The Battle for Algeria. Jennifer Johnson
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to bolster an official state narrative that lionized the FLN and contended that the entire population rose up against their French colonial oppressors and contributed to their overthrow.
Algerian scholars slowly chipped away at this narrative. Mohammed Harbi, an Algerian historian who used personal materials to challenge the postcolonial nationalist version of history, argued that even though the FLN steered the country to independence, it was not the only political group invested in the process. He, along with historians Gilbert Meynier, Daho Djerbal, and Nedjib Sidi-Moussa, have shown the internal fractures within the FLN and exposed the violence they committed to the other major political force at the time, the Algerian National Movement (MNA).25 Celebrating national heroes and lionizing the victorious political parties are common in postcolonial African countries and are subjects that invite comparative analysis. But Algerian scholarship rarely situates its independence movement within contemporary currents of decolonization.
Despite the Algerian conflict’s centrality to the post–World War II international political climate, it was not until the first decade of the twenty-first century that scholars began to tackle this issue.26 Most prominently, Matthew Connelly’s A Diplomatic Revolution examines the international dimensions of the Algerian war and shows how Algerian nationalists gained independence through their international diplomatic efforts at the United Nations.27 Connelly focuses on the Cold War context and demonstrates that Algerian leaders intentionally exploited the American-Soviet rivalry for political gain. A Diplomatic Revolution emphasized that Western countries and the Soviet Union did not have a monopoly on international relations. There were additional actors to consider in the political negotiations and outcomes of the 1950s and 1960s.
Connelly’s work remains critical for scholars of Algeria, the Cold War, and diplomatic history. However, his work largely concentrates on American foreign policy during the Cold War as the two superpowers battled for influence in Africa during decolonization. The Cold War is the main axis of his analysis, not the war itself. He privileges the FLN’s diplomatic efforts over the armed struggle and eclipses crucial local dimensions of the conflict. By placing Algeria at the epicenter of international change, with Washington, Moscow, and Beijing as the centers of power, Algerian voices are overshadowed and numerous questions remain about the Algerian leaders themselves and the war on the ground as they experienced it within Algeria and beyond its borders.
Since the publication of A Diplomatic Revolution, the Algerian National Archives have released a considerable amount of material pertaining to the FLN and the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), allowing scholars to pose new questions about the internal struggle and nationalist strategy. Jeffrey James Byrne’s work stands out because he was among the first to obtain Algerian material on the post-1962 period, allowing him to draw conclusions about Algerian domestic and foreign policy as planned and described by the Algerians themselves.28 This important body of scholarship engages with the postwar international political climate, but it does not adequately deal with international organizations and rights discourse that emerged alongside it.
In the years after 1945, international organizations and universal declarations about peace, security, and human rights proliferated. They articulated a renewed commitment to global cooperation and aimed to offer protection to men, women, and children around the world regardless of a person’s race, gender, or religion. However, these noble intentions, as Mark Mazower has demonstrated, were not necessarily intended for everyone, namely colonial subjects. Emergent international organizations merely masked “the consolidation of a great power directorate.”29 In many cases, French and British officials expressed trepidation over the wording of these important documents. They worried that ideas and the vocabulary within them would serve as a guide and purveyor of rights for anyone able to read them.30 Western leaders did not heed the lessons from the global impact of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points on mobilizing the colonized.31
Prior to decolonization, Western powers benefited nearly exclusively from international organizations and rhetoric about individual freedom.32 However, after 1945, a new global order provided a different vocabulary and vision of the future that anticolonial nationalist leaders appropriated and exploited for their own political gain.33 Postwar international organizations offered additional forums in which nationalists could be heard, and rights discourse afforded them with new political possibilities.34
The war in Algeria demanded that the international community rethink the meaning of humanitarianism and human rights.35 After World War II, especially 1945–1950, a period some scholars call “the human rights revolution,” significant advances were made to protect individuals from physical, mental, and emotional abuse.36 During these five years, the United Nations was created, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention were finalized, the Fourth Convention was added to the Geneva Conventions, and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950 was signed. They provided the legal and moral framework for the dawn of a new world. However, they were hardly enforceable, and imperial powers, mainly France and Britain, strongly protested their universal applicability, fearing that anticolonial nationalists might use them against the colonial state. Their fears were warranted.
To be sure, human rights are difficult to define. They range from political and social rights to economic and legal rights. Their meaning has changed over time, frequently subject to interpretation depending on the context, culture, and location.37 In the 1940s they pertained more to political rights. In the 1950s and 1960s, self-determination became a human rights focal point. By the 1970s, they expanded to include the right to health, food, shelter, women’s rights, and economic prosperity.38 Despite the challenges of an ever-expanding rights arsenal, a useful way to think about human rights is as an effort “to make claims across borders in the name of basic rights.”39 This broad definition provides a common thread throughout the history of human rights and highlights several reasons why the FLN strategy resonated across the globe in the 1950s and 1960s. The events and actions in Algeria inspired revolutionaries from Cuba and the United States to Moscow and China, and the Algerian nationalists’ political success became emblematic of reconfigured post–World War II diplomatic possibilities.
The Battle for Algeria combines these histories and argues that Algerian decolonization should be considered part of human rights history. Too frequently, human rights literature “jumps” from the 1940s to the 1970s, bypassing decolonization.40 Contrary to what Sam Moyn has argued, anticolonial nationalists used rights discourse as tools for their liberation.41 Algerian nationalists were not on the periphery watching rights debates happen around them. They were at the center of them, shaping many of these political contests and defining their outcome. They seized words and ideas, albeit in a piecemeal approach, that could benefit their nationalist cause. In many cases, they thrust themselves onto the international stage armed only with universal terminology about health, humanitarianism, and self-determination.
With the help of universal rights, as broadly defined by Kenneth Cmiel, the FLN acted as a functional state before Algerian independence in 1962. Algerian leaders juggled the provision of medicine and health care, aid, and political representation at the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations, and combined these efforts with a laser-sharp deployment of recently reconceived terms, ideas, and concepts. The massive changes to the international system enabled Third World actors to seize their place on the political battlefield, articulate claims, and seriously challenge their European oppressors in a way that was never possible on a military battlefield.42
The exchange between Ferhat Abbas, president of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, and ICRC president Léopold Boissier illuminates how Algerian nationalists tested the principles and limits of the postwar order to claim sovereignty of Algeria. The FLN took advantage of all the available tools—ideological, political, and rhetorical—and developed a comprehensive domestic and international strategy to claim Algeria as its own. Nonstate actors around the world would emulate this strategy, transforming international understandings of sovereignty and rights.43 This transformation begins in Algeria with the FLN forcing the world to consider the Third World.