Democracy didn’t turn Tunisian youths into jihadis, but it gave them the freedom to act on their unhappiness. By raising and then frustrating expectations, the revolution created conditions for radicalization to thrive. New liberties clashed with the old habits of a police state—young Tunisians were suddenly permitted to join civic and political groups, but the cops harassed them for expressing dissent. Educated Tunisians are twice as likely to be unemployed as uneducated ones, because the economy creates so few professional jobs. A third of recent college graduates can’t find work. Frustration led young people to take to the streets in 2011; a similar desperate impulse is now driving other young people toward jihad. “You have a lot of people who have aspirations and can’t meet them,” Monica Marks, an American doctoral candidate who studies Islamist movements in the Middle East, said.
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have championed democracy as the best way to stop the Arab world’s destructive oscillation between secular dictatorship and Islamist radicalism. Tom Malinowski, the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, said, “One of our articles of faith here—backed up by evidence, I hope—is that open societies are a bulwark against extremism, and that repression tends to make our task in fighting this menace harder.” There are almost no test cases in the Arab world other than Tunisia, and, at the very least, Tunisia complicates the idea. The country is not so much a model to be emulated as a problem to be solved.
