Middle East Dilemma: Chapter 8

Michael C. Hudson (ed.)

1999

8. The Ups and Downs of Maghrib Unity
I. William Zartman

Like much of the developing world, North Africa approaches regional integration on a number of levels. These levels differ from the economists’ classical progression from free–trade zone to common economic area (Viner 1950; Belassa 1962) and also from the political scientists’ notions of spillover and hegemony (Haas 1964, Lindberg and Scheingold 1970, Nye 1968).

The highest level is full political integration, with state commitments to reduce individual sovereignty in favor of a larger state formation. A second level, developmental integration, involves trade creation through larger market economies. Beneath these lies a third and looser level of diplomatic cooperation, characterized by momentary acts of unity that are not necessarily expected to endure. North African integration is firmly rooted in this lower level; it occasionally reaches into the second level but has never broached the commitments of the third. At the same time, each level creates its own counterpressures to downscale the cooperation, creating the cyclical dynamic so evident in the political evolution of the region.

The Region of the Maghrib

Unlike some groups of states pursuing integration—the United Arab Republic for example, or even the European Community (EC) or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations—the Maghrib constitutes a region, an island of similar and self–identifying people, mutually interacting and interdependent (Belaid and Zartman 1993). Although there is no single simple identifying term for North Africans in Arabic—maghribi means "Moroccan," and national identifications are still the most widely used—there is still a sense of regional belonging and interaction when viewed from within as well as from without. Although North African states do not engage in much trade with each other (not more than 5 percent) and their currencies have long been mutually inconvertible, they meet in regional conferences, in Europe, and in transborder exchanges whenever possible, always with a great sense of rétrouvailles (reunion). Although their books and newspapers penetrate customs controls only with great difficulty and they intermarry relatively infrequently (no statistics are available), they live in each other’s countries, speak mutually intelligible languages, and follow with apprehension the twists and turns of each other’s political systems.

Many of the states in the region are long–established entities, as historic as any European state. Morocco is ruled by the oldest dynasty in the world (from 1666), and Morocco and Tunisia were consolidating their monarchies at the same time as were the nations of Europe. Their position as protectorates under colonial rule both attested to and helped to preserve their historic integrity. Algeria and Libya are newer creations (as states, not as societies), and Algeria’s coherence as a state derives from its double revolutionary origins—one revolution at the hands of the French rulers who destroyed the Algerian polity, landownership, social structure, and cultural institutions, and the second at the hand of the Algerian nationalists who destroyed French rule. Mauritania is a very new and at best a very weak state even today, while Libya’s strength as a state is hard to judge. Even established states show sudden and surprising weaknesses on occasion: Algeria was long a case where a "hard" state was confused with a "strong" state, in the technical sense of the terms (Rothchild and Chazan 1988; Migdal 1988); in fact, the state had ceased to function as a decisionmaking institution after the October 1988 riots. Nonetheless, even in such cases, state weakness does not promote the region as an alternative institution, but rather makes regional integration more difficult.

The region where these states are located has a clear structure. It begins with a population concentrated along the Mediterranean coast from Tripoli to Tangier, and the Atlantic coast from Tangier to Agadir, with the only populous penetrations into the interior being in the Gharb plain to Fes–Meknes and the Haouz plateau to Marrakesh. This means that the populous core of the region is parceled out among Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and that the northern ends of their boundaries cross relatively heavily populated areas. As a result, Algeria occupies a keystone position in the region; it is the only state to border on more than two others and indeed the only one to be contiguous with all the states in the region, and some others as well. Morocco and Tunisia are entirely contained by their regional neighbors, whereas the other states of the region break out into other areas; Morocco’s "breakout" is to the Atlantic, which gives it a different perspective than the others. However, the coastal core is not evenly apportioned among the component states: Morocco and Algeria have equivalent populations (about 24 million), whereas Tunisia is only a third their size. Both the equivalence and the disequilibrium are crucial elements in the region’s dynamics, as will be pursued below.

The other determining feature of the region’s structure is the population and power vacuum that surrounds the core. This periphery begins at the Atlas and Tell mountains to the north and west and runs south and east until it meets another region—West Africa and the Nile border of the Mashriq, respectively. This buffer zone forms an area of protection and expansion for the core, for population growth, development, and exploitation, all the more so because it contains rich resources (notably oil, gas, and phosphates). Like the core, however, the periphery is not evenly apportioned among the component states, nor is it even fully incorporated into the region. The keystone position of Algeria is reinforced by its possession of a large and central part of the Sahara, making it at 919,595 square miles nearly half again as large as Libya, three times as large as Morocco (including the Western Sahara) and nearly 15 times as large as Tunisia, which also has a small part of the periphery. Libya is mostly periphery and Mauritania is entirely so. The rest of the periphery is the territory of weak states of the Sahel—Mali, Niger, and Chad. The power vacuum in the Saharan periphery and its uneven apportionment among strong core and weak peripheral states also constitute a major element in regional dynamics.

The resulting dynamics arise from the result of a need among entities new as modern states to establish a sense of rank and relation among themselves in the region. This drive is a basic element in any regional relations and it becomes the powerful motor of history, as centuries of politics of the evolving state system in Europe and half a century of rivalry between Cold War superpowers have shown. In the Maghrib, the dynamic begins with the mixed equality (in population) and inequality (in territory and resources) between Morocco and Algeria, consecrated (but not initiated) by ideological differences between their regimes. The rivalry takes on all forms, from direct military confrontation to contestation for control of the periphery, from leadership of contending Third World alliances to competition for a favored position vis–à–vis the former metropole and Europe, and association with opposing superpowers. It also involves different views of regional integration, the Moroccan view being more pluralistic and the Algerian more hegemonistic (Zartman 1987).

Tunisia’s position in this unfolding structure is clear and awkward. By its position, it is condemned to be a potential ally of Morocco’s, under the Kautilyan dictum that "my neighbor is my enemy and my neighbor’s neighbor is my friend" (Kautilya 1960; Modelski 1964). But its lack of weight forces it to defend its security by being a neutral peacemaker, as a protection both against domination by a powerful Algeria and against destruction of the region through bilateral conflict. As a result, Tunisia’s view of regional relations is loosely integrationist, more egalitarian than Algeria’s but more supranationalist than Morocco’s.

Until the 1970s, Libya’s position in the regional structure was as peripheral as Mauritania’s is today (and Mauritania was not even in the region at the time). Libya functioned only as a kind of hinge between the Maghrib and the Mashriq. With oil and Muammar al–Qadhafi came the means and the ends for a new active role in the region, posing in its turn the question of rank and relations for Libya and hence its entry into the regional dynamics (Deeb 1991; Zartman and Kluge 1991). In Kautilyan terms, reinforced again by ideology, Libya is both a friend and an enemy of Algeria, a potential ally of Morocco, a meddler in the peripheral areas of the Western Sahara, Mali, Niger, and Chad, and a security threat to Tunisia. Before it ever invented its ideology, its role was structurally determined. Ideologically, however, its view of regional relations is tightly integrationist, since Qadhafi dislikes state divisions of the Arab (or Maghribi) nation and since Libya can only gain from acquiring what it lacks (new populations and territory) in exchange for what it has (correct leadership) through union with its neighbors.

As a result of this structural dynamic and of the attractiveness of the myth of unity, Maghribi states continually pursue the mythical goal in their fashion, yet often turn the search for unity into a cause for division. As Gamal Abdel Nasser learned when he vacillated between "Unity of Ranks" and "Unity of Purpose" (Kerr 1967), there is nothing so divisive as the pursuit of "proper" unity. Various North African states have frequently captured the regional flag as a rallying point for rivalry, bringing in some member states in an effort to isolate others. This remains the state of relations, as will be developed below. Thus both the ups and the downs of integration have been achieved in the name of a commitment to unity; they mark high and low points along the all–embracing path toward the achievement of the goal, not a waxing or waning of attachment to the goal itself. By the same token, as an integral part of the dynamic, when the pursuit of favorable unity (Unity of Purpose) becomes too divisive, and threatens to blow the region apart, one of the members—usually Tunisia, because of its calling born of its position—raises the banner of comprehensive unity with a call to pursue Unity of Ranks and overcome conflict.

Cycles of Integration

The interaction of these views of Maghrib unity with the structurally driven dynamics of the region has led to the ups and downs that have marked intra–Maghribi relations since before independence. In these cycles the most notable form of integration has been the diplomatic event, a meeting with no essential concern for institutionalization and continuity, whose main impact is achieved through the meeting itself. Even subsequent meetings of any organization established at the first meeting have been primarily further cases of diplomatic integration, where attendance was the matter of prime importance and durable decisions were suspect.

It must be emphasized that diplomatic integration is not just a meaningless formality. The very fact of attendance serves to reduce conflict, and further specific measures of conflict management may well take place during the meeting. These conflict–related meetings and decisions are not fraudulent or unimportant; to the contrary. But they are not accompanied by any expectation of or commitment to ongoing cooperation, which would constitute the next phase of integration. In the few cases where developmental integration, the next stage, has been reached, it has had to confront the counterpressures of conflict born of the structural dynamics already discussed.

Much has been written about the second and third phases of integration (Cantori and Spiegel 1970; Falk and Mendlovits 1973; Robson 1983; Mazzeo 1984; Onwuka and Sesay 1985; Wriggins 1992), but little of it has any relevance to the Maghrib because its integration has never reached firmly beyond the first stage. Developmental, or functional, integration involves the transfer of some economic and infrastructural activities to the regional level so that normal national activity in the same sector can no longer be accomplished alone. Such activities can remain under some control by individual states, and indeed the activities can be undertaken by nongovernmental organizations and nonstate actors pulling the state into greater integration. It can also be expected to arouse equivalent opposition from either private or public sectors who see benefit in the national status quo; the rise of this "equivalent and opposite force" is an aspect of integration that has generally not been given enough attention in the literature on integration. Only when that inertia and opposition is overcome and the balance of felt benefits tips in favor of cooperation can the second phase be said to be fully underway. Even then, developmental integration is an unstable intermediate stage, always under pressure either to fall back into national activities punctuated by diplomatic integration or to fall forward into political integration. Since the state is still the unit of the second stage, however, the tendency to back away from developmental integration is the greater of the two.

The decade of the 1950s was characterized by cooperation among the nationalist movements of the French colonial territories (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) and then by support for each other as Libya (in 1951) and then Morocco and Tunisia (in 1956) gained their independence. The highlight of the period was the Tangier conference of 1958, where the three countries’ nationalist movements—two of them the major government parties—pledged common efforts in support of Algerian independence and other coordinated policy goals (Zartman 1987, 1–8). The meeting was a major instance of diplomatic integration, with no further effect.

The first half of the 1960s was a time of conflict, with major territorial disputes erupting between Tunisia and not–yet–independent Algeria in 1961, and between Morocco and newly independent Algeria in 1963. In between, the region was split between the two competing African Unity groups: the "radical" Casablanca Group (including Morocco, the Algerian Provisional Government, and, initially, Libya) and the "moderate" Monrovia Group (including Tunisia) (Zartman 1987, ch. 1). The pan–African split was resolved in the formation of the Organization for African Unity (OAU) in 1963, and the OAU in turn managed the Moroccan–Algerian border dispute (Wilde 1966; Touval 1972).

The second half of the decade was a period of cooperation reaching the level of developmental integration. The vehicle was the Maghribi Permanent Consultative Committee and its adjunct, the Committee for Industrial Cooperation, founded in 1964 (Slim 1980). The two organs continued to meet at the ministerial and experts’ level throughout the decade until Qadhafi gained power in Libya and the autarkist developmental policies of Boumedienne in Algeria ended the participation of those nations in 1969.

In the early 1970s cyclical logic promised a period of renewed conflict followed by reconciliation, but the reverse occurred. The beginning of the decade saw attempts to restore cooperation by dampening conflict, with Tunisia taking the lead role in mediation. Morocco recognized Mauritania in 1969 and started a process of border settlement with Algeria which came to fruition in 1972 when they established, for the first time, a border across the Sahara between the two countries. These were important preconditions to any construction of closer unity. However, the process was interrupted by an extended period of fluctuating conflict between Tunisia and Libya, beginning in 1974 with the aborted Jerba union between the two countries, and, even more seriously, by the deep–seated conflict between Morocco and Algeria over the Western Sahara, after an initial agreement in 1974 to support Morocco’s claims. The Saharan dispute was so important because it reflected the basic conflict between the two rivals over size (territory and resources) and over spatial relations, each seeing the other as "encircling" it (Damis 1983a; Zartman 1989, ch. 2).

