STANFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
  



Globalizing Morocco
Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State
David Stenner

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INTRODUCTION

NETWORKED ANTICOLONIAL ACTIVISM

IN NOVEMBER 1952, a group of Moroccan anticolonial activists gathered in New York to advocate before the United Nations for their country’s independence from French and Spanish colonial rule. They had come to receive the global body’s approval of their demands less than a decade after the formation of the Moroccan nationalist movement during World War II. Notwithstanding the dark suits and leather briefcases that made them look like regular diplomats, they had no legal standing in the new headquarters of international diplomacy due to their country’s colonial status. But the representatives of several sovereign states offered their assistance and provided the nationalists with passports that identified them as members of the Saudi, Indonesian, Pakistani, Iraqi, or Yemeni delegations. They could thus attend committee meetings dealing with colonial affairs. Pakistan’s eloquent foreign minister at the time, Mohammed Zafrullah Khan, threw the full weight of the Islamic world behind their demands during a debate in the UN General Assembly on the situation in North Africa. Despite considerable French efforts to keep the Moroccan question off the agenda, the nationalists gained a partial victory when the gathered delegates adopted a resolution confirming “the fundamental liberties of the people of Morocco.”1 From the nationalist viewpoint, “the very fact . . . [that] the UN considered itself competent to deal with the Moroccan problem and pass a resolution” constituted a “victory” for their cause, even though the declaration had failed to explicitly condemn France.2

Many of their compatriots back home followed the campaign in New York with great excitement. A close confidant of Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef informed the activists of the “delight of our Excellency about the presentation of the [Moroccan] case [abroad]”;3 poets recited verses in praise of the UN;4 and a nationalist communiqué celebrated the fact that “our brothers in America issue a weekly news publication every Friday [which] is distributed to . . . public and university libraries . . . and important personalities who follow our case.”5 The anticolonial weekly al-Istiqlal frequently published articles and editorials from US newspapers to keep its readership informed about “the reactions of American [public] opinion.”6 As one nationalist informed his brother in New York, “The people here pay a lot of attention to the news and we often hear the details in the street before we read them in the newspapers, all of which comes from listening to the various radio stations. . . . They follow the situation in America and the people here attach great hope [to it].”7

The Moroccan struggle for independence had gone global. But how exactly did the nationalists internationalize their case so successfully that even the UN eventually deliberated the issue? How did they communicate their message abroad given that almost none of them spoke any English? Why did the international media eventually engage with the demands of activists from a somewhat obscure kingdom in northwestern Africa as an Iron Curtain descended over Europe and the ensuing tensions threatened to drag the entire planet into yet another world war? While certainly impressive in hindsight, the eventual success of their anticolonial campaign had not been predetermined when it began in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Few contemporary observers would have anticipated that the Moroccan question might soon attract considerable international attention.

To overcome the obstacles in their path, the Moroccans adopted an innovative strategy that positioned them in the vanguard of worldwide anticolonial movements, many of which would emulate them in future decades. They succeeded by creating a network of sympathizers that enabled them to raise global awareness for their case. Former intelligence agents, British journalists, Asian diplomats, Egyptian Islamists, Coca-Cola executives, Western labor activists, Catholic intellectuals, French socialists, a Nobel laureate, a US Supreme Court judge, Chilean businessmen, a former American First Lady, and many others supported their efforts. These allies not only translated the nationalists’ demands into their specific cultural contexts but also legitimized the calls for an independent Morocco among their compatriots by speaking out against colonial rule in the Maghrib. The result was an international alliance that spanned across four continents and successfully brought the nationalists’ case to the attention of world public opinion. Ultimately, it even convinced the UN General Assembly to address the status of the North African kingdom.

This diplomatic victory was the outcome of years of lobbying that had led the activists across the entire globe. Organized around offices in Tangier, Paris, Cairo, and New York, the Moroccans successfully advocated for their country’s independence.8 Those executing this campaign, however, were not the leaders of the nationalist movement, known to us from the standard accounts of Maghribi historiography. Instead, a number of young activists relocated abroad to generate worldwide interest in the Moroccan question by assembling a global alliance demanding the abrogation of the colonial regimes. Moreover, after the North African kingdom had finally achieved independence in March 1956, all of them played important roles in the creation of the postcolonial state. Hitherto deemed to have been of minor relevance, these transnational activists made vital contributions to Moroccan history.

