The Seventh Member State

Algeria, France, and the European Community

Megan Brown

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780674251144
• eBook ISBN: 9780674276239
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today's European Union.

On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed at securing unity in order to prevent violent conflict and boost economies emerging from the disaster of World War II. But French diplomats had other motives, too. From Africa to Southeast Asia, France's empire was unraveling. France insisted that Algeria—the crown jewel of the empire and home to a nationalist movement then pleading its case to the United Nations—be included in the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community. The French hoped that Algeria's involvement in the EEC would quell colonial unrest and confirm international agreement that Algeria was indeed French.

French authorities harnessed Algeria's legal status as an official département within the empire to claim that European trade regulations and labor rights should traverse the Mediterranean. Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany conceded in order to move forward with the treaty, and Algeria entered a rights regime that allowed free movement of labor and guaranteed security for the families of migrant workers. Even after independence in 1962, Algeria remained part of the community, although its ongoing inclusion was a matter of debate. Still, Algeria's membership continued until 1976, when a formal treaty removed it from the European community.

The Seventh Member State combats understandings of Europe's "natural" borders by emphasizing the extracontinental contours of the early union. The unification vision was never spatially limited, suggesting that contemporary arguments for geographic boundaries excluding Turkey and areas of Eastern Europe from the European Union must be seen as ahistorical.

1 Eurafrican Dreams, Imperial Realities

In August 1947, the Council of the Republic in Paris had before it a prospective law that would create an Algerian assembly with an equal number of seats for settler and Muslim representatives, pleasing neither would-be constituency. Despite their agreement on the loathsomeness of the proposed statut organique de l’Algérie, there was no love lost between representatives of each population. When Constantine-born Marcelle Devaud, a councillor for the Seine department, rhapsodized about Algeria’s “centuries of history and past grandeur” inherited by the Fourth Republic, Chérif Saadane quickly interrupted to declare, “You speak of France’s history, which is not our history. We are at the French parliament. We demand a parliament for ourselves and we will gladly leave these seats that we occupy here.” Saadane represented the department of Algiers in the council, as Mohamed Bentaïeb, who opened this book criticizing the same law, did in the National Assembly. Devaud, a member of the conservative Parti républicain de la liberté (PRL), retorted, “Monsieur Saadane, we do not find it inappropriate that you are with us [but] if you do not want to be our brothers, you are our guests and we ask you to respect this tribune just as we do.” Devaud’s remarks drew immediate outcry from the benches of the far left and would be referenced by outraged speakers for the remainder of the day. The recording secretary, a Socialist who represented French citizens in Morocco, reminded her that the Algerians present held “exactly the same rights as the other councillors of the Republic.”¹ Devaud’s dismissive and racist assertion—she defended herself against accusations of the latter—of Algerian “guests” in the Council of the Republic speaks to more than just prevailing settler colonial beliefs of the day. It also signals the complexity and ambiguity of the status of Algerians both within the French government and within France itself.

In the late 1940s, regardless of their disdain for Devaud, most deputies were unwilling to extend to Algerians the right of representation that was a given for French citizens in the metropole. If the French Republic was expansive enough to include Algeria, it could be reduced to a narrower version of France that forestalled full equality across the Mediterranean as well. The tribulations of World War II also created openings for people from France’s empire to redefine their relationship to the metropole. With the administrative reorganization of the empire into the French Union in 1946, local authority grew and the possibility of suffrage and citizenship, albeit with limitations, drew more African peoples into France’s political life. Demands for further local autonomy fit within emergent calls for federalism. Federalism, meaning the limited intertwining of the political and economic functions of states beholden to a degree to one centralized power, was one of the most salient ideas of the postwar period. Leaders in the French Union, from Ferhat Abbas of Algeria to Léopold Senghor of Senegal, advocated federalism for the French Union. Indeed, Saadane belonged to the reformist Union démocratique du manifeste algérien (UDMA) party, founded by Abbas and dedicated to pushing for a federalist relationship between Algeria and metropolitan France. In their embrace of the concept, advocates envisioned a future predicated not on metropolitan dominance but on egalitarian and autonomous futures within the French Union’s framework.

