Algeria

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ALGERIA.

FRENCH ALGERIA TO 1954
WAR, INDEPENDENCE, AND DEVELOPMENT, 1954 TO 1978
ALGERIA, EUROPE, AND THE MIDDLE EAST, 1979 TO 2004
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Algeria, North Africa's largest country, began the twentieth century as a political part of Europe. It was the only one of France's colonies to be declared "an integral part of French territory" and its history had become intimately tied to that of France. This unusually close colonial connection was broken only by one of the century's costliest wars of independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962. France's attempt to maintain the colonial tie led it to join Britain in a disastrous final defense of European imperialism at Suez in 1956 and brought down the French state with the collapse of the Fourth Republic in 1958.

FRENCH ALGERIA TO 1954

By 1914 France had considered Algeria French for eighty-four years; Algeria's economy and political system were oriented toward and controlled by metropolitan France, and by the approximately 720,000 settlers from various parts of Europe and the Mediterranean. In 1889 the children of European settlers had been granted French citizenship; they came to be called pieds noirs (black feet, a term of uncertain origin). This population included the indigenous Jewish population of northern Algeria, to whom French citizenship had been granted in 1870, despite the protests of European settlers, among whom anti-Semitism was widespread. The European population had almost complete control of the country's most productive land, along with its industry, infrastructure, and other assets, and it occupied almost all of the middle- and high-ranking positions in public services and the professions.

The majority of Algeria's population, the indigenous Arabic- and Berber-speaking Muslims, numbering between four and five million, were excluded from French citizenship (although they were considered to hold French nationality) and thus from equal civic and political rights. Until 1944 they were subject to repressive legislation, called the régime de l'indigénat (native status code), enacted in 1881 as emergency legislation for civilian-ruled territory after the end of the military conquest, which had begun in 1830 with the fall of the city of Algiers. As a subjugated and socially and economically dislocated population, Algerian political participation was limited to token representation in municipal and regional councils and in the colonial and national assemblies. Algeria's administration was directed by the Government General, a department of the French Ministry of the Interior, and although the civilian European population in most of the country was governed in much the same way as it would be in any part of France, the colony's tax base and labor force rested disproportionately on the disenfranchised and repressed Algerian population.

Algeria had been declared an integral part of France after the Revolution of 1848 overthrew the monarchy of King Louis-Philippe (r. 1830–1848) and briefly reinstated republican government. Although the Second Republic lasted only until 1851, Algeria's integral status, which the republic had proclaimed, was reaffirmed by all succeeding French governments for over a century. In 1870 settlers and their lobbyists blamed a major rebellion on the prevailing system of military rule. With the return of republican government once more in 1871, after the collapse of the Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian War (1870), civilian rule was affirmed in the colony, with local self-government by colonial municipalities and a civilian governor general. Only the Saharan territories in the south remained the exclusive domain of the military. The European population thus gained republican and democratic self-rule and extensions of their rights, which bolstered French sovereignty in Algeria against the claims of other European powers (especially Italy). In 1898 the colonial population was accorded its own colony-wide assembly, the délégations financières, which exercised budgetary autonomy for Algeria within the wider French state. At the same time, demands on the Muslim Algerian population continued to increase while their legal status and economic standing worsened. In 1911, partly in response to decrees making them subject to military conscription, some four thousand Algerians fled the country. Between 1914 and 1918, around 173,000 Muslim Algerians (including 87,500 volunteers) served in the French army in World War I; 25,000 Muslim and 22,000 European Algerians were killed.

The Algerian contribution to the war became a major justification for reform after 1918, and a series of proposals were made both by groups claiming to represent Algerians' interests, especially the Algerian Muslim Congress of 1936, and by liberal French politicians, notably the antifascist Popular Front government, which gained power in that same year. The great majority of colonial settlers and colonial lobbyists in Paris, however, not only feared losing their dominance in the colony but believed that French presence could be maintained only by force against what they called native xenophobia and resistance. Like Algerian nationalists later, the European Algerians never believed that equal coexistence was possible, and they saw every demand for Algerian rights as a threat to their very existence. The various reforms that were advanced from 1919 to 1944 and that were not blocked in parliament by the colonial lobby therefore had limited impact on the fundamental problems of the colonial system.

From World War I onward, Algerian workers began migrating to metropolitan France in large numbers, and it was among the emigrant laborers in Paris that a radical, populist nationalism demanding Algerian independence began. From its creation in 1926, this movement gained support among Algerians in France, and in 1936 the Algerian People's Party (PPA) that emerged from it set up branches in Algeria. On 8 May 1945, demonstrations marking the end of World War II turned into an aborted attempt at nationalist insurrection in parts of eastern Algeria and 103 Europeans were killed. Estimates of the number of Algerians killed in the resulting repression, both by the settlers' militia and by the regular army, navy, and air force, range from 1,500 to 45,000. PPA militants began to prepare for a war of independence.

