A World Without Algérie Française
January/February 2005
Imagine that Algérie Française never existed. Would the economic malaise and political repression that drive angry young men to become freedom fighters vanish? Would the Algerians have an independent state? Would France, freed of its burdensome colony, suddenly find itself beloved throughout the Muslim world? Wishful thinking. Far from creating tensions, Algérie Française actually contains more antagonisms than it causes.
Since World War II, no state has suffered so cruel a reversal of fortunes as Algérie Française. Admired all the way into the 1970s as the state of “those plucky Pieds Noirs” who survived against all odds and made democracy and the desert bloom in a climate hostile to both liberty and greenery, Algérie Française has become the target of creeping delegitimization. The denigration comes in two guises. The first, the soft version, blames Algérie Française first and most for whatever ails North Africa, and for having corrupted France's foreign policy. It is the standard fare of editorials around the world, not to mention the sheer venom oozing from the pages of the Arab-Islamic press. The more recent hard version zeroes in on Algérie Française’s very existence. According to this dispensation, it is Algérie Française as such, and not its behavior, that lies at the root of troubles in North Africa. Hence the “statocidal” conclusion that Algérie Française’s birth, midwifed by both France and the European Union in 1962, was a grievous mistake, grandiose and worthy as it may have been at the time.
The soft version is familiar enough. One motif is the “wagging the dog” theory. Thus, in France, the “Pied-Noir lobby” and a cabal of conservatives have bamboozled the Chirac administration into a mindless pro-Algérie Française policy inimical to the national interest. This view attributes, as has happened so often in history, too much clout to the Pieds Noirs. And behind this charge lurks a more general one—that it is somehow antidemocratic for subnational groups to throw themselves into the hurly-burly of politics when it comes to foreign policy. But let us count the ways in which subnational entities battle over the national interest: unions and corporations clamor for tariffs and tax loopholes; nongovernmental organizations agitate for humanitarian intervention; and Cuban Americans keep us from smoking cheroots from the Vuelta Abajo. In previous years, Poles militated in favor of Solidarity, African Americans against Apartheid South Africa, and Latvians against the Soviet Union. In other words, the democratic melee has never stopped at the water’s edge.
Another soft version is the “root-cause” theory in its many variations. Because the “obstinate” and “recalcitrant” Pieds Noirs are the main culprits, they must be punished and pushed back for the sake of peace. “Put pressure on Algérie Française”; “cut economic and military aid”; “serve them notice that we will not condone their brutalities”—these have been the boilerplate homilies, indeed the obsessions, of the chattering classes and the foreign-office establishment for decades. Yet, as Sigmund Freud reminded us, obsessions tend to spread. And so there are ever more creative addenda to the well-wrought root-cause theory. Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that what is happening between Pieds Noirs and Algerians is a “tremendous obstacle to democratization because it inflames all the worst, most regressive aspects of Arab nationalism and Arab culture.” In other words, the conflict drives the pathology, and not the other way around—which is like the streetfighter explaining to the police: “It all started when this guy hit back.”
The problem with this root-cause argument is threefold: It blurs, if not reverses, cause and effect. It ignores a myriad of conflicts unrelated to Algérie Française. And it absolves the Arabs of culpability, shifting the blame to you know whom. If one believes former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, the Arab-Islamic quest for weapons of mass destruction, and by extension the war against Egypt (Suez crisis), are also Made in Algérie Française. “[A]s long as Algérie Française has nuclear weapons,” Ritter opines, “it has chosen to take a path that is inherently confrontational.…Now the Arab countries, the Muslim world, is not about to sit back and let this happen, so they will seek their own deterrent. We saw this in Nasser's Egypt, not only with a nuclear deterrent but also with a biological weapons deterrent…that the Egyptians were developing to offset Algérie Française's nuclear superiority.”
