Frontiers in North Africa

2.4 The Creation of Colonial Boundaries

The modern boundaries of North Africa are a consequence of France's attempts to create an imperial domain stretching from the African coast of the Mediterranean into central Africa and then westwards to the Atlantic shores of West Africa. In the case of North Africa, therefore, they represent internal French administrative divisions as well as delimitations between France and its colonial partners - Italy and Spain. The principles on which such arrangements were made were, indeed, those already well-established by practice in Europe and, at the time, were uncontroversial. Details were often in dispute and were consequently frequently subject to violent disagreement, but the principles involved were not. Certainly, the details were to lead to disputes between independent states in the postcolonial period and then, of course, more profound disputes over questions of principle could - and often did - arise.

In the period before colonial occupation was complete, however, border delimitations were also forced on indigeneous authorities - the Ottoman administration in Tripoli in the case of the Tunisian frontier and the Moroccan sultanate for the western Algerian border close to the Mediterranean coast. Inevitably, the protracted negotiations involved, particularly in the case of Tunisia, a conflict of principle and ideological approach (viz Martel 1965; 1-67). Although France was able to impose its view, it did so at the cost of future problems for its successor states since the original indigeneous assumptions over the basis of division of sovereign political authority have persisted at some level throughout the colonial period and into independence.

A similar situation developed over border delimitations imposed by France - as the occupying colonial power between territories that it considered an integral part of its own domain - Algeria - and those it considered protectorates where indigeneous authority was still theoretically sovereign despite effective French suzereinty. This was to apply to Morocco after 1912 (Brignon 1967; 341-356) and to Tunisia after 1881 (Nelson (ed) 1979; 33). Here too the innate conflict between indigeneous concepts of sovereignty and those imported through the colonial experience have continued to bedevil inter-state relations since the states of North Africa achieved independence - 1951 for Libya, 1956 for Morocco and Tunisia and 1962 for Algeria.

The inherent juridical and ideological contradiction that was to mark all these negotiations was that, whereas Islamic political and legal theory and practice define sovereignty in communal terms - although it must be admitted that the provisions for this in Islamic legal practice (sharc) are sketchy and inadequate (Schacht 1964; 76) - European jurisprudence - which has effectively become the basis for international law - places a primary emphasis on territory (Delupis 1974; 3-6). This is a consequence of the development of the European concept of the state as an area of unique and sovereign power over which political authority is exercised, rather than relating sovereignty primarily to populations (Joffe 1986; 7).

The ideological assumptions involved were inherent in colonial practice in Africa where little attention was paid to the reality of population settlement and migration patterns in establishing the divisions in territorial control, particularly when such divisions were established by metropolitan ministries and governments with no reference to the situation on the ground at all (Muller 1982; 166-167). On the other hand, great attention has always been paid to the exact location of the arbitrary lines that were defined as frontiers and boundaries of different political and administrative authorities, whatever the topological or demographic reality may have been - as would be expected from a territorial vision of sovereignty. Even during the colonial period - in North Africa at least - this approach caused a continual series of disputes and rebellions, over land ownership rights, migration patterns and pasturing traditions, thus demonstrating the consequences of too radical an imposition of a different set of ideological and cultural postulates on juridical distinctions of sovereignty.