African Socialisms

Nasserite Egypt (1960–1974), Bourguiba's Tunisia (1954–1986), Algeria from Ahmed Ben Bella's and Boumediene's through the reforms of the mid-1980s Qaddafi's Libya (1969/ 1977–) represented the beginning and end of North African socialisms.

Like the Cold War, the Egyptian Young Officer's coup would prepare a template for much of the continent's independence with its one party, state capitalist socialism; it also demonstrated efficacy in achieving power through armed force. Originally hostile to socialism, Nasser eventually used "Arab" socialism to rationalize confiscating large landed estates, foreign nationalizations, and outlawing political and religious opposition, all identified with holding back national development. A trademark of African socialisms was invoking development in the "people's" name, and populist state capitalist socialism became a practice of legitimation. The imperative of rapid economic and social development through planning was put forward as guaranteeing modernization and equitable redistribution that only the state could be charged with. Multiparty democracy was viewed as a disruptive extravagance the progress of the "people's" developmental state could ill afford, and trade unions, once a ground of radical support, were expected to have no role other than to support the aims of the state.

One finds similar rationalizations in all other North African socialisms, despite differences over, for instance, the extent to which there was a need for the state to own socialized property, rather than direct the redistribution of wealth. In Habib Bourguiba's modernist appeal to socialism at independence in 1956 through the Tunisian nationalist Neo-Destourisime; in Algeria's attempt to come to terms with the reconstructive aftermath of a brutal war of independence, in the response to the chaos of the early years under Ahmed Ben Bella's (1918–) chaotic self-management; and Houari Boumediene's (1965) coup, auguring in "Real Socialism," the rationalized normalizing of the revolution combing technocratic development through state-led industrialization; as well as Ghadaffi's coup and eventual 1977 announcement of Jamahiriya (the "people's" state) socialism for Libya. In their different ways, each sought to balance national identity as Islamic, with the demands of modernizing under the quasi-secularist nationalizing, one-party state. Each feared fragmentation, and each sought centralized political and economic control to overcome it. Each restricted political parties, undertook a more or less centralized state for fear of unfettering dormant interests uniting around religion, class, and ethnicity. All claimed to have modern egalitarian and equitable ends, and all wanted to justify themes consistent with religion, while keeping the ulemma and conservative classes allied with them under control, ensuring religion did not interfere with its national cohesion and national development.

Only Ghadaffi clung to fictionalizing socialism's name as real; by the early twenty-first century Tunisia had abandoned all simulation, embarking on the most controlled secular march toward modernizing the society and the economy; while Algeria continued to live with the effects unleashed by the (1978–1991) economic and political liberalization, forces repressed by one-partyism. From the breakdown of the state from ethnic loyalties to the violence of Islamist backlash in the face of annulled elections in 1993, the facade of socialism was all but forsaken.