Diasporic Social Mobilization and Political Participation during the Arab Uprisings

Claire Beaugrand, Vincent Geisser

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138306684
• eBook ISBN: 9781351393218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Arab protest movements of 2010-2011 gave momentum and inspiration to unprecedented political mobilisations of migrants of Arab origin, whether first generation, second generation, or more, in Europe, North and South-America. This book analyses the essential yet understudied role of Arab diasporas during the Arab revolutions, dissecting the new forms of diasporic mobilisations that emerged during the 'Arab Spring' and that were borrowed as much from the home countries' repertoire of innovations as from global movements' tactics from Wall Street to Sao Paulo.

This collection is a very timely and much-welcome contribution to our understanding of the nexus between immigration and integration. At a time when the engagement of European youth in faraway violent conflicts is hitting the headlines all over Europe, this book offers balanced and renewed academic perspectives on migrants belonging, analysing how migrants use political engagement to assert their belonging in newly-imagined home countries and, conversely, how they get involved in the politics of their origin countries to bolster their identity in host nations. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.

Moroccan Diaspora in France and the February 20 Movement in Morocco

Antoine Dumont

ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the links between the so-called 20 February 2011 Movement in Morocco and the Moroccan migrant organizations in France. The research examines how the 50-year-long history of these organizations shapes Moroccan migrants’ political experiences and their ties to homeland in order to explain why they do not play a significant role in the events unfolding in Morocco in 2011. To this end, concepts such as diaspora and transnationalism are mobilized to grasp how activists are connecting to places and territories and reducing the distance between them, while preserving a certain unity in their collective action.

During the 2011 Arab uprisings, mass protests took place in Morocco beginning on February 20. This day gave its name to the whole social movement emerging later. Some observers emphasized the novelty of this February 20 Movement. The goal here is rather to analyze it using a long-term perspective, by comparing its forms with those developed earlier by Moroccan migrants, particularly in France. The fact is that the Moroccan diaspora and its French-based organizations did not massively support the 2011 movement in Morocco. Explaining that requires that we explore the very rich and controversial history between Moroccan migrants organizations and their country of origin. These numerous associations have enabled Moroccans to organize their collective experience abroad since the independence of Morocco from French colonial rule (March 2, 1956), by endowing their common origin and Moroccan belonging with specific meanings. They did so by mobilizing along the lines of particular mottos and watchwords, some of which were to recur in 2011 in Morocco.

From 1960 to the 1980s, there was a Moroccan opposition in exile. Today, there is undoubtedly a Moroccan diaspora. Therefore, the research question is to understand how this history shapes Moroccan migrants’ political experiences and their ties to homeland in order to explain why they did not play a significant role during the events unfolding in Morocco in 2011. This approach could enable us to better grasp the difficulties arising during multilevel collective actions. What do such difficulties have to tell us about the capability of players to shrink the distance between their places of action by building transnational spaces? In the first part of this article, an historical overview of Moroccan migrants’ organizations in France, based on my previous PhD work (Dumont, 2007), shows how different Moroccan remote belongings have been expressed among migrants over time, moving from a long-distance nationalism to a kind of diasporic experience. The second part focuses on the players of the February 20 Movement and their degree of politicization in order to distinguish the long-term legacy of this movement from its potential innovations. Lastly, the article proposes a brief comparison between the space of mobilizations in Morocco and the transnational arena of the Moroccan diaspora in order to better understand the geographical structuring of Moroccan mobilizations.

From long distance nationalism to the formation of a Moroccan diaspora

Moroccan migrations to France, which began in the early 20th century, had become massive in the 1960s, and 1.3 million Moroccans today represent the largest immigrant group in the country. Moroccan nationhood can take on different meanings according to individuals because it simultaneously refers to a State, a territory, and a people. In the migration context, nationalism turns to “long-distance nationalism” (Anderson, 1998; Glick Schiller & Fouron, 2002), defined as a set of practices and identity-orientated claims linking persons who assert their common descent from an ancestral land (Glick Schiller, 2004, p. 459).

Data presented in this section were collected during a 5 years of PhD fieldwork (2002–2006), through 35 interviews with militants in a dozen cities and in depth explorations of association archives. The research examined what it means to be a Moroccan inside a Moroccan migrants’ organization in France. The main hypothesis was that engaging in a migrant organization allows individuals to reduce the material and symbolic distance between their country of origin—what I called remote belonging. From this work, a historical typology has been drawn, according to which some of the organizations gather migrants as “overseas Moroccans” (national type), others as “Moroccans of France” (communal type), and the last as “global Moroccans” (diasporic type).¹

Long-distance nationalism of “overseas Moroccans”

The Moroccan “national” belonging is characterized by powerful individual feelings of membership to the Moroccan people and a will to intervene politically in favor of, or in opposition to, the state of origin. The Moroccan nationhood refers here to the people and the state and also to the national territory of origin, which remains the first space of action. This type of long-distance nationalism emerged in France in the 1950s and 1960s, when the framing of the Moroccan nation state was unfinished and the legitimacy of the new regime was still being challenged. With the creation of the “friendly societies” or “amicales” in 1973, this “national” model became bipolar, divided between those who identify with the state and the king and those who opposed them in the name of the “Moroccan people,” with the help of Marxist-Leninism. Factories, universities, and commercial districts, where political and economic migrants mingle, were their main zones of action. The associations hailing from the two poles formed networks and were organized into rival federations on the national level. Their members were highly politicized, since these associations were a spatial extension of the Moroccan political field and defended an extraterritorial conception of Moroccan nationality. Thus in the 1970s, in the Parisian region, the activities of the friendly societies and the Association of Moroccans in France (AMF), created in 1960, outlined a geography of the extension of the Moroccan political field (Figures 1 and 2).

