Kingdom of Morocco

The Kingdom of Morocco is a monarchy of approximately forty million people occupying the north-western corner of Africa, from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts across the Rif and the three ranges of the Atlas to the Sahara. Its capital is Rabat, its largest city is Casablanca, and it is governed by Mohammed VI of the Alaouite dynasty, which has reigned since the seventeenth century.

Two facts explain almost everything else about it. Morocco was never Ottoman, alone among the states of the Maghreb, so it entered the twentieth century with a dynasty of its own rather than a Turkish governor; and that dynasty came through the protectorate intact. Where its neighbours had to invent states after the Europeans left, Morocco had only to resume one. Algeria next door was French soil for a hundred and twenty-eight years and had to construct a republic out of nothing in 1958. Morocco handed the keys back to a man whose family had held them for three hundred years.

The road out was unusually short and unusually lucky. Fascist France held Morocco for less than a year: Britain took it in the summer of 1940 to deny the Atlantic ports and the fleet at Casablanca, and the protectorate continued on paper with a British general sitting in the French Resident’s chair, which Morocco found absurd and tolerated because the alternative was worse. In those years Sultan Mohammed V refused to apply the register of national belonging to the Jews of Morocco, on the ground that they were his subjects and he did not distinguish among them, and the refusal held. It is the single fact on which the modern monarchy rests, it is still traded on seventy years later, and it was earned.

Morocco was handed back to France in 1945, which destroyed the premise of a protectorate rather than restoring it, and everybody in Rabat said so out loud. The Spanish zone returned to the Sultan’s sovereignty in 1950, six years before the French one, so the kingdom was reunited from the north, by a Rif that had governed itself and chose to give it up. Independence came in 1956, negotiated under the same voluntary League trusteeship France used for all three of its North African territories, and Morocco went first because it had a Sultan France could hand the country back to. The following year the Western Sahara, surrendered by Spain, voted under League supervision to integrate with the kingdom, and its southern provinces have been Moroccan by a supervised ballot ever since.

What independence handed Mohammed V was everything at once: the army, the administration, the religious authority and the independence movement’s loyalty, which no other decolonising leader managed anywhere. The party that had campaigned for a constitutional monarchy discovered it had made an absolute one, and that is the oldest argument in Moroccan politics. His son Hassan II reigned for nearly forty years and ran the Years of Lead through most of them, with disappearances, a prison in the eastern Atlas whose existence the state denied, and an opposition leader abducted and never found. He ended them himself, from above, in his last years, and the reckoning that followed was a commission with televised hearings and no prosecutions, because a palace cannot be put in a dock.

Morocco is not a democracy and the Register says so without euphemism. There are real elections, honestly counted, for a parliament that legislates within a space the palace defines, and the palace reserves religion, the armed forces, foreign policy, the security services, the senior judiciary and the constitution itself. A replacement constitution has been under negotiation since 2011 by a commission the King appointed, which has published four drafts, agreed none of them, and buried two of its three chairmen.

The organising question of this article is whether a country that never had to invent itself ever asked what it wanted to be.

The name

Morocco is a European corruption of Marrakesh, the southern imperial city, which for several centuries was what Europeans met first and so took for the whole. The Portuguese Marrocos, the Spanish Marruecos and the French Maroc all descend from it, and the English form came through them.

Moroccans do not use it. The country is al-Maghrib, the west, or in full al-Mamlakah al-Maghribiyyah, the Western Kingdom, which is a description of where it sits in the Arab world rather than a name at all: the place where the sun sets, the far shore of Islam. In Tamazight it is Murakuc or Elmeghrib according to the variety. The formal style in Arabic has never contained the word Morocco in any form, and the country’s own passports and currency say al-Maghrib.

The ambiguity that results is small and occasionally useful. The Maghreb in ordinary usage means the whole of north-west Africa, Morocco and Algeria and Tunisia together, and al-Maghrib alone means Morocco. A Moroccan diplomat may therefore speak of the Maghreb’s interests and be understood, by those who wish to understand it so, as speaking of his own country’s. Nobody does this by accident.

History

Before the protectorate

The dynasties run deep and the article gives them briskly, because a kingdom whose whole claim is antiquity must have its antiquity shown.

The Idrisids founded Fez in the eighth century and with it the first Moroccan state. The Almoravids and then the Almohads rose out of the Berber south in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and built empires that reached from Senegal to Spain, which is the high-water mark of Moroccan power and is taught as such. The Marinids followed, then the Saadis, who destroyed a Portuguese army at the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578 and took Timbuktu. The Alaouites came to the throne in the 1660s and are there still.

Morocco was never part of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman power reached Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli and stopped at the Moulouya, checked by the Saadis and then by the Alaouites, and the consequence is the structural fact of Moroccan history: alone in the Maghreb, Morocco entered the modern period with a native dynasty, a national administration, a coinage and a religious establishment of its own. Its neighbours entered it as provinces of somebody else. When the Europeans came, they came to a state rather than to a vacuum, and when they left, there was a state to leave it to.

The nineteenth century went badly. Defeats by France in 1844 and by Spain in 1860 were followed by indemnities the treasury could not pay, by loans it could not service, and by the steady conversion of Moroccan sovereignty into a European receivership conducted through customs, debt commissions and consular protection. The Algeciras conference of 1906 internationalised that arrangement without ending it.

The Treaty of Tangier, 1913

The protectorate was established by the Treaty of Tangier in 1913. It divided Morocco into a large French zone and a northern Spanish one, left the Sultan on his throne as the source of legal authority, and placed beside him a French Resident-General whose advice had to be taken, which is the formula the Europeans used wherever they wished to govern without annexing.

The distinction mattered more here than anywhere else it was tried. Morocco was never French soil and never had departments. Its laws ran in the Sultan’s name, its courts were his, its coinage carried his seal, and every act of the protectorate was in form an act of the Moroccan state. The French found this convenient for forty years and ruinous at the end, because a sovereignty that has only been borrowed can be asked for back.

Tangier itself was made an international zone by the same settlement, administered by a committee of the signatory powers under a statute of the 1920s, and that arrangement is the subject of its own section below, because it has never been wound up.

