introduction: north africa and britain

Introduction: North Africa and Britain

International Affairs 85: 5 (2009) 923–929© 2009 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Affairs

CLAIRE SPENCER

The western Arab world, or the Maghreb as the northern littoral states of Africa are collectively known,1 has attracted less sustained British interest than the tradi-tional magnets for policy discussion and debate in the wider Middle East and North African region. Developments in the Gulf region and the three ‘Is’ of the Middle East—Iran, Iraq and Israel–Palestine—have attracted more attention for reasons of historical continuity as well as on account of their eye-catching, and sadly often violent, newsworthiness. The direct military engagement of the UK in Iraq since 2003 and in Afghanistan to the east of Iran since 2001 has also heightened their continuing policy relevance. By contrast, North Africa has seemed more distant and unknown in British policy circles, as well as within the development and business communities, with the great exception of the major energy concerns. Algeria has been open to foreign investment in the energy sector since the early 1990s, attracting material investments by most of the leading energy companies, not least BP. More recently, Libya has become the centre of attention since the lifting of UN and EU sanctions in 2003–2004, and BP is a significant investor there too. Tunisia has also attracted inward investment in the energy sector, albeit on a more modest scale, including from British Gas.

The wider neglect of North Africa, and more specifically the Maghreb, stems partly from longstanding assumptions about the primacy of the influence of France, and to a lesser extent Spain and Italy, over the affairs of these states. The prisms through which the impact and relevance of North Africa and North Africans to British policy are framed and assessed are also responsible for the relatively narrow scope of interest shown in this region. Too often, public and media character-izations of the region are shaped more by fears of uncontrolled migration and violent extremism than concerns about the underlying political changes taking place across North Africa. And yet the Maghreb is capable of offering significant commercial opportunities for those willing to understand, manage and mitigate these risks.

1 The Maghreb (the term means ‘west’ in Arabic) comprises Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, with the addi-tion of Mauritania as a member of the Arab Maghreb Union formed in 1989. Egypt is part of North Africa, but culturally and politically more closely linked to the eastern Arab world, the Mashrek.

INTA85_5_01_Spencer.indd 923 03/09/2009 15:20

Claire Spencer

924International Affairs 85: 5, 2009© 2009 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Affairs

The need for a new and closer look at North Africa

This special issue of International Affairs has been born out of a conscious effort in the recently renamed Middle East and North Africa Programme (MENAP) at Chatham House to refocus British attention on this relatively neglected area. Together, the states of the North African littoral are both Europe’s closest neigh-bours in the broader Middle East and home to the Arab world’s largest, and most rapidly expanding, populations. These two observations alone should awaken more than a passing curiosity in Britain as to how developments in North Africa might impinge—beneficially as well as detrimentally—on a wide range of British interests. The impacts of globalization, the fluctuations in global economic investment trends and the spread of new communication technologies have revolutionized the way identities and expectations are being formed in the region. At the same time, they highlight the dilemmas still to be faced in North Africa’s growing exposure to global trends, in ways that few in the UK have grasped in the fullest sense.

Across the region, the motor for change is demographic. Around 50 per cent of North Africa’s population is under 20 years of age, and as much as 75 per cent under 30. This represents a huge and largely untapped potential for the future development of the regions as well as a current and increasing liability. Put starkly, the young of North Africa currently suffer disproportionately from educational deficiencies, underemployment and unemployment. With unofficial youth unemployment rates of up to 30 per cent and rising, they are likely to continue to do so for some time. Prolonged under- and unemployment and the attendant shortfall in training opportunities for the needs of modern economies are provoking a range of socio-economic and political reactions. Beyond perennial concerns about migration and extremism, Britain and other European states are only just beginning to wake up to these. The challenge facing outsiders is not only to understand what motivates and inspires the youth of the region, but also to revisit their own perceptions of North Africa. In too many cases, exemplified by the hesitancy with which European policy-makers have been prepared to engage with the region’s Islamist movements, European views are based on interactions with an older generation of Francophone elites who no longer fully represent the aspirations of the majority of the region’s populations.

