Politics
in North Africa,
Boston: Little, Brown 1970
CHAPTER
II
THE
COLONIAL DIALECTIC
The French presence did indeed transform North
African segmentary society, subject it to new and more efficient centralized
administrations, and create an alien political space, territorially defined,
which indigenous elements could subsequently capture. In North Africa, as in much of the Third World, colonizers
planted the seeds of their own destruction by restratifying indigenous society,
educating new elites, creating discontented urban and rural proletariats and
lumpen proletariats, and undermining political structures without being able to
replace them with new ones subservient to the colonial order. But no colonial dialectic - only conflict
was inevitable.
THE
DIALECTICS OF EMANCIPATION
Dialectic in the Hegelian sense assumes a
constructive confrontation, one of "identity in opposition," between
master and slave (or colonizer and colonized). Unfortunately colonial
situations have rarely justified Hegel's faith in the "vast power of
negation," his assumption about world history that conflict ultimately
leads to higher synthesis. In North
Africa anti-colonialism, through which indigenous elements reappropriated the
political space defined by the colonizer, generated a new political foundation
only in Tunisia, not in Algeria where the conflict was most intense and the
French presence most overwhelming. As
Frantz Fanon might have agreed, violence alone was not enough to restructure
Algeria.(1) In North Africa, as more
generally in the Third World, the critical intervening variable was the
nationalist elite, the leaders of the confrontation with the colonial
power. Depending partly on the colonial
situation, partly on their owm sense of purpose, they could be the motor of
"dialectic," of "positive" confrontation - or the perpetrators
of unreasoning violence or the passive inheritors of the colonial order. But for a new political design to take shape
in the process of colonial emancipation, the elite had to be sufficiently
homogeneous to share public purposes beyond the immediate struggle, sufficiently
assimilated to the colonial political culture to utilize and redirect colonial
structures and values, and sufficiently powerful to neutralize any aspiring
indigenous counter-elite. When, as in
Tunisia, these conditions were met, the elite could articulate a new political
culture and build a political infrastructure reaching into society, even while
- and for the sake of - struggling against colonial domination. Without a coherent modernizing elite, on the
other hand, political change lacked direction.
In Morocco and Algeria indigenous people finally replaced the French
administrators, but the new rulers survive on old formulae, not new designs of
their own making. Differences between the three contemporary North African
systems, indeed, are
largely
explained by differences in the nature of their respective nationalist elites.
By definition, nationalist elites become
such only so far as they achieve consciousness of their historic role: their
mission of approriating or, from thier standpoint, "recovering" the
political space of the colonizer. Abstractly speaking, three modes of
consciousness are possible, once colonial pacification rules out primary modes
of resistance and it is no longer possible to fight foreign domination, as the
Emir Abdelkader did, by exclusively traditional means. The first mode or
"moment" is that of liberal assimilation. Sons of the shocked old elite admire and imitate the new rulers,
assimilate some of thier styles and values, accept the rules of thier game, and
attempt to engage in dialogue. But in
most colonial situations this mode of consciousness in inadequate. The
colonizers cease to be gentlemen, once natives try to play thier game, and
moreover, the Westernized natives are cut off from thier own society, even
though they may try to reeducate it. In any case, the identity in oppostion
between colonizer and this first-moment nationalist elite is bound to be
superficial: there can be little positive confrontation.
A second possible mode of consciousness
is that of traditional anti-colonialism, entailing a reassertion of traditional
values against the alien presence. The
second-moment elite may thus acquire a mass base in the traditional society and
so embarrass and desplace any lingering first-moment elite. But the traditionalist
mode of consciousness is also one-sided (much like the "stubborn"
slave Hegel depicts as unable to construct a new identity or achieve
emancipation) (2) for the second-moment mentality is no longer
"traditional" and can escape neither the foreign presence nor self-doubt,
doubt, that is, in the traditions which are being asserted. Yet it is incapable
of constructing a new political culture.
The third moment rejects traditionalism
as well as assimilation and colonial domination, for it operates within as well
as against the colonizers original space.
It accepts foreign political innovations and uses them to restructure
indigenous society, to mobilize masses against foreign rule. This radical outlook is the only mode of
consciousness that can sustain a coherent modernizing elite and generate a new
political design. Only in the third
moment can nationalist elites get to the root of their problems and achieve
full consciousness of their mission.
These modes of consciousness are
obviously not historically necessary stages in the development of
nationalism. Movements led by
coalitions of "liberals" and traditionalists have often achieved
independence in the Third World, and in especially permissive colonial settings
the "liberals" have come to power all alone. In Morocco and Algeria all three types were
included in the victorious coalitions, though in varying proportions: the
Moroccan Istiqlal had a preponderance of second-moment leaders, while
the
leadership of the Algerian Front of National Liberation (FLN) was predominantly third-moment. But even when the colonial power is
sufficiently intransigent to provoke revolutionary opposition, there is no
guarantee that the resulting third mode of consciousness will express a
synthetic response - one, that is, which contains yet transcends the
assimilationist and traditionalist moments and achieves identity in opposition
to the colonial presence. This happened only in Tunisia.
The dialectical analysis of North African
nationalism helps to suggest why this is so.
Only in Tunisia did the dialectic unfold gradually, each moment or mode
of consciousness being the contribution of a distinct generation of leaders to
a emergent Tunisian political culture.
Comparisons with Moroccan and Algerian nationalism are possible, for the
moments were present in these other settings; but instead of constituting a
historic sequence, they developed simultaneously, producing fragmented
political cultures incapable of sustaining coherent modernizing elites. In Tunisia, on the other hand, each moment was
worked out in a nationalist movement, affording third-moment nationalists the
historical background from which to derive a synthesis of their identity in
opposition to colonialism.
Historical timing, however, really begs
the question as to why a constructive dealectic was possible in Tunisia and did
not materialize to the same degree in either Morocco or Algeria. Partly this was a matter of
personalities. Habib Bourgiba, without
doubt the most creative of North Africa's leaders in the twentieth century, has
shaped Tunisia's radical elite in his ideal-typical image. But a Bourguiba would have been a political
and sociological impossibility in either Morocco or Algeria for reasons which
will become clear. There are two more
fundamental explanations. First, it
could be argued that even precolonial Tunisia was a special case, in that the
country, though unable to withstand foreign conquest, was politically more
developed than its neighbors and was governed by an elite more attuned to
modernization and hence open to a "colonial dialectic." But this
explanation alone is not very satisfying, for we have seen that the
nineteenth-century elite was fragmented and corrupt, hardly the prototype for a
coherent modernizing elite which, in any event, emerged only in the 1930's, and
from non-elite segments of the society. Rather, for a satisfactory explanation
of the colonial dialectic and its preconditions, we must turn to a second, more
general level of explanation. The nationalist
elites of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia evolved in three very distinctive
colonial settings. It is primarily the
difference in French policies, their impact, and timing which account for
differences in the respective elites and their confrontations with the colonial
power.
THE COLONIAL
SITUATIONS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
By all counts Algeria was the most
intensively colonized country of the Maghrib - and indeed of the Third World,
if one excepts South Africa and possibly Palestine - while Moroccan society was
the least affected by the French presence.
The timing alone is significant: Algeria was first invaded in 1830,
whereas French protectorates were established in Tunisia and Morocco only in
1881 and 1912, respectively. French
rule lasted 132 years in Algeria (until 1962), 75 years in Tunisia (until
1956), but only 44 years in Morocco (until 1956). Furthermore, Algeria suffered the bulk of North Africa's settler
population; in 1955 the 1,700,000 "Europeans" in North Africa
constituted 11 percent of Algeria's total population but only 6.7 and 5.2
percent, respectively of Tunisia's and Morocco's.(3) The settlers moreover had
in one way or another appropriated more than seven million acres, or 27
percent, of Algeria's arable land, compared to only two million acres (21 percent)
in Tunisia and two and a half million acres (7 percent) in Morocco.(4) Juridically speaking, too, Algeria was an
"integral part" of France, whereas Tunisia and Morocco were
Protectorates which had preserved their indigenous precolonial governmnents in
an emasculated form.
Algeria, in fact, was too intensively
colonized for a constructive dialectic to be either sociologically or
politically possible. It was not
sociologically possible because France virtually obliterated the traditional
elites - and traditions - upon which any third-moment syntheses depended. It was not politically possible because the
French stakes were too high to tolerate an organized radical elited as in
Tunisia. By contrast, Morocco was not
colonized intensively enough for full nationalist consciousness to take
control; the conlonial presence did not restratify indigenous society in a way
that would have encouraged radical leadership.
More generally, to explain colonial dialectic or its absence, the
critical variables of the colonial situations to consider are:(1) policies
toward old elites; (2) educational policies creating new elites; (3) economic
development, so far as it produces detached strata or preserves primordial
strata available to support nationalist eltes; and (4) styles of colonial
conflict. We shall descuss each of these variables in comparative perspective.
OLD
ELITES
The duration alone of the colonial
presence in Algeria and Tunisia ensured the decay of old, precolonial elite families
before independence. Irrespective of colonial policy, they were bound to
decline in prestige and power, for a policy of direct rule would destroy their
status, while one of indirect rule would discredit them in the eyes of a rising
nationalist elite and other strata created by
the
colonial situation. Only in Morocco was the timing such as to allow the
precolonial elite to retain its status - and indeed to use nationalism to
recover its power. Even in Morocco the
colonial situation altered - or at least appeared to alter - the structure of
the elite, in that old families or segments of families cooperating with the
Protectorates could not always also be recognized by the nationalsts.
The timing of the colonial penetration
also conditioned the particular policies adoped by the French. French and international attitudes on
colonial questions evolved considerably between the early nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The rapacious laisser-faire attitudes which conditioned
Algerian development until the bitter end were never strong in Morocco, for
they had become an anachronism by the time the Moroccan Protectorate was
established. Increasing respect both for indigenous traditions and
international opinion is suggested by the very formula France used to establish
control over Tunisia and Morocco, that of a "protectorate" or
indirect rule. And in Morocco the
latecomer, the furmula was most nearly (though very inadequately) respected. Here, and to a lesser degree in Tunisia, the
traditional makhzan and its family clienteles were to be preserved as museum
pieces, endowing the colonial system with a legitimacy of sorts. Indirect rule, in short, meant the survival,
albeit in distorted form, of a traditional elite.
Destruction of Elites in Algeria. In this
relpect the contrast between Algeria and the two Protectorates could not be
more striking. In Algeria colonial rule was direct, established by organized
violence ignorant of traditional intermediaries and the uses to which they
could be put. As early as 1833 a French
parliamentary commission reported: "We have exceeded in barbarity the
barbarians whom we came to civilize."(5) Actually the systematic
destruction of the Algerian countryside began only in 1840, when Marshal
Bugeaud engaged in "total war" to reduce trebal resistance. With more
than one hundred thousand troops it took seven years to subdue the Emir
Abdelkader's five- to ten-thousand-man army and his tribal allies.
Indiscriminated search-and-destroy tactics, the routine burning of the crops of
"disloyal " tribes, and occasional incinerations, in villages or even
caves, of hundreds of men, women, and children terrorized populations into
submission while sporadic revolts after 1847, culminating in the Kabylian
insurrection of 1871, resulted in further destruction of traditional Algerian
society. Combat and illniss are
estimatied to have taken a toll of more than one hundred thousand Frnch
soldiers from 1830 to 1871. There are
no reliable estimates of the number of Algerian civilian and military
casualties. However, Algeria probably had a population of three million in
1830. Official censuses indicate a Muslim populatiom of 2,770,000 in 1861,
after most of the populated areas had been "pacified," and
2,125,000
eleven years later, after famine and cholera had ravaged them. (6)
Until the advent in 1871 of the Third
Republic and the triumph of settler-inspired "assimilation," French
colonial policy oscillated between this policy and faltering efforts of
"association" under the military Arab Bureaux. Assimilation meant the
destruction of native institutions in the interests of the settler community.
"What could be more legitimate," one settler explained, "than
dominating 2,500,000 Arabs for the higher interests of forty million Frenchmen?" One influential Republican politician,
Prevost-Paradol, made quite explicit the Darwinist overtones of
assimilation: "We must establish
laws conceived uniquely for the extension of the French colony and then let the Arabs do their best, with equal
arms, in the struggle for life." (7) Few intellectuals of the French Left,
indeed, had any sympathy for the natives or their traditional structures.
Socialists of the Saint- Simonian school, like Enfantin, were thrilled with
possibilities of social engineering in virgin Algeria and devised elaborate
schemes of colonization, but their state capitalism ignored the native. Only the liberal historian, Michilet, was
ready to make the comparison between the Algerian "who starves to death on
his own devastated granary" and the European laborer who "works to
death" to end his days "in a hospital"(8).
Napolean lll and the Arab Bureaux, once
they had acquired an understanding of indigenous social stucture and Islamic
values, were more sympathetic. In 1863
Napoleon stated, "Algeria is not properly speaking a colony but an Arab
kingdom"(9). As his adviser, Thomas-Esmael Urbain, explained it, his
policy of "association" required that the government arbitrate
between Arabs and the growing settler population, rather than ignoring native
interests or assuming them to be identical with colonization. There was to be a division of labor: Europeans would develop industry and
commerce in the cities and specialized cultures on limited landholdings, while
the natives would keep their land. But by this time it was too late to preserve
indigenous structures, for Bugeaus's scorched-earth tactics had already
undermined them. Twenty years earlier in occupied, or "pacified,"
territories he had attempted to copy the administration of his rival, Emir
Abdelkader, but formal offices and titles meant less than the men, whom he
arbitrarily changed. The new ones, serving out of fear or self-interest,
generally lacked authority. In fact the Frnch had probably even earlier
forfeited the opportunity to establish indirect rule by destroying Turkish
administration and desecrating urban religious institutions.
