Robert Mortimer

State and Army in Algeria: The ‘Bouteflika effect’

Abstract Abdelaziz Bouteflika has neutralised the army as the longstanding principal power broker in the Algerian political system. The former foreign minister, elected president in 1999 and re-elected in 2004, has converted his prominence in international affairs into political capital at home. After reviewing the historical role of the military in Algerian politics, the article analyses Bouteflikas career and the process by which he has consolidated the power of a civilian presidency while encouraging the professionalisation of the military institution. In parallel fashion, he reclaimed control over the FLN from his electoral rival Ali Benflis.

Africa in the Twenty-First Century

As the world enters the twenty-first century, African states and societies are enmeshed in a process of global reordering. The terms we have used to describe contemporary African politics—“vibrant,” “fluid,” “rich,” “complex”—are especially appropriate today. Despite the economic and social problems faced by most African governments, the continent is characterized by a tremendous political vitality. Indeed, as the 1990s so forcefully demonstrated, the very difficulties that Africans have faced since independence have prompted experimentation with new political forms and directions.

Global Economy and African Foreign Policy: The Algerian Model

The classical realist school exemplified by Morgenthau, Kennan, and Kissinger has long dominated the study of international politics. In conceptualizing national interest, this school thinks predominantly in geopolitical, military/strategic terms. Economic power constitutes a source of military capability, but it is a subsidiary variable in analyzing the balance of power, which stands as the central concept in this mode of analysis. Africanists have increasingly questioned the utility of this approach for the analysis of African foreign policy. Economic power is not a subsidiary factor in the diplomacy of African states—on the contrary, it is a central but yet essentially negative variable. African states themselves lack economic power. In other words, they must function in a world system dominated by the economic power of others. Global economic structures, elaborated during the colonial era, greatly affect the options open to African states. In the context of an established international division of labor, there are enormous constraints on African choices. Foreign policy is shaped by, but is also potentially an instrument to shape, the external economic environment. In studying African foreign policy, scholars must take into consideration international economic structures. How are states in practice confronting or accommodating, the external economic environment? Case studies that seek to answer this question are now beginning to appear.

Algerian foreign policy: from revolution to national interest

In the immediate aftermath of independence, Algeria pursued a militant anti-imperialist policy of Third World solidarity under presidents Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumediene. The 1976 National Charter sets forth the rationale for such a foreign policy which was marked by Algerian leadership in the Group of 77, the Nonaligned Movement and the effort to create a New International Economic Order in North-South relations. During the 1980s, President Chadli Benjedid gradually shifted the focus of Algerian diplomacy from Third World leadership to a regional policy focused on the Maghreb and the establishment of the Union du Maghreb Arabe. The severe internal crisis of the 1990s led to a further retrenchment of Algerian foreign policy. Despite his role in the revolutionary years, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has continued the evolution of the states foreign policy towards national interest pragmatism.

FROM FEDERALISM TO FRANCOPHONIA: SENGHOR'S AFRICAN POLICY

The passing of the colonial order from much of Africa left a complex geopolitical environment within which to confront the problems of modernization. Since 1960 African states have had to cope with a confused mosaic of competing sovereignties bequeathed by the colonial scramble and the breakup of the colonial federations. In spite of the appeal of pan-Africanism to many African intellectuals, diversity and differentiation rather than unity have been the rule in the postcolonial era, both within most African states and in their international relations. Despite similar legacies and many common problems, African governments have found it difficult to transcend their colonial boundaries either in the name of political ideology or apolitical efficiency.