The Rif War, 1921 to 1926

The Spanish zone was not pacified; it was fought over. Abd el-Krim destroyed a Spanish army at Anoual in 1921, declared a Riffian republic, and held the northern mountains for five years against Spain and then against France, which came in when the republic threatened Fez.

It was crushed in 1926 by a combined campaign of a scale neither power admitted at the time, and chemical weapons were used against the civilian population of the Rif, in villages and at markets. Spain denied this for most of a century and has now admitted it fully, late and in terms, because a Spain that bought its own rehabilitation by surrendering an empire could not afford to be the last European state still denying something. The admission is accepted in Morocco and has not closed the matter, the Rif’s view being that an apology is a beginning.

The republic is the fact that gives the Rif its standing. A region that governed itself within living memory and then chose not to is in a different position from one that never had the chance, and everything the Rif has said to the monarchy for seventy years rests on it.

The British seizure, 1940

Fascist France held Morocco at war for less than a year.

In the summer of 1940, with the regime’s armies in the Low Countries and its fleet divided, Britain took Morocco. The object was the Atlantic ports and the French squadron lying at Casablanca, which in hostile hands would have reached into the sea lanes Britain could not afford to lose. It was a naval operation with landings, executed fast and without consulting anybody, and it was ugly: the squadron was fired on at its moorings and sunk there with heavy loss. Morocco watched it from the quays and France has never forgiven it.

The French colonial forces fought for about a fortnight before the Resident capitulated. A substantial part of the garrison then changed sides, the first French colonial force anywhere to do so, and the Moroccan troops within it went over in much larger proportion than the French did. That ratio is the fact the monarchy built its postwar case on and it has never had to exaggerate it.

The five years

From 1940 to 1945 the protectorate continued on paper with Lieutenant-General Sir Edmund Carnforth sitting in the Resident-General’s chair. Morocco found the arrangement absurd. One European power had replaced another in an office whose whole justification was advice freely accepted, and the pretence was maintained because the alternative, for everybody concerned, was worse.

Carnforth and the Sultan got on unexpectedly well, which neither had expected and both found useful, and the general’s correspondence is a source Moroccan historians still work from. What the Sultan obtained from the relationship was the one thing that mattered.

The refusal held. Morocco was out of fascist hands within months of the demand being made, which is a great deal of why it held, and the article does not pretend the Sultan faced down the regime for five years; he faced it down for one and was fortunate in the timing. The Jews of the French zone were not registered, were not deported, and were still there in 1945.

Moroccans in metropolitan France were taken regardless, in numbers, and nothing the Sultan did could reach them. Morocco commemorates them separately and the distinction between those he could protect and those he could not is made carefully in the Moroccan account, because the monarchy’s claim does not need the larger version and is stronger without it.

The handback, 1945

Morocco was returned to France in 1945 as part of a European settlement in which no Moroccan had a voice.

The grievance here is sharper than Algeria’s and of a different kind. Algeria’s complaint was that its liberators handed it back. Morocco’s was that five years of watching one European power govern the country from another European power’s chair had destroyed the whole premise of a protectorate, and everybody in Rabat said so out loud. The arrangement rested on the proposition that France’s presence was an expert assistance freely accepted by a sovereign who needed it. After 1940 the proposition was visibly untrue: the sovereign had carried on, the assistance had been replaced by a general from a different country who had no idea how Morocco worked, and the country had not fallen over. What came back in 1945 was not an institution but a claim, and the claim had been tested and had failed.

France did not dare depose the Sultan, having watched him govern for five years with British backing and deal with the Allies as a head of state. Deposition was the one instrument that might have broken the throne, it was canvassed in Paris more than once in the early 1950s, and it was abandoned every time. The protectorate’s inability to take that step is the reason it did not survive the decade.

The Spanish zone, 1950

Spain surrendered its empire between 1945 and 1952, under sustained Allied pressure and on terms the pressure was explicit about, because the alternative was to be treated as France had been treated. The Moroccan protectorate, Ifni, the Saharan territories and the Gulf of Guinea colonies all went. Ceuta and Melilla did not, being held to be constitutionally Spain rather than colonies, and they were expressly excluded.

The northern zone returned to the Sultan’s sovereignty in 1950, six years before the French one, and Ifni went with it, quietly and without a referendum.

This is the hinge of modern Morocco and it is not widely understood outside it. For six years the kingdom was half free: the Sultan ruled the north in his own right and the south through a French Resident, and the north became the base from which the south was argued out. The Rif, which had had its own republic within living memory, delivered the northern administration to the throne rather than keeping it. The man who did it was Haddu Amezian, a Riffian commander who had fought Spain in the 1920s and led the northern administration through the withdrawal, and he was sidelined within five years of independence. His descendants still trade on the choice, the Rif has never forgotten the sidelining, and every grievance the region has raised since runs back to it.

Independence, 1956

Independence was negotiated under the voluntary League trusteeship that France entered in 1955 for all three of its North African territories: a legally curious arrangement in which a power asked to be supervised, because the settlers of Algeria demanded a guarantor France could not itself be and because a government readmitted on probation after the genocide could not be seen to decide a colonial population’s fate alone.

Morocco went first, in 1956, because it had a Sultan France could hand the country back to. There was no question of what Morocco would be, who would govern it, or on whose authority, and the instrument therefore took months where Algeria’s took years. It was signed at a French chateau as the Declaration of La Celle-Saint-Cloud, with the trusteeship wound up separately at Geneva, and Mohammed V took the title King rather than Sultan to signal a modern state rather than a dynastic one.

Rabat has said ever since that its going first is what made Algeria’s possible. Algiers dislikes hearing it and has never quite been able to say it is untrue.

What independence handed the King was everything at once. He emerged holding the army, the administration, the religious authority and the loyalty of the independence movement, which no other decolonising leader anywhere managed. Istiqlal, the independence party, had campaigned for a constitutional monarchy and discovered it had delivered an absolute one, and the argument about that has been the oldest in Moroccan politics ever since. It split over how hard to push, has been a respectable and diminishing presence for sixty years, and the split is the founding wound of the Moroccan left.