Immediately after the conquest of Algiers
in 1830, the occupying power took over the public habus (religious foundation or endowment) properties whose income traditionally
supported mosques, schools, and charities.
In
his
famous parliamentary report of 1847, Alexis de Tocqueville lamented:
Everywhere
we have put our hands on these revenues ...
We have ruined charitable institutions, dropped the schools, and
dispersed the seminaries. Around us lights have been extinguished, and the
recruitment of men of religion and men of law has ceased. In other words we have rendered Muslim
society much more miserable, disorganized, ignorant, and barbaric than it was
before knowing us. (10)
Indeed,
the first decades of colonial rule virtually annihilated not only the Turks but
also the indigenous urban bourgeoisie.
The man of religion, law, and commerce had always been less influential
in Algeria than in Morocco or Tunisia, but the French presence accentuated the
differences. Pacification depopulated
the cities, and most of them did not regain their Muslim population of 1830
until the twentieth century.
Substantial remnants of a traditional bourgeoisie survived only in
Constantine and Tlemcen (despite the famed exodus of leading Tlemcen families
to Syria in 1911).
Tranditional rural elites fared no better
under colonial rule. Ironically it was Napoeon lll, not the settlers nor the
Republican politicians, who hastened tribal disaggregation in the
countryside. The Senatus-Consultus of
1863 put an end to arbitrary expropriation of tribal land but fostered a new
set of local institutions, the douar-communes, to encourage greater political
participation at the expense of tribal notables. The law also permitted tribally owned land to be broken into
privateley owned pieces, thus undermining tribal cohesion and the authority of
the chief. Moreover, no chief could
preside over more than one commune, and his traditional judicial powers were
placed in their hands. Those hurt the most by this legislation were the
aristocratic chiefs of warrior tribes upon whom the Turks, and subsequently in
some cases the Arab Bureaux, had relied to keep law and order and bring in the
taxes. The Warnier Law of 1873
completed the destruction of the tribe by permitting property sales to
Europeans. The coming of the Third Republic also meant that tribal chiefs,
supported by the Arab Bureaux which settlers and Republicans distrusted, would
have even less influence. It was his
fear of the new regime which prompted Mokrane, a typical warrior chief, to
spark the Kabyle insurrection of 1871.
Concomitant in the later nineteenth
century with the decay of tribal elites was the rise of religious orders,
hitherto contained and largely dominated, even when they called for holy war
against the French, by the warrior tribes.
By virtue of their doctrines and organization, they easily superceded
not only the warrior but also the maraboutic tribes - the "honest
brokers" who had, incidentally, been Emir Abdelkader's most reliable
support.(11) While the French colonial rulers had taken over
many of
the habus incomes supporting the religious orders, their zawiyas, dispensing
Islamic instruction, continued to flourish on initiation fees and volutary
offerings. Indeed, the suppression of
Islamic government seems to have enhanced their activity and prestige. Rather
that eliminating the orders, the French kept their zawiyas under surveillance,
influenced the election of their sheikhs and muqadamin (subordinate officials),
and gradually, in the words of a French scholar and strategist, "wore them
down by using them."(12)
By the turn of the century their leaders
were virtually Algeria's sole traditional elite. They usefully intervened with local colonial authorities on
behalf of their members, but they had submitted to the French presence after
the insurrection of 1871, when the Rahmaniyya order had mobilized masses in
support of Mokrani. As they grew rich, however, their doctrines became
conservative, and by the First World War their influence was waning. Algeria would acquire new nationalist
elites, but they would have virtually no connection with traditional elites,
worn down or destroyed by the intensive colonial situation. For this
sociological reason, no colonial dialectic bridging traditional and modern
values would be possible. The brutal
French take-over dislocated Algerian society and precluded a dialogue across
generations that would be possible in Tunisia and Morocco.
Elite survival in Morocco and Tunisia. It
is perhaps not surprising that Tunisia's traditional elites survived the French
invasion of their country in 1881, for, educated by the Algerian experience,
they put up little resistance. Several weeks after the bey capitulated to
French demands and signed the Treaty of Kasser Said, some marginal tribes,
urged by religious brotherhoods, revolted against infidel rule, but the entire
country was pacified in a matter of months.
In Morocco, by contrast, the French did not complete their conquest of
outlying mountainous areas until 1934, twenty-two years after the Protectorate
was proclaimed. But though Morocco,
like Algeria, was a difficult terrain to subdue, the French had become more
experienced. Under the striking
leadership of Marshal Lyautey, who had campaigned in Algeria and other colonial
wars, the "oil spot" tactics of pacification invoved an economy of
violence, a maximum of mediation and political intrugue to divide the tribal
opposition. And in both Tunisia and Morocco the French applied the formula of
the protectorate so as to cover colonial designs with the ligitimacy of the
traditional makhzan. Especially in
Morocco where the sultanate's legitimacy rested on religious grounds, the
tactic was a brilliant success.
Pacification was a modern military operation, or protracted series of
operations, but it was undertaken in the name of the sultan and his makhzan and
was not too different in form from the traditional warfare and bargaining that
strong sultans had always employed to consolidate their rule. Thus, rather than
destroying
traditional elites as in Algeria, the French protected them and gradually won
them over, conditionally, to act as agents of indirect rule.
The
conception of a protectorate is that of a country keeping its institutions,
governing and administering itself with its own organs, under the simple
supervision [conrole] of a European power which, substituting itself for it in
external representation, generally takes over the administration of its army
and finances and directs its economic development. That which dominates and
charaterizes this conception is the formula of "supervision", not
that of "direct administration".(13)
But
actually "indirect rule" was already a myth by 1926, when Lyautey
left Morocco in the hands of a succession of Resident Generals who, bowing to a
greater extent to settler pressures, were less dedicated than he to his
conception of a protectorate. In Tunisia, where these pressures were greater
and had a longer history, the Protectorate was even more of a myth. In both
countries French administrators controlled all-important policy-making in
internal as well as external affairs, for treaties bound the bey and sultan to
carry out all "administrative, judicial, and financial reforms which the
French government considers useful." (14) Under the nominal authority of
the native head of state, French directors supervised by the Resident General
established new administrations which in effect were modern French
ministries. Traditional ministries of
the respective makhzans persisted, and the Prime Minister of Grand Vizier
theorectically had to approve legisltion affecting them. just as the bey or
sultan, nominally soveriegn, had to approve all legisltion for it to be
valid. But this approval was routine
except when, under the pressure or influence of rising nationalism, the heads
of state could no longer be rubber stamps for the colonial power. And at the regional and local levels French
controlers civils and native-affairs' officers respectively represented the
Resident General in the areas under civilian and military rule. In theory they "supervised" the
makhzan's caids and other officials, but in practice they often administered
populaitons directly, exercising the caid's judicial as well as administrative
powers.
Nevertheless, the myth of the
Protectorate did help to ensure the survival of traditional elites in Tunisia
and Morocco. Unlike their forebears in Algeria, for instance, the French did
not disrupt the habus, or religious foundations. The most they did, in Tunisia where settler pressure was strong,
was to obligate the public habus administration to cede five thousand acres annually
to the Tunisian state domain, which parceled them out to settlers. For the most
part, traditional institutions were preserved, even though decades of
French-inspired modernization emptied many of thier substance. The mosque-universities of Zitouna
(Tunis)
and Qarawiyin (Fez), for instance, survived independace, despite the growth of
modern schools. The traditional
mechanisms regulating urban commerce also survived, despite the virtual
collapse of traditional commerce under modern competition. Traditional families
in Tunisia and Morocco retained high status as they slowly adapted to the
social changes unduce by the foreign presence, the most notable one being a
mondern economic sector. And even as
they adapted, the old families would not, unlike their Algerian counterparts,
forget the traditions they embodied, preserved in the museums of the
Protectorates.
It was in Morocco that the old families
were most successful in adapting to the colonial situation, that is, acquiring
new bases of wealth and prestige in the modern sector to compliment and
reenforce their traditional statuses.
The myth of the Protectorate sustained old makhzan families and tribal
notables, while French favoritism - la politique de grandes familles - afforded
them opportunities in agricultural and military pursuits. The traditional
commercial bougeoisie in Fez began to adapt to modern commerce even before the
Protectorate. In addition to new
wealth, many of its members acquired new status by joining a nationalist party. And Sultan Mohammed V, who became
"king" in the eyes of young nationalists, was of course the most
successful of all in translating his
traditional status into modern wealth, prestige - and eventually power.
In Tunisia, too, old families acquired
new statuses. On the eve of the Second World War, Henri de Montety, a French
controleur civil, did a remarkable study documenting their adaptation to the
modern sector engendered by the French presence. We cannot here do adequate justice to his detailed findings, but
he marshaled statistical evidence, involving a painstaking study of Tunisian
elites, to show how the makhzan families, the caids and other provivcial
notables, the ulama, and the baldi bourgeoisie of Tunis (comparable to the
Fassi merchants) "still [in 1938] occupy an important place, especially in
positions of authority, of traditional culture, and of officialdom. In the new structures they have often been
able to conquer the largest share, especially as lawyers, secular judges, and
Old Destour [nationalist party] leaders."
Montety goes on, however, to suggest the
critical difference between the Moroccan and the Tunisian elite structure, the
difference, in fact, which explains why a full dialectical interplay between
colonizers and nationalists was possible in Tunisia but not in Morocco:
Nevertheless,
despite the important place they still enjoy in the social structure, the role
of the old families is already diminished by the simple fact that they have to
share their influence and authority with the new elite, as
the
waves of new aspirants are storming the gates of command posts.(15)
Though
the members of old families who competed with newcomers for new jobs in the
modern sector had also adapted to modern civilization, the very fact of
competition explains how dialectic was possible. In Morocco, by contrast, there was no time for newcomers to emerge in sufficient numbers to
challenge the old families.
NEW
ELITES
In the context of French North Africa,
the indigenous stratum most likely to spearhead a fully consious, radical
confrontation with the colonizer were the French-educated intellectuals -
graduates of French lycees and/or universities - for this stratum was the most
exposed to political values of the metropolitan power and potentially the most
capable of appealing to French audiences and so mobilizing these values in
dialectical fashion against colonial domination. Furthernmore, French education was the most obvious sign of elite
status in the modern sector of colonial society. To be a member of the modern elite - whether as a lawyer,
pharmacist, doctor, modern farmer, official, or businessman - a French
education was virtually mandatory. Conversly, virtually every North African who
acquired a diploma was assured of some respectable position in the modern sector.
The graduates often complained, especially in Algeria, that thier talents were
not put to adequate use, that a represseve colonial power kept them out of
responisible positions in government, and even that the French did not
encourage higher studies. These
complaints were often well founded but should not obscure the fact that
graduates were ipso facto members of
the new elite. The Maghrib did not produce a surplus of unemployable
intellectuals, however angry, alienated, and nationalist (and unemployed) many
of the graduates became.
French education was the passport
guaranteeing entry into the new elite. Moreover, it took very few years of
colonial rule, even in insular, self-centered Fez, for native North African
society to recognize and respect French-educated compatriots, to recognize
modern status destinctions based on education.
Such recognition was perhaps a reflection of the traditional Islamic
respect for (Arabic) learning. Widespread respect for French education, with
its corollary of appreciable wealth and status, had one important implication
for the colonial dialectic. French education systems could restratify
native society.
In fact the colonial power did restratify
Algerian and Tunisian society but had little impact upon the structure of the
Moroccan elite. For, naturally, Algeria
and Tunisia, being colonized earlier, received French schools before Morocco
did. By the end of the Protectorate, it
is true,
many
Moroccans had gone through French schools, but the few who had received higher
degrees were from the first, favored waves of school-goers. By and large they
tended to be sons of the traditional elite and hence the composition of the
Moroccan elite, whether traditional or modern, underwent little change. It could also be argued that the Moroccan
graduates - with the obvious exceptions from poor families, like Abderrahim
Bouabid or Megde Ben Barka - were less socially displaced or uprooted than most
of their Algerian or Tunisian counterparts, for the Moroccans were equally at
home on the traditional or modern status stsyem. Obviously the Algerians, coming from nowhere, were the most
uprooted - unless, like some, they could pass as Frenchmen. Upwardly mobile
Tunisians, on the other hand, could both identify with, and react against, the
traditional elite, and the confrontation would be constructive.
By 1931 there already were 151 North
African students in metropolitan universities; these included 119 Tunisians but
only 11 Moroccans.(16) There were probably almost as many Algerian as Tunisian
students in French universities if Muslims at the University of Algiers (for
which no figures are available) are also counted. Morocco remained behind, for in 1955-56 there were no more than
400 Moroccan students in French universities, compared to 862 Tunisians and
1,800 Algerians.(17) More significant
than the absolute numbers, however, were their social origins. It is known that
in 1939 only 15 out of 80 of those accepted into Tunisia's elite preparatory
school, Sadiki Colege, come from the "old families" of Tunis, while
half were upwardly mobile Sahilians.(18) We assume that similar proportions
prevailed among Tunisian university students.
Looking at the names and addresses of the 134 Moroccans studying in
French universities in 1947-48, by contrast, we see that 30 percent came from
Fez, an additional 10 percent from Casablance.
We assume that most of the Casablancans (and perhaps others as well)
came from commercial Fassi families which had earlier transferred thier
businesses to the booming French commercial capital. At least 40 percent of the student population, in short, could be
classified as Fassi, while the percentage of student sons of the traditional
elite was much higher. Our admittedly
fragmentary evidence bears out what was clear to any observer of North African
students in Paris even subsequently, in the fifties: the sharp contrast between
the assiduous petit-bourgeois Tunisians and the Moroccan playboys. Whithout data, only impressions, it seems
that the larger Algerian student body by this time displayed even greater
social diversity that the Tunisians. There is one siginificant comparison,
however, to be made between the Algerian and Tunisian student bodies. Just as half, of perhaps a majority of the
Tunisians came from the Sahil, an area comprising 10 percent of the national
population, so amoung the Algerians a disproportionate share were from Kabylia.
