The decision to extend the application of the emergency law in Tunisia, though anticipated, raises some serious questions about the nature of the change that has occurred since the uprisings. Detractors and advocates have disputed the motives behind this decision through adopting two distinct accounts. First, states of emergency have been frequently used for the purpose of sustaining domination and control by totalitarian regimes. Maintaining such a law, thus, would imply reducing the political dynamic to a minimum through silencing all opposition. The state, consequently, is accorded the role of the guarantor of security, a Hobbesian state that seeks to stave off the threat of the state of nature where fear and death reside. Yet amidst the very recent political upheaval, supporters argue that the continued application of the emergency law is necessary to restore security in the community. Accordingly, the state of emergency is viewed as an exceptional and temporary situation following the revolution. Both of the above narratives acknowledge instability, whether in terms of what poses a threat to dictatorship, or of what is deemed necessary to protect newly founded rights. But this recognized instability is itself telling. Following the revolt, a lot of ink has been spilled on the relation between the political flux in Tunisia and the modernization process that occurred under the auspices of Bourguiba, the latter being necessary for the former. But, on the one hand, the relapse into a conception of a state of national security would clearly indicate a setback and a failure to modernize at the level of the intellectuals and the ruling groups. On the other, if the state of emergency is merely for the purpose of thwarting any attempts to transform the country into a failed state, then the problem can be located in the narrow scope of the process of modernization itself. The process appears to be then insufficiently pervasive, and thus inadequate to bring about the desired change in the community. Consequently, and in both attempts to depict the situation, the endurance of the emergency law reveals that the modernization process itself did not play as vital a role as claimed in the revolution. In fact, the current situation in Tunisia reveals the glaring disparity between the intellectual discourse and the motives behind the public frustration. The admitted instability shows, for instance, that Ghannouchi's work which presents the correct Islam as a modernized Islam has been thus far incapable of influencing the community, and consequently of functioning as a foundation for a stable society. Furthermore, the modernization process of Bourguiba also seems to have retreated into the closed intellectual circles, where it proved to be unsatisfactorily internalized. The state of emergency shows that Tunisia is not ready to embrace the political change. Whereas democracy and freedom of speech require the cultivation of some degree of tolerant struggle, Tunisia appears to be incapable of enduring the consequences of a modern political life. The uprisings, thus, cannot be understood as the culmination of an enlightened solid basis, but rather, only as possibly the beginning of an incipient progressive discourse. This has interesting implications on the alleged causes behind the beginning of the revolution. The retrospectively constructed narrative tells a story of political oppression, of the absence of individual rights, and of the value of intellectual freedom. The need arises then to repeal the political injustice by founding a just state that is capable of ensuring that the proper values are propagated. But perhaps we are wrong in the initial diagnosis of the situation. The narrative seems to exhibit an intellectual optimism, and even a projection of academic hope for change that might be in fact groundless. Could it instead be a story of an internal dynamic that erupted in the call for the most basic demands? Such demands have no use for the rhetoric of empty political concepts, and for the abstractions of ideals. These rather stem from material conditions, and it is there that any attempt at reform should originate.
