Despite its long borders with Algeria and Libya, Tunisia "is an island," explains Oussama Romdhani, the director of the government's information agency. Much of the frontier is desert, and the land crossings are used mainly by Algerians and Libyans, who come to buy consumer products, including alcohol.
Since the days of ancient Carthage the area that makes up present-day Tunisia has been like this: an oasis of urbanity, relative prosperity, and stable government jutting out into the Mediterranean, close to Sicily, and yet squeezed between vast tracts of unruly tribal territory. Though lacking the oil and natural gas of their Libyan and Algerian neighbors, Tunisia's 9.6 million people are by some estimates 60 percent middle class, with a poverty rate of only six percent. Yearly economic growth rarely falls below five percent, and inflation hovers around three percent. The World Economic Forum rates Tunisia the most competitive country in Africa, whereas Algeria does not even appear on its list of twenty-four African economies. Although many developing countries waste money on grandiose projects, Tunisia devotes a quarter of its budget to education.
"People say our success is because of this policy or that policy, or because we have been fortunate to have good leaders," Romdhani says. "Though that is all true, there must be something deeper going on." The explanation for Tunisia's success begins with the fact that modern Tunisia corresponds roughly to the borders of ancient Carthage and of the Roman province that replaced it in 146 B.C., after a third and final war between the two powers. "Africa," originally a Roman term, meant Tunisia long before it meant anything else. Archaeologists have uncovered 200 Roman cities in the fertile farmlands of northern Tunisia, where the vast majority of the population lives. North Africa was the granary of the Roman Empire and produced more olive oil than Italy. The Romans built thousands of miles of roads there, and also bridges, dams, aqueducts, and irrigation systems; one aqueduct alone, still partially visible near the town of Zaghouan, carried 8.5 million gallons of water daily to Carthage, fifty-five miles to the north. Fifteen percent of Rome's senators came from Tunisia. Not only the Romans but also the fifth-century Vandals and every conqueror since, including the French in the nineteenth century, made the fertile north of Tunisia their base in North Africa.
In contrast, Algeria and Libya have virtually no history as organized states before the arrival of colonial mapmakers; they connote not nations so much as vague geographical expressions. The ancient cities of Thagaste (the modern Souk Ahras) and Hippo Regius (the modern Annaba), in eastern Algeria, were always oriented toward Carthage, where Saint Augustine, born in Thagaste in 354, went to study; through much of history the cities of western Algeria were linked politically to the Berber kingdoms of Morocco. Libya is almost all desert, with the exception of the cities of Tripoli and Benghazi, which traditionally have had little in common: Tripoli, the capital, usually had close economic ties with present-day Tunisia, and Benghazi was aligned with Egypt. The diatribes of the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi about Arab unity are attempts to mask Libya's own disunity. The fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun wrote in his Muqaddimah (Introduction to History) that the areas that are now Algeria and Libya were rarely stable. Consider the situation today: After a bloody war of independence from France, Algeria became a Soviet-style state in the 1960s. A brief experiment with democracy in the early 1990s collapsed into civil war and anarchy, from which the country has only partially recovered. Qaddafi's thirty years of misrule have created no institutions in Libya except those of terror. Meanwhile, from 1956 through 1987 President Habib Bourguiba's success at building a relatively secular Westernized state in Tunisia earned him the appellation "the Arab Atatürk"—a reference to modern Turkey's founder. Bourguiba's successor, Zine el-Abdine Ben Ali, by dramatically expanding the middle class through enlightened dictatorship, has earned comparisons to Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore.