Identité tunisienne : de la personnalité géographique d'un pays du Maghreb, du monde arabo-islamique et de la Méditerranée / Tunisian identity, the geographical characteristics of a country belonging simultaneously to the Maghreb, the Arabo-lslamic world and the Mediterranean
Authors: Miossec Jean-Marie 
Published: April 2011

Tunisian identity, the geographical characteristics of a country belonging simultaneously to the Maghreb, the Arabo-lslamic world and the Mediterranean.

Societal proximity, international proximity, social proximity combined with a strong centralised state superstructure, give substance to a specifically Tunisian personality which is made up of a high capacity for négociation and dialogue. The societal proximity on such a small territory was woven along the Eastern sea-board which had been urbanised in an early period. This contact zone, although not buttressed by important inland centres of power, has managed to play, along the millenia, a highly complex role of absorption of outsides influences at the same time as it imposed, through a progressive tying of the knots, a differentiated control of the constitutive elements of the territory.

The modernist complexus which bears witness to Tunisia's international proximity has also developed gradually. In the 19th century, the nahdha or Arab renewal — especially through its political and social reformism — has definitely contributed to anchoring Tunisia to an endogenic process of modernisation which blossomed in the modernist a priori of the elites of the Independence period (1956). The transition in gender matters is the most praiseworthy item of this evolution as it makes Tunisia today by far the most advanced country in the Arab world in this respect.

The new problems to which the country has been confronted lately are real challenges. Thanks to unmistakable economic achievements and great efforts in its social policy, the backbone of the country — the urbanised axis of the eastern seaboard — has achieved spectacular advances which testify to a high social proximity and a great capacity of regulation and governance. The differentiated treatments of the various components of the Tunisian entity meets its limits when confronted to the socio-spatial inertia in some parts of the country and international changes abroad. The economic, cultural and geopolitical environment can only be met on equal terms through a strengthening of the components of a society that upholds the values of tolerance and open-mindedness and remains faithful to its Arabic, Muslim and Mediterranean heritage as well as to modernity. These are the internal and external references which shape, along a middle of the road compromise, the Tunisian açabiyya.

The highly powerful identity machinery at work in the East of the Maghreb has to respond, in the even more acute context of globalisation and aggressive international competition, to the challenges of development and social cohesion. The internal cohesion of the whole and its external connexion to the world economy depends on the minimal thresholds of the societal, international and social proximities. A high level of awareness as to the three types of proximity mentioned can ensure, as it has in the past, the periennal existence of the Tunisian identity and of Tunisia as a nation.