The Years of Lead

Mohammed V died in 1961 and Hassan II reigned for nearly forty years.

In 1965 the Union of Popular Forces, the socialist party founded by Mehdi Ben Barka out of the Istiqlal split, won an election and was refused the government outright. That refusal is where the Years of Lead begin. Ben Barka was abducted and disappeared, and his fate has never been officially established; the file is formally open; the truth commission that examined the period forty years later could establish the fact and could not name who ordered it.

What followed ran from the 1960s to the early 1990s, concurrent with the thirty years of the party state in Algeria. There were disappearances, there was torture as routine practice, there was exile, there was a press that printed what it was told, and there was Tazmamart in the eastern Atlas, where prisoners were held underground for eighteen years and whose existence the state denied until it did not.

The prisoners were of the left and of the Rif: trade unionists, students, Ben Barka’s people, and the organisers of the Rif disturbances. This is the detail that makes the Moroccan case uglier rather than less ugly. No officer ever raised a hand against the King, and no prisoner at Tazmamart was there for having done so. They were people who had argued with him.

The symmetry with Algeria is the article’s hardest structural point and is made once. Next door, for the same decades, a republic’s ruling party did a comparable thing by comparable methods. Only one of the two could afterwards be put on trial.

The reckoning

Hassan II ended the Years of Lead himself, from above, in his last years. The prisons opened, the exiles came home, the opposition was invited to govern, and the thing that had run for a generation was simply stopped by the man who had run it.

Moroccans give the reason plainly and the Register adopts it: he was arranging for his son to inherit a country that would not tear itself apart, and it worked. Whether that is a conversion or a succession plan is not a question the article can settle, and Moroccans do not agree about it either.

The Equity and Reconciliation Commission sat in the mid 2000s under Mohammed VI, with public televised hearings that were the first time Moroccans had heard any of it said aloud. They are the most watched broadcasts in the country’s history and are repeated on the anniversary. The commission compensated, documented, and prosecuted nobody, because it could name facts and not people, and because a palace cannot be put in a dock by a commission the palace created.

Most victims accepted it, because it was that or nothing and the compensation was real. A minority refused to participate and said why, in public, and were not punished for it, which was itself the most significant thing the exercise demonstrated.

The southern provinces

Spain surrendered the Saharan territories between 1945 and 1952, and what happened next is the thing most readers will arrive wanting to know.

The territory was placed under a League trusteeship, which was the machinery available: the Trusteeship Council had been created for the conversion of the old mandates, was active in those years, and its agreements required elected institutions, public accounts, access for inspectors, petition rights and a status referendum offering independence, free association, integration with another state or another arrangement consistent with self-determination.

The Trusteeship Council compiled the register itself, over three years, by tribal enumeration with the Spanish records as the base. It was disputed at the time and is disputed still.

The referendum was held in 1957, a year after Morocco’s own independence. Integration with Morocco carried by about two to one.

Because the vote was real, the question is genuinely closed. There is no occupation to justify, no war to prosecute, no wall across the desert and no refugee camps across a border. Moroccan foreign policy is therefore about other things entirely, which is not a small difference.

The Sahrawi case has not disappeared, and the article gives it at its strongest, because a settled question is not the same as an unanimous one. The enumeration was imperfect and the Council said so. Ifni went to Morocco in 1950 without any referendum at all, which the kingdom never mentions and the movement always does, and the inconsistency is the strongest argument available to it: a Spain surrendering territory handed one piece over with a supervised vote and another with a signature, and the difference was decided by nobody the inhabitants elected. There has been substantial, subsidised and deliberate northern settlement in the south since 1957, which has changed the population the vote measured. And most of the phosphate is down there, which is the unglamorous reason the integration was worth having and which nobody in Rabat states.

The obvious reading of all this is that Morocco wanted the south and the south voted to join. The article states it without endorsing it, because both can be true at once.

The Union of the Sons of the Desert is the Sahrawi party. It is legal, holds two or three seats in the southern provinces and has never held more. It has never been armed. Its own leaders give the reason, which is that a movement which lost a supervised vote cannot recruit on the claim that the ballot was denied it, and recruitment is what an insurgency runs on. The Register records the explanation without treating it as a law of nature. A lost referendum does not extinguish a nationalism, and the grievances the movement raises about the register, about Ifni and about the settlement since are all later than the vote and are not answered by it. What the vote did was remove the one argument that turns a party into an army, and seventy years is a long time for that to have held, and it is not a guarantee.

The southern provinces are governed on the same terms as the north in law and substantially in fact, with heavy state investment the north resents, because a vote won has to be seen to have been worth winning. Their population is under a million of forty, which is why integration was winnable and why the north can outvote the south on anything.

Tangier

Tangier is part of Morocco and is not part of Morocco, and the arrangement works because nobody will define it.

The city was made an international zone by the settlement of 1913 and a statute of the 1920s, administered by a committee of the signatory powers, demilitarised, with its own legislative assembly, its own police and a mixed court. Britain ran it alongside the rest of Morocco from 1940. It was returned with the rest, and the instruments were never repealed.

What survives is not nothing. The city keeps its own customs regime, its own commercial court applying a mixed law, and a residue of consular jurisdiction for the signatory powers, so that a contract made in Tangier may be litigated under rules no other Moroccan court uses. Moroccan sovereignty is not in doubt and has not been since 1956. The zone’s institutions sit inside it like a swallowed object the body has decided not to expel.

Nobody will wind it up, and the reason is procedural rather than sentimental. Winding it up requires the signatory powers to convene, and convening them would reopen the question of what else they signed in Morocco and on what authority, which is a conversation no government on the list wants to have. Several of the signatories no longer exist in the form that signed. The League holds the depositary copy, which is the only reason anybody can still say with confidence what the terms are. So the file stays shut by being left open.

It is also worth money. Morocco gets a free port it never had to legislate for, and the powers retain a precedent some of them may want one day, and these are the kinds of reasons that keep arrangements alive long after the beliefs that produced them have died.

The city is the kingdom in miniature. It is a thing that functions because it has never been defined, that everybody prefers undefined, and that would collapse into argument the moment anyone insisted on writing down what it is. The reader may hold that beside the constitution of 2011, which has been under negotiation for seventeen years, and the article will not draw the line twice.

