The Challenge of North Africa Present, and Future of North Africa

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The Challenge of North Africa Present, and Future of North Africa In the twenty-first century, North Africa has emerged as one of the most complex and challenging regions of the world. The aim of this book is to examine a variety of the the challenges it offers, looking beyond the media headlines into the complex and inter-related issues of culture and politics, including the politics of performance, governance, challenge of and mapping the territory. The book is written from inside the region as well as offering international perspectives. Its essays range over a variety of geo-political issues, each inflected by a personal point of view, and it provides a North Africa timely intervention in current debates about the past, Africa North The Challenge of present, and future of North Africa. Edited by Andrew Hussey and Martin Rose The Challenge of North Africa The Challenge of North Africa EDITED BY ANDREW HUSSEY AND MARTIN ROSE SENAR (ThE CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF EUROPEAN AND NORTH AFRIcaN RELATIONS) BRITISH COUNCIL MOROccO The Challenge of North Africa The Challenge of North Africa Contents edited by Andrew Hussey and Martin Rose PREFACE Martin Rose 7 Published by SENAR (The Centre for the Study of European and North African Relations, University of London, Institute in Paris) THE MAGHREB IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY and the British Council Morocco George Joffé 9 REREADING THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY: Editorial coordination: Collette Brown TUNISIA’s untold territories Imen Yacoubi 25 Copy editing and production design: Bronwyn Mahoney MOROCCAN WOMEN BETWEEN LEGAL ASPIRATIONS Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY AND CULTURAL TRADITIONS: THE STORY OF AN EVOLUTION Mohamed Laamiri 33 ‘ArAB SPRING’ AND THE PERFORMANCE OF PROTEST IN MOROCCO AND TUNISIA Khalid Amine 53 This work is pubished by SENAR (The Centre for the Study of Eu- RESHUFFLING THE CARDS IN THE MAGHREB: ropean and North-African Relations) <http://senar.ulip.london. A POLITICAL AND CULTURAL AFFAIR ac.uk>) and the British Council Morocco. Pierre Vermeren 65 It is published under Creative Commons Noncommercial No SMALL BROTHERS ARE WaTCHING YOU: Derivative licence. You may not use this work for commercial REFLECTIONS ON A MOROCCAN DIGITAL SPRING Youssouf Amine Elalamy purposes. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. 77 You are free to share this material, to copy and distribute in any THE FRONTIERS OF NORTH AFRICA medium or format. NEED RECONSIDERING Francis Ghilès 87 For more information see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ ALGIERS UNDERGROUND: by-nc-nd/4.0/. A PSYCHOGEOGRAPHer’s Guide Andrew Hussey 101 University of London Institute in Paris BavURES AND SHIBBOLETHS: THE CHANGING 9–11 Rue de Constantine ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN MOROCCO 75340 Paris Cedex 07 Martin Rose 115 France THE POTENCY OF A GOOD IDEA: CULTURAL INNOVATION ACROSS THE MAGHREB ISBN 978-0-86355-758-3 Claire Spencer 129 AUTHors’ BIOGRAPHIES 143 The Challenge of North Africa Preface Writing from England, soon after completing a four-year posting in Morocco with the British Council, I am more than ever struck by the extraordinarily fast process of change that is sweeping North Africa. During these four years, regimes and governments have fallen in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, a new constitution has been written in Morocco, and the whole political articulation of the Maghreb is changing — in some cases subtly, in some dramatically, in all irreversibly. And these processes are very far from finished. But what strikes me above all is the cultural and linguistic change that we have seen — the way in which the francophone cultural elite of France’s former empire, once monolithic, has begun to acknowledge and in many cases share the demand for other languages and other international links, other partnerships and other destinations. As a process, this was predictable — indeed I remember sitting in a faculty office in Cambridge four and half years ago, having its nature eloquently explained to me. But no one then had any idea of how fast it would happen — there was a quiet frustration in my Cambridge conversation that I recall very clearly, a sense that so much was ready to happen, but couldn’t yet quite achieve traction. That traction has been supplied by the way that the youth of the region have seized the microphone. Suddenly there is a sense of opening up, of impatience with the francophone monoculture of the last half century, of an urgent need to join a wider world. And that world speaks English. Whatever direction political processes take, and it is not easy to foresee ultimate destinations, this cultural enlargement is a fait accompli, a genie released from its lamp. Talking through this sea-change with Andrew Hussey, then Dean of the University of London in Paris, we felt that it needed to be marked — that the intensity