Indeed,
primordial loyalties of sorts could strengthen the cohesion based on a
shared higher education of all three modern North African elites. But whereas in Morocco the critical
identification tended to be with the traditional society of Fez, the old
intellectual capital as well as the source of much of the new elite, in Algeria
and Tunisia the identification was with a provincial region marginal to
traditional upper strata. All three
modern elites had their natural social constituencies, but the Moroccan one
would constrict social a political innovation, whereas Sahilians and Kabylians
could share a vested interest in change.
That is to say, it was easier for a Tunisian or Algerian than a Moroccan
intellectual to acquire revolutionary consciousness; the old ties with Fez and
upper strata kept most Moroccans back in the second movement.
Yet the French educational system and
pattern of primordial loyalties conspired to thwart the Algerian elite while
advancing the Tunisian elite as an agency of social and political change. The government primary schools in Tunisia
(as in Morocco) taught Arabic as well as French, whereas the Algerian system
virtually ignored Arabic even after the Second World War (when limited
concessions were made to nationalist demands).
Moreover, Sadiki College, founded by a modernizing Tunisian prime minister
in 1875, became the model for a special Tunisian type of secondary education,
equivalent to the French lyc¸e but including substantial Arabic studies. Thus, the modern Tunisian elite was equipped
in two cultures and, unlike the Algerians, could communicate its ideas through
a variety of Arabic intermediaries to the traditional society.
The intermediaries, moreover, were much
weaker in Algeria than in Tunisia or, for that matter, in Morocco (where they
were outlest for traditionalist intellectuals). On the one hand, the traditional educational system destroyed by
the French in Algeria endured in the Protectorates. the Quarawiyin University at Fez and the University of Zitouna at
Tunis continued to dispense a medieval Islamic education. Indeed, though morbund when the French came
--- Qarawiyin had roughly 300 students, Zitouna less than a thousand --- these
venerable institutions, including their secondary level annexes, were schooling
respectively 3,000 and 15,000 students by the mid-1950s. And linking in some degree the traditional
Arabic with modern forms of instruction were the so-called "free
schools" in Morocco and the "Quranic schools" in Tunisia. The Tunisian desire, expressed earlier by
the founding of Sadiki College, to modernize while retaining an Arabic culture,
led by 1906 to the founding of these private, predominantly Arabic primary
schools preparing children to enter a modern secondary school. By 1955 almost 35,000 Tunisians ---
one-fifth of those in school --- were attending these schools, which French
educational authorities officially inspected and recognized. The "free school" movement in
Morocco was comparable but originated later and was less extensive, schooling
only 20,000 children in 1954.
Politically, however, these intermediaries were very important as links through
their school teachers with the nationalist elites. Their equivalents in Algeria, launched in 1912 and subsequently
made famous by Ben Badis (see below), were more significant for the history of
Algerian nationalism but schooled only 7,000 children in 1951.19
The primordial affiliations of the major
part of the Algerian elite also hindered its ability to communicate with
Algerian society. For Kabyles, however
modernized or "socially mobilized" they might be, in comparison with
the rest of the Algerian population, were a linguistic minority, native
Berber-speakers who, for the most part, did not speak the language of
three-quarters of the country. However
nationalist, however concerned for Algeria, not Kabylia, the French-educated elite (and indeed other
"mobilized" strata) from this region might be, they could not
represent and articulate the values of the rest of the nation, except so far as
these values could be expressed in French.
In Tunisia, by contrast, primordial ties could be the building blocks of
national solidarity. Though his accent
was distinctive, like a Yankee drawl, the Sahilian spoke and thought in Arabic
as well as French and could therefore represent, in the sense of articulating
the values for, a new Tunisian nation.
Indeed only in Tunisia was there a core
group marginal, unlike the Fassis, to the traditional elite yet available and
culturally capable of providing the sense of purpose for a new, nationwide
political space. The Sahil, in the
restricted sense used in this chapter, is a concentrated cluster of villages
and towns one hundred miles south of Tunis extending forty miles along the
eastern coastline and up to twenty miles inland. Like Upper Kabylia and parts of the Berber Atlas in Morocco, its
olive orchards were not enough to support a dense and growing population. For
French settlers, too, it was a peeripheral area. (The twocolons [settlers]
who tried to establish themselves eventually departed.) The Sahil peasant jealously guarded his
private property, though it might not consist of more than a few olive
trees. A segmentary pattern of intra-
and intervillage rivalries existed here as elsewhere in North Africa, but the
Sahil, though geographically more vulnerable than the Berber strongholds, had
managed for centuries to protect its orchards from the nomads of the
interior. What made the Sahil unique in
North Africa was not its sedentary village life but the fact that its peasants
also spoke Arabic, historically had been open to various currents of
Mediterranean civilization yet would, like Kabyle peasants, be especially
attracted to French education. Though
disdained as country folk by the refined upper classes of Tunis, educated
Sahilians would be able to assimilate some of their manners and eventually,
successful in modern careers, marry their daughters as well as take over the
country. While Kabyles could not absorb
Arabs, Sahilians absorbed other Tunisians.
The Sahil, Kabylia, and Fez would be the
core constituencies of the respective nationalist movements, just as they
provided primordial bases of cohesion for the new elites. But to mention the key constituencies ---
the natural "audiences" for nationalist elites --- is to introduce
another set of variables conditioning the colonial dialextic; the largely unintended
consequences of colonial policies which detached non-elite strata from
traditional society and made them "available" for nationalist
activity.
SOCIAL
MOBILIZATION
In all three societies the French presence
induced what Karl Deutsch calls "social mobilization," or "the
process in which major cluster of old social, economic and psychological
commitments are eroded or broken and people become available for new patterns
of socialization and behavior."20
The
critical precipitating factors were education and the creation of modern
economic sectors juxtaposed to traditional subsistence economies. Mass primary education, with concomitant
increases in literacy and social communications, created new native audiences
susceptible to elite appeals. The colonial
economies uprooted millions and made them "available for new
patterns" that the colonial power often could not provide. A constructive colonial dialectic, however,
is not necessarily facilitated by high indices, in the abstract, of
"social mobilization."
Rather, what is crucial is who gets "mobilized," that is,
detached from the usual order of things, and in what respect. Are the detached strata available to the
articulators of the dialectic, that is, to the modern intelligentsia, or do
they threaten to swamp the new elite and hence jeopardize the possibilities of
a dialectical confrontation with the colonial power?
Comparative analysis suggests that there
was too much social mobilization in Algeria and not enough in Morocco. The uprooting in Algeria began earliest, and
the modern economy was least capable of absorbing the rural exodus of
dispossessed peasants. In these
respects Tunisia occupied a middle ground.
Moreover, a greater proportion of Tunisians than either Algerians or
Moroccans received primary school education.
This meant that more modern intermediaries would be available in Tunisia
to link the intellectual elites and uprooted masses. Rather than compare indices of social mobilization in the
abstract (such as degree of urbanization, literacy, nonagricultural employment,
or news media), it is necessary to discern and compare the processes of social
mobilization, their discontinuities as well as continuities, in the three
colonial situations.
Stimulated by dynamic European entrepreneurs
with generous supplies of foreign private capital, Morocco, the late developer,
caught up with Algeria after an industrial "boom" in 1948-1953. By 1955, in fact, Moroccan production in the
primary and secondary sectors of the economy (that is, agriculture, mines,
energy, industry, construction) exceeded Algeria's. The Moroccan economy had grown at an average annual rate of 3.7
percent since 1920, whereas the older colonial economies had "peaked"
earlier and could no longer keep up with the growth of the native Algerian and
Tunisian populations. By 1955, 600,000 Moroccans were employed in
nonagricultural and for the most part, modern occupations, compared to only
460,000 Algerian Muslims and 210,000 Tunisians.21 Table II.1, which gives the
TABLE
II.1 Percentages of Muslims in 1955 by
Economic Sector
Sector Algeria Tunisia Morocco
______________________________________________________
Primary (agriculture) 78% 71% 60%
Secondary 12.5 11 23
Tertiary (services) 9.5 18 17
______________________________________________________
Source: Ren¸ Gallissot, L'Economie de l'Afrique du
Nord (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), p. 77.
percentages
of Muslims employed in each economic sector, also indicates that Algerians
experiences the greatest difficulty, Moroccans the least, in being integrated
into the modern economy. That is, a
greater proportion of Algerians remained in the "primary sector" of
traditional agriculture, whereas the modern secdondary and tertiary sectors
were more open to the Tunisians and especially the Moroccans. Indeed, Muslim nonagricultural unemployment,
5 to 10 percent in Morocco, ranged from 10 to 20 percent in Tunisia and 25 to
33 percent in Algeria.22 One reason for
this, obviously, was that Algeria's much larger settler population included many
petit blancs occupying jobs the Muslims
could take in Tunisia and especially Morocco, where there were proportionately
fewest settlers.
Yet, ironically, the modern economy most
capable of absorbing surplus Muslim labor from the countryside supported the
rural society least disturbed by the French presence. Foreigners appropriated proportionately the least arable land in
Morocco, and official efforts to preserve tribal structure were the most
successful. Rural proletarianization,
the consequence in Tunisia and especially in Algeria of policies encouraging
European settlement, did not occur to any such extent in Morocco. More than one-half of the Moroccan rural
population in 1955 could be considered relatively well off by North African
standards, earning an annual $400 or better per family from their farming. By contrast, in Tunisia rather less than
half (40 percent) earned only $300 or better, while in Algeria only one quarter
of the native rural population enjoyed relatively satisfactory incomes.23
But of course under the twin pressures of
colonization and a population explosion, the rural populations suffered in all
three countries. As they were squeezed
off their traditional lands, Muslims sought jobs on European farms or in the
mines; they also invaded the new European cities, thereby coming into contact
with modern life, becoming "socially mobilized," even when they could
not find steady jobs. Though the
process of rural proletarianization began earlier in Algeria and Tunisia than
in Morocco, the exodus en masse to the
cities began at about the same time, after 1930, in all three countries. From 1936 to 1948 alone, Algerian cities
received a net influx of one-half million.
From 1936 to 1952, one million rural Moroccans were on the move, two-thirds
of them to the cities, the remainder to rural centers of colonization. From 1936 to 1946, more than 150,000
Tunisians flocked to the capital.
Alongside all of North Africa's major cities miserable shantytowns (the
so-called bidonvilles, or towns built
of tin cans) mushroomed and housed up to two-fifths (Algiers, 1954) of the
Muslim urban populations. Meanwhile the
impoverished rural populations continued to increase in absolute numbers
despite the massive exodus.
Abstractly speaking, and confining our
attention strictly to what was happening in North Africa proper, Moroccans
would appear between 1930 and 1955 to have been more socially mobilized than
either the Algerians or Tunisians. For
during this period the proportion of Moroccans in cities almost quadrupled,
while the others little more than doubled.24
By 1955 one-fifth of the native Moroccan population lived in cities of
over 20,000 inhabitants; this was a slightly higher proportion than either Algeria
or Tunisia could boast (though in the succeeding ten years of revolution and
independence both countries would outstrip Morocco). Similarly abstract indices of nonagricultural employment showed
Moroccans to be more mobilized than either the Algerians or Tunisians. But in the politically significant sense of
being available for new kinds of nonprofessional activity, the Moroccans
remained backward, and political development lagged behind economic
development. For most of the urbanized
Moroccans had jobs to go to, unlike their Tunisian and especially Algerian
counterparts. Moreover, the Moroccans,
urbanized more recently, retained stronger attachments to their traditional
structures in the countryside.
In fact, French sociologist and political
consultant Robert Montagne, writing just before the Portectorate in Morocco
ended, suggested the possibility of creating ethnic quarters in the coastal
cities, to serve as a social "brake" easing the transition of the new
proletariat to city life.25 And indeed
the Moroccan workers, whether or not they brought their families with them,
generally retained their primordial loyalties to a greater extent than their
Tunisian or Algerian counterparts, even though, as elsewhere, the colonial
authorities failed to control social change.
Moroccan trade unionism developed much later than its equivalents in
Tunisia and Algeria. Morover, the
majority of the new Moroccan working force were of Berber origin, from the Sous
and the surrounding slopes of the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas, and hence
relatively immune, until political creses of the early fifties, to the
nationalist appeals of the Fassi political elite. Politically the Moroccan Berbers were less significant than
Algerian Kabyles, even though Berbers constituted a larger percentage of the
total population in Morocco (40 percent) than in Algeria (25 percent) or
Tunisia (1 percent).26 The urban Arabs
generally regarded the Berbers as ignorant rustics. Though they had a head start over the Arabs in joining the urban
proletariat, Moroccan Berbers did not, unlike Kabyles, enjoy a similar
educational advantage. Furthermore, the
traditional Arab elites retained their status and sense of identity in
Morocco. Hence, during the struggle for
independence, no coalition materialized between third-moment intellectual (who
were also for the most part Arab) and the new proletariat. Social mobilization did not lead to
political mobilization until just before independence, when no elite could
channel it.
In Algeria, by contrast, the process of
social mobilization occurred over a longer time and was more painful, in that
fewer jobs were available. By 1905 some
uprooted Algerian peasants were already working in southern France; by 1913,
according to an official survey, four to five thousand were working in the
factories of Marseilles and Paris and in mines near the Belgian border. Virtually all were Kabyles, squeezed as they
had been, even before 1830, out of their poor, overpopulated mountain villages. Kabyles had also sought out jobs in the
nineteenth century in colon settlements, as agricultural workers, petty
tradesment, or semiskilled laborers.