By the time the nationalists made their voices heard on the world stage, their country had been subject to colonial rule for more than three decades following the collapse of the Moroccan state in the early twentieth century.9 Signed in March 1912 by then-sultan Abdelhafid, the Treaty of Fez had granted France the right and duty to “inaugurat[e] a regular regime in Morocco based upon internal order and general security, making it possible to introduce reforms and to insure the economic development of the country,” with a resident general being “charged with the representation and protection of Moroccan subjects and interests abroad.”10 It also promised to “safeguard the religious status, the respect and traditional prestige of the Sultan.”11 Paris signed a separate agreement with Madrid eight months later, based on a clause in the Treaty of Fez that had promised an “understanding with the Spanish government regarding the interests, which this government has in virtue of its geographical position and territorial possessions on the Moroccan coast.”12 The deal designated a northern strip along the Mediterranean as the “Spanish zone of influence . . . governed by a caliph [khalifa] under the supervision of a Spanish high commissioner, which caliph shall be chosen by the sultan from two candidates proposed by the Spanish government.”13 The question of the port city of Tangier remained open until 1923, when France, Spain, and Great Britain agreed on a multinational administration led by a committee of control.14

Morocco’s tripartite division led to the proliferation of anticolonial resistance movements—initially armed but later political—across much of the country.15 By May 1930, the scions of the country’s urban bourgeoisie challenged the protectorate authorities through mass protests against the so-called Berber dahir (edict), which replaced Islamic with customary law in many rural regions and thus aimed to fragment Moroccan society.16 But the trajectories of the two zones diverged soon thereafter. The Spanish high commissioner in Tetouan granted legal recognition to Hizb al-Islah al-Watani (Party of National Reform, PNR) in December 1936 and encouraged its leaders’ partial integration into the colonial apparatus. The French authorities, by contrast, temporarily exiled in November 1937 most of the activists from the territory under their control. Ultimately, the hardships caused by World War II proved pivotal for the transformation of Moroccan anticolonialism into a nationalist movement that openly called for an immediate abrogation of the protectorates. In December 1943 in Rabat, several dozen young men founded Hizb al-Istiqlal (Independence Party), which quickly grew into the country’s largest political organization. Although separated by different colonial regimes, both parties coordinated their activities. This applied particularly to their campaign abroad.

The complex legal reality of the two protectorates forced the nationalists to structure their struggle for independence around two important facts. First, Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef literally embodied the last vestiges of Moroccan sovereignty, since it was for his “protection” that the entire colonial edifice had been erected. Second, the Spanish protectorate existed solely as a French concession—if Paris ever nullified the Treaty of Fez, the government in Madrid would have to withdraw its officials as well. For these reasons, activists from both zones embraced Sidi Mohammed, as the monarch was also known, as the country’s symbol of unity, fully capable of leading his people toward a prosperous future. Moreover, it meant that everyone—including the nationalists from Tetouan—directed their activities first and foremost against France. Doing so had become both easier and more difficult in the face of recent world events: whereas the UN provided an ideal platform for reaching out to world public opinion, the constraints of the emerging Cold War threatened to marginalize the interests of the decolonizing world. Nowhere did this become more apparent than in North Africa.

DECOLONIZATION AND THE COLD WAR

The end of World War II not only heralded the beginning of a new age on the European continent but also remade the relationships between the Western powers and the world’s colonized peoples.17 Having witnessed their empires contract during six years of total warfare, politicians in London, Paris, The Hague, and beyond sought to salvage their colonial possessions from the ruins of the global conflict. Yet that was easier said than done. France’s Fourth Republic, for example, emerged materially devastated and morally tarnished by the legacy of the collaborationist Vichy regime. Many French citizens nonetheless expected the reconstruction of the colonies from Indochina to North Africa to secure their country’s economic well-being and restore its shattered national pride. Even politicians that had risked their lives in the resistance against the Nazi occupation did not hesitate to order the brutal repression of anticolonial movements overseas.18 But the defeat of the European armies by the German Wehrmacht had shattered their aura of invincibility in the eyes of the colonial subjects, who deemed a continuation of the status quo neither desirable nor inevitable. The two decades after 1945 thus saw the clash of two antagonistic currents: recolonization and decolonization.

