The long time of Algeria

“The problems come from Algeria” (al mashakil jayya min al-jaza’ir). According to the American historian Julia Clancy-Smith, Tunisians bordering Algeria used this expression in the troubled 1990s. Algeria is often presented as a machine for generating problems – for others. Political and security problems, first of all. In French school curricula, for example, Algeria only appears when its war of independence disrupts the metropolitan constitution, then disappears beneath the waves once it has brought down the Fourth Republic.

But Algeria is also a great generator of theoretical problems. Who can think about colonization without reading Fanon in Blida, or about social distinction without reading Bourdieu in Kabylie? By turns a beacon of the revolutionary Third World and a moral lesson of a failed democratic transition in the Arab world, Algeria too often appears only as a model or counter-model for others.

The relationship between state and society

What if we tried to understand Algeria not as a problem, but as a territory where people live, in short, as a country with a history? This is the challenge taken up by the new work of the British historian James McDougall, lecturer at the University of Oxford, who traces the history of Algerians from 1516 to 2012.

With this long period, one might have expected a synthesis, which Algerian historiography, in full expansion since the beginning of the 2000s, is in dire need of. The fiftieth anniversary of independence in 2012 saw the publication of an important collective Franco-Algerian work, but this is limited to the colonial period. However, by combining archival and field work, J. McDougall offers the fruits of massive research that goes well beyond simple synthesis.

Its central theme is the relationship between state and society. J. McDougall opposes what he sees as the stereotype of an atomized Algerian society in the face of “power”, to show the persistence of social institutions and local communities. He combines elements of political narration with dives into specific localities and characters, as many vignettes that paint a plural portrait of Algerian society.

Like any work over a long period, the most interesting choices are made at the chronological level, and it is therefore on this aspect that we will concentrate here. Because the decision to unfold from 1516 to 2012 allows above all to depict long continuities across the Ottoman, French and independent periods, which constitutes the main strength of the work.

Putting the colonial back in its place

It is customary to begin the history of modern Algeria in 1830, with the capture of Algiers by the French. J. McDougall begins in 1516, with the arrival of the Ottomans, showing that it was the Ottoman period that truly created a state structure on Algerian territory. Even today, the Algerian Arabic dialect designates the state by a Turkish word: the beylikWhat is too often reduced to a monochrome “pre-colonial” period is here depicted as a mosaic where the “depth” of the State varies considerably according to regions and lifestyles.

But it is in the colonial period, to which he devotes 3 chapters, that the work deploys its strength. This is cut in an original way, setting aside a classic chronology that only repeats that of the metropolitan regimes (1830, 1848, 1870, 1940, etc.), already severely criticized by Sylvie Thénault, among others. J. McDougall first distinguishes a long phase of upheavals of the conquest from 1830 to 1912, followed by a new phase of invention of new political forms in contact with French institutions.

Chaotic and devastating, the conquest was not, however, a “steamroller” that would have annihilated Algerian social structures. Despite the war, expropriations and epidemics of the conquest, J. McDougall shows the continuity of certain notable families from the Ottoman period to the XX^e century. In 1831, Ahmed Bouderba, an Algerian merchant married to a French woman, proposed to the French a municipal government of Algiers on liberal principles. In 1914, his grandsons, Omar, Ahmed and Ali, were lawyers, municipal councilors or doctors in Algiers, also supporters of a conciliation between France and the Algerian elites.

But, in this continuity, what is the place of a history of the settlers? If J. McDougall subtly shows both the proximity and the limits of the hegemonic relations between colonizers and colonized, this argument is undermined by a division that places the history of the European and Jewish communities in a separate chapter on the development of the colonial state. Rather than compartmentalizing them and thus doubling the narrative over the same period, it would have been interesting to deal with the relations of these communities with a colonial state with which they are too often confused.

Born in war

The divisions, however, bear fruit when J. McDougall turns to the pivotal period of the long war of independence, from 1942 to 1962. This is finally rightly considered, not as the inevitable awakening of a nation or the result of an unfortunate French political crisis, but as a profound transformation of Algerian society and territory.

