Tunisia is the narrow state that its coast carries

Tunisia is the narrow state of the Maghreb, set with its brow against the Mediterranean. Algeria holds the western border, Libya the eastern one, and what lies between is governed from the coast, not from the desert.

The capital, Tunis, sits on this northern shore, on the gulf that points toward the Strait of Sicily. Across that strait lies Italy. Sfax and Sousse continue the eastern coast, Kairouan already stands inland, and Gabès opens a gulf with the Sahara behind it. Tell the country only as a desert state and the edge is mistaken for the core. The core is the inhabited north: hills, fields, ports. The south is the border where settlement thins.

The coast carries the state

Tunisia has 12,348,573 inhabitants on 163,610 square kilometres. Beside Algeria and Libya that is a compact territory with its own capital and its own law. Most people live in the north and along the eastern coast. Tunis is more than the seat of government. The city stands where the country comes closest to the Mediterranean, and it stacks port, administration and the old site of Carthage on the same strip of shore. Understand the capital and you understand where the state places its weight.

Inland the landscape changes quickly. After the humid north come steppe, salt lakes and at last the dunes of the Great Eastern Erg, which reaches in from Algeria. Oases such as Tozeur keep the south habitable; they do not carry it. The border with Libya runs through that expanse. The border with Algeria is longer and no more a line through dense towns. Tunisia has no deep buffer of its own hinterland. It has a shore, and behind the shore the country thins fast.

Narrow between two large neighbours

On 20 March 1956 the French protectorate ended. The beylik became a republic with Tunis as its capital. The constitution makes Arabic the language of the state. That is not a side note in a country whose schools, courts and businesses long ran alongside French. The state wrote itself down as Arabic and separate, on a territory too small to overlook its neighbours and too clearly drawn to dissolve into them.

The political geography follows from that tightness. What happens in Algiers or Tripoli does not stand behind a wide forefield of one's own. The ports of the north open instead onto the same sea that Europe faces. Tunisia was therefore never only an annex of the Sahara and never only a bridge. It is a coastal state that has to hold its independence between larger land powers and a nearby north. The map explains the pressure without settling the choice.

Tunisia is not the middle of the Maghreb. It is the strip where the Maghreb ends and the sea begins.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Arabic in the law, French in the corridor

The official language is Arabic, spoken in its own Tunisian form and written in the shared script. French does not stand beside it in the constitution. It remains nevertheless the language of many offices, faculties and firms, an inheritance of the protectorate that daily life has not put down. Read only the constitution and you hear an Arabic country. Walk through Tunis and you hear the two languages mesh. The state chose one official language and did not make the second into law.

Payment is in the Tunisian dinar. The currency is tied to this state and is not the euro of the opposite shore. That belongs to the thesis too. A narrow country remains its own country only when coast, law and treasury belong together. The Sahara in the south is real, the border with Libya is real, the size of Algeria is real. Government still runs from Tunis, on the sea that closes the Maghreb to the north.

Tell Tunisia from the desert and the country is folded the wrong way. It begins in Tunis, on the water, and reaches south only until the Sahara and the border close it.