of the cultural drama being played out is not yet nearly well enough understood in Great Britain. So the British Council and ULIP have commissioned this short collection of essays which carry a message, explicit or subliminal: North Africa is hungry for cultural and linguistic diversification. The door is open, the welcome — as I know very well — more than just warm. Martin Rose Director, British Council, Morocco (2010–14) 16 October 2014 7 The Editors would like to thank the authors for their unique perspectives, and Collette Brown and Bronwyn Mahoney for their tireless and meticulous work without which this book would not have appeared in this or any other form. Andrew Hussey and Martin Rose 8 The Challenge of North Africa The Maghreb in the Twenty-First Century George Joffé The Maghreb today, particularly the three key states of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, offers a very different picture from the early days of inde- pendence in the 1960s. Then Algeria, led by Houari Boumedienne was the embodiment of non-alignment after its violent struggle for independence dominated the political scene, whilst Habib Bourguiba’s Tunisia was the pro- Western alternative and Morocco’s monarchy under Mohamed V and his son, Hassan II, symbolized links to a precolonial past. Today however, Tuni- sia has undergone a revolution and seems set to develop a democratic alter- native to autocratic and corrupt rule; Morocco has developed an evolution- ary approach to political and social liberalization, but Algeria has regressed into political opacity in the wake of a brutal civil war. All three states, too, are enmeshed in complex and dominant economic linkages with Europe as they struggle with unemployment and economic development whilst seek- ing to come to terms with globalization and modernity. Nor can they ignore their Saharan hinterlands as, in the wake of the Arab Spring and the collapse of Libya, extremism flourishes in the Sahel and threatens to seep back into North Africa itself. Nor, indeed, have the geopolitical tensions of the past disappeared, for the age-old struggle for regional hegemony between Algeria and Morocco — typified by the Western Sahara crisis — has not gone away. Nor, finally, can Europe and America ignore the Maghreb, given its proxim- ity to crucial trade routes through the Mediterranean, its location on mi- grant routes into Europe and the oil-and-gas it supplies to European states. The Maghreb remains, in short, a region of acute concern to the wider world and its significance in future seems bound to increase. *** Since the 1980s the states of North Africa have experienced radical change, which seems to be the harbinger of an ambiguous and uncertain future, both domestically and in terms of their relationships with the wider world. At the end of the 1970s, after all, Algeria was still a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, alongside Egypt and Yugoslavia, and the exem- plar of successful national liberation from colonial rule. Libya, too by then 9 George Joffé The Challenge of North Africa 3 approaching the end of its first revolutionary decade as the embodiment and 59.9% of the gas that Libya and Algeria produce. Europe is dominant of Colonel Gaddafi’s idiosyncratic Arab nationalist vision, was refashioning in terms of foreign investment, too, at least for the non-oil economies. It itself as the world’s firstjamahiriyah — the ‘state of the masses’ — and earn- supplied 61.3% of Morocco’s direct foreign investment, 72.7% of Tunisia’s ing. a reputation as a global radical. Morocco, opposed to both, saw itself investment receipts, and 80.9% of Egypt’s investment funds in 2011. In Al- and was seen to be the West’s partner in the Cold War and the embodiment geria, however, Europe only supplied a quarter of the total for most of the of the longevity and viability of traditional institutions, whilst Tunisia had investment was made by international oil companies instead. also plotted a pragmatic, pro-Western path under the autocratic umbrella of One aspect of this economic relationship that has changed, however, is the charismatic Habib Bourguiba. that North African states now have to deal with the European Union, rath- er than with individual European states, as had been the case in the past. THE ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIP Since 1993, when the Union was formed, Europe has increasingly tried to Yet, despite these varying political alignments, all four states were still locked channel its external economic relationships through European-wide instru- into a shared postcolonial relationship with Europe in which their former ments, rather than on a bilateral country-to-country basis. In 1995 Brussels colonial powers continued to play significant roles. France, in consequence, proposed to the South Mediterranean region a comprehensive policy — the was the dominant partner for three of the states concerned, while Britain Euro-Mediterranean Partnership — to create a zone of shared peace, stabil- and Italy were more concerned with Libya.
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