In this same era, advocates of European integration dubbed themselves federalists. No discussion of European federalism is complete without an account of the place of empire in that history.² From its inception, modern dreams of joining the continent for peace included Africa and, in particular, a shared exercise in its domination. From Victor Hugo’s exhorting of a United States of Europe in 1849 to the prolific interwar and postwar publications casting Africa as Europe’s “last chance,” the connections between European planning and empire proved durable. European federalists eventually found a name for the link between unified Europe and colonized Africa: Eurafrica. The coiner of the term, like Hugo and the others who preceded him, saw a collective European subjugation of Africa, through the shared exploitation of its resources and the opening of its territory to European migration, as central to the project of binding Europe. The dream of a federative Europe traced deep roots into the nineteenth century, but the horrific nature of World War II pushed authorities to make it a reality. Federalism here meant European powers binding themselves via trade agreements—and symbolically, in the case of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), coupling their war industries—to eradicate competition and render future conflict impossible. By then, the advocates of federalism in the French Union, like Senghor, insisted that European federalism must support a Eurafrica in which Africans were equal partners in the integration process.

After surveying the long life of Eurafrican ideology, this chapter turns to changes in French overseas administration and citizenship after World War II. As Devaud’s incendiary remarks indicate, not all French officials believed that people in the French Union were ready or deserving of the rights of French citizenship. This reticence to accept French Union nationals as French citizens was compounded by the opaque nature of the legal language surrounding their rights under the Fourth Republic’s constitution. Algeria, for example, although considered a part of the French Republic and organized into administrative departments like the metropole, appeared to some jurists to have been demarcated as overseas departments or territories, which would imply different forms of representation and rights. Indeed, while it was legally inaccurate to group Algeria with the rest of the French Union, officials did so when they discussed the empire on the international stage. Neglecting Algeria’s peculiar status as a part of the French Republic allowed these officials to maintain an exclusively French grip over the region as they negotiated the boundaries of a European federation.

The ambiguity that arose in this period puzzled some legal scholars and caused concern among representatives of overseas populations. Whereas the unknowns drew alarm in some circles, for French officials in Paris the uncertainty also proved useful. It provided greater flexibility in how rights would extend to Overseas France and, at the negotiating table for European integration, facilitated their ability to draw a line between the France that would be included in Europe and the France that would be kept out. In the early steps of European institution building, French officials unevenly applied the principle that Algeria was a constitutive part of the Republic. This wavering allowed them to maintain exclusive access to Algerian resources and markets while also drawing on international funds to feed development projects in Algeria. The same went for the rest of the French Union. However, that very useful state of ambiguity made it increasingly difficult for French officials to deny rights to people in the French Union, including rights under European institutions.

Eurafrican ideology shifted from being a pan-European pursuit to tool for French mastery over its own colonial holdings. That change occurred at the end of World War II and amplified as French officials grew to fear challenges from anti-imperial nationalists. In tracking the shift to a French-focused Eurafrica, the international consequences, intended and otherwise, of reforms to the French Union come into focus. The domestic conditions of imperial reform, and specifically the turn toward federalism, opened particular pathways for French officials to demand Eurafrican policy when it suited their economic and political needs. The surprising elision of the supposedly firm legal distinctions between Algeria and the remainder of the French Union served that purpose well. French domestic debates about the meaning of the French Union and the best ways to represent its residents—regulations like the statut organique de l’Algérie and others—showcase the range of ways that representatives from Paris to Algiers to Dakar could harness the gray areas of imperial law to insist on concrete policies that would place France at the center of integrated Europe.

