Colonial Origins of the Algerian-Moroccan Border Conflict of October 1963

Abstract

The newly independent nations of the Maghrib inherited many political problems from their former imperial ruler. Of these, the question of frontiers was potentially the most explosive. The Algerian-Moroccan hostilities in the fall of 1963 provided clear evidence of this fact. Another territorial dispute pitted Tunisia against Algeria in a diplomatic crisis. In each case, the government in Algiers disputed claims based on the historic rights of Morocco and Tunisia. In contradiction to the ancient claims of its neighbors, the Algerian thesis was that it now owned all territories that had been controlled by the French administration of colonial Algeria (“Algerian-Moroccan Border Conflict…” 1963). In order to judge these contradictory allegations, it is thus necessary to look back to French colonial policies. Such a study inevitably leads to the conclusion that France was largely responsible for this great divisive question in North Africa. The blame might well be mitigated, however, for beyond selfish French colonial interests lay varying concepts of statehood and long-standing historical problems. When the French conquered Algiers, they had no plan to take all of Algeria. Nor was there an Algerian state in the European sense, or an Algerian consciousness. Nationalism was apparently born out of opposition to French rule. When, about 1837, France decided to take all of the “Regency of Algiers,” no one knew exactly what the term included. French expansion in North Africa, however, quickly brought the colonialists into direct conflict with the ill-defined empires of Morocco and of the Beylik of Tunis as well as with so-called Algerian dissidents.