Abstract
From the end of the 19 th to the beginning of the 20 th century, Morocco’s modernizing projects included plans for signing up to the Geneva Convention and creating a local Red Cross/Crescent society. These plans initially stemmed from the convergence of Moroccan administrative/military reforms and Spanish “regenerationist” interventions. They ran parallel to developments in leading Islamic countries such as Egypt, Persia and the Ottoman Empire though they would have to wait till the country’s independence from Franco-Spanish domination in 1956 to become a reality. Beyond their lack of actual results, those early initiatives would serve as legal ground for Morocco’s “humanitarian sovereignty”, tacitly confirmed by the provisions of the Algeciras Act of 1906. In the following two decades, the resilience of this sovereignty would reveal itself in the sustained competition between the Spanish and the French Red Cross for “humanitarian hegemony” in the country, and also in the repeated and nearly successful demands to establish a local Red Cross/Crescent that were made to the International Committee of the Red Cross by the insurgent leader Abdelkrim during the so-called Rif War.
Highlights
During the 19th century, Islamic countries such as the Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Persia launched programs of reform aimed at modernising the structures of their armies, State bureaucracies and economies in an effort to deal with the growing challenges posed by European hegemony in the world (Al-Sayyid, 1984; Moreau, 2007; Moreau 2009)
Late 19th century plans for joining the Red Cross movement can be taken as another example of independent Morocco’s modernizing projects in the field of medicine and public health. Despite their failure to materialize before the Protectorate period they paralleled similar, more accomplished developments in leading Islamic countries such as the Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Persia
A weak, problematic, though utterly resilient drive towards modernization would have been the thread connecting the creation of the Tangier Lifeboat Board in 1886, the demarchés for joining the Geneva Convention in 1897-99 and the Riffian demands for a Red Cross/Red Crescent society in 192426 with the creation of the Moroccan Red Crescent in 1956
Summary
During the 19th century, Islamic countries such as the Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Persia launched programs of reform aimed at modernising the structures of their armies, State bureaucracies and economies in an effort to deal with the growing challenges posed by European hegemony in the world (Al-Sayyid, 1984; Moreau, 2007; Moreau 2009). ABSTRACT: From the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century, Morocco’s modernizing projects included plans for signing up to the Geneva Convention and creating a local Red Cross/Crescent society.
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