Tunisia

The smallest Maghreb state, the most homogeneous, and the one place where the Arab Spring produced a democracy. Carthage was founded here by Phoenicians around 814 BCE and fought Rome for the western Mediterranean before being destroyed in 146; Roman Africa then became one of the empire's granaries, and Kairouan after the Arab conquest became a centre of Islamic learning. Ottoman suzerainty was loose, and France imposed a protectorate in 1881 on the pretext of border raids, keeping the bey in place. Habib Bourguiba led the independence movement and governed from 1956, pushing through a personal status code that banned polygamy, established judicial divorce and set a minimum marriage age - the most far-reaching such reform in the Arab world and still the basis of Tunisian women's legal position. He was deposed on medical grounds in 1987 by Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who ruled until a street vendor's self-immolation at Sidi Bouzid in December 2010 set off protests that removed him in twenty-eight days and spread across the region. A national dialogue quartet won the Nobel peace prize in 2015 for holding the transition together. Democratic institutions have been rolled back since 2021. Tunis is the capital. The country has about twelve million people. Its coastline runs some thirteen hundred kilometres. Carthage and the amphitheatre at El Djem are World Heritage sites. Arabic is official and French is widely used. Olive oil is among its principal exports, and the country is among the largest producers in the world. Tunisia was the first Arab country to abolish slavery, in 1846.

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