Algeria

France's initial foothold in Algeria was purely accidental, precipitated by the vagaries of French internal politics: Fearing revolution, archreactionary King Charles X sent an expedition to the North African coast in order to avenge a slight made by the Bey of Algiers to a French enjoy, and in doing so to distract the general French population from his attempt to reestablish royal absolutism. Though the regime of Charles X quickly collapsed in the 1830 Revolution, his Algerian military expedition encountered remarkable success, quickly subduing the capital of a state long disliked by Europeans for its sponsorship of piracy in the Mediterranean. Due to these strategic considerations, and out of national pride, France decided to retain this new North African possession. Arab and Berber rebels fought the imposition of French sovereignty throughout the 1830's, but by 1840 enough of Algeria had been pacified by the French army for the territory to be truly French.

The question of what to do with Algeria after its conquest vexed many French. Soon enough, though, the French government under Louis-Philippe I decided to develop Algeria as a colony of settlement. By 1848, almost a quarter-million settlers had been settled in the fertile lands along the Algerian coast, divided into three départements centered around the main cities of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine. Though some poor Parisiens were resettled in the cities of Algeria, by far the largest contingent of settlers came from the south of France -- particularly from  the regions of Languedoc, Provence, and Savoie -- as well as from Spain, the Italian states, and Malta. This mass settlement naturally provoked the resentment of Algerian natives, and in 1858, a massive Arab rebellion occurred across Algeria. This rebellion abruptly ended a flirtation with the rights of the Algerian natives by the Second Empire. Almost immediately, the Second Empire continued the First Orleanist Kingdom's relentless assault on the Algerians. The warfare continued long after the rebellion had been suppressed, and verged upon genocide. Though French liberals protested the appalling treatment of Algerian natives, the Imperial government had the support of the general French population in its program of colonization. In the decade of the 1860's, the settlement of European colonists in the depopulated rural areas of Algeria was accelerated. By 1870, when the Second Empire collapsed in the Franco-Prussian War, almost two-fifths of the Algerian population was composed of European colonists.

In the century that followed the foundation of the Second Orleanist Kingdom, Algeria evolved into a bifurcated society. The Francophone European minority -- by the early 1950's numbering some three million in total, not including the million-strong community of Sephardic Jews, given French citizenship under the 1870 loi Crémieux -- was among the most prosperous populations in the world. An overwhelmingly urban population, with only a tenth of the total living in rural areas, living standards for European Algerians were well above French levels, and were at par with standards of living in such Southern Hemisphere countries as Argentina and Australia. The accession of Algeria in 1894 to the status of a self-governing province along the lines of metropolitan French provinces allowed the independent-minded European-Algerians to run "their" country as they saw fit. A European-Algerian national identity distinct from that of France gradually took shape over the 20th century, informed by the origin and development of the European-Algerian community as a heterogenous community of immigrants from across western and southern Europe, very often influenced by the radical political ideologies of metropolitan French deported in the early 1870's.

The Arab and Berber populations of Algeria, though, suffered intense exploitation. Following the liquidation of communally-held lands under the First Orleanist Kingdom and the Second Empire, the native population of Algeria was left destitute. Just as in South Africa, the native population was transformed into a convenient (and inexpensive) force of wage labourers for farms and mines. A clear division of labour between the European-Algerians, with their high incomes and high-status jobs, and the poorly paid Algerian natives soon became apparent. In desperation, between the First and Second World Wars almost a million Algerians emigrated to metropolitan France in search of work. Even though Algerian natives, like the immigrant population, qualified for full French citizenship, discriminatory legislation passed by the Algerian provincial government served to disenfranchise all but the most pro-French of Algerian natives.

Up until the 1950's, most European-Algerians -- and most French -- had deluded themselves into thinking that the situation of European-Algerian prosperity and Algerian native impoverishment could continue indefinitely. A shifting demographic balance -- by the 1960's, Algerian natives outnumbered European-Algerians by three-to-one -- could have forced a change by itself. The growth of anti-racist political movements in metropolitan France threatened to make the cozy arrangement of the European-Algerians untenable, at the same time that a guerrilla movement erupted amongst the Algerian native population. For six bloody years, from 1957 to 1963, bombings and assassinations conducted by the Front de libération nationale of a wide array of civilian European-Algerian and military targets in Algeria were met with reprisals aimed mainly against civilians and intellectuals by the Gendarmerie de la Province d'Algérie. By 1963, the situation threatened to destabilize to the point of internecine civil war. Metropolitan France, which had finished building a truly federal French Community everywhere else in the French empire but Algeria and which was subject to criticism by its allies in the European Community and the Muslim member-states of the League of Nations, was finally forced to intervene. The Évian Conference of 1964 was the result. On the shores of Lac Léman, representatives of the European-Algerian and native communities, and of the Algerian provincial government and the Front de libération nationale, were forced to arrive at an equitable settlement.

On the 14th of July, 1965, after much debate both in Algeria and in metropolitan France, the Province of Algeria gained independence as the Republic of Algeria. The Constitution of the Republic of Algeria defined Algeria as a multireligious and multilingual society, and guaranteed the civil and collective rights of all ethnic populations inside Algeria. A half-million European-Algerians emigrated in panic to France, but the overwhelming majority of European-Algerians stayed in their adopted homeland. As part of a deal reached with the European Confederation, the Republic of Algeria was immediately admitted to the EC as a full member, with fully proportionate representation in the European Parliament, free movement of both European-Algerians and Algerian natives to and from "mainland" Europe, and preferential access to EC regional development funds.

After a period of instability in the latter half of the 1960's, as Algerians came to grip with their new status, the Republic of Algeria prospered in the 1970's. Just like Ukraine, Algeria enjoyed a remarkable economic transformation as foreign investment in the lowest-cost member-state of the European Single Market combined with remittances from the six million Algerian natives living in mainland Europe. Even though the living standards of the Algerian native population remained below the western Europe average throughout that decade, they did rise to Second World standards. Algerian political developments soon became entirely dependent on the electorate of Algerian natives. The 1981 electoral gains of the Parti démocratique islamique -- an Islamic Democratic party on the model of European Christian Democracy -- led to the PDI becoming the single largest political party in most coalition governments from the 1981 election to the modern day.

More than any other then-member state of the European Confederation, Algerians suffered immensely from the Third World War. Starvation took the lives of 1.5 million Algerians in the winter of 1982 and 1983, and economic collapse forced a second mass migration to Europe; there are now half as many Algerians living outside of Algeria as inside Algeria. Despite this immense depopulation, though, Algeria circa has managed to recover most of its post-Third World War population losses, while remittances and Confederation development funds have aided the Algerian economy's recovery. Increasingly, Algeria, both prosperous and populous, has become an important power in both the Arab and Francophone worlds. With the renewed economic boom in Algeria, and the growth of a large and well-educated Algerian native middle class, Algeria's future seems bright.