Soon after the outbreak of the Western Sahara conflict in 1975, Algeria and Libya signed an agreement at Hassi Messaoud to share the burden of supporting the Polisario Front, the Western Saharan independence movement, and unite in supporting other causes. As the conflict raged, raising the danger of an open war between Algeria and Morocco despite their tacit agreement to avoid direct hostilities, Algeria again took Maghrib unity under its wing. In 1983 Algeria established a friendship treaty with Tunisia and Mauritania, explicitly refusing membership to Morocco and Libya (Meliani 1985; Ibrahimi 1988). To Algeria’s surprise—and no one else’s—Morocco and Libya united in turn in 1984, in a very similar treaty, which, again to no one’s surprise, fell apart two years later (Deeb 1989). The call for integration which one would have expected Tunisia to sound, in order to dampen the conflict, was slow to come for inherent reasons: Tunisia felt threatened by its neighbors and feared that each might take integration as a pretext for dominance; while on the other side, the hostility between Morocco and Algeria was too deep and personalized under Hourani Boumedienne’s reign (to 1978) and then too politicized under Chadli Benjedid (thereafter) to be susceptible to early reconciliation. It was not until the mid&-;1980s that a new wave of diplomatic integration was launched (Zartman 1989, ch. 20) ₁

In all of these ups and downs, there had been no effort to move beyond the level of diplomatic integration, where every meeting is its own reward, except for a few years under the auspices of the Maghribi Permanent Consultative Committee (CPCM, in its French abbreviation) in the late 1960s. The dominant motor in cycles of relations has been the search for security within a structural dynamic, in which cooperation is as threatening as conflict, and unity as divisive as dispute. By leaving the CPCM in the hands of economic ministers, whose credits were to be won primarily by tending the domestic economy, even this level of developmental integration became an exercise in defense rather than in construction. At its best, Maghrib unity became a superpatriotic call for a momentary truce, rather like playing the national anthem to control a postgame melee. If integration was ever to move to the next level, something more would be required beyond merely the need to suspend escalating conflict that threatened to break up the family.

The UMA: A New Phase?

Maghribi states draw together in an exercise of diplomatic integration when they need to emerge from a conflict that threatens the integrity of the region. Such integration is only momentary: although the event can be repeated several times if necessary and mutually useful, it carries no presumption of durability. For integration to climb to the next level, one of two conditions is necessary—either an external challenge or an internal hegemon (Deutsch 1957). Although the latter possibility is theoretically conceivable, no state can or will play the hegemonic role for North African integration in the current situation. Algeria is the obvious candidate, but it is so deeply caught up in the structural dynamics of rank and rivalry that it cannot act as a unifier, and any attempt by it to do so would merely provoke even greater opposition and structural dynamics. The Algeria–Tunisia–Mauritania friendship treaty of 1983, renewed in spirit in 1996, is a case in point. However, because of its dynamism, its weight, and its central position, any Maghribi cooperation scheme would require Algerian commitment and participation. Algerian defection undid the CPCM in 1969, and Algerian support is crucial for the success of any pan–Maghribi integration, whether developmental or political.

A mild external challenge—or rather a competition—played a role in each of the peaks in the cycle. The 1958 Tangier meeting with Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco was stimulated in part by competing challenges from the Mashriq, where both the United Arab Republic joining Egypt and Syria and the Union of Arab States (UAS) between Jordan and Iraq were formed in February 1958 (al–Sayyid, chapter 5 in this volume; Deeb 1991). Similarly, the CPCM corresponded—and responded—to efforts to build an Egyptian–Syrian–Iraqi union in 1963 (Kerr 1967, 69–95; Deeb 1991). Similar conditions were present in 1989, when the Gulf Cooperation Council stimulated the creation of an Arab Cooperation Council of Egypt, Jordan and Iraq (Dessouki 1994).

For the first time at the end of the 1980s, however, a stronger and truly external threat was present. It took the form of an enlarging and closing Europe that contained its major suppliers of Mediterranean products within harmonized tariff walls and excluded their competitors (Aghrout and Sutton 1990). The admission of the Iberian countries to the then EC and the passage of the Single Europe Act (SEA), both in 1986, posed the challenge to North Africa that it must combat Europe with a united front and build trade and industry through an integrated region. The target date for meeting the challenge was 1992, when the SEA was to take effect. The closing of Europe to North African emigrants, rising racial animosity against those already established in Europe, and the shift of European attention to the more developed product and labor markets of the East all compounded the external challenge.