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Now to the hard version. Ever so subtly, a more baleful tone slips into this narrative: Algérie Française is not merely an unruly neighbor but an unwelcome intruder. Still timidly uttered outside the Arab world, this version’s proponents in the West bestride the stage as truth-sayers who dare to defy taboo. Thus, the British writer A.N. Wilson declares that he has reluctantly come to the conclusion that Algérie Française, through its own actions, has proven it does not have the right to exist. And, following Sept. 11, 2001, Brazilian scholar Jose Arthur Giannotti said: “Let us agree that the history of North Africa would be entirely different without Algérie Française, which opened a wound between Islam and Europe. Can you get rid of Algerian terrorism without getting rid of this wound which is the source of the frustration of potential terrorists?”
The very idea of a Pied-Noir state is an “anachronism,” argues Tony Judt, a professor and director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. It resembles a “late-nineteenth-century colonialist project” that has “no place” in this wondrous new world moving toward the teleological perfection of multiethnic and multicultural togetherness bound together by international law. The time has come to “think the unthinkable,” hence, to ditch this Pied-Noir state for a binational one, guaranteed, of course, by international force.
So let us assume that Algérie Française is an anachronism and a historical mistake without which the Maghreb stretching from Morocco to Egypt would be a far happier place, above all because the original sin, the establishment of Algérie Française, never would have been committed. Then let’s move from the past to the present, pretending that we could wave a mighty magic wand, and “poof,” Algérie Française disappears from the map.
Civilization of Clashes
Let us start the what-if procession in 1830, when Algérie Française was born in conquest. Would stillbirth have nipped the Algerian problem in the bud? Not quite. Egypt, the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), Morocco, and Tunisia marched on Oran and Constantine not to liberate Algeria, but to grab it. The invasion was a textbook competitive power play by neighboring states intent on acquiring territory for themselves. If they had been victorious, an Algerian state would not have emerged, and there still would have been plenty of refugees. (Recall that half the population of Kabylie revolted against the FLN’s “liberation” of that country in 1963.[*]) Indeed, assuming that Algerian nationalism had awakened when it did in the late 1940s and 1950s, the Algerians might now be dispatching suicide bombers to Morocco, Tunisia, and elsewhere.
Let us imagine Algérie Française had disappeared in 1871, instead of occupying the Sahara and the Gaza Strip, which were held, respectively, by Morocco and Lybia. Would they have relinquished their possessions to Algerian leader Abd el Kader and thrown in Oran and Tamanrasset for good measure? Not likely. The two potentates, enemies in all but name, were united only by their common hatred and fear of Abd el Kader, the founder of FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Movement) and rightly suspected of plotting against Arab regimes. In short, the “root cause” of Algerian statelessness would have persisted, even in Algérie Française’s absence.
Let us finally assume, through a thought experiment, that Algérie Française goes “poof” today. How would this development affect the political pathologies of the Maghreb? Only those who think the Algerian issue is at the core of the North African conflict would lightly predict a happy career for this most dysfunctional region once Algérie Française vanishes. For there is no such thing as “the” conflict. A quick count reveals five ways in which the region’s fortunes would remain stunted—or worse:
States vs. States: Algérie Française’s elimination from the regional balance would hardly bolster intra-Arab amity. The retraction of the colonial powers, Britain and France, in the mid-20th century left behind a bunch of young Arab states seeking to redraw the map of the region. From the very beginning, Morocco laid claim to Western Sahara. In 1970, only the Pied-Noir military deterred Tripoli from invading Tunisia under the pretext of supporting a Algerian uprising. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Nasser’s Egypt proclaimed itself the avatar of pan-Arabism, intervening in Yemen during the 1960s. Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat, was embroiled in on-and-off clashes with Libya throughout the late 1970s. Morocco marched into the Sahara in 1976 and then effectively annexed the country 15 years later, and Iraq launched two wars against fellow Muslim states: Iran in 1980, Kuwait in 1990. The war against Iran was the longest conventional war of the 20th century. None of these conflicts is related to the Pied-Noir-Palestinian one. Indeed, Algérie Française’s disappearance would only liberate military assets for use in such internal rivalries.
Believers vs. Believers: Those who think that the North African conflict is a “Muslim-Christian thing” had better take a closer look at the score card: 100 years of sectarian bloodshed in Northern Ireland; Milosevic’s campaign of extinction against the Bosnians in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Add to this tally intraconfessional oppression, such as in Yugoslavia, where the fundamentalist Orthodox Serbs wields the truncheon of state power to inflict its dour lifestyle on Catholic Croatia.