J. McDougall finishes demolishing two myths already well scratched by his previous works: on the one hand, a tragic vision of the war, which sees it as the end of a series of “missed opportunities” to integrate Algerians into France; on the other, a heroic vision which positions the FLN as the sole and inescapable actor in a colonial system that could only die in one way. Here, the inner story of the FLN shows men divided and prey to multiple internal contradictions, but capable of sublimating them to achieve external objectives.

Above all, the war of independence paradoxically brought the French state into places it had never been before, leading to massive displacements, accelerated urbanization and brutal social restructuring. Together, the insurrection of FLN and the French counter-insurgency gave rise to a new society of which independent Algeria is the heir.

The most original and important chapters deal precisely with this history of independent Algeria after 1962, a period that is sorely lacking in historical analysis. On this less cleared ground, J. McDougall yields to a more classical political chronology, following the successive Algerian presidents. He nevertheless succeeds in establishing key tensions between, on the one hand, a monist political imaginary where the State, the party and the people are one and, on the other hand, factional power struggles and an unequal political economy.

If the balance is maintained under the Boumediene presidency, the crisis of the 1980s reveals what has partly always been there: a crisis of the political economy, with the reduction in hydrocarbon revenues, and a crisis of legitimacy of a FLN threatened by Islamist and Berberist protests, leading to an open crisis of the regime which sees the end of the single party of FLN at the turn of the 1990s. The military coup of January 1992, interrupting the electoral process, was part of the long history of a state dominated by the military since 1962 and never really contained by the rule of law.

From the “black decade” to non-revolution

It is this deep chronological anchoring that makes legitimate the (rather daring) bet of pushing the analysis to the “black decade” from 1992 to 2002. As J. McDougall himself recognizes, it is impossible to write “a satisfactory history of what happened in Algeria in the mid-1990s, twenty years later” (p. 292), despite a significant amount of interviewing with actors of the time. Indeed, the impossibility of producing scientific knowledge on this conflict is one of the most lasting consequences of its violence. This violence, multifaceted and diffuse, causes a collapse of social ties and therefore of the bonds of trust that are essential to the transmission of historical facts.

Given the hot topicality of this period in Algeria, this final chapter is bound to stir up controversy. For example, J. McDougall takes up the Algerian-Algerian controversy over the use of the expression “civil war” to describe the violence of the 1990s. For some Algerians critical of the regime, there was no civil war in Algeria, because there was neither a collapse of the state nor opposing camps, hence the term “black decade” to designate diffuse violence.

But, inserted into a global context, this seems less relevant. The Guatemalan, Lebanese and Syrian civil wars, to name but a few, share many characteristics with what happened in Algeria in the 1990s. Other political scientists may wonder whether, by opposing the State and society, J. McDougall does not end up retrospectively overestimating the level of organization of the regime in the face of the crisis of 1988-1992.

But her analysis remains convincing, because she refuses the temptation to see the black decade only as a rupture. The repeated theme of contrasting relationships between a not-so-strong state and a rather resistant society therefore allows the book to draw to an epilogue on the situation in Algeria since 2011. The obsessive question among specialists and pseudo-specialists of the region is the following: why was there no Arab Spring in Algeria?

In fact, according to J. McDougall, Algeria does not live so much in the shadow of the revolutions of its other Arab neighbors, but in the shadow of its own revolution. Factional struggles within the power have tainted the promise of the 1^er November 1954 of a revolution launched for national dignity and social equality. Far from being an anomaly, the current Algerian situation should therefore be placed in the contradictions of the Algerian revolution and, further still, in the tensions constituting state construction since the Ottoman and French periods.

There would be many other things to summarize and discuss, as it is a dense work, sometimes too dense. But the central challenge is highly raised, that of a history that places Algerians at the center, that depicts a complex society traversed by its own dynamics, characterized as much by its stability and its continuities as by the violent ruptures that often attract the attention of foreign researchers.

In a period of proliferating polemics on both sides of the Mediterranean over colonial history, the political uses of violence or the future of the Algerian regime, it is therefore to be hoped that translations into Arabic and French will give this work the audience and impact it deserves – especially in Algeria.