Frontiers in North Africa

2.10 The Consequences

Indeed, the Moroccan case underlines the fact that these concepts of sovereignty that now inform the situation in independent North Africa are articulated with all the force and precision of territorial delimitation that is typical of the European experience, even though the underlying principle is one of communal sovereignty, in which territory was not of primordial importance. The explanation is simply that the successor states to the colonial legacy are obliged by the logic of the ideologies they have incorporated through the experience of national liberation to claim a nationalist heritage within their sovereign territories. Thus, ironically, border disputes in North Africa are the ultimate colonial legacy in that they have forced the independent states of North Africa to adopt that typical form of European political organisation, the nation state. In doing so, they have also accepted the primacy of precise territorial delimitation in defining their uniqueness and sovereignty.