American diplomacy in Tunisia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

• Author: Manai, Adel

Background literature

In a now aged article published in 1973, Paul J. Zingg described the field of US-North African relations a "historiographical wasteland." Zingg explored the US-North African relations before and after World War II and concluded that the writing of this history was still pending. He argued that the arguments of irrelevance and unimportance, which previously excused the lack of American-North African scholarship, are fallacious. (1) The American insensitivity towards North Africa, Zingg adds, seems to have been determined by an ongoing pro-colonialist rhetoric used by the US and its cultural and ideological biases towards the indigenous societies of the region. The little significant interest shown by the US towards the region after 1945 had more to do with containing communism than assuming a committed policy to North Africa according to Zingg.

Alfred Andrew Heggoy joined Zingg in calling for "the urgency of the challenge to examine American-Maghrebi relations. (2) In the case of US-Tunisian relations, the challenge barely exists. Equal attention, it is my conviction, should be given to all stages of US history in Tunisia and North Africa more broadly, especially this "long interlude" as Carl L Brown called with reference to the period 1815-1941 which he thought was "of no decisive importance to either side." (3) yet Brown does not offer any plausible explanation for his assessment of the period. This "interlude" is all the more important because American diplomacy started to take shape and its broad lines became clearer than in the period immediately following American independence.

This does not suggest that American historians showed no interest in North Africa. They wrote among other issues about the 'infamous' Barbary States, Barbary wars, Christian captives and Tunisian foreign communities. Two American historians have so far written prolifically about Tunisia. Leon Carl Brown wrote a pioneering survey of mid-nineteenth century Tunisia, Tunisia of Ahmed Bey 1837-1855, where he showed how, under a highly energetic ruler, Tunisia made its first efforts to establish European-like political and military reforms. More recently, Kenneth Perkins published A History of Modern Tunisia with Cambridge University Press (2004), the first English written history of modern Tunisia. Perkins traced the story from where Carl Brown had left it until the recent present. For Perkins, this period saw the inauguration of French colonial rule, the creation of the nationalist movement and finally independence in 1956. He also examined the problems generated by colonialism and the measures undertaken to achieve independence, and described the subsequent process of state formation, including the design of political and economic structures and the promotion of a social and cultural agenda.

Less academic studies like Gallagher's The United States and North Africa: Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia (1963), even though it remained for sometime a reference on these relations and Richard Parker's Uncle Sam in Barbary (2004) cover the modern period with little addition to the historical literature on Tunisia in particular. The most update works on the region such as Oren Michael's Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (2007) and Douglas Little's American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (2008) hardly address Tunisia. Most of these studies are, in addition, redundant insofar as they all glorified the young and inexperienced American state and underlined its brave efforts to strike commercial deals with the "predatory" Barbary States.

Aside these histories, American historians have not yet thoroughly studied the US-Tunisian relations, yet, all concord that these were subsidiary to French and more broadly speaking European relations with Tunisia. North Africa more generally and Tunisia specifically remain understudied in American academia and little known by the American public. They clearly merit an increased scholarly attention, particularly with the advent of the 'Jasmine Revolution' in Tunisia and its domino effect triggering the so-called 'Arab spring' and affecting regional (Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, Sudan, Mauritania, partly Morocco) and global relations (Ukraine). The little work on US-Tunisian relations is unevenly focused on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (1776-1815) and World War II periods. The US-Tunisian bilateral and interactional history is still awaiting serious scholarly interest. This article is, then, an attempt to trigger such an interest and fill in a significant gap in this history.

The US recent interest in Tunisia reflected in the tango of visits American officials made to Tunisia since the advent of the revolution in January 2011 together with the financial support the US has so far granted to the post-revolution Tunisian governments, but more importantly the US declared commitment towards the support of Tunisia's transition to democracy and the role the latter may play as a model for prospective candidates for democracies in the "Arab spring" countries suggest a significant change in the US diplomacy in Tunisia, which until recently was just a working one with no apparent prospects for improving and strengthening.

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