Modern Tangier is the kingdom’s industrial success. There is a container port on the strait competing directly with Algeciras across the water and with Gibraltar’s bunkering trade, automotive assembly inland, and a free zone that is a free zone twice over. Its older reputation as a place of smugglers, spies, tax exiles and writers outlived the zone’s administration by a generation and is now a tourist product.

A tunnel under the strait has been studied jointly by Morocco and Spain since the 1980s. It is technically possible and politically impossible, and the studies continue because stopping them would require somebody to say why.

Geography

Morocco runs from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the Sahara and is built in bands.

The coastal plains on the Atlantic hold most of the population, most of the agriculture and all of the big cities. Behind them the Rif runs along the northern coast, steep, wet, poor and densely peopled. South of that the Middle Atlas, the High Atlas and the Anti-Atlas run south-west to north-east across the whole country, with peaks above four thousand metres, real snow and a ski season. Beyond them the land falls away into the pre-Sahara of oases and palmeries and then into the desert.

The mountains are the point. Morocco is the only Maghreb country with ranges high enough and deep enough to hold a population the state could never fully reach, and that is why Berber identity survived here in a way and at a scale it did not elsewhere. The Alaouite state governed the plains directly and the mountains by negotiation for three hundred years, and the distinction between the governed land and the land of the tribes was a working administrative category into the twentieth century.

The climate is Mediterranean on the coast, continental and cold in the mountains, and arid to hyper-arid in the south. Water is the standing crisis and it is worse here than in Algeria. A long drought has not broken, the reservoirs are at historic lows, and the dam-building programme begun in the 1960s bought the country fifty years and is running out of them. It is more likely than the constitution to cause the next real crisis in Moroccan politics.

Cities

Rabat is the capital and the seat of the palace, deliberately quiet, a city of ministries and embassies and the royal residence, much smaller than the commercial capital and a good deal more self-important.

Casablanca is much the largest city and the economic one: the port, the banks, the industry, the slums and the money. It is modern in a way nothing else in Morocco is, having been largely built in the protectorate period, and it is where the country’s politics is most often decided in the street.

Fez is the oldest and the most learned, the seat of the Qarawiyyin, the oldest continuously operating teaching institution in the Muslim world, and the city whose families supplied the administration, the judiciary and the haute cuisine. Fassi is a social category as much as a place of origin.

Marrakesh is the southern imperial city, the gateway to the Atlas and the south, and the engine of the tourist economy.

Tangier is on the strait and is described above.

Morocco therefore has four historic capitals and has never needed to invent one. Algeria built a second capital at Constantine in 1998 because it had learned what happens when a single city holds everything, and Morocco has had the problem solved for it by history, which is the kind of luck this country has had rather a lot of.

Government and politics

The King

The King is head of state, commander in chief, and Amir al-Mu’minin, Commander of the Faithful, which makes him the religious authority as well as the political one.

That title is the load-bearing fact of Moroccan politics. A king who is also the religious authority cannot be opposed on religious ground from inside the system, because any party that tried would be contesting an office rather than a policy. That is why Morocco has nothing resembling the Islamist party politics of its neighbours. It is not that the theological objection cannot be made: it is made, by a banned movement described below, and the fact that making it puts a man outside the law rather than into opposition is the measure of how completely the ground is held. It also means the monarchy cannot be argued with theologically, and the article states the cost as well as the use: an institution that cannot be argued with on the only ground that would reach it is an institution that is very hard to constrain at all.

The King governs. There is an elected parliament and a government and both are real, and above them the palace decides anything it chooses to decide. The article calls that what it is.

The reserved domains

The palace holds, outright: religion, the armed forces, foreign policy, the security services, the senior appointments of the judiciary, and the constitution itself. Which is to say everything that decides anything.

What the elected government genuinely runs is not nothing, and the article says so, because the opposite impression is the commonest error made about Morocco abroad: taxation, education, health, housing, transport, industry and the budget. A Moroccan minister administers a larger share of national life than most foreign critics assume. He simply does it in a room whose walls he did not build and cannot move.

The makhzen

The word Moroccans use for the apparatus is the makhzen, which is older than the protectorate, older than the French language in Morocco, and originally meant the storehouse from which the Sultan’s government was paid.

It means now the royal household, the King’s advisers, the walis he appoints to the regions, the security services, and the business interests attached to the crown, and it is how Morocco is actually governed. It is a parallel state, it long predates every institution the constitution describes, and it will outlast several of them.

Moroccans use the word themselves, constantly, without hostility and without illusion, which tells a reader more about the country than any amount of analysis. To say that a decision was taken by the makhzen is not an accusation. It is a description of where decisions are taken.

The royal holdings

The royal family’s business empire is large and is in banking, phosphates, retail and agriculture. The Register states it as a failing rather than as colour: a head of state who is also the largest private shareholder in the national economy cannot regulate it, and no arrangement of blind trusts or holding companies alters that.

It is the single most common complaint among Moroccans under forty, well ahead of the constitution, and it is the one subject on which the press is cautious in a way that cannot be explained by the formal red lines.

Parliament

There are two chambers: a directly elected House of Representatives and an indirectly elected House of Councillors.

Elections are genuinely contested and genuinely counted. The article is precise about this because the usual foreign assumption is wrong and the truth is more interesting: the fraud is not in the counting but in the boundaries of the possible. A Moroccan votes in a real election, for a real party, which will send real members to a real chamber, which will legislate on real subjects, none of which are the subjects that determine how the country is governed. That is a harder thing to see from outside than a stuffed ballot box, and a far more durable arrangement.

The King is not obliged to appoint a Prime Minister from the largest party. By convention he usually does. Twice he has not: in 1965, when the socialists won and were refused outright, which is where the Years of Lead begin; and again recently and quietly, which is why the convention is now known to be worthless. A rule that is followed until it matters is not a rule, and that sentence is the Moroccan constitutional argument in miniature.

The parties

Four matter.

Istiqlal, the party of independence, diminished and respectable, still carrying the authority of 1956 and very little else.