One area which needs revisiting is the dominant security prism, through which much of British concern over North Africa is funnelled. This currently rests on limited insights into the underlying dynamics of the region, above all into what Jonathan Githens-Mazer’s and George Joffé’s articles in this issue argue is the pervasive influence of pre-colonial ( Joffé) and colonial (Githens-Mazer) history on local political cultures. The extent to which apparently novel develop-ments are really new, or rather a reformulation of longstanding socio-economic and political behaviours of resistance and control, is rarely examined beyond the potential consequences for European and, by extension, British security interests. Local cultural and religious identities have resurfaced in direct correlation with




the failure of existing mechanisms to provide jobs or greater local accountability, but also, and perhaps more acutely, in response to the failure of the region’s official systems to meet their citizens’ cultural and religious expectations.

As at least two contributions to this issue (by Kristina Kausch and Richard Youngs, and Lise Storm) point out, the external policy community has made few attempts to understand the rise of Islamism and radicalism as a response to the failure of the ‘Washington consensus’ described by Jon Marks and the largely European (and secular) development models adopted by local leaderships which have stifled the emergence of real democratic trends within this changing cultural context. Rather than adjusting these models, and adapting policy to encompass the new circumstances in which North African societies now find themselves, the primacy Europe gives to the preventive aspects of its security policy has effectively undermined the capacity of European actors, the UK among them, to question the conceptual and ideological assumptions on which their existing support to North African states is based. In turn, where aspects of European policy have identified the right combination of targets, Europe’s zeal for preventive security has thrown the most promising aspects of policy off course. This is most notable in the retreat from regional democracy promotion and engagement with the breadth of Islamist and other opposition movements that have emerged in recent years.

In attempting to stimulate more debate on these issues within the UK, it is perhaps significant that a recent Chatham House briefing paper on the ‘hidden risks to security’ elicited more commentary and responses from outside the UK than from inside it.2 For the UK, long used to France and Spain taking (and indeed often jealously guarding) the lead on specific North African issues, revis-iting policy towards a region which is currently included within much larger EU Mediterranean policy processes and frameworks poses problems of how to engage with specific policy challenges. Kristina Kausch and Richard Youngs chart how far the EU’s Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, launched in 1995, and the more recent Union for the Mediterranean, launched in 2008, have strayed from engaging with the local drivers for change in North Africa. Both processes are so frequently halted by or held hostage to the Arab–Israeli conflict that the needs of North Africa are suppressed or obscured. Since UK policy towards the Maghreb in particular is largely filtered through the channels of EU foreign and external policy, links with the region have become limited by the lack of strong national imperatives. Beyond counterterrorism, migration control and energy security the UK has invested less in sustaining and building a stronger set of bilateral relationships in North Africa outside these EU frameworks.

The news, nonetheless, is not all bad, and it is unfortunate that some of the better news has not been entirely captured by the contributions that comprise this special issue. The aim has in part been to act as a showcase for British academic and research interest in North Africa, which, despite a still limited scope, has been developing and expanding in recent years. Not all the contributors to this issue

2 Claire Spencer, ‘North Africa: the hidden risks to regional stability’, Chatham House briefing paper, MENAP BP 2009/01, April 2009.


Claire Spencer


are in fact British scholars, but they all have strong, growing or previous ties to Chatham House’s interest in North Africa. Contributors were invited to interpret North Africa loosely, encompassing Egypt as part of the broader region or not, depending on whether their analysis was pertinent only to the Maghreb group of states (the North African littoral minus Egypt). None was tasked with drawing direct conclusions for British policy, but all were asked rather to highlight aspects of their research that might provoke further reflections on where British policy should focus attention in future. In the case of the contributions on EU and US policy, chosen because of their influence over British policy directions, it is clear that the authors have significant reservations about the ability of current policy initiatives to encompass both their unintended and longer-term consequences.

At least four of the contributors (Alison Pargeter, George Joffé, Lise Storm and Jonathan Githens-Mazer) are currently engaged in research projects examining the roots of radicalization in North African societies. For this reason, a number of the articles focus on the contexts within which radicalism thrives, on the political and economic factors shaping the reactions of North African governments to Islamist activism, and on the support given by external actors (above all the EU and US) to combating the rise of violent extremism. What all of these accounts suggest is that more attention needs to be paid to the religious dimensions of the region’s polit-ical cultures, not as an aberration from the secular norms that regional elites have ostensibly espoused over the past 50 years, but as an intrinsic part of the collective memories and identities of these societies. The focus on radicalism merely ampli-fies the depth of frustration many feel when these identities are constrained, often violently, by their political and economic environments. It also raises questions, explored here by Jonathan Githens-Mazer, about the functional value of violence as a recurring form of politics, above all in Algeria.