This “national” Moroccanness was thus mainly predicated on a “returnee” perspective. When the latter turned out to have become a myth, in the middle of the 1980s, the former started to spiral into decline and to fragment. The Moroccan historical and migratory context is thus pivotal in explaining the emergence of this type of association. Notwithstanding, the amicales persisted and renewed themselves in the 1990s, when the Moroccan state took the remote control of the National Federation of French Muslims (FNMF), turning its local Muslim associations into Moroccan “national” associations on using a top-down approach; they were to be renewed above all, in the course of the 2000s, within “neo-friendly” societies. Conversely, the bipolarization declined because the opposition-based associations had become fewer and less powerful, after the 1994 political amnesty and the 1997 governmental alternation in Morocco. To summarize, the meaning of this Moroccan long-distance nationalism lies in the act of identifying and associating migrants as “overseas Moroccans”.

The enclosure of the communities of “Moroccans of France”

Community-based Moroccanness is also characterized by a deep individual feeling of belonging to the Moroccan people though disconnected from any will to intervene politically for or against the Morrocan state. The Moroccanness is here no longer emanating from the nation state in the making but from the Moroccan people, including the migrants, and from some parts of the national territory, the migrants’ places of origin (village, neighborhood, town, region). In other words, the migratory and spatial dimension takes precedence over the political dimension. It is no longer a question of transforming the space of origin or supporting the political fights there, but of keeping this space in memory and, from time to time, leading an action there: group travel, the donation of school supplies, the building of a mosque, and so forth. This type of organizations emerged in France in the 1980s, when foreigners accessed the right of association. It was first of all embodied in associations for cultural expression and mutual aid, then associations for the defense of the rights of Moroccan migrants in France. The Association of Moroccan Workers from France (ATMF) partly corresponds to this type of Moroccanness, when it defended the idea of a “trade-union community,” from 1981 to 1985, and attempted to rally, until 1995, as many local associations as possible to its national network. This organization was very powerful in some car-industry strikes affecting Peugeot, Citroën, and Renault sites in the early eighties.

Figure 1. Distribution of Moroccan Amicales in Paris and inner suburbs in 1973.

Figure 2. Distribution of Associations of Moroccans in France in Paris and inner suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s.

This communal Moroccanness gives priority to social housing estates and “local-level” actions directed toward the migrants to promote a “residential citizenship” independent of nationality (Dumont, 2013b). This change of perception is to large extent linked to the passing from a temporary migration of workers and exiles to a settlement migration, including families from the 1980s onward. Here, the French historical and migratory context is pivotal in explaining the emergence of this second type. During the 1990s and 2000s, the growing number of associations devoted to hometown development caused an important change: The valued closeness was still local, but it was now about Morocco and about networking of places situated on both sides of an international border. These translocal associative networks thus became transnational, when they connected with several national networks, such as Migrations and Development. Thus the question arose of the emergence of a third type of organization. To summarize, the significance of the “communal Moroccanness” lies in identifying and associating the migrants as Moroccans of France.

The diaspora of “global Moroccans”

The diasporic Moroccanness is characterized by powerful individual feelings of Moroccan belonging, whose basic reference is no longer the People, the State, or an action focused on one single place of origin, but the group of migrants themselves. This Moroccanness thus corresponds to a transnational ethnic identity. The associations that approximate this model carry out actions oriented toward the migrants, and the Moroccan state or its territory, but within a transnational framework. These associations situated in France set up links with those situated in Morocco and in other areas of settlement (Canada, Spain, etc.), without going through the na...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Social Mobilization and Political Participation in the Diaspora During the “Arab Spring”
• 1. Moroccan Diaspora in France and the February 20 Movement in Morocco
• 2. The U.S. Coptic Diaspora and the Limit of Polarization
• 3. Diaspora Mobilization for Western Military Intervention During the Arab Spring
• 4. To What Extent Can the January 25 Revolution Be Seen as a “Bifurcation” in the Life Stories of Egyptian Migrants in France?
• 5. Algiers–Paris Round Trips: Diasporic Pathways of a Public Civil Dissidence
• 6. Building Support for the Asad Regime: The Syrian Diaspora in Argentina and Brazil and the Syrian Uprising
• 7. Diaspora Mobilizations in the Egyptian (Post)Revolutionary Process: Comparing Transnational Political Participation in Paris and Vienna
• Index