The stalemate in the Western Saharan war by 1981 led the parties to seek a political solution and to find ways to get on with Maghribi business. The Morocco–Algerian summits at Akid Lotfi and Zouj Bghal in May 1987, their joint declaration of May 1988, and the five–state Maghribi summit during the larger Arab summit in Zeralda in June 1988 bore fruit. The Algerian friendship treaties with Tunisia and Mauritania and with Libya were superseded by a new, all–Maghribi summit and commitment among the five states on February 17, 1989, at Marrakesh. The Maghrib Arab Union (UMA) was formed to develop institutionalized cooperation among its members (treaty text in Daoud 1989).

The treaty of Marrakesh overcame many of the problems of past attempts at integration. It provided for a regular twice–yearly meeting of the heads of state, the only figures capable of taking binding decisions. It also provided for a secretariat and planned for periodic agreements on further, specific areas of cooperation and integration. Yet, despite these wise elements, the UMA has still not moved beyond the dominating characteristics of diplomatic integration to developmental integration.

Seven regular summits have been held to date, including Marrakesh. ₂ Only the first and third had full attendance: Maaouya Ould Taya was absent from Tunis, King Hassan II from Ras Lanuf, and Qadhafi from Casablanca, each for those minor political reasons typical of diplomatic integration disputes. The twice–yearly rotating presidency occasioned much complicated maneuvering among the heads of state; Hassan II claimed the first 10 and a half months, Qadhafi lost his place in the order, Ould Taya lost his turn completely.

It took two summits to confront and three summits to make the important institutional decisions, again linked to the allocation of positions within the Union. The third summit issued agreements on an agricultural common market, investment guarantees, phytosanitary coordination, elimination of double taxation, and land transit and transport measures (Soudan 1990). The fourth summit decided to create a free trade area by 1992 and a common market by 1995, as proposed by Algeria during its presidency (Soudan 1991a). But no implementing decisions for either have been undertaken. The last three summits were taken up with political problems, including the Gulf War in 1991, the alleged Libyan terrorist destruction of the airliner over Lockerbie after 1992, and the Saharan conflict after 1994. At the end of 1995, Morocco called for a suspension of the Union over the Saharan issue, and there was another round of diplomatic maneuvering. The following two years were spent reaffirming the existence of the Union by the other members and gradually trying to win from Morocco an acknowledgement that the UMA’s inactivity did not warrant suspension but rather that its potential merited continued support.

As the summit of the Union, the twice–yearly presidential council meetings (prepared and assisted by more frequent council of foreign ministers’ meetings) originally made decisions only by consensus. Since the fifth summit they have agreed to decide by majority (except in case of hostilities). The secretariat, with members from all five states, was located in Morocco by decision of the fifth summit, with a Tunisian secretary general, Mohammed Amamou, for the first three–year term (after Tunis lost the competition for the venue). The consultative committee, composed of ten members from each state’s parliamentary body, is situated in Algiers. The tribunal of ten judges appointed in May 1991 is to hold sessions in Nouakchott, the Academy of Sciences and Universities is to meet in Tripoli, and the Maghribi Bank for Investment and Foreign Trade is to operate in Tunis. This allocation of venues was proposed by Morocco at the fifth summit, except for the seat of the secretariat, originally to be in Algiers and then offered by Benjedid to Tunis (Soudan 1991a). Among these institutions, the only one to show any real activity to date has been the presidential council.

Another level of institutions, however, has invigorated the Union with creditable signs of life. These are its commissions and functional meetings. Between the Zeralda and Marrakesh summits, an interministerial commission of the five states met in Tripoli in September 1988, in Rabat in October 1988, and in Tunis in January 1989 to prepare a plan, adopted at Marrakesh, for five commissions, on financial and customs matters, on economics, on social and human affairs, on culture (information, education, and instruction), and on organic and structural affairs. Other specialized commissions on mining, transportation, tourism and handicrafts, and maritime affairs meet frequently. Commissions on interior affairs (internal security) and defense (external security) have never met, although cooperation on internal security among some of the members has been intense. Beyond the commissions, various interministerial meetings among the five countries give serious study to measures of coordination and harmonization.