WAR, INDEPENDENCE, AND DEVELOPMENT, 1954 TO 1978

The Algerian war of independence began with coordinated armed actions by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, National Liberation Front) on the night of 31 October 1954 and ended when a ceasefire was announced on 19 March 1962. In between, the war brought down the parliamentary fourth French republic in 1958 and brought about the creation of the presidential Fifth Republic and the return to power of Charles de Gaulle. It gave rise in 1961 to an attempted revolt by French generals, the threat of civil war in France, and the emergence of European terrorist groups opposed to decolonization.

France fought a counterinsurgency that became a massive campaign of territorial control, forcibly relocating around three million people from the countryside into resettlement camps under military supervision, creating free-fire zones across rural Algeria, destroying some eight thousand villages, and putting some two million French soldiers into the field against an Algerian liberation army of only twenty-one thousand men and women at its height in mid-1958. Some three hundred thousand Algerians were made refugees, and according to demographic calculations another three hundred thousand were killed. The sufferings of the Algerian population—which included internments, disappearances, systematic torture, summary executions, and rapes—came to be symbolized by the official Algerian figure of one and a half million martyrs. Officially termed "operations for the maintenance of order," however, the conflict was unrecognized as a war by France until 1999, and its consequences in both France and Algeria have been the focus of renewed scholarly and public debate since the early 1990s.

After 1962, independent Algeria initially stood out on the world stage as a staunch advocate of Third World assertiveness, Cold War nonalignment, and global anti-imperialism, and as an inspirational model of revolutionary liberation and state-led industrial development for the European as well as the African and Middle Eastern Left. Algeria's independence, which was recognized by France on 3 July 1962 and officially celebrated in Algeria on 5 July, brought to power a faction of the FLN that the army supported, one which had been organized on the Tunisian and Moroccan frontiers in the final years of the war and which emerged successfully from internal struggles with control of the provisional government and other armed factions.

The country's first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, consolidated a bureaucratic, single-party system, proclaimed Algeria's socialist orientation, and sought to marginalize potential rivals within the regime. Some of these, however, grouped around the minister of defense, Houari Boumedienne, and removed Ben Bella in a coup d'état on 19 June 1965. Algeria under Boumedienne nationalized major industries and embarked on an ambitious program of state-led industrial development, partnerships with the Soviet bloc, and diplomatic support for independence struggles in Palestine, Western Sahara (against neighboring Morocco, with which Algeria fought a brief war in October 1963), Vietnam, and sub-Saharan Africa. In 1964 Algeria's national currency, the dinar, replaced the franc, and Algeria, alone of France's major former territories, remained outside forums such as the Francophonie, an intergovernmental organization of France and the former colonies. In 1971 Algeria nationalized its oil wells and pipelines, taking a 51 percent stake in all French-owned oil interests in the country.

In the 1960s and 1970s, despite these breaks with the former colonial power, thousands of French technical advisors and educational personnel worked in Algeria, partially replacing the skills that had been lost when the European population, which numbered almost one million, left the country in 1961 and 1962. Arabization and the promotion of Islamic culture was, during the same period, heavily reliant on ideas and personnel from Egypt and the Middle East. More significantly, the economic independence that was projected to grow out of Algeria's so-called specific socialism was never realized, since its industrialization was dependent on the purchase of technology and expertise from Europe, financed by revenue from hydrocarbon exports. In addition, underinvestment in agriculture and other sectors meant that the development of Algeria's industrial production never had the anticipated effect of stimulating the rest of the economy and of creating, and growing to meet, expanding demands.

ALGERIA, EUROPE, AND THE MIDDLE EAST, 1979 TO 2004

After the death of Boumedienne in 1978, statist economic programs were abandoned, the private sector was encouraged, and middle-class consumption increased while much of the population lived in poverty. The country's basic dependence on imports and its reliance on a single export commodity—hydrocarbons—did not change. With proven reserves in 2004 of 11.87 billion barrels of oil and 4.739 trillion cubic meters of gas, and as the world's second-largest gas exporter, Algeria remains an important country for its northern neighbors.

Algeria entered a period of political uncertainty in the 1980s, when Islamist radicalism increased among the younger generation and the monolithic, ritualized nationalism of the postindependence period eroded without being replaced by steps toward political pluralism. The shift away from the 1970s' Third Worldism brought the country back into Euro-Atlantic, and especially the French and later the American, spheres of influence. Algeria became a strategically and economically significant part of Europe's southern Mediterranean "near abroad." The same period saw Algeria, along with much of the Arab world, realigning itself toward the Gulf states and the concomitant rise of a domestic Islamist politics linked to events in the Middle East: the Iranian revolution, the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, the development of Egyptian Islamism, the Palestinian intifada (the uprising against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, from 1987 to 1993) and the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991. In the 1990s Algeria suffered a decade-long political crisis and Islamist insurgency, in which between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand Algerians are believed to have been killed.

At the start of the twenty-first century, Algeria emerged from this crisis as a significant regional actor in European and American strategic and economic calculations, a sizable emerging market and major energy supplier, and an important near neighbor to Europe—especially to France but also to Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom—in terms of trade, security, and migration. After 2001 Algeria also became an ally of what the United States called the global war on terror, one whose own recent historical experience exemplifies the complexities of the contemporary politics of globalization, economic adjustment, Islamism, security, terrorism, and democratization.