“Delightful Peace At Last”

France’s beloved author Victor Hugo is often celebrated for his prophetic call for a United States of Europe, which he trumpeted during the 1849 Peace Conference held in Paris. By joining together, European states could stem future war and allocate resources to education and technology, rather than costly armies. Like statesmen a century later, Hugo saw his motherland as the center of that union, writing, “France is already Europe.” Further, in its colonial enterprise, he declared, “We have not come to Africa to bring back Africa, but to bring Europe there.” His rationale presaged later Eurafrican ideology, encouraging European states to “pour your overflowing population into Africa, and thereby solve your social issues: turn your proletarians into owners.”³ That Hugo tied “Europe” to a celebration of the French conquest of Algeria—he referred to the army in “Roman land”—is telling. European unity, even in the eyes of its earliest proponents, would be constructed in Africa as well as in the metropole.⁴

Efforts to strengthen European grandeur and find solutions to continental poverty and overpopulation through colonization went hand in hand with attempts to secure peace through treaties and to alleviate competition between Berlin, Paris, and beyond. In vision if not in name, Hugo had identified Eurafrica as a pivotal part of the unification of Europe. Although he centered Paris at Eurafrica’s heart, the nascent ideology first encompassed the imperial aspirations of many European statesmen and thinkers, rendering it a truly pan-European concept. The offer of sharing access to Africa appealed to Europeans whose states lacked colonies or whose colonies were wrested from it, as in the case of Germany after World War I. A European pact to share Africa would decrease competition and labor issues across Europe by putting continentally bound states onto an even playing field with major empires and by opening supposedly empty African space to excess and underemployed European populations.⁵

As even the most cursory glance at the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrates, Hugo’s dreams were far from realized. To name only the major conflagrations, the Crimean War, Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II all embroiled European powers in the years and decades after his peace conference proclamation. Beyond the battlefield, politicians and industrialists alike looked warily at the rising economic and political might across the Atlantic: the United States.⁶ These subsequent conflicts and anxieties convinced more elite Europeans that some form of unity could secure perpetual peace, particularly after the Great War.⁷ Questions of self-determination, sovereignty, and empire were closely bound up in the pursuit of securing and maintaining world peace. Although this offered venues, particularly through the League of Nation’s Permanent Mandates Commission, for minority populations and people from colonized places to make claims and decry mistreatment, the league ultimately reinforced the right of domination, shying away from declarations of racial equality and reticent to condemn imperial powers.⁸

The nightmarish casualties of World War I rendered campaigns for European unification all the more urgent. France had suffered over 1.6 million metropolitan and colonial military and civilian deaths, or 4.29 percent of its population. Germany lost 2.4 million people, or 3.82 percent of its population.⁹ Those losses are roughly equivalent to the 2021 populations of Philadelphia and Houston, respectively, or of Vienna and Rome.¹⁰ The blame placed on the German Empire is remembered as having the most influence on the aftermath of war, namely in the form of the so-called war guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles. But the interwar period was also marked by the popularity of internationalism and, in particular, cooperation among Europeans. The respected French minister of foreign affairs Aristide Briand declared during a September 1929 meeting of the League of Nations Assembly, “I think that among peoples constituting geographical groups like the peoples of Europe, there should be some kind of federal bond.… This is a link I want to forge.”¹¹ Such an idea was not Briand’s innovation; he and his compatriots, including French prime minister Édouard Herriot, had been influenced by their relationship with Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the Pan-European Union.

Coudenhove-Kalergi cuts a fascinating historical figure. Perhaps best known today for his successful advocacy of “Ode to Joy” as the Council of Europe’s anthem, he was born in Tokyo in 1894 to an Austro-Hungarian father and a Japanese mother.¹² He published the “Pan-Europa Manifesto” in 1923 and established the Pan-European Union the following year. He quickly became an influential thinker and lobbyist for the cause of Eurafrica, a turn of phrase he is credited with coining. In his view, the federation of Europe was both in need of and akin to empire. As he wrote in Paneuropa, the movement’s publication, “Africa could provide Europe with raw materials for its industry, nutrition for its population, land for its overpopulation, labor for its unemployed, and markets for its products.”¹³ The emphasis on Africa’s utility to the whole of Europ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Timeline
• Maps
• Epigraph
• Introduction: A Kaleidoscopic Approach to European Integration
• 1. Eurafrican Dreams, Imperial Realities
• 2. Reforming Empire, Forming Europe
• 3. The Ultimatum for the Treaty of Rome
• 4. Algérie Européenne
• 5. French Supremacy in Europe after Algerian Independence
• 6. Algeria, France, and the Europe of Nation-States
• Conclusion: “We’re from Europe—Let Us In!”
• Notes
• Archival and Primary Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Index