Two events symbolized this contradictory transformation of global politics. Just three weeks after the Istiqlal Party had unilaterally declared Morocco’s independence on 11 January 1944, the leaders of the Free French Forces gathered in Brazzaville, then capital of French Equatorial Africa, to plan the resurrection of a reformed empire following the end of the war (they emphatically rejected the “autonomy” and “self-government of the colonies even in the long term”).19 An even more emblematic incident occurred on 8 May 1945. While crowds from Los Angeles to Moscow celebrated Nazi Germany’s surrender, the local population in Sétif commemorated VE Day by demanding an end to colonial rule. Instead of acknowledging the validity of their demands, though, the French authorities massacred thousands of Algerian Muslims.20 European statesmen denied their colonial subjects the very same freedoms for which they had fought against Hitler and his allies. What seemed like a moment of liberation to some actually meant new forms of oppression for others.

Yet despite the colonial powers’ feverish attempts to reassert their control, a tectonic shift in international relations had made such endeavors unfeasible: politicians in European capitals no longer decided the fate of the world, but their counterparts in Washington and Moscow seeking to recruit client states to their respective camps did.21 The ultimate symbol of this dramatic transformation occurred during the Suez Crisis of November 1956, which came to an abrupt conclusion when US president Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet first secretary Nikita Khrushchev jointly forced Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw their invading armies from Egypt. Such moments of cooperation remained rare, however, since the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union had already given way to a new rivalry that soon enough encompassed all five continents.22 As the promise of “a world free of want and fear” outlined by the Atlantic Charter in 1941 became an ever-more-distant dream, the hopes of many observers rested on a new intergovernmental organization designed to promote international cooperation.

The United Nations symbolized the nascent global order after its establishment in 1945; its two-tier structure consisting of the Security Council and the General Assembly emphasized the organization’s hierarchical nature, and it initially did little to encourage anticolonial nationalism around the globe. It sought stability, not revolutionary change.23 But notwithstanding its founders’ conservative intentions, the UN soon came to embody the hopes of many Africans and Asians, who viewed it as a forum through which they could mobilize “world opinion” against the colonial powers.24 After all, its founding charter had proclaimed “the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” and thus appeared to fulfill the promises made by the Allies during the war years; three years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlined the “common standard of achievement for all peoples” that included the “dignity and . . . equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” and permitted “rebellion against tyranny” as a last resort.25

Although the colonial powers had done everything possible to prevent the gathered delegates from incorporating radically anticolonial language into the UN’s founding documents, they left the conference fearful that the nascent intergovernmental organization would inevitably herald the end of their empires.26 The flood of petitions inundating the UN demonstrated its appeal to women and men across the colonized world.27 Transnational alliances of nongovernmental organizations such as the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the International League of the Rights of Man helped African nationalists appeal to a global public as well as to the responsible UN committees.28 And an itinerant clergyman established the Africa Bureau in New York to advocate for Namibian independence.29 These activists also received support from influential grassroots movements such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), which used its contacts among US politicians to actively assist a wide range of anticolonial causes.30 “Everything done to inform the world about the situation of the subject peoples slowly promotes their emancipation,” French legal scholar André Mathiot noted in 1949 with regard to the organization’s ability to “submit colonial policies to public opinion.”31

The emergence of the UN as the center of international diplomacy thus both contributed to and paralleled the age of decolonization.32 The Moroccan nationalists visiting New York sought to take advantage of trends that pointed to the decline of empire across the globe, only some of which can be attributed to the intergovernmental organization. The Philippines in 1946, India and Pakistan in 1947, Burma in 1948, Indonesia in 1949, Libya in 1951, and Vietnam in 1954 all secured their independence within the decade following the end of World War II and inspired others to follow in their footsteps. Seeking to make the voices of Africa and Asia heard around the world, twenty-nine non-Western nations met in Bandung in 1955 to take a stance against imperialism and reestablish their peoples as independent historical actors.33 A different world suddenly seemed possible. Statesmen from across the globe founded the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade six years later to move beyond neutrality toward a much more assertive stance that would exploit the tensions of the Cold War to their own benefit.34 Unwilling to maintain their subservient position vis-à-vis the former colonial powers, they sought to transform the entire world;35 the resulting rise of South-South relations created a new sphere of politics outside the confines of Western control.36 Whereas the global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union had begun as a bilateral confrontation, it quickly became a multipolar conversation.37 And the Moroccans wanted to participate in it.

