of large entities, and that the unity of language and culture offered to Arabs a historical opportunity that should be seized.15
ONCE AGAIN, I REFER the reader to the first volume of these memoirs for a narrative of my participation in Egyptian political life during the Nasser era. Later, I shall give an account of my activities in post-Nasser Egypt up to the current revolution, which erupted in 2011.
MY ACTIVITIES IN THE MAGHREB AND MASHREQ
I began my discoveries of the Arab world beyond Egypt with the countries of the Maghreb, which very few Arabs from the Mashreq knew at that time. Within the context of my teaching at the IDEP, I gave myself the objective of closely studying the three experiences of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, still in the initial stages of their development in the middle of the 1960s.
Tunisia and Morocco
It was, I believe, in 1963 that the first opportunity arose to visit the Maghreb. The Plan administration in Tunisia wanted to establish a new framework for its national accounts. It confided this task to two experts: a Syrian statistician, Nazhat Chalaq, and me (recommended by SEEF). We fulfilled our mission, properly I believe, in stays of fifteen days that, for me, were spread over several months. Hussein Zhall and other colleagues at the Plan assisted us with great effectiveness, friendship, and Arab hospitality. Chalaq was a very talented statistician who was able to uncover the contradictions and absurdities in the figures submitted by various people. Having a good sense of humor, he said to me one day: “They cheat everyone, but not to the same extent; the President will have to decide by decree the proportion of compulsory cheating for all services.” We pushed the fun to the point of including this proposal in our final report! That report was very well received, and its reception reassured us about the Tunisian administrators’ sense of humor.
My stays in Tunis allowed me to meet many intellectuals, professors, and political leaders of the Tunisian left. (These same intellectuals, with well-established reputations, later led teams in the TWF.) Students also asked me from time to time to give them a lecture, a request I never refused. But I did not meet the “big leaders” of the Destourian system, those of the Bourguibist camp or those of the Ben Salahist and Ben Youssefist camps. I met Ben Salah much later, after his release from prison. I only knew of the system’s internal contradictions through their interpretation by the left opposition.
Obviously, I visited Tunisia subsequently on numerous occasions and I followed its change of direction—the failure of its attempted insertion into the international system via a strategy of welcoming outsourcing operations in free trade zones—and the rise of fundamentalist Islam. Tunisian society remains, despite everything, one of the least backward in the Arab and Muslim world in an important area: the status of women. In the long term, I believe this advantage is decisive. Habib Ben Ali Bourguiba should be credited with this advance, whatever one thinks of his—quite limited—political views, his illusions concerning the West, particularly the United States, his penchant to autocracy, and perhaps his unbearable vanity. That certainly does not suffice to excuse Ben Ali’s odious regime of its everyday villainy.
I began to have a small reputation as a good technician at creating a framework for national accounts tailored to planning needs. This reputation is probably what lay behind the invitation, circa 1964, from the Moroccan Minister of the Economy (or Planning?) Driss Slaoui. I had known the young Slaoui, a communist student in Paris. He had put a lot of water in his wine, but remained, in his own way, faithful to his youthful ideals. The Moroccan comrades with whom I have spent time since this first opportunity, followed by repeated visits, are friends I respect. But despite my respect for the activities of these militants, their party (the PPS) does not appear to me to have succeeded in going beyond the limitations of a narrow elite circle lacking solid grassroots support.
Militants of the left-wing of the USFP—during the heyday of this party—certainly benefited from a much wider popular audience. But all those whom I met left me with the feeling that they would only move beyond the limitations of Nasserist/Boumediennist/Baathist populism with great difficulty. This turned out to be the case, while they gradually and inevitably slid to the right, participating in the great game of the monarchy anxious to expand the system’s legitimacy by integrating—beyond the traditional classes that have formed its historical base (the Fassi and Soussi merchants, landed and tribal aristocracies, more recently the new comprador bourgeoisie)—the middle strata of the technocracy and bureaucracy and the urban and rural petite bourgeoisies. From that, there followed the anger and revolt of the new generation in the 1970s, the March 22 movement, and what emerged from various organizations. Their leftism was certainly commensurate with their exceptional courage.
The case of the Western Sahara shuffled the cards even more. The PPS and USFP rallied to the “Green March” bloc, as is well known. Concerning the Western Sahara, my personal viewpoint is not widely shared. Invited by leftist Mauritanians to explain my view of the problem, they suggested that I go say these things “at a higher level,” using their connections with the government. The Mauritanian president thus invited me to meet with him. My thesis was simple. We all, I said, are in favor of Arab unity. Then why create an additional Arab state, the Sahrawi Republic? Would this not be tantamount to allowing a small local ruling class to monopolize the earnings from phosphate exports? And if this region has to become part of an existing Arab country, is not Mauritania the best choice? The tribes of Western Sahara are the same ones found in Mauritania. Should not an attempt be made to convince Polisario and the Mauritanian government to make a joint declaration to this effect? And at the same time, why not go further and propose a confederation of Morocco, Algeria, and Mauritania, and begin serious negotiations to provide substance to that proposition? I am sure that the peoples of the three countries would be more than favorable, even enthusiastic. The Mauritanian president seemed to be convinced by these views, although they came too late since the Madrid accords had already been signed, in which Morocco and Mauritania agreed to share the Western Sahara. Some time later, the president perished in an airplane accident. To others, I said: Why don’t parties, organizations, and important persons on the left in the three countries adopt this common position? They would be understood and would gain the support of their peoples. None of them would do it. Why?
The Algerian government at the time harbored extravagant expansionist ambitions. It treated its recent Mauritanian ally like a semi-colony. I heard Algerian leaders with my own ears refer to the Mauritanian president as the “wali [custodian/helper] of Nouakchott.” I laid into them. “Pardon me? Is that how you believe you will achieve Arab unity? Moreover, the Algerian model of which you are so proud is beginning to run out of steam. Is the question of the Western Sahara the major problem for the Algerian people today? Is it not the main priority of the Algerian left [because to cap it all, the statements mentioned above were made by important figures in the Algerian left] to have a closer look at this model and step up efforts to resolve the impasses in which it resulted?”
I never made any public declarations or wrote anything about this affair because I thought that would only throw oil on the fire as long as the leftist forces in the three countries refused to assume their responsibility. But this example illustrates two realities, in my opinion. The first is that the Algerian left had decided to align itself unreservedly with Boumediennism, of which it was no more than one wing. It subsequently had to pay dearly when the regime’s legitimacy eroded and then collapsed, to the immediate advantage of the Islamists. In the eyes of the working classes, the Algerian Communist Party did not appear to have a project different from that of the FLN. The second is that the division among Arabs is not only or even mainly the result of manipulation by outside forces. It is the product of the established ruling classes and the opposing forces, of their egotistical ambitions and narrow-minded views. I subsequently visited Morocco and Algeria on multiple occasions. I must say that I have unfortunately not seen any palpable progress made in any of these areas. There has been no self-critique.
Here is another interesting story. I was invited to Rabat around 1974 to “assist” the Secretaries-General of the Arab League and