Other Maghribi institutions have been created under the auspices of the UMA. The Union of Arab Maghrib Labor Organizations was formed in 1989 of all five countries’ labor unions, and has met regularly, in June 1991 issuing a charter of basic social rights of Maghribi workers. The third summit approved plans to create a common airline, not yet implemented. The improvement of trans–Maghribi road, rail, and pipeline networks has been studied.

Possibly the most sustained line of activity among the commissions and councils of the UMA has been in regard to Europe, the external challenge. While the initial programs and declarations made no mention of the European Community, the second summit discussed the matter of UMA–EC relations and Zine Labidine Ben Ali used his turn at the presidency in the first half of 1990 to press united Maghribi policy toward Europe. On the first anniversary of the founding of the Union, he called for a joint Maghribi mission in Brussels, and at the end of his term he proposed to EC Commission President Jacques Delors a UMA–EC charter of social rights for North African emigrants in Europe, and a Mediterranean Development Fund to recycle Maghribi public debt for the creation of employment in North Africa to reduce emigration. In May 1990, the human resources commission meeting in Tunis had proposed a consultative council for the North African colony in Europe, as well as the UMA–EC charter.

Both ideas were pursued in a series of Euro–Maghribi meetings in Majorca in October and in Brussels and Tunis in November, and then a year later in further ministerial meetings on Mediterranean cooperation in Rabat and Algiers in September and October, respectively. These meetings have turned into the "5 + 5" Conferences of the European and Maghribi states of the Western Mediterranean, culminating in the Barcelona Conference of November 1995 where significant sums of aid were promised for allocations from the northern to the southern shore, in an effort to keep Maghribi workers at home. UMA insistence, accompanied by growing European resentment of North African immigrants, has kept the matter alive among EC members.

On the other hand, three Maghribi political issues have crowded more productive concerns off the agenda during the short life of the UMA to date, rendering cooperation more difficult. One was the Gulf War, which dominated Maghribi preoccupations for a year from mid–1990 into 1991. During the Algerian presidency of the UMA in the second half of 1990, the war was the subject of Maghribi attempts at mediation; when they failed, optimism over the diplomatic potential of the Union dropped. The shift in attention explains in part the gap in discussions of EC–UMA cooperation during the period. Even before the war was over, the new political issue of Islamist opposition had arisen to trouble the states’ relations (Soudan 1990), and in Algeria’s case to weaken its capacity for making decisions. The Libyan Lockerbie crisis of early 1992 elicited a cool response from the UMA (Soudan 1992a); the extraordinary summit of support that Qadhafi demanded that year was never held, and the Maghrib states have been troubled by the effect of the affair on their own cooperation and on their relations with the West.

Finally, the shadow of the Saharan conflict still hangs over Maghribi cooperation. Once the treaty of Marrakesh had been signed, King Hassan II began to feel that the issue was under control, a feeling encouraged by the return of a number of Polisario leaders to the Moroccan fold over the following years. The persistence of UN Secretaries General Javier Perez de Cuellar, then Boutros Boutros Ghali, and then Kofi Annan kept the referendum on track, even if slowly, as the UN Mission took up its position and the electoral lists, including Saharans who had fled to Morocco, began to be drawn up. The military–backed takeover of power in Algeria installed a government that Morocco regarded with extreme wariness and considered to be generally less favorable to a solution than an Islamist government might have been.

Then, in the summer of 1994, relations between Morocco and Algeria deteriorated sharply. A terrorist attack on tourists in Marrakesh in August convinced Morocco of Algerian intentions to destabilize the monarchy using Islamists as hired guns; Morocco reimposed the visa requirement for Algerians, and Algeria closed the border in retaliation. Algeria, which had been reviving a hard line on the Western Sahara from time to time as a means of placating its own military, turned toward an even harder position in support of the Polisario Front and in November 1995 rose in the UN to block a plan for an early referendum. On December 22, Morocco formally requested suspension of the UMA. Libya and Tunisia attempted to mediate and Egypt tried to arrange an informal meeting of the five during an Arab League meeting scheduled for March 1996; instead, Algeria (president for the year) called a ministerial council meeting of the UMA in early February 1996, which only Tunisia and Mauritania attended (Ouazzani 1996). Throughout 1996 and 1997, the UMA was in catalepsy as a political organization, although its commissions continued to meet. Integration in the Maghrib had fallen back to the diplomatic level, following the dynamics of the basic structural rivalries.