The Arabs usually distrusted these itinerant single men, who left their
families at home and rarely fused with the Arab populations they visited. More mobile than the Arabs, they also tended
to assimilate modern skills more rapidly --- out of economic nexessity. Indeed, a recent book, L'Alg¸rie kabylis¸e, describes their
subsequent take-over of most strategic sectors of the modern Muslim economy ---
civil service, teaching, skilled labor, etc.27
Before independence, however, many other
Algerians were socially mobilized, in that they had to escape a rural
overpopulation and uneremployment which the colonial situation had
generalized. By 1955 at least half of
Algeria's modern work force was in France, and Kabyles, though still the most
distinctive segment, constituted less than half of these temporary
emigr¸s. Including its workers in
France, Algeria was clearly more socially mobilized, as measured by
urbanization and nonagricultural employment, than either Morocco or
Tunisia. Moreover, the Kabyle masses,
activated and mobilized over a long period of time, were potential audiences
for revolutionary Kabyle intellectuals.
But, unfortunately, enough other Algerians were also mobilized to
challenge Kabyle predominance. Indeed,
there were too many uprooted, mobilized Algerians, scattered between Algeria
and France, for any intellectual elite to control. Social mobilization outran the political capacities of the elite
long before independence.
Only in Tunisia, apparently, was there
enough social mobilization to make mass support available to a radical elite,
yet not so much as to ensure anarchic revolts against it. In terms of urbanization and nonagricultural
employment, Tunisia lagged slightly behind the two larger countries by 1955,
compared to about 15 percent of the Algerians and 11 percent of the
Moroccans.28 A proletariat had been
developing in the modern colonial sectors of the economy since the turn of the
century. Its primordial ties were
weaker than those of the newer Moroccan proletariat; indeed, Tunisians had been
actively involved in trade unions since the twenties. Many of the proletariat came from trives of the center and south,
relatively few from the Sahil. Primordial
links made it "available" to third-moment intellectuals only in the
same sense that both workers and intellectuals share a similar marginal status
vis--vis the traditional elite of Tunis.
Had there been a greater social mobilization in Tunisia, the proletarian
strata might have endangered the Sahil's hegemony in the nationalist
movement. But, strengthened by a
national vision and educational advantages, Sahilians retained control (and of
course recruited leaders from other regions as well). Ironically even the head of the trade unions in 1956 was a French
university graduate from the Sahil (Ahemd Ben Salah). Only in Tunisia could the intellectuals, drawing cohesion and
support from a primordial core, guide and channel the process of social mobilization
induced by the French. Social changes
in the first century of colonial Algeria had been too profound, painful, and
uneven for its intellectuals to channel, while the mobilization in Morocco had
been too recent to provide a reservoir of support to radical intellectuals
(who, anyway, were not numerous).
CONFLICT
SITUATIONS
The final set of critical factors
conditionsing dialectical evolutin concerns the nature of the conflict with the
colonial power. If the conflict is
protracted, there is more time for radical intellectuals to outdistance and
incorporate earlier moments of nationalis consciousness and to articulate a new
political design in a durable organization.
In this respect algeria and Tunisia had the advantage over Morocco,
where urban nationalism did not become a significant polital force until the
Second World War. France gave up
Morocco before colonial conflict could generate a radical take-over of the
nationaslist movement. But the
style of conflict is a significant as
its duration. Only when the conflict
encourages an articulation of national values does it become a dialectical
confrontation, one building the "identity in opposition"
characteristic of the Hegelian paradigm.
Widespread violence, however, rules out articulation. For violence undermines the leadership of
the intellectuals, the articulators of dialect, unless they already, like the
Vietnamese, control an organizational weapon.
In Algeria a tradition of violence and colonial repression had
devaluated intellectuals and their organizational skills. Frants Fanon condemns their compromises with
colonialism. Only in less violent, more
"political" conflicts --- as in colonial Tunisia --- are their skills
essential. The French stakes in Algeria
were too high, settler influence too pervasive, to permit the
"political" kind of confrontation.
The settlers were the de facto rulers of Algeria, whereas they were at best
a powerful pressure group in the Protectorates. Settlers controlled the Algerian administration, for high officials
tended to make lifelong careers in the country. The administration depended not, as in Morocco and Tunisia, upon
the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs but upon the Ministry of the Interior
(until 1956). Through the D¸l¸gations
Financi¸res (1900-1945) and then the
Algerian Assembly, the settlers wielded decisive influence upon the Algerian
budget. In the communes de plein
exercice (local governing bodies) they
had three-quarters of the seats. Their
deputies in Paris could block political reforms against all but the strongest
French governments; after Georges Clemenceau's reforms of 1919 no government
excepting those of Charles de Gaulle had the strength or will to stand up to
the settlers. The crucial blow to
moderate Algerian politicians came in 1937, when settlers successfully blocked
the Blum-Viollette reforms, which offered the Muslim magority the prospect in
the very distant future of having a decisive voice in domestic affairs. Perhaps no dialextic was possible after this
date. For zMuslims did not have
political allies, or even sympathetic adversaries, among the predominantly
lower-class, racist settler population.
Even the Algerian Communist Party, consisting mostly of Europeans,
supported a bloody suppression in 1945 of the Constantine uprising. In this anomic outburst of native
frustration, more than one hundred Europeans were killed, but some six thousand
Muslims (the estimates vary) lost their lives in the blind reprisals which set
the stage for subsequent violence.29
Widespread electoral fraud perpetrated by the Algerian administration
destroyed any chance of applying timid reforms promised by the Algerian Statute
of 1947. As classic methods of
effecting political change proved ineffective, Algerian intellectuals committed
to these methods lost their prestige and ability to canalize mass protest.
By contrast, in Tunisia and Morocco a
political process was possible. To be
sure, the settlers, as in Algeria, opposed reforms allowing greater Muslim
participation and acquired important allies in the Protectorate
administration. But the weak
governments of the Fourth Republic nevertheless retained some margin for
maneuver in these countries. Though the
settlers usually in the end sabotaged the policies of liberal Resident Generals
whom French governments occasionally appointed, reformists could boast of
temporary victories even before 1954-1955.
In tunisia under the supervision of the Popular Front government in
Paris, 1936 and 1937 were years of conciliation and compromise with natinalist
forces. So also in 1945-1950, some
political negotiations were possible.
In Morocco, too, despite periods of police repression as in Tunisia,
there were periods of compromise and dialogue with nationalist forces. On occasion, as in 1950, nationalist learder
like Bourguiba and Mohammed V were received in Paris. Tunisian and Moroccan politicians never lost hope in getting
hearing at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and influencing French public
opinion through sympathetic metropolitan politicians like Pierre Mend¸s-France
or Edgar Faure. Those North Africans
most suitable for these diplomatic tasks, of course, were the intellectuals,
graduates of French universities.
The ambiguity of the political formula of
the protectorate was an asset Algerians did no have. Realizing the dangers of the ambiguity --- even though after the
days of Marshal Lyautey it was never French policy to train a native elite for
self-government as the British agreed to do afdter 1943 in some of their
African colonies --- the settlers attempted to revise the formula, to develop
"Franco-Moroccan" and "Franco-Tunisian" sovereignty. Thus both sides, not just the Muslim
nationalists, were attempting to the status quo. Despite their influence upon some French administratior of the
Protextorates, the settlers were in a weaker position than their counterparts
in Algeria. Settlers and nationalists
competed for concessions from the government in Paris.
The fact that nationalists could not
effect significant change within the structures of their respective
Protectorates --- for indirect rule was subverted and consultative bodies
favored the settler --- encourage them to organize instruments of action, such
as political parties, outside the legal framework. In two important respects, however, the conflict situations in
Morocco and Tunisia differed. One
difference, as noted above, was timing.
With roots antedating the First World War, Tunisian nationalism was
older than its Moroccan equivalent, and the political conflict began in earnest
in 1920. Nothing comparable occurred in
Morocco until 1936 (earlier flurries resembled, in the number of Moroccans they
involved, the happenings in Tunis between 1906 and 1912). Furthermore, the politicasl styles of the
settler population differed, explaining in part (as dialectical analysis would
suggest) the difference in style of their adversaries.
The settler population had been
established for a longer time in Tunisia and tended to be of lower
socioeconomic status, both by origins and income, than its Moroccan
counterparts. Therfore highly developed
in Tunisia. The chief spokesman for the
settlers in the last years of French rule here was a former petty administrator
(appropriately named Colonna) who had organized white-collar workers, whereas
his counterpart in Morocco was a wealthy landowner. The Tunis section of the French Socialist Party (SFIO) was also
an important influence on nationalists.
Though always small in numbers, it dated from the twenties and, as Carl
Brown points out, argued with and helped politically to socialize influential
segments of the Muslim elite (including Habib Bourguiba).30 Fascist methods of mass organization,
imported by a substantial Italian settler population, were likewise a
suggestive political model. Thus
university graduates were exposed to modern ideas and styles of mass political
participation not only abroad, where they looked to French parties of the Left,
but also when they returned home. In
Tunisia the mass organizations of the settlers posed concrete threats to the
nationalists as well as models to emulate.
Nationalists had to demonstrate to French public opinion that Mr.
Colonna was not the only one who could mobilize masses for the revision of the
political status quo.
In Morocco, by contrast, the most
influential settlers were wealthy landowners and financiers enjoying
international connections. they acted not like mass pressure groups but rather
as individuals exercising influence through personal contacts behind the scenes. Trade unions and sections of metropolitan
political parties tended to be less active and visible in Morocco than in
Tunisia. Hence the Moroccan
nationalists were not as exposed as the Tunisians to the more modern styles of
mass politics. It was enough to operate
in a similarly exclusive world of traditional families. The elitist style of settler politcs long
after Lyautey's departure probably halped to perpetuate the monarchy, though
not in the way the Marshal had intended.
The settlers' style, which encouraged the development of a third moment
in Tunisia, helped to block it in Morocco.
To summarize our discussion, the
circimstances of the French presence were more conducive in Tunisia than
elsewhere to a constructive conflict engendering new bases of social and
political cohesion. Algeria experienced
too much social distuption and a conflict too violent to promote new elites
capable of reknitting the many and varied segments of its society. Morocco, on the other hand, was too lightly
touched for conflict basically to transform the old partimonial structure and
its segmental underpinnings. Tunisia
was the most fortunate, in retrospect, because the French presence did not, as
in Algeria, eradicate the traditional elites who were the carriers of Tunisia's
past, yet it provided favorable circumstances for the new elite to displace the
old and reinterpret its values and practices in light of modern European
models.
NATIONALISM
AND "NATION-BUILDING"
If the colonial situations produced
nationalist elites and potential audiences of socially mobilized masses, it was
the inevitable set of conflicts between colonizer and colonized that allowed
new possibilities for the latter to define new public purposes and to
institutionalize them in political organizations. Sociological generalizations cannot fully explain why this
conflict was most constructive in Tunisia, where a political party expressed
and crystallized the radical consciousness of a new elite, or least constructive
in Algeria, where no lefitimate organization was generated, or useful for
sustaining and reinvigorating a traditional monarchy in Morocco. One can only report, briefly, what happened,
that is, the consequences of a colonial dialectic or an aborted dialectic for
political development.
Tunisia:
Reason and Revolution. In the
Tunisian Protectorate a colonial dialectic fully unfolded: Young Tunisians before the First World War
played out the game of liberal assimilationism, forever discrediting this mode
of consciousness without precluding an eventual synthesis. After the war, the second moment of
traditionalist anti-colonialism held sway under the aegis of the Old Destour in
1934 --- a movement led by an elite able to synthesize the modes of consciousness
of preceding political generations into a genuine identity in opposition to
colonial power.
At the turn of the century the Young
Tunisians founded modern Tunisian nationalism.
They were, for the most part, sons of the Turkish mameluke aristocracy
which had ruled Tunisia before the French came. Many were among the tiny elite graduated by Sadiki College. While founding a party and a newspaper, Le
Tunisien, in 1907, their concerns were more coutural and economic than strictly
political. In the tradition of
Kheireddine, the founder of Sadiki, and inspired by the Young Turks of the
decaying Ottoman Empire, their goal was to make Tunisia modern. As one of them put it, "The Muslims of
Tunisia are indolent, improvident, and fatalistic. They must be prodded into activity."31 These French-educated Tunisians were
unabahedly elitist, as the "they" suggests. They readily identified with liberal French Resident Generals and
with the strands of French public opinion which took France's mission
civilisatrice seriously. They accepted the Protectorate
wholeheartedly, and even its policies of official colonization insofar as
Tunisians, too, might be taught modern farming methods. They were "liberal", of course,
not in the sense of advocating laisser-faire --- indeed, they wanted strong,
paternal government --- but in the sense of being heirs of the Enlightenment,
believers in progress through the development of man's rerasoning
capacities. Hence, thy place their
faith in modern education, and by "modern" they meant predominantly
French education, not a patched-up curriculum of Islamic studies. As early as 1896, with the support of the
French Resident, some of the future Young Tunisians who in 1906 founded the
first modern Quranic school in North Africa.
But the thrust of the movement was to urge the government to establish
more Franco-Arab schools, for the leading Young Tunisian, Ali Bach Hamba,
feared that any lesser steps would perpetuate Muslim backwardness.
The group was "liberal" in a
second, equally important sense.
"Let us talk as Tunisians and not as Muslims or Jews," wrote
Bach Hamba. "The time of
confessional distinctions is past. It
is the task of the young generations to work that they be completely
forgotten."22 The Young Tunisians
had assimilated the French conception of a secular political community. They implicitly made a distinction between
religious matters and the cultural, economic, and political affairs which
interested them. Islam was essentially
irrelevant. while the Young Tunisians
wisely avoided a frontal assault on the conservative ulama, some, if pressed,
would have identified with the French anti-clerical Left.