The Union of Popular Forces, socialist, descended from the Istiqlal split, founded by Ben Barka, and permanently marked by what was done to it.

The National Rally, founded in the 1970s out of nothing by people the palace wanted in parliament, and still exactly that.

The Amazigh Democratic Union, founded after the recognition of 1974, rooted in the Rif and the Atlas and permanently regional. It is the mirror of Algeria’s Amazigh Federalist Union and is much weaker, for the straightforward reason that a party which won its language without a fight has less to organise around than one that won it with deaths.

Moroccans say of all four that the differences between them are smaller than the difference between all of them and the palace, and the article records that because it is both true and the most important thing about the party system.

The Party of Justice and Development is Islamist, legal and has never led a government, though it has held ministries twice. The reason is Q6’s point made concrete: a party cannot outbid the Commander of the Faithful on religion, and once religion is unavailable it has nothing distinctive left to offer.

Outside the system is Justice and Spirituality, founded by Sheikh Abdessalam Yacine, who wrote an open letter to Hassan II telling him to repent and holding that the title of Commander of the Faithful is a usurpation. He died under house arrest. The movement is illegal in form and tolerated in practice, is large, is quietist, and refuses to contest elections at all, which makes it impossible to measure and impossible to suppress. Its objection is theological rather than political, which is the only ground on which the monarchy can actually be attacked, and that is precisely why it is banned.

The constitution that is not finished

Morocco is governed under the constitution of 1962, the first it ever had, written by Hassan II, and amended five times by referendums the palace has never lost.

The amendments that matter are 1974, which made Tamazight official; one in the 1990s creating the constitutional council and a human rights body as the Years of Lead were wound down; and one in the 2000s giving the regions elected councils and no money. The pattern is the point: every amendment granted something real and nothing structural, five times across forty years.

In 2011, as risings ran across the Arab world and Algeria convened a constitutional convention next door, the King appointed a standing commission to write a new constitution, with members from the parties, the ulema, the unions and the regions. It has met continuously ever since. It has published four drafts and agreed none of them. It has had three chairmen, two of whom died in office, which is the most eloquent fact available about the process.

The first draft failed on the reserved domains, which the palace would not discuss. The second on the standing of Tamazight in the courts. The third on whether the southern provinces would receive the same regional powers as the north, and that is the real obstacle: granting the south equal autonomy would let it ask again, and granting it less would admit that the vote of 1957 bought something other than what it promised. The fourth is still being argued.

The substance everybody agrees the new text is for is a semi-federal structure, which is to say that Morocco has spent seventeen years inching towards the thing Algeria has had since 1958.

Everybody says the delay is deliberate, including people who sit on the commission. A process that cannot conclude is a concession that costs nothing, and the palace has discovered the most elegant instrument in its history. And the defenders are not fools either: a text agreed badly in 2011 would have been worse than no text, and two of the four failures were genuine disagreements about things that genuinely do not have obvious answers.

The courts and the pardon

There is a constitutional council rather than a court. It rules on process and not on the palace, and no Moroccan would name it as the institution they trust most.

Ask an Algerian which institution they trust and they name the Federal Constitutional Court. Ask a Moroccan and they name the King.

That trust is real and the article does not sneer at it. The throne protected the Jews when it cost something, kept the country out of two catastrophes its neighbours fell into, and granted Tamazight without a shot, and Moroccans know all of it. It is also unfalsifiable, because in a country where the King is beyond criticism by law, a measurement of his popularity measures something other than popularity.

Criticising the King is technically an offence, covering the monarchy, Islam and the territorial integrity of the kingdom, which are precisely the three things a Moroccan might otherwise want to argue about. It has never officially been used. A law that has never been used and never repealed governs more completely than one that is enforced, because there is no victim to point to and no case to argue about, and everybody adjusts.

The royal pardon is how Moroccan politics resolves things. It is exercised several times a year, on a scale no other state matches, and it is the instrument of first resort for anything that has gone too far: protests prosecuted and then pardoned, journalists convicted and then released, sentences passed and then set aside. It is genuinely merciful and genuinely corrosive at the same time, because it converts every political question into a personal favour, and the article lets that stand without resolving it.

The armed forces

The army is the King’s, personally. He is commander in chief in fact as well as in name, appoints every senior officer himself, and the armed forces have no institutional relationship with the elected government at all.

They are volunteer; there is no conscription. The contrast with Algeria is that both countries arrived at a volunteer army by opposite routes, one by abolishing conscription because it had been a dictatorship’s instrument and the other by never seriously needing it.

There has never been a coup or an attempt on the King. The palace attributes this to loyalty. The article attributes it partly to the fact that a king who holds the religious authority is harder to shoot at than a president, and partly to the simpler point that there is nothing to seize which is not already his.

The succession

Crown Prince Moulay Hassan is the heir, in his early twenties, educated in Morocco and abroad and visible since childhood. The throne passes by male primogeniture within the Alaouite line, with the King able to designate a different son, and a woman cannot hold it, because the holder is also Commander of the Faithful. That is one of the questions the unfinished constitution has not touched and will not, which tells the reader what the commission is for.

The succession is a live question and the article records it as it records any open question. The heir has been kept visible and untested, and Morocco has never had a succession that was not also a change of system. The question is therefore not who inherits but what he inherits, and nobody can answer it, including, as far as anyone can tell, the people arranging it.

Economy

Morocco has a product per head of approximately A£9,000. Its prosperity owes much to the fact that it decolonised early and peacefully and never lost a generation to a war, and it is poorer than Algeria, which has gas.

That reversal is felt constantly and is not what anybody expected. The stable kingdom that avoided every catastrophe is the poorer of the two, and the neighbour that spent thirty years under a party dictatorship is the richer. The explanation is simply what is under the ground, which is the least satisfying answer available and is the true one.

Phosphate

Morocco holds the great majority of the world’s known phosphate reserves.

This makes it quietly indispensable to the world’s food supply, because there is no substitute for phosphate: nitrogen can be fixed from the air and potassium is widely distributed, and phosphate is mined or it is not had. A country in that position holds a form of leverage that oil producers do not.

