Anticolonial nationalism, nation, and state

Sayad’s analysis of anticolonial nationalism develops in two directions, being geared towards clarifying the relation that nationalism bears, on the one hand, to the nation and, on the other, to the nation-state.

We just saw that in identifying the contents of colonial nationalism, Sayad looks to the aims of the anticolonial struggle and to the mimetic relationship that pulls the colonized into the logic of colonization. Not so straightforward, by contrast, is the path he follows in defining the concept of nation. Where to look in tracing its origin? Sayad cannot pin down the moment of creation, that is, a specific time when the myth of the nation was actually forged.

There are two reasons for this impossibility. The first of these is that there is nothing in the Muslim world like the Western concept of nation understood as an entity set in a prelegal state of nature in which a “national” community comes into form whose members we consider to be our forebears. The second reason has to do with the history and ideology of colonization, which deprived the Algerian people of the possibility of even constructing a national myth. This was done by promoting a view of Algerian history as the history of a people who had always been subject to one domination after another. This process, Sayad (2003, 63) writes, “is exemplified by the Arab conquest and the Islamification of the country, which melded into each other and were reduced to simple expeditions of troops and nomadic tribes.” Even the Ottoman regency of Algiers was a moment in this continuous series of “conquest after conquest.” Thus the “French conquest, occupation, and colonization [...] took on the meaning of a historical foundation, for the Algerian lands were constructed as being colonial by vocation: the colony of the East or that of the West—all territories that thereby lacked an independent political or national existence” (ibid.).

Hence the central thesis that Sayad extracts from his analysis—namely, that Algerian nationalism, anticolonial in its thrust, is nationless in spirit and in its self-understanding.

In fact, all the components of Algerian society—the village, the tribe, the federation of tribes, the brotherhoods—jealously guarded the myth of their own origin and legitimation. It is this social fabric, and not an inexistent Algerian nation, that formed the seedbed of Algerian nationalism, which sprang up as the child of colonization and embraced the ideals of French colonialism.

Whereas Algeria’s “negative” nationalism took hold only as a movement of opposition to colonial domination, the French nation-state, initially imposed on an Algeria set up as a “French department,” continued to provide the model for the Algerian state after independence: France continued to act as “the institutional benchmark, representing the state’s omnipotence in every sector of national life, which logically can be powerfully seductive for a state aspiring to an existence in its own right.” France, in other words, acted as “the organizational vantage point,” as a model for organizing the many aspects of the state’s life: “territorial, administrative, social, economic, etc.” (ibid., 57).