployment rate of 14% has been said to be far too optimistic; and it bears to keep in mind that the current protests were set off by a college graduate igniting himself after being prevented by the police from operating a fruit stand. Deposing Ben Ali was no small achievement, but all signs show that the mobilized Tunisians do not see this as enough. With autocratic regimes in Libya and Egypt following closely in hope that the Tunisian uprising does not become a precedent for their own populations, these developments could have enormous significance for the future of the Middle East.

[Sources: Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Harvard, 1991); Reinhard Schulze, A Modern History of the Islamic World (NYU, 2000)]