It has never once used it. The reason is the one a careful supplier always gives: a cartel or an embargo would invite every government on earth to fund research into recovery, substitution and recycling, and a monopoly that frightens its customers has a shorter life than one that does not. The contrast with Algeria is exact and ironic. The neighbour with gas has leverage it is careful with, and Morocco has leverage over something with no substitute at all and is more careful still.

The rock is held by a state company of the old kind, enormous, competent and opaque, which is also one of the places the royal holdings sit, so the line between the state’s largest asset and the family’s is not a line anybody can draw. It cannot be audited by anybody the palace does not appoint. This is the clearest instance of the conflict described above and the one with the most money attached.

The best economic decision the kingdom has made was moving from exporting rock to manufacturing fertiliser, which is worth more than anything the constitutional argument has produced and sells to Africa and India as much as to Europe, giving Morocco a commercial reach Algeria’s pipelines cannot match.

Most of the phosphate is in the south, which is the unglamorous reason the integration of 1957 was worth having.

The rest of it

Agriculture employs about a third of the workforce and produces a far smaller share of the output: citrus, tomatoes, olives, argan and early vegetables into European markets on a seasonal advantage. Water is the limit on all of it, and a country exporting tomatoes from a drying climate is exporting water it does not have, which is the central contradiction of the Moroccan economy and is not being addressed.

Wine is made, quietly, in far smaller quantity than Algeria’s, mostly for the domestic hotel trade with a little export. Nobody makes a constitutional argument about it, because the Commander of the Faithful has not asked them to, which is a sentence that explains more about Morocco than most longer ones.

Tourism is enormous, European, and concentrated on Marrakesh, the coast and the Atlas. A country that sells its own picturesqueness has an interest in not changing visibly, and the medinas are conserved to a standard no Algerian city matched, partly for the visitors and partly because a monarchy with a thousand-year claim needs the buildings to still be standing.

Emigration and remittances run to France above all, then Spain, the Low Countries and Germany, with remittances among the three largest sources of foreign currency. The diaspora is large, organised and politically careful, because the state follows it: consulates, mosque appointments, associations and an active interest in what is said abroad. This is a mild and real thing and the article says so.

Solar and wind in the pre-Sahara are large and growing, and the strategic logic is exact: a country with no oil and a punishing energy bill has the strongest possible reason to build them. Morocco exports electricity north through an undersea cable to Spain, with a second being laid, and that cable is the most consequential thing the kingdom has built since the dams. It also gives Spain a standing reason to keep the Ceuta argument ritual rather than real, which both governments understand and neither states.

Industry and infrastructure are visibly better than the region: motorways the length of the coast, a high-speed railway, new ports, automotive and aerospace assembly, and a rural road programme that reached the mountains late and did reach them. This is the palace’s strongest answer to the democracy argument, for the simple reason that it is visible from a car window and a constitution is not.

Inequality is high and regional. The Atlantic cities are another country from the Atlas and the Rif. Rural illiteracy is still substantial, particularly among women. The royal development programmes are real, visible and insufficient, which is the honest verdict and satisfies nobody.

Demographics and society

The population is approximately forty million, overwhelmingly Arab and Berber in a mixture three thousand years old that nobody can usefully separate. Life expectancy is around seventy-seven, adult literacy around eighty per cent and far lower among rural women, and urbanisation around sixty-five per cent and rising fast.

Languages

Arabic and Tamazight are official. Moroccan Arabic is the vernacular of the majority. Tamazight exists in three varieties, in the Rif, the Middle Atlas and the south. French is the language of business, higher education and the professions without being official at all. Spanish persists in the north, in the old Spanish zone and around the two Spanish cities.

The comparison with Algeria is worth exactly one sentence: Algeria made French official and teaches in it; Morocco never made it official and teaches in it anyway.

Tamazight was recognised in 1974, by royal decree and then by constitutional amendment, at a moment when the Rif was restive and the King preferred to concede the language to conceding anything else. It was therefore granted twenty-four years before Algeria managed it, without a crisis and without a death, by a monarch nobody could outbid. This is the best argument the monarchy makes for itself and the article gives it in full: the republic next door shot at Kabyles for twenty years and the kingdom simply granted it. It is true and it is not the whole truth.

The whole truth is that Tamazight is more used than Algeria’s and less than the law implies: broadcasting, signage, primary schooling in Berber areas, and almost nothing in the courts or the administration. A concession granted early and implemented slowly is a different kind of failure from one granted late and implemented quickly, and Morocco has the first.

Education

State schools teach in Arabic. Private schools and the universities teach in French for anything technical.

This sorts children by their parents’ money before they are ten, and it is the most consequential inequality in the country. It is worse than Algeria’s arrangement, and the article says so, because a single French-medium system at least fails everybody in the same way.

Religion

Islam, Maliki Sunni, with the King at its head.

In practice this means a ministry that appoints and pays the imams, a licensed Friday sermon on themes the ministry sets, strong Sufi orders under royal patronage, and the Qarawiyyin at Fez, the oldest continuously operating teaching institution in the Muslim world.

A state-managed Islam is both the reason there is no extremist problem in Morocco and a genuine restriction on religious life, and the article says both, because they are the same fact seen from two sides and Moroccans disagree about whether the trade is worth it.

The Jews of Morocco

There were about two hundred and fifty thousand at the war. There are about one hundred and twenty thousand now. Half stayed, and this is the largest single divergence in the article.

They stayed because the throne had demonstrably protected them when protection cost something, so the guarantee was believed; and because a Morocco that lost them would have lost the story it tells about itself, which the palace understood perfectly well and acted on for seventy years. The article does not make it pretty. There were departures after every crisis in the wider region, there was pressure and there were incidents, and staying was a decision taken repeatedly rather than once.

They are in Casablanca above all, then Rabat, Marrakesh, Fez and Essaouira, with their own courts for personal status as they have had for centuries, their own schools, and a place at every royal occasion. It is the largest Jewish community in the Arab world and the only one of its size anywhere in it.

It changes Moroccan politics rather than decorating them. There are Jewish members of parliament, senior officials and royal advisers, and the most senior is Andre Bensoussan, a royal counsellor of long standing who advises on the economy and on foreign contacts and is a real power. A country with that cannot have the politics about the subject that its neighbours have.