The potential of decolonization to bring about radical change was best expressed by the term Third World, which many opponents of Western hegemony eagerly embraced.38 Originally coined by the French geographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952, it echoed the ideals of the French revolutionaries so famously expressed by Abbé Sieyès in 1789. (“What is the Third Estate? Every thing. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something.”)39 But within the context of the Cold War, the expression also advocated for the “positive neutrality” of the non-Western world with regard to the binary geopolitical conflict. It reflected the desire of the colonial peoples to assert themselves on the world stage as sovereign nations and galvanized the hopes of many—including some in Europe and North America—at the height of the era of decolonization.40

Morocco was no exception in this regard. Even before the notion of a Third World became an integral part of the global political vocabulary, the country’s nationalist press had advocated for the creation of “a third force of small states at the UN maintaining a balance . . . [between] the two powerful states,” thus indicating that it understood the local anticolonial struggle as inherently intertwined with the Cold War.41 At the same time, though, the Moroccans rejected the term’s more radical implications. Although they wanted to free themselves from all vestiges of the colonial era, they did not seek a fundamental rupture with either Europe or the United States. Their goal was acceptance as equals within a global system based on representative democracy and liberal capitalism. Aspiring to close relations with both Western and Afro-Asian capitals did not seem like a contradiction to them.

GLOBALIZING THE MOROCCAN QUESTION

The rapidly shifting international landscape of the post–World War II decade shaped the Moroccans’ struggle for independence. From a global perspective, it was exactly the right moment to make their case abroad: the European empires displayed clear symptoms of decay, while two new superpowers outbid each other to gain the sympathies of the decolonizing peoples. The bipolar conflict thus provided nationalist movements with leverage to gain independence on their own terms despite the constraints it imposed on them.42 It was now or never—the Moroccans had to seize this unique opportunity by appealing directly to the conscience of what came to be known as world public opinion. Thereby, they would exert international pressure that might force France and Spain to relinquish their respective protectorates.43 The solution was the formation of an international network of supporters that allowed them to successfully advocate for Moroccan independence on the global stage.

But whereas this networked approach proved very useful throughout the liberation struggle, it became a liability after the end of the protectorates as the country descended into a power struggle that pitted the political elites against each other. Although they had closely cooperated during the years of the anticolonial campaign, the royal palace and the nationalists now vied to fill the vacuum created by the withdrawal of the colonial authorities. The country’s monarch ultimately emerged victorious as he took control of the levers of power by co-opting the central nodes of the advocacy network, thus weakening the Istiqlal and turning it into an opposition party. Its informal nature, lack of a clearly defined membership, and failure to establish a coherent ideology had once constituted advantages but suddenly turned into liabilities; the skills, resources, and personal connections acquired by the nationalists during their campaign abroad strengthened the monarch’s hand as soon as he had drawn the network’s central participants to his side. Through a careful analysis of the liaisons of activists working on the global level, we can understand how the Istiqlalis managed to win the battle for independence but then abruptly lose the prize of political dominance over the postcolonial state. Instead, Sidi Mohammed laid the groundwork for the authoritarian monarchy that still rules the country today.

The Moroccan nationalists repeatedly referred to their own outreach activities as propaganda.44 Of course, that term carries a negative, even derogatory, connotation today. At the time, however, they self-consciously embraced the importance of “confronting the world conscience through propaganda [diʿāya] and dissemination of information [tanshīr] about the activities of the oppressors.”45 And the nationalist press regularly celebrated those traveling abroad “to conduct propaganda for the Moroccan case.”46 The term used in this way implied objectivity and truth, not bias and deceit. Even US media outlets such as the New York Times occasionally used the term approvingly (“Motion pictures . . . are . . . the best kind of propaganda for the American way of life” one article argued in the context of the early Cold War).47 Considering the international media’s general sympathy toward France’s policies, the Moroccans knew that they had to craft their own narratives. To achieve this end, they needed to provide verifiable facts to validate their claims.