But the Young Tunisians of course remained
a very exclusive elite group; the party never claimed a membership of more than
1,500, and, as Brown points out, "Most of [their] activities and writings
. . . can be traced to about a dozen persons."33 Though not isolated from their society, in that they all belonged
to leading families and were well received, too, by early French
administrators, they had no roots among the Tunisians they wished to
educate. When Muslim masses in Tunis
did become agitated, after Italy took over Libya in 1911, four of the leading Young Tunisians were deported
because of their protests over the handling of a minor incident.
A juncture between elite and other strata
had to await the conclusion of the First World War, the dissemination of
Wilsonian ideas of national self-determination, and the return to Tunisia of
almost one hundred thousand demobilized soldiers and workers. In 1920 the Young Tunisians, who now, no
longer so young, called themselves simply the Parti Tunisien, merged into a
more broadly based force, the Liberal Constitutional Party (Destour), under the
leadership of Sheikh Abdelaziz Taalbi.
There were some continuities with the prewar party. Taalbi himself had been a Young Tunisian in
charge of the Arabic press; though he had been trained at Zitouna the
sonservative ulama expelled him for a book advocating the reform of Islam along
lines suggested by the Salafiyya movement in Egypt. Some of his associates in the Destour were French-educated
veterans of the older party. But most
of the secular modernists subsequently joined another party, encouraged by
Protectorate authorities, which had little impact upon Tunisian opinion. The Destour marked a new moment in Tunisian
nationalism, that of traditionalistic anti-colonialism.
Taalbi had been less concerned with
modernizing Tunisia than with using modern ideas to reform Islam. His second book, La Tunisie martyre, was a
polimic against the Protectorate which oriented the new party to the
specifically political task of altering the colonial condition. Delegations were sent to Paris; Taalbi
himself was briefly jailed; political manifestaions occurred at home; like the
Egyptian Wafd, the Destour rapidly acquired a mass following both in Tunis and
the Sahil. For a time in the early twenties it was fashionable for almost
everybody to be in the party.
The ostensible goal of the Destour was to
persuade France to grant Tunisia a constiution which would permit an elected
Tunisian parliament (with some settler representation). Consulted by the party, a couple of French
lawyers concluded in 1921 that such a demand was compatible with maintaining
the Protectorate. Tunisian independence
was never mentioned. but the underlying
attitude of the Destour, as expressed in La Tunisie martyre, was one of total rejection and all its
innovation. The authors resorted to the
myth of Tunisia's precolonial past, now imagined to have been a golden age of
piety and learning. The French were
attacked not only for having expropriated land but for having intorduced a
French educational system whan a national as well as scientific education was
needed. Taalbi and his followers
affirmed what Ali Bach Hamba had rejected, that modern sciences could be
assimilated in Arabic, that French culture was basically superfluous. And while their formal demands were couched
in the language of Western liberalism, their inspiration was essentially
Islamic. Behind the glories they
extolled of precolonial Tunisia lay nostalgia for Islamic grandeur. They represented a popular reaction, that of
withdrawing from French influence and asserting traditional religious values. The secularizing tendencies of the Young
Tunisians were submerged in anti-colonial protest.
But the Destour was ineffective. Its united call for a constitution masked
significant differences in outlook among its leaders. All were either mameluke or baldi, that is, traditional urban
notables including sheikhs from Zitouna.
But the French-educated lawyers who pleaded the Destour's case in Paris
were joined only by common family ties and distrust of the Protectorate to the
religious figures who swayed the masses.
Hence the party's underlying conservatism and its legalistic style, the
only sort of politics possible in the absence of a deeper mode of nationalist
consciousness. When by 1923 it was
clear that France was not going to grant Tunisia a constitution, the lawyers
could only rest their "case."
Taalbi departed on a long pilgrimage to the Orient. The persisted but refused in 1925 even to
support the first indigenous efforts to create an exclusively Tunisian trade union. Rejecting all compromise with the
Protectorate, the notables remained "pure" and intransigent but
utterly inactive, despairing of all progress once their objective could not be
achieved.
Habib Bouguiba and his generation, trained
in French universities in the twenties, represented a new mode of nationalist
consciousness. They inherited from the
Young Tunisians an abiding faith in liberal France and in its economic and
cultural innovations, while from the old Destour they stole the banner of
anti-colonialism. What they reacted
against was not the French presence as such but rather the relationship of
subordination it implied. More
explicitly than the Young Tunisians they stressed the idea of a Tunisian
patrie, a nation in which confessional considerations were irrelevant, but
frankly recognized that such a nation did not exist. It had to be brought into existence. How? Bourgiuiba ppushed
the tutelary views of the Young Tunisians one step further by equating education
with sustained political activity. His
radicalized generation viewed politics no longer as a series of disconnected
arguments but as pedagogy. Inculcating
faith in a new nation was more important than the record in the courtroom, for
history, they believed , was on the side of the new believers. In fact the Neo-Destour's courtroom became
an open schoolhouse for Tunisia's political edification; Bourguiba never lost
sight of a primary purpose in his struggles with France: to provide a scenario including spectator
participation.
To acquire mass support in a sonservative
Islamic society, the new generation could not skirt the religious issues as had
the Young Tunisians. Rather Islam was
affirmed as an integral but in the last analysis subordinate, aspect of
national culture. The autobiography of
one of Bourguiba's associates, Tahar Sfar,34 shows a deeply personal
appreciation of religion which is very Western and secular in its
approach. Publicly, however, they could
without hyprocrisy stand as Islam's most energetic defenders. In 1929 Bourguiba defended the custom of
veiling women against progressive European critics. He did not appeal to tradition but rather, anticipating Frantz
Fanon, to the need for protecting symbols of Tunisia's national identity. In 1932, while still members of the Old
Destour, the young group brashly seized upon a real issue, whether Muslims who
had been naturalized as Frenchmen could be buried in Muslim cemeteries. While their older leaders hedged, they
sparked a newspaper campaign against such burials, on the ground that
naturalization had required renouncing the shari'a (corpus of Islamic law) for
the French civil code. Their real aim
was to deter Tunisians from giving up their nationality, but in the public eye
it was thus the radical elite which staunchly defended religion, not the muftis
and sheikhs who officially pronounced that naturalized Frenchmen remained
Muslim and could be buried as such.
(Eventually the Protextorate authorities had to give way to popular
pressure and create special cemeteries for the few thousand potential cases.) While subordinating religion to nation, the
young activists appropriated the symbols of Islam. As Jacques Berque put it, Islam, no longer a refuge, became a
"Jacobin Islam" liberated from its traditional trustees, the ulama.35 Faith transplanted from formal religion
became a shared sense of national mission orchestrated by a new party.
The so-called "Neo-Destour"
Party was founded March 5, 1934, at Ksar-Hellal, a village in the heart of the
Sahil, the region from which most of the new leaders came. Originally just a splinter group contesting
the leadership of the older party, it rapidly captured much of the Old
Destour's organized support. The young
leaders --- Bourguiba was now just thirty --- did not hesitate to tour the
countryside spreading their message; for them unlike the older generation,
politics was a full-time profession. In
the difficult summer of 1934, when some tribes were threatened with famine, the
Neo-Destour urged its supporters to boycott French goods and to refuse to pay
their taxes. Out bidding the older
party's intransigence, the young leaders refused to cooperate with the Resident
General by participating in his study commissions for reform. Finally, in early September, the Resident
cut short the political agitation by arresting eight Neo-Destour leaders, along
with six Communists. This gave
Bourguiba his first chance to be a national martyr; when he was freed in 1936,
his prestige reached a new peak. And
when Taalbi returned in the summer of 1937 from his extended fourteen-year
pilgrimage in the Orient, the new party held firm. Though Taalbi was a spellbinding orator, the Neo-Destour was
sufficiently strong to stir masses in the provinces against the old leader and
discredit him when he tried to unify the Destours under his own
leadership. Taalbi's orientation had become
obsolete in rapidly changing Tunisia.
Usually the Neo-Destour insisted that its
goals and aspirations were the same as the older party's, that what
differentiated the two groups was political tactics. The older leadership was passive and intransigent while the
younger leadership was more dynamic, flexible in its tactics, more capable of
achieving results from its confrontations and negotiations with the French
authorities. Thus
"Bourguibism," as Bourguiba explains it, is primarily a tactic for
wresting concessions from an adversary.
And it was true in the two decades before independence that the
Neo-Destour occasionally reached compromises with the French authorities and
had to justify them to anti-colonialist opinion. But the older leadership in similar circumstances would have been
equally "flexible" in Levantine political negotians. The two groups differed not so much in
tactics as in fundamental orientations.
The basic difference was that the new
party considered that a Tunisian nation had to be created, whereas the old
party took for granted that the traditional social structure already
constituted a nation. The older
generation, after all, was incapable of subjecting its own social to rational
critism. The young sons of the Sahil,
on the other hand, did not share the baldi's stake in the order. While expressing colonial grievances to the
French, the Neo-Destour simultaneously marshaled the new social forces created
by the Protectorate. For this double
task European models of political organization were extremely relevant. A highly organized mass party was needed,
not only as a weapon against colonial domination but as the instrument of
nation-building. Discipline, too, was
needed if Bourguiba was to keep aroused Muslim masses from falling under
Taalbi's influence. But above all,
since politics was pedagogy, a network of communication was needed within which
Bourguiba might exercise his powers of rational persuasion, explain his
political positions, and induce traditionally rival segments to merge their
identities in a larger whole.
By 1937 the Neo-Destour had about 28,000
members organized in more than four hundred branches throughout Tunisian civil
territory (excluding the military regions of the South).36 Most of its strength was concentrated along
the eastern coast, especially in the provinces of Cap Bon, Tunis, and
Sousse. The formal structure resembled
that of the French Socialist Party. The
party's main strength, however, lay not so much in its organization --- the
leaders would never be able to duplicate the elaborate French Communist model
--- as in the types of activitists it recruited. At the lower echelons many were graduates or teachers of modern
Quranic schools or Zitouna and therefore able by virtue of their traditional learning
to acquire the respect of a mass following.
Tehy constituted the crucial intermediaries between the French-educated
national leaders and the conservative society.
Perhaps Bourguiba's greatest quality as a leader was his ability to
transmit his own dedication and enthusiasm to the cadres.
Driven underground from 1938 to 1942, the
party managed to survive even when all its top leaders were jailed. Again from 1952 to 1954, when the party
underwent a third wave of repression, it survived. Bourguiba spent a total of ten years in jail. But colonial repression seems to have been
just enough to enhance the party's cohesion and authenticate it s nationalist
credentials without being so severe as to discourage the activists and destroy
the organization. Violent
demonstrations and police brutality never escalated to a point of no return; it
was always possible for the party to control the activities of its
following. Thus rallies,
demonstrations, and even the acts of sabotage underataken in 1953 and1954,
while serving as expressions of national solidarity, were always geared to the
political end of inducing the French authorities to negotiate on terms
favorable to the Neo-Destour.
The intricate story of the party's
struggle to obtain Tunisian independence need not concern us here. What was significant was that the party had
twenty-two years, from 1936 to 1956, in which to educate a new Tunisian public
sharing common symbols and experiences, especially those of the leader-hero
Bourguiba. In 1959 he could say without
too much exaggeration,
It is rare that the events that make up
the landmarks in the life of one man
are integrated into the history of a people to such an extent that the
man seems to incarnate his whole people.
If this transposition has been brought about, it is because the man was
able to be the sincere and disinterested spokesman of the nation's conscience,
and because he fought so much and so well for the people's cause that the
movements in the life of each were brought to merge with one another.37
Bourguiba
in fact successfully portrayed the drama of a nation which did not yet
exist. With brilliant theatrical skill,
he captured his audience, reveted its attention upon his trials and
tribulations and brought it to believe that it shared the same stage.
The sense of a public interest was new in
the maghrib. If Bourguiba was its chief
articulator, the party was its institutional embodiment. To become a militant took courage. It also meant breaking with other loyalties
or subordinating them, at least, to the common cause. In its twenty-two years of gestation the party was able to shape
new personalities not isolated, to be sure, from other social influences but
marked bya new sense of dedication and a belief in progress. Destourians who did not know one another
could identify one another by the imiplicit cues which shared experience in the
party provided. At the root of the new
Destourian personality, perhaps, lay a religious quality which had become
politicized and secularized. But any
Tunisian Muslim could become a "good militant" by the party's
concrete, if intuitive, standards.
Unlike the Young Tunisians, the French university graduates of
Bourguiba's and subsequent generations were not elitists, at least not
intentionally.
The party rode the crest of the social
changes wrought by the colonial situation.
In addition to peasants from the Sahil and elsewhere --- and even
bedouin tribes --- it recruited from all sectors of the modern urban economy,
especially in the lower middle class and proletarian suburbs of Tunis which
were swamping the central median inhabited by the baldi. In 1954, just before its victory was
assured, the party already had more than one hundred thousand members. Its most useful new recruits were the newer generations
of French-educated secondary school and university graduates, who themselves
increasingly represented a cross-section of Tunisian society. By independence the party enjoyed a virtual
monopoly of the professional skills available in Tunisia for running the
administrations the French would vacate.
Most important, its victory gave it legitimacy in the eyes of most
Tunisians, while the very longevity of the party offered possibilities of
political cohesion which were not present elsewhere in North Africa.
The party benefited, of course, from
Tunisia's "natural" linguistic homogeneity and compactness. Even more important was the cohesion of the
elite which founded the party; it was based upon common ideals acquired at
Sadiki and French universities but also upon a sense of opposition to the
traditional baldi as well as to French rule.