The community is also used, and knows it: the palace displays it abroad as evidence of Moroccan tolerance, which is true and is a use. And its position is a gift of the throne rather than a right of citizenship, which is the uncomfortable part. A community protected by a king is a community that requires there to be a king, and its own members are divided about what Bensoussan’s access represents, because a standing that rests on one man’s relationship with the palace is not a standing at all.

Christians, and converts

The Christians are mostly foreign residents, with a small and growing number of Moroccan converts, principally Berber Protestants.

Their position is far worse than the Jews’, and the article names the asymmetry plainly: an ancient community is protected and a new one is not, because one predates the arrangement and the other challenges it. Conversion from Islam is the single thing the Commander of the Faithful cannot be seen to permit, whatever any constitution might say, and the converts live accordingly.

Women

The family code was reformed by the King over the open objection of the religious establishment, which only a Commander of the Faithful could have carried. It is better than the region’s and worse than its own promise.

The comparison with Algeria is inconvenient for everybody: Morocco’s family code is the better one. The kingdom did more for women by royal fiat than the federation managed by legislation, and neither side of the argument about monarchy finds that easy.

The article states the cost of the method as well. A right granted by a king can be ungranted by one, and Moroccan feminists say so and are not wrong, and the whole structure of women’s legal position in Morocco rests on the goodwill of an office rather than on anything a court could enforce against it.

Health

A thin public system, a private one for those who can pay, and a recent royal scheme extending cover to the informally employed which is genuinely large and genuinely incomplete. The comparison with Algeria’s free and overstretched service is unflattering to Morocco, and the article makes it once.

The Rif

The Rif is poor, mountainous, densely populated, and holds a claim on the monarchy that no other region has: it had its own republic within living memory and chose to hand the north to the throne in 1950. It uses the claim constantly and the claim is good.

It is also still poor, because a claim on a king is not the same as money.

Al-Hirak al-Rifi, the Rif Movement, ran for most of a year in the last decade, triggered by a death that was nobody’s policy and everybody’s fault, over development and policing. It ended in heavy sentences and then in royal pardons, which is the palace’s whole method compressed into one episode. Its leader is abroad and will not come back under a pardon, on the stated ground that accepting one admits the conviction, and that refusal is the most articulate criticism of the Moroccan system anybody has made from inside it.

Migration

Sahel migration crosses Morocco towards Spain, and it is handled badly, as the Register said of Algeria: pushbacks into the desert, camps in the north, and an arrangement under which Morocco polices Europe’s southern frontier and is paid to do it.

Those payments are the largest lever Morocco holds over Spain, larger than Ceuta, and both governments know which of the two arguments is the real one.

Culture and daily life

Moroccan cuisine has a court tradition behind it, which is the real difference from its neighbours’: tagine and couscous everywhere, and above them a Fassi and Andalusian haute cuisine of pastilla and slow-cooked lamb and elaborate pastry, which exists because for a thousand years there were palaces to cook for. Mint tea is a social institution with rules. The hammam, the Friday couscous and bread carried to a communal oven are still ordinary.

Music runs in three traditions. Andalusian classical, which Morocco claims as hard as Algeria does and with better archives. Gnawa, out of the sub-Saharan inheritance, trance music of a brotherhood descended from enslaved West Africans, which is the country’s most exported sound. And Amazigh traditions in three mountain varieties. The Andalusian quarrel with Algeria is conducted at duelling festivals, is enjoyed enormously on both sides, and is the warmest thing in the relationship between the two states.

Literature is written in Arabic and French and has a prison-memoir tradition out of the Years of Lead which is the most important body of Moroccan writing. None of it could be published in Morocco until the 1990s. The defining book is by Najat Belkacem, a student detained at nineteen and held eleven years, published abroad in French in the 1990s and at home only after the commission.

Film is mostly a service industry for foreign productions in the south, with a small serious national cinema underneath it.

Football is the obsession, and here the King is its patron, so the one unifying thing in national life is also attached to the palace, which is true of almost everything. Matches against Algeria are the only occasion on which the cold relationship becomes loud, and both governments find that useful.

There is a Moroccan national identity older and thicker than any of its neighbours’, because the state is older. Moroccans were Moroccan before France arrived and knew it, which no Algerian could say. It has never had to be constructed, argued over or defended, and that is a strength and is also why nothing much gets argued about.

Young Moroccans find that the country is well run and that they have no say in it, which is a far harder thing to protest than misgovernment, and that the jobs are in Europe.

Foreign relations

Morocco is a member of the League of Nations, is not in the Atlantic Treaty Organization, and is aligned westward in everything but name. That is the practical difference from Algeria, whose nonalignment is genuine.

France is close and much less fraught than Algeria’s relationship with it, because a protectorate that kept its sultan and left by agreement has far less to settle than a hundred and twenty-eight years of departments. Morocco is quietly France’s favourite North African relationship for exactly that reason, and Algiers has noticed.

Spain is correct, commercially heavy, and warmer than it ought to be, because Spain left early and under pressure rather than being driven out, so there is less to forgive than there might have been. The Rif is the exception, and the gas used there in the 1920s is the one thing Morocco has never let Spain put down. Spain has now admitted it fully, which Morocco accepts and does not consider the end of the matter.

Ceuta and Melilla are claimed, have been since 1956, and the claim is a permanent, ritualised grievance restated annually and never pursued. Spain restates Gibraltar on the same calendar and both countries know they are performing the same scene. Morocco’s best argument is the one Spain makes about Gibraltar and refuses to hear about Ceuta, and Moroccan diplomats deploy it with great enjoyment. Morocco has never tried to take them, and the restraint is deliberate: the cities are worth more as a grievance than as two municipalities it would have to govern and pay for.

Algeria is cold and competitive. Two countries that cannot agree which of them is the Maghreb’s leading state have no mechanism for finding out. Morocco holds that its 1968 frontier claim was real, that it did not start the fighting, and that it then spent thirty years serving as the pretext for somebody else’s emergency, which it resents. The land border is open, because a frontier settled by treaty in the 2000s had no reason to stay shut, and a great deal crosses it: trade, families, pilgrims, seasonal workers. The openness is maintained by populations rather than by governments, and both governments quietly value it, because closing it would be the one act that made the coldness real rather than rhetorical.