Publications such as Morocco under the Protectorate: Forty Years of French Administration promised a detailed “analysis of the facts and figures,” all of which had been taken from French government reports.48 In the United States, the nationalists’ monthly periodical Free Morocco, which reached curious individuals across the entire country, informed its readers that “the Moroccan demands are not extreme” but merely called for the restoration of their compatriots’ “rights and liberties.”49 The Moroccans saw their best chance of success in appealing to the liberal conscience of Western publics—at no point did they consider working with the Soviet Union or its allies. (“The foremost aim . . . is to establish a democratic government—a liberal constitutional monarchy and social democracy, where the Moroccan citizens can exercise all their rights as free citizens,” a booklet published in New York in 1953 explained to the reader.)50 This tactic proved extremely effective in gaining the sympathies of Western observers, whose increasing hostility toward the colonial regime in Morocco ultimately contributed to the demise of the two protectorates.

NOTES

1. “UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/612(VII)—The Question of Morocco,” 19 December 1952, http://research.un.org/en/docs/ga/quick/regular/7; and Leon Borden Blair, Western Window in the Arab World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), 165.

2. “The Moroccan Question in the United Nations,” Moroccan News Bulletin, 26 December 1952, 2.

3. Mohammed al-Khatib to Mehdi Bennouna, 21 October 1952, Mehdi Bennouna File, vol. 2, Bennouna Family Archive, Tetouan (hereafter BFA).

4. Tayeb Bennouna to Mehdi Bennouna, 10 November 1952, Mehdi Bennouna File, vol. 2, BFA.

5. PNR Communiqué No. 4, 7 March 1953, Mehdi Bennouna File, vol. 2, BFA.

6. See, for example, “Les reactions de l’opinion américaine,” al-Istiqlal, 26 April 1952, 2; and “Les grands organs de la presse américaine critiquent sévèrement la politique française en Tunisie,” al-Istiqlal, 24 May 1952, 4.

7. Tayeb Bennouna to Mehdi Bennouna, 10 November 1952, Mehdi Bennouna File, vol. 2, BFA.

8. Muhammad al-ʿArabi al-Masari, Al-Maghrib kharij siyaj al-himaya (Rabat, MA: Manshurat ʿAkath, 2012), 11–14.

9. Susan G. Miller, A History of Modern Morocco (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 63–79.

10. “Protectorate Treaty between France and Morocco—March 30, 1912,” The American Journal of International Law 6, no. 3 (1912): 207, 209.

11. Ibid., 207.

12. Ibid., 208.

13. “Treaty between France and Spain Regarding Morocco—November 27, 1912,” The American Journal of International Law 7, no. 2 (1913): 81.

14. Miller, A History of Modern Morocco, 88.

15. The most important resistance movement was led by Mohammed b. Abdelkarim al-Khattabi in the northern Rif Mountains from 1920 until 1926. María Rosa de Madariaga, Abdel-Krim el Jatabi: La lucha por la independencia (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2009); and C. Richard Pennell, A Country with a Government and a Flag: The Rif War in Morocco, 1921–1926 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1986).

16. John P. Halstead, Rebirth of a Nation: The Origins and Rise of Moroccan Nationalism, 1912–1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs, 1967), 178–90.

17. Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel, Dekolonisation—das Ender der Imperien (Munich: Beck, 2013), 50–52. The relationship between Britain and its former white settler colonies underwent a very similar transformation within the framework of the Commonwealth during this period. See A. G. Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonization,” Past & Present 200 (2008).

18. Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and Their Roads from Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 76.

19. “Recommendations adoptées par la conference,” in La Conférence africaine française, Brazzaville: 30 janvier 1944–8 février 1944 (Paris: Ministère des Colonies, 1945), 32.

20. Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–62 (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), 23–28.

21. On the hierarchical nature of international relations during the Cold War, see Prasenjit Duara, “The Cold War as a Historical Period: An Interpretive Essay,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 3 (2011).

22. Odd A. Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Robert J. McMahon, ed., The Cold War in the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Tony Smith, “New Bottles for New Wine: A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (2000); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

23. Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

24. Evan Luard, A History of the United Nations, vol. 2, The Age of Decolonization, 1955–1965 (Palgrave: New York, 1989), 102.

25. “Charter of the United Nations,” chapter 1, article 1, part 2, United Nations, accessed 7 February 2017, https://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations; and “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” preamble, United Nations, accessed 7 February 2017, https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html. In the eyes of many anticolonial activists, however, the appeal of human rights did not lay in their protection of individuals against the authority of the state but rather in their ability to bring about the “threshold right of self-determination” that protected the “autonomy of the new nation” against foreign intervention. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia—Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), 117.

26. Jessica Lynne Pearson, “Defending Empire at the United Nations: The Politics of International Colonial Oversight in the Era of Decolonisation,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43, no. 3 (2017): 526.