To balance this, it was hoped to include an article on the diversity of cultural and social change in North Africa, especially in relation to the interactions between North African diaspora communities resident in Europe and their societies of origin. For reasons of timing, it proved impossible to do this, but it is hoped that an article of this kind will appear in a future edition of International Affairs. The rationale for charting the growing dynamism of North African civil society, both within and across borders, is that it is not all related to disenchantment or a drift towards violence. The positive aspects, ranging from artistic, media and musical endeavours to the creation of financial networks to support the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in North Africa, are not always as easy to capture or characterize as the region’s more salient instances of radically inspired violence. In a policy sense, however, these smaller, yet positive, initiatives require further exploration and more focused, supportive external attention.

On the economic side, North Africa has experienced sustained growth rates in recent years, even if the benefits of higher state revenues have accrued to large sections of society in only patchy and limited ways. The situation is encouraging insofar as the debt burdens of the past no longer weigh down on national govern-ments, which now have increased financial resources at their disposal to invest




for the long term. The downside is that the regulatory frameworks needed for investing and disbursing revenues wisely and sustainably are in their infancy, while patterns of state control and ‘crony capitalism’, as pointed out by Jon Marks, have a tendency to be self-reinforcing. It is the unevenness of develop-ments across the region that presents the greatest conundrum to outsiders. While levels of GDP per capita put the whole of North Africa outside the scope of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) bilateral country assistance focusing on poverty alleviation, large pockets of the region’s popula-tion are still living in poverty as internationally defined. As Lise Storm writes: ‘Approximately 15 per cent of Algeria’s population, 44 per cent of Egypt’s, 14 per cent of Morocco’s and 7 per cent of Tunisia’s are currently living below the poverty line.’3 If these communities are not the source of one of Britain’s main security headaches (radical jihadists or terrorists), those with just enough means to pay the human traffickers could well join the ranks of the other (illegal migrants) in coming years.

A new British approach?

A renewal of British interest in this region might well start from a closer exami-nation of the opportunities it offers for investment. As Jon Marks points out in another publication, ‘the southern Mediterranean flank, from Morocco’s Atlantic coast to Egypt’s Sinai, offers a huge array of different prospects, from niche real estate developments, healthcare provision and education to big ticket infrastructure developments and aluminium and other giant industrial schemes’.4 In response to globalism, there is still a largely unmet demand for English language training that British providers could do more to supply, as well as other investment opportuni-ties that have been met only timidly by British investors, at least in part because of existing language barriers and the lack of cultural familiarity on both sides of the relationship. On the North African side, however, more could be done to make life easier for Anglophone investors. The bureaucratic hurdles and the lack of legal, economic and political transparency noted in a number of the contributions here also deter potential investors used to making more straightforward and predictable business choices in markets elsewhere.

This is where a reorientation of European and US policy towards the region could make a difference, in creating new incentives—and dissuasions—for North Africa’s leaders to tackle the clear and inherent limitations to the status quo. Politics and economics are so closely entwined in North African state systems that any attempt to delineate the private and public spheres constitutes an ill-defined endeavour in itself. The region’s economies, in other words, are just as much subject to the ‘vicious cycles of repression and radicalization’ that Lise Storm and, by implication, Jonathan Githens-Mazer identify as dominating the political 3 Lise Storm, ‘The persistence of authoritarianism as a source of radicalization in North Africa’, International

Affairs 85: 5, Sept. 2009, p. 1009.4 Jon Marks, ‘A zone ripe with opportunity’, in Middle East business focus: guide to trade and investment in the Middle

East and North Africa 2009 (London: Middle East Association/Newsweek Communications, 2009).


Claire Spencer


sphere. If the international climate not only makes it easier to follow tried and tested systems of governance, but also rewards local leaderships for doing so, then it is hardly surprising that prevention, repression and policing remain preferable to tackling root causes, expanding participation in both public and private endea-vours, and identifying solutions (more likely than not to be prejudicial to those in a position to apply them) to the region’s challenges.