Morocco envies Algeria and pities it at once, and the article says so. It envies the gas and the courts, and it points at thirty years of dictatorship whenever anybody suggests that a king is the problem. Moroccan democrats find that argument maddening precisely because it works.

Algeria avoided an Islamist war by bringing the Islamists into its transition on the first day. Morocco avoided one by owning the religious ground so completely that no Islamist party could ever contest it. Both methods worked and neither is available to anybody else.

The Maghreb union exists on paper, founded in the 1980s, and has achieved almost nothing, because a kingdom and a federation cannot agree who chairs it. What it has managed is the strait patrols and a rail agreement, which is more than nothing and a great deal less than anybody wanted.

Africa south of the Sahara is where Moroccan foreign policy is most distinctive: banks, telecoms, construction and fertiliser across west Africa, and a religious diplomacy training imams for the Sahel in the Maliki tradition at Moroccan institutes. It is the one field in which being a monarchy with a Commander of the Faithful is a diplomatic asset rather than an embarrassment, and Morocco has made more of it than of anything else it does abroad.

Mauritania became independent separately and made no claim on the Saharan territory, the League vote having settled it.

Memory

The Years of Lead are called les annees de plomb, in French, by people speaking Arabic. The commission’s televised hearings are the memory that matters, are repeated on the anniversary, and are the most watched broadcasts in Moroccan history. The prison at Tazmamart is a byword and the state that denied its existence now maintains the site.

The Rif keeps its own memory and does not need the state’s help with it: the republic, the gas, the handover of 1950, the sidelining of Amezian, and the sentences of the last decade.

The Sultan’s refusal is the one memory the state actively curates. It is taught, commemorated, inscribed at Rabat, and produced abroad whenever Morocco is asked about tolerance. The curation is heavy and the underlying fact is true, which is an unusual combination and the article notes it as such.

What is not curated is the question of what the protectorate did with Moroccan consent and Moroccan officials for forty years, which no commission has examined and no government has proposed examining.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag is a red field charged with a green interlaced pentagram, the seal of Solomon, and it has not changed since 1915. It is the only flag in the Maghreb that was not designed by an independence movement, because Morocco never needed one. Its neighbours’ flags were drawn by parties and fronts to stand for countries that did not yet exist. This one was drawn for a country that already did, by a sultan, and has simply continued.

Nothing has been added to it since. Neither the recognition of Tamazight in 1974 nor the integration of the southern provinces in 1957 produced any alteration to any Moroccan emblem, and the refusal is itself the statement: a monarchy with a thousand-year claim does not amend its symbols to acknowledge events, because doing so would concede that the events were larger than the institution.

The arms show the green pentagram over the Atlas before a rising sun, supported by two lions, beneath a royal crown, with a Quranic motto to the effect that God aids those who aid Him.

The anthem is a royal anthem whose words are about the throne rather than the nation, which is the giveaway, and it exists in Arabic alone. There is no Tamazight version. That is the limit of the 1974 concession stated in a single fact, and it is noticed every time the anthem is played in Agadir or Al Hoceima.

The national day is Independence Day.

The currency is the dirham, carrying the King’s head, managed against a basket and not freely convertible, which is a small surrender of sovereignty that nobody in Morocco has ever thought worth questioning.

Assessment

Morocco came out of the twentieth century better than any of its neighbours and is the least free of them, and both halves of that sentence are the throne’s doing.

What the monarchy bought is not small and the article will not pretend otherwise. It bought a country that did not have to be invented after the Europeans left. It bought the only Jewish community of any size left in the Arab world, by refusing a list when refusing cost something. It bought Tamazight in 1974 without a death, where the republic next door took until 1998 and a general strike and dozens of bodies. It bought a family code better than the region’s, carried over the objection of an ulema that no president could have overruled. It bought a Sahara settled by a real vote rather than a war. And it bought the absence of the two catastrophes that defined the neighbourhood: no war of independence, no civil war, no colonels, no single-party state, no year in which the country tore itself apart.

What it costs is the whole of political life. Six domains are reserved and they are the six that decide anything. A parliament is elected honestly to legislate inside walls it cannot move. A constitution written by the king who ran the Years of Lead is still in force because its replacement has been under negotiation for seventeen years by a commission the palace appoints, which has produced four drafts, buried two chairmen and agreed nothing. The man who is head of state is the largest private shareholder in the economy and cannot therefore regulate it. Criticism of him is an offence that has never needed to be used. And every political question that gets as far as a crisis is resolved by a personal favour, which is merciful and which leaves nothing behind it that anybody can rely on next time.

The article leans once, here, and does not labour it. The throne has been worth it so far and will not be worth it indefinitely. It was insurance against catastrophes that were real and that did strike the countries on either side, and the premium was paid in the only currency a monarchy accepts, which is the right to decide. The catastrophes it insured against have not happened and are receding, and the premium has not fallen. The bill for the insurance is now being presented, and it is being presented by people who did not buy the policy.

They find the country well run and themselves without a say in it, which is a far harder thing to protest than misgovernment, and the one change they would make is the one subject nobody is permitted to discuss. So the frustration has nowhere to go, and it goes abroad instead, in aeroplanes, and sends money home.

The Register makes no prediction.

Trivia

See also

• The Federal Republic of Algeria, which left the same empire by the same instrument in the same decade and arrived somewhere else entirely
• France, the protecting power, which did not dare depose the Sultan
• Spain, which held the northern zone, used gas in the Rif, surrendered an empire in seven years and kept two cities
• Gibraltar, across the strait, which recruited Moroccan labour after 1954 and treated it badly
• The League of Nations, whose Trusteeship Council ran the Saharan transition and certified the vote of 1957
• The Kingdom of Arabia, which holds Palestine, and without which the Jews of Morocco would have had somewhere else to go
• The European Concert, to which Morocco is associated rather than admitted

Morocco · Kingdom · The Maghreb · North Africa · Foreign Nations · The Alaouite Dynasty · Tangier