During the first two decades of the party's life its French-educated
elite would expand considerably and include and include sons of the baldi; but
common experiences within the party helped to maintain elite cohesion. In the last analysis the increment of
cohesion which the party contributed to the elite was probable more important
for Tunisia's future than the "mass mobilization" it sometimes
engineered. Elite cohesion would ensure
coherent government
Moroccan Nationalism: Traditionalistic Anti-colonialism. From its inception in the mid-twenties until
victory three decades later, Moroccan nationalism remained a diffuse coalition held
together by common oppositon to French rule.
The distinct phases of Tunisian
nationalism coexisted in the Moroccna movement, but the predominant Moroccan
strain was traditionalistic anti-colonialism.
And the symbol of national unity was not a party politician but rather
the Sultan, a youth elected by the French in 1927 for his apparent
docility. Mohammed V became a
consummate diplomat and arbiter, but he was never an active political leader,
much less innovator, dramatist and pedagogue like Bourguiba.
Some of the young Moroccans who had
acquired a French university education education after the First World War
joined small discussion groups and associations of graduates, but they never
constituted a movement comparable either in size or influence to the Young
Tunisians. For in the late twenties
other nationalists educated at Qarawiyin developed similar groups. In 1927 Ahmed Balafrej, representing the
French-educated elite, joined forces with Allal al-Fassi, the leading firebrand
among the Qarawiyin students. In 1930
they already began to agitate against French Berber policy; there was no time,
as in Tunisia before World War I, for first-moment reactions to the French to
be thought-fully articulated. Al-Fassi,
rather than the French-trained intellectuals, provided most of the intellectual
stimulus to the new movement.
Like Taalbi, Allal al-Fassi was strongly
influenced by the Salafiyya movement of Islamic reform, which had roots in
Morocco predatin the Protectorate. Like
Taalbi, too, his political thought combined rather than synthesized liberal
constitualism and Islamic reformism; the former, he claimed, could be derived
from a proper interpretation of Islamic texts.
Indeed all modern innovations had to be judged by Islamic criteria, and
political activity was subordinate to, and dependent upon, religious
values. Unlike Taalbi, Al-Fassi never
became a rigid traditionalist, but this was a reflection less of differences in
their philosophies than of the evolution of their respective cultures. Al-Fassi remained in the vanguard of
Moroccan Nationalism even after independence because politics and religion were
never clearly distinguished as they come to be in Tunisia under the influence
of the Neo-Destour's French educated elite.
In the context of traditional urban Morocco, Al-Fassi remained an
innovator. But his goal was a spiritual
renaissance based upon a reassertion of early Islamic values, from which proper
political order would follow, not a political reordering of society along
Western lines. The dialectical
antipodes were Islam and Christianity, not Morocco and France.38 In his Autocritique, published in 1952, he
rejected dichotomies between the "modern" and the
"tradtional" by claiming, like many earlier Islamic reformers and
apologists in the Near East, that early Islamic institutions were better and
more advanced than contemporary "capitalist" ones and that Islam was
essentially constitutional and democratic, however, "decadent"
Moroccan institutions had become. While
sometimes arguing that public opinion had to be guided by "a well-thinking
elite," he advocated "popular supervision of the leaders" for
Morocco. "All the disorders which
Morocco experienced were due to the fact that the King was directly responsible
to the people."39 What was now
needed was responsible cabinet government and constitutional monarchy along
British lines. He wrote of the need,
referring to Maurice Duverger as well as Ibn Khaldun, for a popularly elected
constituent assembly after independence and of the desirability of a
multi-party system. Al-Fassi was an
open, extremely eclectic thinker with great magnetism. He appealed primarily to the youth of
Morocco's traditional cities, especially his own city of Fez. His cautious acceptance of Western
innovations was also compatible with the reformism of the French-trained sons
of traditional upper strata.
But nationalism in Morocco never had a
chance to enter the Tunisian third phase combining anti-colonialism with a
wholehearted assimilation of metropolitan political styles and
organization. The young leaders who
sparked hostile reactions in the cities in 1930 against French Berber policy,
and then founded the Committee of Moroccan Action and Subsequently, in 1937, the National Party, were the same men who
in 1943 created the Istiqlal Party and retained control of it after
independence. Though they incorporated
younger graduates of French universities, like Abderrahim Bouabid and Mehdi Ben
Barka, who were wholehearted modernizers, the younger elements did not have
time before independence to articulate their divergencies or transform the
movement. By the time they entered
politics, after the Second World War, political events in Morocco were moving
too rapidly for dissent within the Istiqlal to develop. Moreover, these potential Bourguibas who
were of equally marginal status within the traditional social order lacked an
autonomous political base such as the Tunisian Sahil. Fez remained traditionalist in outlook.
The newcomers, especially Ben Barka,
invigorated the Istiqlal's organization and probably, like Bourguiba in
Tunisia, considered it to be a weapon for refashioning society as well as for
obtaining independence. but party
organization never achieved either the discipline, continuity, or numerical
strength (proportionate to population) of the Neo-Destour. At its peak in 1937 the Committee of
Moroccan Action is estimated to have had 3,000 members in Fez, 1,500 in Rabat
and Sal¸, 800 in Mekn¸s, 700 in Casablanca, and 500 in Eastern Morocco.40 At this time there was little rural
mobilization, though in some areas the party was perceived a religious
brotherhood of Allaliyines (followers of Allal al-Fassi) despite the fact that
he combatted religious orders as Islamic heresies. When Al-Fassi and several other nationalist leaders were arrested
--- for they were successful in electrifying crowds --- the embryonic party
apparatus disappeared. It was only i
late 1943, when Al-Fassi was still exiled in Gabon, that the party was
resuscitated and rebaptized the Istiqlal (Independence) Party to include
members of a splinter group which Hassan al-Wazzani had founded in 1937. The new party's Declaration of Independence
on January 11, 1944, led to the arrest of four nationalist leaders, which
provoked bloody incidents at Rabat, Sal¸, and Fez. This time, however, the party survived. After cautious beginnings, it increased it membership during the
period 1947-1952 from an estimated 10,000-15,000 to 80,000. But intensive
recruitment created problems of party discipline, and, from 1953 to 1955, when
most leaders were again in jail or exile, the party lost control of the rank
and file. Activists took the initiative
of organizing terrorist bands in the cities and subsequently querrilla warfare
in the old blad as-siba.
Consequently the Istiqlal by independence
had the prestige of its name but none of the institutional qualities of the
Neo-Destour. Even more significant for
Morocco's political development or lack of it, however, was the fact that the
nationalist struggle had engendered new support for and altogether different
intitution, the Moroccan monarchy. As
we have already seen, the traditional Moroccan sultans enjoyed greater
legitimacy if less effectiveness than the Tunisian beys, since the former,
descendents of the Prophet, were religious as well as political leaders. It was therefore logical for traditionalist
nationalists to appeal to the Sultan for what Al-Fassi called the
"mystique of governmental stability, of national consciousness, and of the
State's existential continuity."41
On November 18, 1933, they created a special anniversary celebrating
Mohammed V's accession to the throne.
When the Sultan visited Fez the following year, nationalists organized a
popular demonstration on his behalf and acclaimed him their "king," a
Western and hence modern term, rather than "sultan." Mohammed V was visibly satisfied. He was too cautious by nature and too
dependent upon the French for his throne to support the nationalists publicly,
but he seems from this period to have kept discreetly in touch with them. After his famous meeting with President
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943, he actively encouraged the creation of the
Istiqlal. In 1947 he openly took the
offensive for the first time since his accession twenty years earlier. At Tangier he gave a speech which omitted a
conluding homage to France. In a
special press communiqu¸ he insisted upon Morocco's Arab character and praised
the Arab League. His eldest son and
daughter, Moulay Hassan and Lalla Aicha, also took the public stage --- the
latter appearing unveiled in modern dress.
tangier, as one French observer put it, was "a sort of festival of
the imperial family."42
When in 1952 Mohammed V refused to sign
dahirs consecrating Franco-Moroccan "co-sovereignty," General Juin,
the tough-minded French Resident who had been raised in Algeria, took
threatening steps against his throne.
The Pasha of Marrakech, Thami al-Glawi, was encourage to break with
Mohammed V, whom he declared to be the sultan of the Istiqlal, not of
Morocco. The Glawi family, which had
helped Lyautey and his successors to pacify the south, controlled most of the
Berber tribes of the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas and of course owed most of its
wealth and prestige to the Protectorate.
Urban nationalists accused them of being "feudal" traitors,
and in fact Thami al-Glawi did rule his populations in the medieval style of an
exploiting caid, while French military protection secured his hold over a
larger area than successful caids could have exploited before the
Protectorate. In 1951 the Pasha
mobilized some of his tribes and marched them to the city walls of Rabat and
Fez. This was hardly ba traditional
siba --- but the threat of bloody incidents constrained the Sultan to sign the
dahirs and to authorize his Grand Vizier to condemn the methods "of a
certain party," meaning, of course, the Istiqlal. By threatening the Sultan, however, the
French had made a mockery of the Treaty of 1912 and enhanced Mohammed V's
prestige as nationalist leader.
Intransigent Protectorate officials were
not content, even after arresting virtually all Istiqlal leaders in December,
1952, to leave a pro-nationalist sultan on the throne. Some theorized about the possibilities of a
dynastic change to another family of descendents of the Prophets, the
Idrisids. One member of this family
assembled a congress of religious brotherhoods to attack the Sultan's religious
policies. Meanwhile Thami al-Glawi marshaled
support among minor local officials for replacing the Sultan. Again the tribes were made to march on Fez
and Rabat. While the Laniel government
was protracted strikes in France during the summer of 1953, Al-Glawi and French
Protectorate officials forced its hand.
Since he would not abdicate, Mohammed V was deposed on August 20 and
exiled, together with his family, to Madagascar.
Popular reactions were utterly
unanticipated. Shortly after the
depostition, rumors circulated that "Mohammed Ben Youssef had become a
martyr and a saint; God has now placed him in the moon to watch over
us." Growing numbers of people
awaited the moon to behold the figure of "Sidna" (our Lord) within
it. As an English observer explained,
In its
right hand half the lunar landscape showd a formation that suggested sidi
Mohammed's figure as known to every Moroccan from innumerable protraits. While that formation had always been there,
it needed the jolt of the events of August to make people discover it. And the discovery was followed instantly by
attribution to the image of a supernatural significance. Though the Sultan could no longer be seen in
the flesh, "God ordained" that the people should behold him in a form
even the Resident General could not obliterate. Allahu Akbar! --- God is Great!
Having become thus inviolable, a focus for national sentiments, Sidi
Mohammed had assumed an entirely novel stature and power.43
Whatever its plausibility, the myth was
believed by large numbers of superstitious women and rural Moroccan --- Berbers
as well as Arabs --- whom the Istiqlal had not penetrated. For the latter's urban constituency, of
course, the King had always been the prime symbol of the Moroccna nation.
Parallels have been suggested with
"Moncefism," a reaction of Tunisians to a pro-nationalist bey who
reigned for a year before being ousted by the French in 1943. Like Mohammed V, Moncef bey attempted to
recover the substance as well as the form of his sovereignty recognized by
treaty. Without the Resident's permission
during the confused Vichy period, he appointed a government including leaders
of both Destours. He enjoyed immense
prestige among all nationalist circles at a time when Bourguiba was still in
prison. Until he died in exile in 1948,
he was a moral leader whom the Neo-Destour carefully cultivated. But there the parallel ends. While recognized as a devout Muslim
sovereign by urban strata, Moncef bey had no special religious appeal. Moreover, the Neo-Destour did not need the
prestige of a traditional sovereign to extend its influence in the
countryside. And in the cities it was
sufficiently strong before independence to dispense with an arbiter or a
traditional intermediary. The
Neo-Destour used the bey in its dealings with France but did not need Moncef's
successor to enhance its own legitimacy.
In Morocco, by contrast, an arbiter was
essential after the Protectorate crumbled in late 1955. Outside traditional urban strongholds the
Istiqlal had never acquired organizational roots, and even these were difficult
to restablish after the Istiqlal leaders were freed. During the Sultan's two years of exile new strata entered the
political arena through participation in urban terrorism and in the Army of
National Liberation. Politically most
of them identified not so much with the Istiqlal as with Mohammed V. And even within the leadership of the
Itiqlal, cohesion depended not so much on diffuse ideology or party loyalty as
on allegiance to the King.
Thus colonial conflict enhanced the
legitimacy of a traditional institution rather than displacing it, as in
Tunisia, by a new institution. When
Mohammed V returned form exile in 1955, on the twenty-eighth anniversary of his
accession to the throne, he was welcomed as a nationalist hero, just as
Bourguiba, the "supreme holy warrior," had been greeted in
Tunis. The Moroccan masses whom the
Istiqlal had not politically educated believed in his tratitional baraka, while
the disparate forces of modern nationalism looked to him to satisfy their
demands for a national government. He
was the one leader whose title to rule rested on sufficiently diverse modern
and traditional grounds to satisfy virtually all sectors of the heterogeneous
elite. By then even Al-Glawi had made
his formal submission, for a rapida shift in tribal allegiances made him utterly
dependent upon the Sovereign's forgiveness.
