Negotiating national identity: The case of the Arab states of North Africa.

摘要

The main objective of this dissertation is to show that the development of a polity can be explained through the study of the emergence of national identity not only as the product of elites' conscious actions, but as the outcome of negotiations (or lack thereof) between opposing visions within the elites at the national movement stage and subsequently at key historical moments.; The hypothesis that the study test is first, that the stability of a country in the medium to long term can be explained by the realization, at some moments in its history, of broad based, effective negotiation of national identity values and beliefs between the various components of a polity's elite; secondly, that on the other hand, the lack of negotiations and the imposition of only one vision to the detriment of all the others, is at the basis of the identity crisis in which some states find themselves at a later period of their political development.; The originality of employing negotiation theory and perspective to the issue of national identity formation allows for a better understanding of how, why, and when elites reach a definition of national identity. In other words, the main focus of this dissertation is on why in certain countries elites decide to negotiate identity with or between competing elites while in others they do not, how these negotiations are carried out, when elites carry them out, and what the consequences are of the outcome of these negotiations (or lack thereof) for the politics of identity.; The findings of this study, obtained through the analysis of four cases constituted by the development of the four North African countries of Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, show that those countries like Morocco, where the monarchy was able to craft an identity formula with the cooperation of the various elites of the country obtained through a continuous process of negotiations, enjoy greater stability and are free of basic identity crises throughout their socio-political development. On the contrary, those countries, such as Algeria and Tunisia, where a modernizing faction of the elite imposed its vision upon all the others, at some point suffer a deep identity crisis seen in the often violent re-emergence of those identity visions previously repressed.; Libya is a case that exemplifies both positions since the succesful negotiations undertaken at the time of independence were later rejected by a faction within the elite creating an identity crisis that was then exacerbated by the erratic identity politics of the successive military regime.