ABSTRACT
In Tunisia one is more conscious of foreign economic relations and of dependence on world markets than in Morocco, which is blessed with natural resources. Tunisians are aware that foreign aid is necessary to raise the country to level of more highly developed European Mediterranean countries, or even to avoid retrogression as a result of growth in population which is threatening to overtake economic development. A special feature of Bourguiba’s foreign policy is the unusually great interest which Tunisia has been showing in events in Black Africa. For several years Tunisia sheltered a second ‘government’, that of the Algerian rebels with its own political organization, its finances, 150,000 Algerian refugees and an army bigger and better armed than that of its host country. Tunisia’s whole policy was therefore over-shadowed by the Algerian problem, which determined its relations with the other Arab countries and, to an even greater degree, with France, whose rule Tunisia itself had thrown off not long before.
