A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence
and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era

From the Introduction of A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era

At ten o’clock one May morning in 1961 three Swiss Army helicopters skimmed across the waters of Lake Geneva toward the French resort town of Evian. Each one landed by the water’s edge, disgorged three passengers, and then lifted off to make room for the next. Stooped under the swooping blades, the assembled men smoothed their suits and were met by the local sub-prefect before making their way to a group of French officials awaiting them. Just out of sight, anti-aircraft guns were positioned along a defensive perimeter, while armed patrols and road blocks covered the countryside beyond. Even the lake, the only thing that seemed pacific about the place, concealed frogmen swimming beneath the surface.

The arriving delegation represented the “Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic” — or GPRA, its French acronym — though they could not truthfully claim to govern any territory in Algeria. All of their ministers were exiled in Tunis and Cairo or imprisoned on a fortified island off the Breton coast. Their forces in Algeria numbered less than 15,000 operating in units of ten or twenty men. With nothing heavier than mortars and machine guns, the mujahadeen faced a modern force of half a million men that was then testing its first nuclear weapons in the Sahara. The Algerians’ most effective actions were bombings and assassinations in Algeria and France, which would claim 133 lives during this first round of formal negotiations. The leader of the delegation, Belkacem Krim, had himself twice been sentenced to the guillotine.

Yet those French authorities feared most — and the reason for the extraordinary security at Evian — were their own military commanders and settlers in Algeria, who bitterly opposed conceding independence. A month earlier a military junta had briefly seized power in Algiers and threatened to land paratroops in Paris, while the Secret Army Organization (OAS) — a terrorist militia made up of the most die-hard settlers —had already murdered the mayor of Evian because of his chance association with what would happen there. Renegade army officers and remnants of the OAS would persist in attempts to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle long after the Evian accords sealed the fate of French Algeria almost a year later.

Why than was de Gaulle ready to risk his life and the Republic itself to hand over a part of the patrie and a million citizens of European descent to men considered criminals under French common law? After all, there had never been an Algerian equivalent of Dien Bien Phu, or even of the Tet Offensive. Instead, the French won the Battle of Algiers in 1957, effectively sealed off the borders in 1958, and had reduced the mujahadeen remaining in Algeria to scattered and increasingly desperate bands by 1960. Yet all along they gave ground on the question of Algeria’s future status and finally accepted the inevitability of its secession when the insurgency was at its weakest. The inverse relationship between France’s preponderant military strength in Algeria and the progressive deterioration of its bargaining position vis-a-vis the nationalists was —as de Gaulle’s biographer, Jean Lacouture, put it— “the supreme paradox”of the Algerian War.

Explaining this paradox requires recognizing the tenacity and bravery of the rebels, from the back alleys of Algiers to the border villages of the Constantinois, who fought and organized for more than seven years against atrocious repression. But the principal part of the answer— and of this history —must range far beyond the borders of Algeria. Based on archival research and interviews in Europe, North Africa, and the U.S., it is argued that what the Algerians called “the Revolution” was distinctively diplomatic in nature, and that their most decisive struggles came in the international arena. For weapons they employed human rights reports, press conferences, and youth congresses, fighting over world opinion and international law more than conventional military objectives. By the end, when they hardly attempted to breach the border fortifications erected around Algeria, the GPRA rallied majorities against France at the United Nations, won the accolades of international conferences, and gained 21-gun salutes in capitals across the globe. These accomplishments, in turn, inspired the hard-pressed mujahadeen to endure in their struggle. Together with the rebel armies and administrators sheltered by Morocco and Tunisia —supplied and funded by countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia and Communist China—they outlasted a government that had become obsessed with the war’s impact on its reputation abroad. Essentially, the Algerians won by outflanking French forces and border fortifications and surmounting the invisible barriers of censorship and sovereignty around Algeria. Once impregnable, these physical and intellectual defenses proved as obsolete as a crusader’s castle before the batteries of the international media and the UN General Assembly — though the siege took over seven years and as many as 500,000 lives.

Algeria’s fight for independence was also a diplomatic revolution according to the conventional meaning of the term, in the sense that it helped to reorder international relations. Here too there is a paradox: France’s repeated attempts to contain the conflict only ensured that it would have the most far-reaching repercussions. It was the immediate cause of Paris’ concession of independence to the protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia and it accelerated the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa. A determination to confront the rebels’ foreign backers contributed to the Suez crisis and triggered the events leading to the fall of the Fourth Republic and the return of de Gaulle. Le général began to withdraw French forces from NATO commands partly to retaliate against America’s unwillingness to support the war. All along Algeria was a rallying point for the non-aligned movement and Arab nationalism. Indeed, this was the first time a subject people lacking the means to control any of the territory they claimed declared their independence and won the recognition that finally made independence possible. Their example inspired the African National Congress, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and many other such movements.

Perhaps Algeria’s progress toward independence reflected changes in the perceptions and reality of national sovereignty more than it affected them. After all, this was a time when waves of economic and technological change were already beginning to erode the borders that separate states from one another and the world community as a whole. To gauge the importance of the international aspect of the war and, conversely, the war’s effects abroad, it should therefore be viewed within that wider context. But to describe that scene in more than a superficial fashion one must also sketch its underlying structures. This will reveal the third great paradox of the Algerian War — and the third dimension of this diplomatic revolution: exploring the war’s causes, course, and consequences will show how “globalization” through integrating markets, migrations, and new means of mass communications exacerbated cultural conflicts and caused increasing political fragmentation. The Algerian War will thus serve as a laboratory to observe the velocity of trends that were sweeping the Cold War world and came to shape the contemporary era.