The Algerian Revolution: Aborted Dialectic. The French presence in Algeria was sufficiently intensive not
only to eradicate all traditional instiutions but also to prevent intellectual
strata from creating new national institutions as in Tunisia. Furthermore, indigenous responses were not
synchronized in such a way as to permit the actors to unite against colonial
domination while wholeheartedly assimilating modern innovations. Rather the three responses --- liberal
assimilation, traditionalistic anti-colonialsim, and radical anti-colonialism
--- were each articulated simultaneously in the thirties by distinctive
strata. Political competition among
these movements served further to divide rather than unite their
constiuents. Thus the assimilationist
intellectuals, for instance --- and indeed intellectuals generally --- were
distrusted by the petit bourgeois and proletarian revolutionaries, and vice
versa. The timing of the respective
responses, as well as the environment in which they operated, militated against
a viable synthesis.
There were no old ruling and commercial
strata, as in Morocco or Tunisia, within which nationalism would emerge and
branch outward into the sociey, with the possible exception of the Constantine
bourgeoisie, in part reconstituted in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. Its petition to the French in
1887 perhaps anticipated the demands of reformist ulama of the thirties, but
the grievances seem not to have had any immediate echo outside
Constantine. Unlike its Tunisian
counterpart, the small stratum of ¸volu¸s (French-educated natives) who called
themselves Young Algerians lacked clear connections with Algeria's precolonial
elites. Identifying with liberal
metropolitan opinion and cut off from their own society, they supported
drafting Muslims before the First World War, in return for fiscal reform, more
primary schools, more extended Muslim political representation, and an end to
the oppressive indig¸nat (set of laws regulating the natives). Though accused by colonial administrators of
being a "national movement against the French occupation," they were
in fact Algeria's first generation of liberal assimilationists. While the Young Tunisians could take their social
identity for granted, the Young Algerians sought only equality with other
Frenchmen; some went so far as to advocate naturalization --- which was legally
possible but not encouraged by the administration. The reforms of 1919 did not meet their expectations, and their
one political victory, that of Emir Khaled, Abdelkader's grandson, being in
theAlgiers municipal elections of 1919, was quickly annulled by the
authorities. Nevertheless, assimilation
continued to be the objective of the ¸volu¸s when their representatives in
elected Algerian bodies, including Ferhat Abbas, constituted the F¸d¸ration des
Elus in 1934.
Abbas's
political testament recently summed the tragedy of his career and those of
similar French-educated intellectuals:
One
will well understand why my generation and those that proceded it obstinately
looked to the republican and liberal France against the tyrannical and
colonialist France. They thought that
it was sufficient to enlighten the former of the contradictions which gave
birth to out misfortunes so as to end them.44
Actually
Abbas's own political position changed radically from 1931, when he published a
book subtitled "From Colony to Province" advocation assimilation, to
the late fifties, when he headed the FLN's Algerian Provisional Government. After rejecting, in an often quoted
statement in 1936, the existence of an Algerian nation, he conluded in his
Manifesto of Algerian People (1943) that "the hour has passed when an
Algerian Muslim asks other than to be a Muslim Algerian" amd called for an
Algerian constitution guaranteeing equal political rights to all its
inhabitants. But he failed in the
Second French Constituent Assembly and in the Council of the Republic to win a
federal soultion to Algeria's political problem. After 1951 his party, the Democratic Union of the Algerian
Manifesto (UDMA), retained barely three thousand members. What had once, in 1946, been perhaps the
strongest Algerian Muslim party had lost most of its audience because
assimilationist nationalism was clearly inadequate: all attempts at reform within the legal French framework
failed. No longer an independent
political force, Abbas rallied to the FLN more than a year after the outbreak
of the Revolution and became its political prisoner.
During his long political career Abbas
reached a political position close to but never as revolutionary as
Bourguiba's; indeed, the latter notes their political kinship but criticizes
his lack of determination in a letter he addressed to Abbas in1946. Their closest supporters were the same
French-educated professional middle classes and students. But other Algerian parties and perhaps his
personality blocked Abba's efforts to reach down into the lower strata which
Bourguiba was able to mobilize. His one
big effort to develop a mass organization, the Amis du Manifeste during the
Second World War, boomeranged when its congress rejected his resolution for an
"autonomous Republic federated with the French Republic" and declared
his rival Messali Hadj "the indisputable leader of the Algerian people." Even adopting Marxist vocabulary did not
help Abbas to erase his "bourgeois" image among supporters of
Messali's more revolutionary party. In
his political testament Abbas quotes Camus:
"L'histoire court pendant que l'esprit m¸dite."45
The Association of Ulama which Sheikh
Abdelhamid Ben Badis founded in 1931 marked the entry into the Algerian
political arena of an utterly different bourgeoisie, one of urban Islamic
culture which also constituted the core of the Tunisian Destour and the
Moroccan Istiqlal. Like Taalbi and
Al-Fassi, Ben Badis fulminated against the religious brotherhoods, "the
domestic animals of colonialism."
He, too was inspired by the Salafiyya movement to reform Islam and was
anti-colonialist in that he wished to defend Islam from Christianity. And like his counterparts, he countered
French assimilation and Muslim Cultural decay by organizing modern Quranic
schools. But in the Algerian context
the significance of the movement was not the same. The Association was never a political party. Its schools, partially suppressed, educated
fewer children than either the Tunisian or Moroccna ones and half were
concentrated in the province of Constantine.
The cultural heritage it drew upon --- even that of the Constantine
grandes familles from which Ben Badis came --- was in a much more advanced
state of decompostion. But in the
absence of any other distinctively Algerian bases of identity, the ulama's
affirmation of Islamic religion and Arabic language had greater impact upon
other Algerian nationalists than similar assertions in the less threatened
Protectorates. Possibly, too, a
contemporary Algerian historian is correct in judging Ben Badis, who seems to
have been more open to modern currents thatn either Taalbi or Al-Fassi, to be
Algeria's "only enlightened thinker of historic nationalism and modern
culture."46
Paradoxically the Association aligned
itself in the thirties with Abbas's assimilationist group, even while Ben Badis
was declaring that "this Muslim population is not France, cannot be
France, and does not want to be France" and that "independence is a
natural right for every people of the earth." For the ulama (like the leaders of the Old Destour) were
political moderates, more concerned with education and culture than with
immediate political change. but
tactical alliances with Ferhat Abbas during the Popular Front period of
anticipated reforms helped to increase the political distance between Ben Badis
and Messali Hadj, who also wanted independence, but right away. It was perhaps unfortunate that the ulama
participated with the assimilationists in the Muslim congresses of 1936, for
radical Algerians were in greater need of the ulama's teachings than Abbas.
The radical anti-colonialists originated
in Paris, not in Algeria, as an improbable group of North African (mostly
Kabyle) workers who were organized by the French Communist Party in 1926 as the
North African Star. Dissolved by the
French government in 1929, the Star reappeared as the Glorious North African
Star in 1932 and continued to confine its activities to France until the advent
of the Popular Front. In 1927, when he
was twenty-nine years old, Messali Hadj became the leader. He came from a Tlemcen family of
"obscure religious personages" and had been one of the 173,000
Algerian Muslims to fight in the First World War.47 He seems afterward to have drifted to Algeria and back to France
to find a job. His education was
rudimentary though his oratorical talenst and organizational energies wer
tremendous among Algerian workers inclined to direct action. Once he had sympathied with a religious
brotherhood; after the war he assimilated Communist organizational technques
though it is not clear whether he actually joined the party; shortly after returning
to Algiers in 1936 he broke with the Communists; an extreme rightwing group,
the Croix de Feu, helped him to found a new party, the Parti du Peuple Alg¸rien
(PPA) after the Popular Front dissolved the refurbished Star. Julien remarks that some European settlers
could not help feeling indulgent toward a native party whose members were
always ready to say, "Down with the Jews."48 Clearly, whichever the extremist European
group attracting Messali's sympathies, he could not have been ideologically
further apart from Abbas and his fellow moderates. Each had assimilated different slices of the French political
spectrum. What they shared was the same
marginality with respect to Algerian culture.
Though severly repressed like its
predecessor, the PPA managed on the eve of the Second World War to have three
thousand members --- as many as the Neo-Destour under similar circumstances
maintained. Its intransigent
nationalism and social policies (de-emphasized in the move from Paris to
Algiers) appealed primarily to urban workers.
The fact that an obscure tramway employee campaigning for the party
could win a Muslim seat on the Algiers municipal council was a measure of the
PPA's popularity in 1938 in the city's proletarian districts. Unklike the predominantly European Algerian
Communist Party, it stressed Algeria's Islamic and Arabic identity without,
however, making common cause with the ulama.
Much like the Neo-Destour, the PPA and,
after 1946, its overt political wing, the Mouvement pour le Triomphe des
Livert¸s D¸mocratiques (MTLD), used religion tactically to mobilize a
first-generation proletariat and other traditionalist strata. Religion was also a protection against
assimilation be the Communists. Messali
and his followers were neither concerned with Islam as an end in itself nor
with the complexities of
Salafiyya
reform, and they had no respect for the timid tactics of the Association of
Ulama --- an organization which lost much of its luster after Ben Badis died in
1940. Like the Neo-Destour, the PPA had
strictly temporal objectives. But
unlike the older party, it lacked experienced political revolutionaries who
could unite theory and practice and tailor its tactics to a long-term strategy
of political emancipation and nation-building.
In Algeria the capable intellectuals were always political
latecomers. In Tunisia, by contrast,
the revolutionary theorists, like Bourguiba, trained and kept control over
professional agitator like Messali who made excellent middle-level cadres.
The PPA-MTLD never seems to have had more
than 15,000 members, but it had clearly outdistanced Abbas's rival party by the
late forties. Like his early Communist
mentors, Messali made a cult of organization:
"If I were a teacher," he once said, "and the Algerian
people my pupil, I would have to conjugate the verb 'to organize' every
day."49 His overt structure, the
MTLD, operated within the legal order, contesting elections, participating in
the various diliberative assemblies to which Muslims had limited access. The legally banned PPA remained the
clandestine core of the movement. Under
the orders of as member of its Central Committee, the paramilitary Oragisation
Sp¸ciale (O.S.) developed a clandestine
structure structure of its own, directed first by Hocine Ait Ahmed, then after
1949 by Ahmed Ben Bella. The PPA of
course also created or infiltrated various parallel organizations for workers,
youth, women, and students --- often in competition with the Communists --- as
did the Neo-Destour in Tunisia for the same reason.
But in a sense Messali committed the error
of traditional Muslim rulers who had thought they could acquire Western
military techniques without transforming their societies, or of liberals who
thought it possible to transplant Western constitutional forms. Communist organizational models could not be
successfully imposed upon politically inexperienced "militants." Unlike the Communists, Messali did not
articulate a doctrine. He could not
explain to militants anxious for direct action why it might be useful
simultaneously to win political points.
Without an idoelogy, the party lacked an internal communications system
of implicitly or explicitly shared symbols and values. Other than to risk prison and possibly torture,
to agitate and obey orders, it was not clear what a "militant" really
was or what he believed. Parallel overt
and clandestine structures moreover blurred the lines of party hierarchy. As the FLN subsequently directed,
"Leaders at all levels will watch that militants break with certain habits
inherited from the MTLD: lateness at
meetings, negligence in executing directives, idle chatter. . . ."50 Without either a sociological or ideological
basis of cohesion, splits rapidly appeared in the organizational weapon. The fact that the PPA was clandestine made
it difficult to develop internal institutions for resolving conflicts. Moreover, the French authorities
consistently repressed overt local organization while sparing its national
leaders, thus driving a further wedge between proponents of direct action and
"reformist" leaders.
A young generation of intellectuals joined
the party after the war and led a majority of the MTLD's Central Committee in
1953. But the party was already losing
many of its less educated youthful activists, disenchanted with the tactical
compromises of the legal party. The
split between the "Centralists" and Messali became public the
following year, the former accusing the latter of "verbal violence,
agitation for agitation's sake, sectarianism and adventure" and the latter
attacking the Centralists for "reformism" because they were
cooperating with a liberal French mayor inside the Algiers municipal
council. In fact many elements within
the party, including the O.S. leaders, considered Messali outdated and rejected
his "personality cult." But
the clandestine activists equally distrusted the intellectuals. Compromise within the party was impossible
as external alliances with either the ulama or Ferhat Abbas. Like the leader of UDMA, the Centralists
were caught in the classic squeeze between the need to cooperate with liberal
Frenchmen, strengthening their hand for carrying out limited reforms, and the
danger of being outflanked by more intransigent elements. the Algerian Revolution, of course, erupted
on November 1, 1954.
It came as a great surprise to most
observers in 1962 when, after almost eight years of guerrilla struggle afainst
tremendous odds, the Front of National Liberation achieved its objective of
independence but immediately disintegrated into factions which threatened civil
war in Algeria. But the Front suffered
from the same political weaknesses which had rent apart the PPA-MTLD. The nine "historics" who launched
the Front were all veterans of the O.S.
It had been more out of disgust with the divisions of the traditional
parties, especially their own PPA, than with any carefully designed plan in
mind that some of them, along with others, had founde a Revolutionary Committee
for Unity and Action in March, 1954, and sworn a "moral contract"
renouncing past nationalist rivalries.
None of the Nine were university graduates; in fact only Ait Ahmed and
possibly Boudiaf had secondary school education. Only one, Mohammed Khider, had national political experience, for
he had served in the French National Assembly (1946-1951) while working in fact
for the O.S. Though some had acquired
military experience, none had risen to be officers in the French army. Their one common link was clandestine
experience and arevolutionary faith in direct and violent action. Once Khider explained what distinguished the
MTLD from UDMA: recourse to
violence. "What seperated us
yesterday and perhaps even today from Ferhat Abbas and his friends is the
refusal to believe in persuasion. There
is a logic in violence, and it is necessary to carry this logic to its conclusion." Whether or not such a belief was shared by
all the "reformist" politicians of the MTLD, it was certainly the
macabre cement binding the FLN leaders together in 1954. And by its nature violence shuts off
possibilities of rational articulation.
