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Abstract
The progressive integration of Tunisia into the international capital market implies deep institutional and social transformations as well as the positioning of the country in the semi-periphery of the capitalist world-economy. From the mid-19th and during the twentieth century, the growing Tunisia’s debt paved the way to a compulsory financial administration of the North African country by 1870. Likewise, this process favoured the development of a capitalist class, whose origins were both exogenous and endogenous, drawing its power from doing business with the global financial élites. Thus, we assist to the birth of a capitalist class with local and international interests, also called afterward compradors. Adopting an original comparative approach, this article shows that the integration of a country into the global economy, mainly when occurring through a growing foreign debt, paves the way not only to the birth of a local capitalist class drawing its power from the circulation of capital but also to the permanent positioning of the country in the semi-periphery of the capitalist world-economy. The access to the international capital markets, according to the rules of the controlling powers and elites, makes the indebted country less independent in its economic policy choices, thus modifying its class structure in favour of the new capitalist elites, and their interests.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the reviewers and editors for the substantial and encouraging feedback they offered during the peer review process. Vittorio Caligiuri wrote paragraphs 4 and 5, Giampaolo Conte paragraphs 1 and 2 and Gaetano Sabatini 3 and 6. All the authors have jointly contributed to the abstract and the conclusions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The domestic debt had been originally converted in four series (Conte, Sabatini 2018).
2 Formed by the Union (UGTT), the confederation of industry, trade and craft (UTICA) and the Tunisian union of agriculture (UNAT), according to a corporatist structure where all the difference voices passed through the mediation of the Party.
3 The final reversal towards a development based on capital-intensive industrial activities took place with the ITPAL programme in 1986. Caligiuri and Sabatini Citation2021.
4 In the basis of the initial planning.
5 These were bound to the import of specific products from the lender Countries.
6 These issues were denounced by Third World Countries in the ‘Algiers Paper’ 1967 and at the UCTAD meeting in Geneva in 1967.
7 Opposed to the extension of the cooperative sector to the totality of the land, planned in 1968 and directly interested in the association of the Country to the CEE, signed in 1969.
8 On the basis of what wrote Ben Salah regarding the content and the date in its thesis of Doctorat d’état, I deem it is the Report EMA-12 of July 28th 1969.
9 First Country to follow a path of Infitāh.
10 Consequently, the social alliance between the capitalist class and the labour organizations, that characterized the ISI policies and was hinged around the increase of income and of the aggregate demand, as the key conditions for the industrialization of the Country, starts to fail. Since the production is aimed at the external market and considering that investments are based on the inflow of foreign capitals, the reduction of production factor costs, and consequently of salaries, becomes paramount: the contradiction between the interests of the capitalist class and the working class starts to emerge once again.
11 This movement has already appeared during the second half of the previous decade in Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea.
12 Import of semi-finished products used by the Tunisian manufacturing sector and the food independence lost in the early’70s are just two examples.
13 This phase is identified by Giovanni Arrighi as the prelude to the ‘globalization’ moment of the economic and financial cycle, characterized by a growing exploitation of peripheries and semi-peripheries by the center of the capitalist economy (Arrighi Citation2010).