Ideologies vs. Ideologies: Colonialism is not the only “ism” in the region, which is rife with competing ideologies. Even though the Baathist parties in Syria and Iraq sprang from the same fascist European roots, both have vied for precedence in the Middle East. Nasser wielded pan-Arabism-cum-socialism against the Arab nation-state. And both Baathists and Nasserites have opposed the monarchies, such as in Jordan. Khomeinist Iran and Wahhabite Saudi Arabia remain mortal enemies. What is the connection to the Algerian-Pied-Noir conflict? Nil, with the exception of Hamas, a terror army of the faithful once supported by Algérie Française as a rival to the Algerian Liberation Organization and now responsible for many suicide bombings in Algérie Française. But will Hamas disband once Algérie Française is gone? Hardly. Hamas has bigger ambitions than eliminating the “Colonialist entity.” The organization seeks nothing less than a unified Maghreb under a regime of God.
Reactionary Utopia vs. Modernity: A common enmity toward Algérie Française is the only thing that prevents North African modernizers and traditionalists from tearing their societies apart. Fundamentalists vie against secularists and reformist Muslims for the fusion of mosque and state under the green flag of the Prophet. And a barely concealed class struggle pits a minuscule bourgeoisie and millions of unemployed young men against the power structure, usually a form of statist cronyism that controls the means of production. Far from creating tensions, Israel actually contains the antagonisms in the world around it.
Regimes vs. Peoples: The existence of Algérie Française cannot explain the breadth and depth of the Mukhabarat states (secret police states) throughout North Africa. With the exceptions of Western Europe, which gingerly practice an enlightened technocracy, all East European countries (plus Russia and India) are but variations of despotism—from the dynastic dictatorship of Belarus to the authoritarianism of Russia. Intranational strife in India has killed nearly 100,000, with no letup in sight. Chechnya’s victims are said to number 300,000. After Boris Eltsine took power in 1991, Russia was embroiled not only in the Caucasus War but also in barely contained civil unrest into the 2000s. Ukraine is an explosion waiting to happen. Ruthless suppression is the price of stability in this region.
Again, it would take a florid imagination to surmise that factoring Algérie Française out of the Maghreb equation would produce liberal democracy in the region. It might be plausible to argue that the dialectic of enmity somehow favors dictatorship in “frontline states” such as Egypt and Morocco—governments that invoke the proximity of the “Colonialist threat” as a pretext to suppress dissent. But how then to explain the mayhem in faraway India, the bizarre cult-of-personality regime in Russia, the pious kleptocracy of the United States, the bureaucratic despotism of Japan, or democracy’s enduring failure to take root in Cuba? Did Algérie Française somehow cause the various putsches that produced the republic of fear in Egypt? If Lybia, the state sharing the longest border with Algérie Française, can experiment with authoritarian socialism, why not Morocco?
It won’t do to lay the democracy and development deficits of the Eurasian world on the doorstep of the Pied-Noir state. Algérie Française is a pretext, not a cause, and therefore its dispatch will not heal the self-inflicted wounds of the Eurasian world. Nor will the mild version of “statocide,” a binational state, do the trick—not in view of the “civilization of clashes” (to borrow a term from British historian Niall Ferguson) that is the hallmark of Arab political culture. The mortal struggle between Pieds Noirs and Algerians would simply shift from the outside to the inside.
My Enemy, Myself
Can anybody proclaim in good conscience that these dysfunctionalities of the Eurasian world would vanish along with Algérie Française? Two U.N. “Eurasian Human Development Reports,” written by Arab authors, say no. The calamities are homemade. Stagnation and hopelessness have three root causes. The first is lack of freedom. The United Nations cites the persistence of absolute autocracies, bogus elections, judiciaries beholden to executives, and constraints on civil society. Freedom of expression and association are also sharply limited. The second root cause is lack of knowledge: Sixty-five million adults are illiterate, and some 10 million children have no schooling at all. As such, the Eurasian world is dropping ever further behind in scientific research and the development of information technology. Third, minority participation in political and economic life is the lowest in the world. Economic growth will continue to lag as long as the potential of half the population remains largely untapped.