The outbreak of the Revolution bears all
the marks of hasty impovisation. The
FLN ignored the elementary Maoist lesson that it was necessary to prepare the
political terrain before launching guerrilla attacks. The Nine seemed eager just to "do something." Most of the seventy-odd attacks coordinated
for November 1 did little damage and immediately fizzled; only in the remote
and under-administered Aur¸s Mountains was the rebellion able to survive,
playing on the tribal sympathies and economic grievances of the Chawia
Berbers. The program publihed the same
day introducing the Front seemed equally rash and hasty, calling for the
liquidation of "all vestiges of corruption and reformism," declaring
a struggle "by all means" for the "restoration of the sovereign
democratic and social Algerian State in the framework of Islamic
principles," and expressing willingness for the "authorized
representatives of the Algerian people" to open negotiations only if
France first recognized Algerian independence.
Miraculoulsy the rebellion survived and
developed considerable momentum a year later when Kabylia became
organized. But the leadership did not
remain united. Even before Ben Bella and
three fellow "historics" were kidnapped by the French in mid-air
between Morocco and Tunisia, their "external" leadership had been
successfully constested by the "internal" maquisards (guerrillas) who on August 20, 1956,
organized a rump "congress" of the FLN near the Valley of the Soummam
in Lower Kabylia. There were also
veiled rivalries between Kabyles and Arabs; the main organizers of the congress
happened to be Kabyle, while the "externals," a majority of whom were
Arab, happened not to have been informed in time to attend the congress. The new organization decided by the congress
virtually eliminated the latter from effective command of the FLN, by requiring
that the five-man executive be stationed on Algerian soil; the leaders elected
by the congress included only two "historics." While Ben Bella insisted upon the sovereignty
of the nine founders, the congress co-opted new leadership. Leaders of the prerevolutionary parties,
like Ferhat Abba, rallied as individuals in the Front, and the Revolution
needed them to give it a respectable and representative fascade. but they, too threatened the legitimacy of
the historics. By October, 1956, when
Ben Bella and his colleagues were captured, the "moral contract" of
the Nine had evaporated; in any event within a year only Belkacem Krim remained
alive and free. The principles and institutions
established by the Soummam congress, however, became as contested as the
original contract. And the leader who
had masterminded the congress seems to have been assassinated by his colleagues
shortly after the latter, on September 19, 1958, established a Provisional
Algerian Government.51
The congress had decided the
"priority of the political over the military organization" of the
Revolution and the "priority of the internal over the external"
forces, but within three years these priorities were reversed. The congress also appointed a National
Council of the Algerian Revolution which was to be its sovereign
"parliment" until peace allowed another congress to convene. The composition of the CNRA, however, was
altered by a series of co-optations reflecting shifts in the strength fo
various military factions. Under
wartime conditions it was not possible to devise functioning institutions and
agreed-upon procedures for resolving the inevitable factional rivalries which
plagued the Front. Guerrilla warfare
entailed continuous fragmentation among and withing Algeria's six wilayas and
between these and the external centers of the Revolution. French experts in psychological warfare were
able to play upon and intensify some of the internal divisions which resulted
in Kabylia, for instance, in the liquidation of hundreds of
"traitors" by the commander of the wilaya.
Divisions within the FLN during the war
were due basically to the fact that there had been neither an incontestable
leader, a political organization, nor an articulated ideology before the
Revolution. Thus, unlike successful
Communist guerrilla movements, it was unable to survive the fragmentation
inherent in guerrilla warfare. In the
heat of struggle, Algerians from all walks of life joined the Revolution, and
those with the most initiative became local political-military leaders and
sometimes worked their way into the national leadership. Few of the cadres had previous political
experience, which in any event served to divide rather than unite them. The distances and clandestine conditions
separating the wilayas from one another and from the Provisional Government
made it impossible to establish a centralized political structure having
nationwide local roots. The Revolution
failed to develop ideology into an effective system of political communication
to enhance the cohesion of the cadres.
These had a rapid turnover under the pressures of French milityary
action (which was more successful in Algeria than in Vietnam). Even within the relatively small group of
Algerians associated with the Provisional Government, there was no agreement on
any single natinal leader who might have united the cadres. The only popular figure, Ferhat Abbas,
lacked a following in the FLN. His
successor as President of the Provisional Government, Ben Youssef Ben
Khedda, was a former Centralist who had
never acquired a popular following.
Without a strong political organization in Algeria, he was helpless when
Houari Boumedienne's organized armed forces on the Tunisian and Morocan
frontiers broke with the Provisional Government in June, 1962.
POLITICAL
SPACES AND VACUUMS
Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieu have
suggested that the Algerian Revolution fundamentally altered the society. Affecting virtually everyone, it engendered
national solidarity; Algerians could therefore accept modern styles and values
introduced by the colonizer. Bourdieu
argues that before the war traditional symbols and habits, such as the woman's veil
and paternal authority, had acquired new meaning at methods of withdrawal from
and resistance against the colonial situation.
Effective armed resistance banished the need for these devices.
Each
Algerian may henceforth assume full responsibility for his own actions and for
the widespread borrowings he had made from Western civilization; he can even
deny a portion of his cultural heritage without denying himself in the
process. Because the negation of the
system remains, permament and unchanged, a negation made up of the sum total of
all the refusals on the part of individuals, any innovation introduced by the
West can be adopted without its acceptance being considered an expression of
allegiance.52
One
illistration was the secular tone of the Soummam Platform, in marked contrast
to the original FLN Program. Through
violent struggle the Algerians acquired a sense of confidence allowing them,
like the Tunisians a generation earlier under Bourguiba, to assimilate modern
values. But the colonial dialectic did
not produce in Algeria either a coherent modernizing elite or the political
organization needed to retain this confidence and give direction to the
Revolution.
On balance, colonial conflict was
obviously most constructive in Tunisia, where it engendered an elite that was
capable of nationalizing, so to speak, both the modern colonial structures and
the political culture which had produced them.
The protracted conflict encouraged the development of a political
organization which enhanced the cohesion of the elite and facilitated the implementation
of its purposes. In Morocco the
conflict was less constructive, in that the nationalist elite remained
predominantly traditionalist in outlook, sharing a culture more congruent with
past than with modern colonial structures.
The elite remained less cohesive, moreover, than its Tunisian
counterpart, and less experienced in sustaining a political organization that
might increase its cohesion. In Algeria
the conflict was least constructive, in that elites, though sharing radical
attitudes in the abstract, remained both fragmented and disorganized. In all three settings the nationalists
ultimately captured the alien instruments of rule --- bureaucracies
guaranteeing a fixed territory, law and order, and tax revenues. But these signs of political development,
these aspects of political space, could not guarantee any of the capacity for
self-sustained political development characteristic of modern political
systems. In this respect the crucial
colonial legacy, accounting for critical differences in political development
between contemporary Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, was the nationalist elite
and organization generated by the struggle.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Footnotes:
1.
Frantz Fanon, Les Damnes de la terre (Paris:
Francois Maspero, 1961) pp. 109-10
2.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of
Mind, J.B. Baillie, trans. (New York: Macmillan, 1949) pp.239-40.
3. Jean
Despois, L'Afrique blanche (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958) l,
198
4. For
Algeria, see Grigori Lazarev, "Auto-gestion agricole en Algerie," in
Institutions et developpement agricole du Maghreb (Paris: Presses Univeritaires
de France, 1965) p.23. For Tunisia and Morocco see Rene Gallissot, L'Economie
de l'Afrique du Nord (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961) pp.47-48.
5.Charles-Andre
Julien, Histoire de l'Algerie contemporaine: conquete et colonization (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1964) p.110
6.Despois,
op.cit., p.183.
7. Charles-Robert
Ageron, L'Histoire de l'Algerie contemporaine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1964) p.38.
8.
Julien, op.cit., p.261.
9.Ibid.,
p.425.
10.Alexis
de Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1962) lll, 323.
11.
Pesseh Shinar, "Abd al-Qadir and Abd al-Krim: Religious Influences on their Thought and Action," Asian and
African Studies, Annual of the Israel Oriental Society, l (1965) 139-74.
12. See
Augustin Berqe, " Essai d'une bibliographie critique des confreries
musulmanes algeriennes," Bulletin, Societe de Geographie et d'Archeologie
de la Province d'Oran, Vol.XXXlX (1912).
13.
Marechal Louis-Hubert Lyautey, La Renaissance du Maroc: dix ans de protectorat,
1912-1922 (Rabat: Residence Generale de la Republique Francaise au Maroc, 1922)
p.113, cited in John P. Halstead,
Rebirth of a Nation: The Origins and Rise of Moroccan Nationalism,
1912-1944 (Cambridge: Center for Middle-Eastern Studies, Harvard University,
1967) p.34. In my translation, controle
is translated as "supervision" rather than
"control".
14.
Convention de la Marsa, June 8, 1883, cited in Andre Raymond, La Tunisie
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961) p.31.
15. See
Henri de Montety, "Old Families and New Elite in Tunisia," in l.
William Zartman, ed., Man, State, and Society in North Africa (New York:
Praeger, forthcoming).
16.
Cited in Clement H. Moore, Tunisia since Independence: The Dynamics of One-Party Government
(Berkely and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1965) p. 22.
17.
Clement Moore and Arlie Hochschild, "Student Unions in North African
Politics," Daedalus (Winter 1968) p. 48.
18.
Cited in Moore, op. cit., p. 24.
19. For
Tunisia, see Leon Carl Brown, "Tunisia," in James S. Coleman, ed.,
Education and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965) p. 151. For Morocco see Albert Ayache, Le Maroc
(Paris: Editions Sociales, 1956) p.
320. For Algeria, see "Etudes du
Secr¸tariat Social d'Alger," Construire la Cit¸: l'Alg¸rie et sa jeunesse (Algiers: Editions du Secr¸tariat Social d'Alger, 1957) p. 88.
20. Harry Eckstein and David E. Apter, eds.,
Comparative Politics: A Reader (New
York: The Free Press of Glencoe) p.
583.
21. Samir Amin, L'Economie du Maghreb
(Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1966)
I, 172, 156, 166.
22.
Ibid., p. 171.
23. Amin. op. cit., pp. 130, 136, 141.
24. Ibid., p. 35.
25. Robert Montagne, La Naissance du prol¸tariat
marocain (Paris: J. Peyronnet, 1951) p.
259. (Cahiers de l'Afrique et de
l'Asie, III.)
26. Despois, op. cit., p. 140.
27. See Jean Morizot, L'Alg¸rie kabylis¸e
(Paris: J. Peyronnet, 1962)
28. For Tunisia, see Salah-Eddine Tlatli,
Tunisie nouvelle: probl¸mes et
perspectives (Tunis, 1957) p. 234. For
Algeria, see "Etudes du Secr¸tariat Social d'Alger," op. cit., p.
74. For Morocco, see Ladislav Cerych,
Europ¸ens et Marocains 1930-1956:
Sociologie d'une d¸colonisation (Bruges: De Tempel, 1964) p. 298.
29. for a detailed report, see Robert Aron, Les
Origines de la guerre d'Alg¸rie (Paris; Fayard, 1962) pp. 117-42.
30. For the best analysis of the impact of
French socialism upon Tunisian nationalism, see L. Carl Brown, "Tunisia
under the French Protectorate: A History of Ideological Change" (Ph.D.
diss., Harvard University, 1962), as summarized in "Stages in the Process
of Change: A Theoretical Model," in Charles A. Micaud, et al.,
Tunisia: The Politics of Modernization
(New York: Praeger, 1964) pp. 48-52.
31. Ibid., p.35.
32. Ibid., p. 27.
33. Ibid., p. 23. for the most recent scholarly account of the Young Tunisians, see
Charles-Andr¸ Julien, "Colons francais et Jeunes-Tunisians,
1882-1912," Revue Francaise
d'Histoire d'Outre-mer, LIX (1967) 87-150.
34. Tahar Sfar, Journal d'un exil¸ (Tunis,
1960).
35. Jacques Berque, Le Maghreb entre deux
guerres (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1962) pp. 70-75.
36. Henri de Montety's estimate, cited by Moore,
op. cit., p. 108.
37. Speech, June 1, 1959, cited in ibid., p. 46.
38. For a parallel interpretation, see Abdallah
Laroui, L'Id¸ologie arabe contemporaine (Paris: Editions Masp¸ro, 1967).
39. Al-Istiqlal, March 16, 1957.
40. Robert R¸zette, Les Partis politiques
marocains (Paris: A. Colin, 1955) p.
279.
41. Al-Istiqlal, March 16, 1957.
42. Roger Le Tourneau, Evolution politque de
l'Afrique du Nord musulmane 1920-1961 (Paris:
A. Colin, 1962) p. 220.
43. Rom Landau, Moroccan Drama 1900-1955 (San
Francisco: The American Academy of
Asian Studies, 1956) pp. 323-24.
44. Ferhat Abbas, La Nuit coloniale (Paris: Julliard, 1962) p. 110.
45. "History runs while the spirit
reflects." Ibid., p. 106.
46. Mostefa Lacheraf, L'Alg¸rie: nation et soci¸t¸ (Paris: Masp¸ro, 1965) p.
322.
47. Le Tourneau, op. cit., p. 312.
48. Charles-Andr¸ Julien, L'Afrique du Nord en
marche, nationalismes musulmans et souverainet¸ francaise (Paris: Julliard, 1952) p. 120.
49. Michael Clark, Algeria in Turmoil (New
York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1960) p. 77.
50. Colette and Francis Jeanson, L'Alg¸rie hors
la loi (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1955)
p. 309.
51. Claude Paillat, Dossier secret de l'Alg¸rie
(Paris: Presses de la cit¸, 1962) I,
155.
52. Pierre Bourdieu, The Algerians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962) pp. 157-58.