Maghrib Integration—Up or Down?

t would be unrealistic to expect the path from new statehood to economic and political integration to be free from mines and potholes. The challenge is rather to evaluate whether the political obstacles are more compelling than the road itself. In the process, it should be remembered that whatever form the integration takes—diplomatic, economic, and/or political—it will still contain, not erase, the structural dynamics that characterize current Maghribi relations. Moroccan–Algerian rivalry, Libyan interference, Tunisian mediation, and Mauritanian vulnerability will all characterize the workings of an integrating Maghribi entity as much as they have marked the pre–UMA interactions. Similarly, the cyclical rise and fall of cooperation will also continue, whether or not the trend line itself is rising. Finally, the issues will remain the same, only to be handled in new forms. It should not be thought that a referendum will "solve" or "end" the Saharan question: No matter how it goes, the vote will merely transform the age–old question of nomadic vs. sedentary relations across the desert into new problems for Moroccan, Mauritanian, and Maghribi politics.

It is also important to separate instances and themes of Maghribi cooperation from still or moving pictures of the whole. As it nears the end of its first decade, the UMA shows no greater overall integration than it did at any of its birthdays. Indeed, compared to the plans and timetables, it is behind schedule and stagnating, much like the attempts at regional cooperation which the Economic Commission for Africa has encouraged elsewhere (such as the Economic Community of West African States, and the Economic Community of Central African States) (Lancaster 1995). When the Maghrib states negotiated new free trade agreements with the European Union in 1995, they did it individually, with little coordination, just as they always had done. All three countries vie with each other for special ties and preferential rights in the European market. Both Morocco and Tunisia have defected from Maghribi economic cooperation and opted for closer integration with Europe, a position Algeria also seeks to claim once its governmental coherence is restored (White 1996).

Sectorially the picture is somewhat different. There is a growing solidarity vis–à–vis Europe which meets European concerns and leads to bilateral cooperation between the two shores of the western Mediterranean on some areas of common concern, even if it does not extend to the joint negotiation of trade agreements. There are a number of small areas of intra–Maghribi coordination and cooperation, not mentioned here in detail, which create familiarities and interdependencies, scarcely irreversible but still influential. There is the increasing reflex of thinking and acting Maghribi in diplomacy. And there are public commitments, as yet unrealized, to eliminate customs, passports, currency controls, and support for opposition movements among the members. (There is even a pan–Maghribist party in Morocco, the Arab Maghrib Unionist Party, though it won no seats in the 1993 election. More important, thirteen nongovernmental parties in the four Maghrib countries met regularly in a "reflection committee" beginning in April 1996 to pressure their governments to revive the UMA, and created a permanent interparty structure (Jeune Afrique 1996). The more these developments continue, the more they lift the general trend of integration out of the merely diplomatic and into the economic and, perhaps someday, the political.

But the political is still trumps. North Africa is not a security community (Deutsch 1957), and suggestions from abroad that it work toward that end have been met with understandable incredulity from the Maghribis themselves (Lewis 1994). The structural dynamics of rank and rivalry have and will continue to dominate the region, tearing unity apart and then again making it necessary from time to time, but for the moment keeping it firmly on the level of diplomatic integration, never reaching the developmental or political level.

Endnotes

Note 1: For a conflict that blew a region apart, the collapse of the East African Community and the withdrawal of Tanzania to southern Africa, see C. P. Potholm, "Who Killed Cock Robin? Perceptions Concerning the Collapse of the East African Community," World Affairs 142 (Summer 1979), 45–56. Back.

Note 2: The second summit was on January 22, 1990 in Tunis, the third on July 22–23, 1990 in Algiers, the fourth on March 10–11, 1991 in Ras Lanuf, Libya (originally planned for January 22, in Tripoli), the fifth on September 15–16, 1991 in Casablanca (originally planned for June–July in Nouakchott), the sixth finally in Nouakchott on November 10-ll, 1992 (originally scheduled for January, March, April, and then June); and the last to date in Tunis on April 2–3, 1994. Francoise Soudan, Jeune Afrique 1633 (April 23, 1992a), 6–7 and 1640 (June 11, 1992b), 18–23; Tunisia Today May 1994, 4–5. Back.

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