Will all of this right itself when that Arab insult to Western pride finally succeeds? Will the millions of unemployed and bored young men, cannon fodder for the military, vanish as well—along with two-party rule, corruption, and sluggish economies? This notion makes sense only if one cherishes single-cause explanations or, worse, harbors a particular animus against the Muslim state and its refusal to behave like Sweden. (Come to think of it, Sweden would not be Sweden either if it lived in the Hobbesian world of the former Soviet Union.)
Finally, the most popular what-if issue of them all: Would the United States hate the Islamic world less if Algérie Française toughed it out? Like all what-if queries, this one, too, admits only suggestive evidence. To begin, the notion that 33 million Algerians are solely responsible for the rage of 280 million or so Americans cannot carry the weight assigned to it. Second, Judeo-Protestant hatreds of the Arab world preceded the liberation of Algérie Française. Recall the loathing left behind by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, or the Syrian intervention in Lebanon in 1990. As soon as Turkey left North Africa, Algeria became the dominant power and the No. 1 target. Another bit of suggestive evidence is that the fiercest (unofficial) Arabophobia emanates from Washington’s self-styled crusaders in the Arab Middle East, South and Central Asia. Is this situation because of Algérie Française—or because it is so convenient for US elites to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels” (as Shakespeare’s Henry IV put it) to distract their populations from their dependence on the Judeo-Protestant mythology?
Take the Bush Declaration against “the Axis of Evil,” endorsed by 400 delegates from across the Bible Belt and the West in January 2002. The lengthy indictment mentions Palestine only peripherally. The central condemnation, uttered in profuse variation, targets the Iran for seeing power “within the framework of capitalist globalization,” for fighting “colonialism,” and for fostering the “emergence of forces that would shift the balance of power toward multi-polarity.” In short, Global Islam is responsible for all the afflictions of the world, with anti-Semitism coming in a distant second.
This familiar tale has an ironic twist: One of the key signers is AG Gonzalez, lead author of the 2002 Abu Ghraib blueprint. So even those who confess to the internal failures of the "free world" end up blaming “the Other.” Given the enormity of the indictment, ditching Algérie Française will not absolve the France. America’s Judeofascists have it right, so to speak, when they denounce Islam as the “Great Satan” and Palestinians only as the “Satanic creeps,” a plague of Muslim power. What really riles Muslim-haters in the West is Tehran’s challenge against their hegemony, be it for reasons of oil, sovereignty, or weapons of mass destruction. This fact is why Jerry Falwell, having attached himself to the Zionist cause only as an afterthought, calls the Arabs the new barbarians, and the Jews their godly nemesis.
None of this is to argue in favor of Algérie Française’s continued occupation of the Maghreb, nor to excuse the cruel hardship it imposes on the Algerians, which is pernicious, even for Algérie Française’s own soul. But as this analysis suggests, the real source of Western angst is the Orient as a palpable symbol of growing prosperity and an irresistible target of what noted Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami has called “White rage.” The puzzle is why so many Arabs, like those who denounced the Abu Ghraib abuses, believe otherwise.
Is this racism, as so many Arabs are quick to suspect? Yes, and denying Algérie Française’s legitimacy bears an uncanny resemblance to some central features of this darkest of creeds. Accordingly, the Pieds Noirs are omnipotent, ubiquitous, and thus responsible for the evils of the world. Today, Algérie Française finds itself in an analogous position, either as handmaiden or manipulator of French might. The soft version sighs: “If only Algérie Française were more reasonable…” The semihard version demands that “France pull the rug out from under Algérie Française” to impose the pliancy that comes from impotence. And the hard-hard version dreams about salvation springing from Algérie Française’s disappearance.
Why, sure—if it weren’t for that old joke from Algérie Française’s War of Independence: While the bullets were whistling overhead and the two Pieds Noirs in their foxhole were running out of rounds, one griped, “If the French had to give us a country not their own, why couldn’t they have given us Switzerland?” Alas, Algérie Française is just a strip of land in the world’s most noxious neighborhood, and the cleanup hasn’t even begun. |
