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Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War

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Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era Matthew Connelly OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS A Diplomatic Revolution This page intentionally left blank A Diplomatic Revolution Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era Matthew Connelly 1 2002 1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and an associated company in Berlin Copyright ᭧ 2002 by Matthew Connelly Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Connelly, Matthew James. A diplomatic revolution: Algeria’s fight for independence and the origins of the post-cold war era / Matthew Connelly. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–19–514513–5 1. Algeria—History—Revolution, 1954–1962. I. Title: Algeria’s fight for independence and the origins of the post-cold war era. II. Title. DT295 .C6115 2002 965'.0462—dc21 2002001234 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For my brother Stephen, and a night in Tunisia... This page intentionally left blank Preface The historian is “a witness to what has been found on a voyage of dis- covery,” as Peter Novick once put it. Readers will never know—even if they wished to—all that was seen. All they can expect is a good story, one that speaks to their concerns or, still better, says something new about timeless themes. But at some point in the narrative, with impatience or real interest, they may wonder what impelled the voyage in the first place—especially one that ranged from Kansas to Cairo, London to Tunis, at no small expense to two universities and several foundations.1 The answer to that question begins with a road not taken and a scholarly debate without end. Originally this was to be a diplomatic his- tory of America’s involvement in the Algerian War. If it were still, I might never have ventured beyond American shores. Leading scholars have ar- gued that since U.S. foreign policy emerges from the perceptions and motives of its practitioners, U.S. archives can account for their actions. Given America’s exceptional power in the Cold War period, what critics deride as “the world according to Washington” warrants special attention. Nevertheless, even proponents of this view concede that one cannot assess the effects or effectiveness of U.S. policies without doing research abroad.2 While there is doubtless interesting work to be done on American officials’ perceptions of the Algerian War, I wanted to know about the impact of their actions. Moreover, I did not understand how I could invoke U.S. power to validate my work even while admitting that my sources could only reveal how Americans reacted to external events and influences. I therefore resolved to conduct archival research and, when the archives were unavailing, interviews in Europe and North Africa. viii Preface I soon discovered that the United States did indeed have great influ- ence in France and Algeria, and much of this study concerns the triangular relationship between these countries. Yet that influence was not always what American officials intended and assumed it to be. Even states the size of Tunisia—indeed, even a stateless people like the Algerians—could manipulate U.S. power for their own purposes. The meaning of American power, and thus the meaningfulness of the studies it is said to justify, is determined by how it was mediated abroad.3 What some U.S. diplomatic historians took to be axiomatic—Amer- ica’s exceptional power—began to appear more like an assumption, one that their methodology is incapable of testing. This is not to suggest that America was weak but rather that we only know what power is by de- termining what power does in particular cases. In a sense, a state’s archives reveal nothing so much as its self-perceptions and conceits—what Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher once called the “official mind.”4 Foreign contemporaries provide the fairest measure of its mental limitations, knowing as they did neither more nor less than how the world appeared from different vantage points. Of course, one misses some of the detail in the interminable fights between State Department bureaucrats by as- suming distance from them, but one also begins to lose interest. What then seems more compelling is how they interacted with others to affect the fate of nations in ways they sometimes did not intend, or even imag- ine. I therefore began to redefine my study as a more general international history not only of how the United States and other states influenced the Algerian War but also how these countries were themselves influenced by it. Indeed, I came to see these two lines of inquiry as practically insepa- rable, linked by feedback loops that made diplomatic history’s conven- tional distinction between Innenpolitik and Aussenpolitik appear increas- ingly artificial. For instance, in their attempts to alter U.S. policy on North Africa, French officials hired Madison Avenue public relations firms, took members of Congress and journalists on junkets to Algeria, and at one time considered denouncing unsympathetic foreign service officers to Joe McCarthy. The North Africans, for their part, fought to win over many of the same reporters, politicians, and citizen’s groups. Was American opinion on Algeria American in origin? The question is akin to asking the nationality of a Japanese-designed car assembled in Tennessee with Mexican parts. Even if one could devise an answer, is this really the most interesting line of inquiry? Some diplomatic historians insist that we “more rigorously distin- guish between the domestic and foreign sources of America’s international behavior.”5 But while this might guarantee work for some, it would limit them to a shrinking subfield of U.S. history at the very moment when their colleagues in social, cultural, labor, and other fields of inquiry are pressing for internationalization.6 This is not just a matter of academic Preface ix fashion but rather reflects one of the defining features of our age: the increasing interpenetration of domestic and foreign affairs. I therefore came to agree with the other aspect of the internationalist critique, which pic- tures official U.S. policy and public opinion as parts of a complex network of relations linking American society to the rest of the world—an evolving international and even transnational system that also includes the media, multinational corporations, and diasporas. Would-be international histo- rians must therefore examine “structures,” the nongovernmental phenom- ena that have changed the basis of interstate relations.7 The main criticism of these proposals for reconceptualizing diplo- matic history as international history is that together they are too much for any one historian or even an entire field to handle in more than a superficial fashion. In terms of both geographical areas and areas of in- quiry, ranging too far afield can result in a work without real insight into any particular one. Alternatively, in using research from several states and nonstate organizations to reconstruct the web of relations between them, one can lose control of the material and become lost in the complexity.8 Some historians have held out the hope that “the next generation of grad- uate students, or the one after that, will readily traverse this international terrain.”9 But graduate students of my generation could not afford to be so complacent, especially considering that scholars as different as Gabriel Kolko and Ernest May had been calling for greater attention to foreign archives and structural approaches a quarter of a century ago. It seemed that what they wanted—and what is increasingly required—is readily commendable but impossible to achieve.10 Faced with this daunting prospect, I delved into the origins of the debate by examining the life and work of the man who first made it possible to imagine history that would be truly international in its sources and scope: Fernand Braudel and his magnum opus, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. I was surprised to discover that he had originally planned to write a traditional diplomatic history to account for Habsburg Spain’s shift of strategic priorities to the Atlantic after 1580. He became dissatisfied with the idea that this sea change was merely a matter of personalities and high politics. Instead, he looked to centuries-old structures and conjonctures that were decades in duration, such as agricultural practices and trading patterns. In Braudel’s telling, leaders like Philip II and the events they shaped were themselves shaped by these more profound forces—so profound, in fact, that states- men remained oblivious to them. To uncover these causal links, he strove for a “total history” that was both international in range and interdisci- plinary in method. This was an overly ambitious goal, but in attempting it Braudel helped to redefine the discipline. His successors scaled back his bold design and many began to ignore interstate relations, asserting that, since most early modern peoples lived out their lives in a confined area, each village was a “small world” unto itself and has to be studied as such.11 x Preface Diplomatic historians, on the other hand, have been on the defensive ever since, as reflected in their repeated admission that they have not given sufficient attention to “structures.” Interestingly enough, Braudel made his great discovery in Algeria, where he spent the years 1923–1932 thinking through the main ideas of his dissertation while teaching at a lyce´e.
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