Ethnicity, Class, and the State

Our political interaction approach emphasizes the complexity of the group demands that the African state faces. It assumes a constant engagement of rival interests in the contemporary political arena, an interaction among various groups mobilized to secure public resources from those in authority. These groups—based on ethnicity, region, race, gender, religion, generation, class, and so forth—may be distinct in terms of origins and appeals, but they share common features in the way they organize to engage in a dynamic interplay of conflict and collaboration. In some instances cultural communities succeed in uniting people for some of the primary purposes of existence—cultural fulfillment, belongingness, psychological and physical security, and social intercourse; where this occurs, such communities can play an important role in gathering group members around an intermediary for the purpose of making collective demands on state decisionmakers. The range of these demands varies considerably. Not only do group representatives lay claim to a full share of public political power, protections, economic resources, administrative positions, contracts, awards, and scholarships but they make appeals, sometimes more conflict-laden in their effects, for broad grants of political autonomy and independence.

South Africa: The Possibilities and Limits of Transforming State and Society

On April 26, 1994, South Africans voted in the first nonracial universal suffrage election in the country’s violent history and elected Nelson Mandela president. The election culminated decades of popular struggle against apartheid, a system of racial domination whose hallmarks were racial violence and privilege. In 1960, Africa’s “year of independence” in much of the continent, the ruling government in South Africa banned the leading nationalist movement, the African National Congress (ANC). Not until thirty years later would the government lift its ban on the ANC and other antiapartheid political parties. The intervening period saw recurrent outbursts of violent protest and ever growing black political mobilization within the country, and increasing international pressure against apartheid in the rest of the world. Mandela’s election brought one chapter in the history of Africa to a close—the era of formal white domination of African states—and began a new era in South Africa’s history: an era faced with the challenge of transforming a racist, ethnically dominated state and society into a nonracial democracy.

State Institutions and the Organization of the Public Arena

In the first part of this book we examine the types of organizations devised by Africans at various levels to mobilize themselves, their allies, and their resources to deal with their constantly changing surroundings, and we introduce the basic concepts of contemporary African politics: state, social groups, ethnicity, and class. Who are the main political actors in Africa today? What interests do they have and what resources do they control? How are they structured? In what ways are they connected? And what are their capabilities and their weaknesses? In Chapter 2 we focus on the consolidation and alteration of formal government institutions, and in Chapter 3 we deal with the structures of social and economic life. Because state and society are analytical categories that intersect and frequently overlap, Chapter 4 is devoted specifically to the investigation of the many forms of state-society relations that have evolved in Africa in the postcolonial period. These relationships provide the basis for understanding how decisions are made, why certain policies are adopted, how they affect various groups, and with what results.

Africa and the World Economy

When African countries received their independence, most had economies that were closely tied to those of the former colonial power. At least one-third of the trade of most countries occurred with the former metropole; in many cases, particularly the francophone states, the concentration was much higher. France, for instance, accounted for three-quarters of the external trade of Benin, Chad, Niger, and Senegal at independence. Most countries had given preferential tariff treatment to imports from the metropole during the colonial period; similarly, most countries tied their domestic currency to the value of that of the metropole. Colonial powers had typically monopolized foreign investment in their colonies: A similar concentration was found in aid receipts. Decolonization offered the opportunity to African governments to diversify their economic links and to reduce their economic dependence on the former colonial power. In this chapter, we examine a number of strategies that African governments have pursued in attempting to restructure their external economic relations. We focus on efforts to promote self-reliance; on relations with transnational corporations (TNCs); on Africa and the New International Economic Order (NIEO); and on Africa’s relations with the former colonial powers of the EEC through the Yaounde and Lome Conventions. Finally, we examine how Africa’s economic decline has opened the way for new external intervention in African economies by the international financial institutions.

Regimes in Independent Africa

Political processes—the ways in which political rules, norms, methods, and modes of interaction are established, maintained, and change—have evolved in Africa in a historical environment of economic adversity and external dependence and in a structural context of fragility and diffusion. Patterns of political conduct determine priorities, preoccupations, and possibilities. Development strategies and foreign policies (the substance of politics) are therefore the concrete outcome of how politics are conceived, practiced, and transformed. The dynamics of politics in Africa is about the procedures and mechanisms by which state agencies and social groups cooperate, conflict, intertwine, and consequently act.