Tunis's Avenue Habib Bourguiba is the place where freedom celebrates itself, and where individualism celebrates its achievements, amid creative displays, jazz, reggae and rap rhythms, and poems and paintings all seeking to stand up to the fundamentalist and salafi desire to stifle society and subdue it. The symbolic namesake of the street happens to also reflect something real and tangible. Indeed, Habib Bourguiba, of all Arab leaders and rulers in the twentieth century, was the only one who had social values that went beyond merely broadening the base of power through nationalization and agrarian reforms. Questions of progress and women's rights were central to Bourguiba's thinking. He for instance argued that independence loses a great deal of its worth when it leads to a rupture with the West, because one of the most important functions of independence is to provide greater opportunities to take advantage of the achievements of the West and its modernity. One of the most prominent moves made by Bourguiba in this regard was issuing, in the summer of 1956, what was known as the "Code of Personal Status", which prohibited polygamy and confined divorce matters to the courts, as well as other achievements that the Islamist Ennahda Movement and the Salafis are trying to undo today. But Bourguiba was certainly not democratic. Yet he was at the helm of a meek form of tyranny, compared to both his contemporary Arab dictators and those who came after him. More importantly, his tyranny was associated with the large-scale development of the Tunisian middle-class which is capable, at least theoretically, of establishing democratic rule. In other words, the false choice that other despots offered between development and democracy, while crushing both, was not false to the same extent in Bourguiba's case, where development was fostered without eradicating democratic future potential, which was indeed suppressed. In this sense, the late Tunisian leader may be described as one of the indirect forefathers of the "Arab Spring," which took place in response to the eradication of democracy and development simultaneously. Bourguiba, in addition to all that, was also a founder of the realistic school in Arab politics. He fought a famous battle against the radicalism of Salah Ben Youssef, in defense of a gradual independence that would spare Tunisians the pains suffered by the Algerians, without leading to a break with the colonial metropole. Thus, unlike his contemporary Arab peers, Bourguiba's policies took into account the balances of power and the relationship between actual capacity and the slogans raised, and were also based on the implicit premise that going too far in the political conflict with "colonialism" exceeds the political sphere to the cultural one, and threatens to bring about a break with modernity and progress. This, in turn, links up with a question that the "Arab Spring" has brought back to the fore, namely that dealing with foreign issues requires a coherent interior in the countries concerned, and which would determine the extent of the ability of a given country to contribute to these issues. In this sense, the political battle fought by President Mahmoud Abbas recently for UN recognition of Palestine as an observer state, reminded us of Bourguiba's famous position in early 1965. Then, in a famous speech in the city of Jericho, he called on Palestinian refugees to recognize the UN partition plan of 1947. This sparked a huge backlash against the Tunisian leader, and then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Syrian Baath outbid one another in directing accusations and insults against Bourguiba, while engaging in one-upmanship with one another in the name of Palestine and at the expense of the Palestinians. Then only two years after that, a terrible defeat was inflicted on the two outbidders. Since then, the partition plan of 1947 became a goal that still requires nothing short of a titanic struggle to attain it. Today, Bourguiba is still relevant and actual here and there, in Tunisia and in the Levant, and more than any other Arab politician, living or dead.