27. Meredith Terretta, Petitioning for Our Rights, Fighting for Our Nation: The History of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, 1949–1960 (Bamenda, CM: Langaa Research & Publishing CIG, 2013); and Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

28. Meredith Terretta, “Anti-Colonial Lawyering, Postwar Human Rights, and Decolonization across Imperial Boundaries in Africa,” Canadian Journal of History 52, no. 3 (2017); and Meredith Terretta, “‘We Had Been Fooled into Thinking That the UN Watches over the Entire World’: Human Rights, UN Trust Territories, and Africa’s Decolonization,” Human Rights Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2012).

29. Chris Saunders, “Namibian Solidarity: British Support for Namibian Independence,” Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 2 (2009): 439.

30. Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

31. André Mathiot, Les territoires non autonomes et la charte des Nations Unies (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1949), 62.

32. For a study of how the UN moved beyond serving as a mere platform for anticolonialism and became an active agent in the process of decolonization itself, see Eva-Maria Muschik, “Managing the World: The United Nations, Decolonization, and the Strange Triumph of State Sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of Global History 13, no. 1 (2018).

33. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007); and Christopher J. Lee, “At the Rendezvous of Decolonization: The Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, 18–24 April 1955,” Interventions 11, no. 1 (2009).

34. Jeffrey James Byrne, “Beyond Continents, Colours, and the Cold War: Yugoslavia, Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-Alignment,” The International History Review 37, no. 5 (2015).

35. Mark Philip Bradley, “Decolonization, Revolutionary Nationalism, and the Cold War, 1919–1962,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Samuel E. Crowl, “Indonesia’s Diplomatic Revolution: Lining Up for Non-Alignment, 1945–1955,” in Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945–1962, ed. Christopher E. Goscha and Christian F. Ostermann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

36. Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl et al., “Non-Alignment, the Third Force, or Fence-Sitting: Independent Pathways in the Cold War,” The International History Review 37, no. 5 (2015).

37. Jason Parker, Hearts, Minds, Voices: U.S. Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1; and Gerard McCann, “From Diaspora to Third Worldism and the United Nations: India and the Politics of Decolonizing Africa,” Past and Present 218, suppl. 8 (2013): 260.

38. Mark T. Berger, “After the Third World? History, Destiny and the Fate of Third Worldism,” Third World Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2004).

39. Genealogies of the term can be found in Leslie Wolf-Phillips, “Why ‘Third World’?: Origin, Definition and Usage,” Third World Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1987); and B. R. Tomlinson, “What Was the Third World?,” Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 2 (2003).

40. For an economic explanation of the “collapse” of Third Worldism, see Guy Laron, “Semi-Peripheral Countries and the Invention of the ‘Third World,’ 1955–65,” Third World Quarterly 35, no. 9 (2014). Interesting studies of the impact of anticolonial nationalism on the Left in France and the United States, respectively, are Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950–1976 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

41. “Masaʿi al-quwwa al-thalitha fi haiʾat al-umam al-muttahida,” al-ʿAlam, 10 February 1951, 2.

42. Richard H. Immermann and Petra Goedde, eds., introduction to The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7.

43. Robert Rézette, Les partis politiques marocains (Paris: A. Colin, 1955), 196.

44. I use the term propaganda as defined by Merriam-Webster: “Ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause.” Merriam-Webster, s.v. “propaganda (n.),” accessed February 5, 2017, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda.

45. Allal al-Fassi to Azzam Pasha, 1 September 1948, dossier 2/folder 14, Allal al-Fassi Foundation, Rabat (hereafter AFF).

46. “Al-Zaʿim ʿAllal al-Fasi yusarrihu: Sanutalibu min haiʾat al-umam manh al-istiqlal ila al-Maghrib tibqan li-dusturiha,” al-ʿAlam, 9 July 1952, 1.

47. Samuel Goldwyn, “World Challenge to Hollywood,” New York Times, 31 August 1947, SM8.

48. Hizb al-Istiqlal, Morocco under the Protectorate: Forty Years of French Administration. An Analysis of the Facts and Figures. (New York: Moroccan Office of Information and Documentation, 1953).

49. “Franco-Moroccan Relations: Facts and Prospects,” Free Morocco, 25 July 1953, 1.

50. “Nationalism, Independence and Democracy,” Free Morocco, 25 June 1953, 1.