As the conclusions of much of the analysis in this issue imply, this approach is unlikely to be sustainable for long. The weight of the demographic pressures outlined above, combined with the longevity of existing leaderships, means that changes at the top will be all but inevitable over the next five to ten years. Planning for this from outside requires, at the very least, a better understanding of the dynamics of the alternatives that could follow, ranging from smooth successions to the sons and heirs of current leaders to the kind of contestation most recently seen in Iran, or indeed something significantly worse. North African societies do have the advantage that socially, at least, they are accessible and diverse, to which the large and open tourist sectors of Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco attest. This accessibility, which is now being squeezed by the authorities in each state, argues in favour of the British policy establishment taking up the challenge posed by Storm and by Kausch and Youngs. This is to renew and lead the EU’s efforts towards upgrading democracy promotion while the opportunity is still there: not as a complementary initiative to the hard security options now preferred, but as the best conduit towards ensuring the region’s long-term stability and security.

There is another dimension to moving away from the current reliance (shared by the US as well as Europe, as Yahia Zoubir illustrates) on strong and centralized states. Alison Pargeter’s analysis highlights the localized and historical roots of much of the region’s contemporary Islamist opposition movements. Her insights suggest that a shift in attention away from the capitals of North Africa, to the traditionally neglected subregions of each state, could reap more tangible rewards in terms of stemming the spread of radicalism, and at considerably less cost to the EU and US than the resources currently deployed to support, train and arm national security establishments.

The Tangiers–Tetouan region in the north of Morocco, for example, until recently suffered years of neglect by the central state authorities, yet its proximity to Europe (only 14 kilometres away across the Straits of Gibraltar) offers new opportunities for creating a regional economic hub with southern Europe. The success of the Tangiers–Med transhipment and container port, opened in 2007 and now under expansion, has surprised many observers by creating significant compe-tition to the overstretched resources in the nearest Spanish port across the Straits, Algeciras. In a region of high unemployment, and with a history of radicaliza-tion as outlined by Alison Pargeter, northern Morocco’s recently formed regional




investment centre has ambitious plans to develop the region.5 It nevertheless faces considerable challenges in combating the local drug trade and its associated, and often illicit, financial and business offshoots. Since the region is a major transit route for the trafficking of sub-Saharan migrants into Europe, a targeted effort by the UK to invest further in this region and assist in training the local workforce could, in addition to combating crime, have considerable offshoot benefits for both local and European security.

For the US, however, even under the change of presidency in 2009, security policy towards the broader North African and Saharan (Sahel) region still appears to be wedded, as Yahia Zoubir describes, to the kind of counterterrorist mission best known under the Bush-era rubric of the ‘global war on terror’. Here, combating Al-Qaeda and its local offshoots (most notably the Algerian-based Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or AQIM) is the primary goal. Even if not pursued to the exclusion of other US policies in the sphere of democracy promotion and the development of regional markets, US military training and surveillance efforts in the Sahara nonetheless receive the lion’s share of American attention and resources.

This focus on international security imperatives is not lost on local popula-tions. Having gained independence from colonial and protectorate powers barely 50 years ago, they have grown used to suspecting the motives of outsiders’ involve-ment in the region. If security deficits (economic as well as political) are not seen as a priority to be tackled on behalf of all the region’s populations, the exploitation by jihadist movements of the US presence in the region, and by extension, that of the British and other European actors, is likely to continue. As yet, however, the very diversity of North African societies means that no single movement or ideology has taken root, nor is terrorism the predominant choice of even the most disaffected of the region’s youth.

Yahia Zoubir’s account further demonstrates that if the region is subject to patchy development, it is not aided by patchy international responses either. In other words, the international resources that go into preventing the spread of crime and terrorism via national governments should at the very least be matched by those devoted to enabling the wider populations of North Africa to devise and act on their own cures. For the US, this has meant a renewed emphasis on encour-aging regional integration as the best means of maximizing the region’s markets and private sector growth. Yet the simmering, if not now violent, conflict over the Western Sahara still requires more sustained diplomatic engagement than has hitherto been evident to overcome the longstanding barriers raised between the region’s key players, Morocco and Algeria. In this the UK (via the UN or bilater-ally) could play a much more significant part.

5 See the Centre Régional d’Investissement Tanger–Tétouan website for investment plans (in French): http://www.investangier.com/, accessed 11 Aug. 2009. A new English language school has recently been opened in Tangier, to complement a long-established translators’ college, suggesting that within years the cultural deterrent for non-French or local Arabic speakers may be overcome. Engaging with the bureaucratic and other impediments to market access might require more patient, yet persistent, demonstrations of the benefits to be accrued from new methods of working.


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