ABSTRACT
In a little-known article published in 1994, Ernest Gellner (Gellner 1994, 116-125) likened the application of international law at the United Nations, particularly in the Security Council, to the Moroccan tribal tradition of the collective oath.1 In the article, he argued that power, rather than justice, was the deciding factor in political action in both circumstances and provided a better explanation of the ways in which both institutions operated. Power, in this context, was a manifestation of the ability of certain states within the international organisation to coerce others into accepting their allegedly normative priorities, just as in the collective oath a social group – usually agnatically defined – could choose to support or abandon recalcitrant members who had been accused of offences against tribal code and custom, irrespective of the inherent truth or falsehood of the accusation. Implicit in this statement was another; that popular support was a better guide to – or, more accurately, a better description of – judicial and decision-making processes than impartial evaluation of evidence. There was a further implication, too, namely that social and political processes from the past
may still retain significance in a very different present, even when that past had occurred in
the context of pre-colonial Morocco. For the Western-trained academics and politicians in his audience (the paper was originally presented at a closed conference in Morocco), his arguments presented a difficult and uncomfortable intellectual challenge, but it proved to be extremely difficult to refute their validity. Yet, for the author, they also constituted, no doubt, a whimsical academic gesture which reflected on the main topic of the conference, a discussion of contemporary views on the state and territorial sovereignty. It also recalled the author’s early career as a social anthropologist in Morocco studying social structures amongst the Imazighen populations of the High Atlas (Gellner 1969). There he had developed structural-functionalism as a mechanism to explain tribal social struc-
tures in North Africa, views which he shared with one of North Africa’s pre-eminent ethnographers, David Hart, who had worked amongst the Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif and the Ait ‘Atta in the Jabal Sarghu (Hart 1976; Hart 1984). Structural functionalism and segmentary opposition might now be out of favour as explanations of patterns of indigenous political practices in North Africa and elsewhere, but the studies by Ernest Gellner and David Hart did propose that such practices, often spontaneous and developed outside the structures of a centralised state, did exist and that, together with the practices of the pre-colonial state, the concepts behind them did constitute a traditional political culture which should, as a result, still find an echo today in the much more recent political experiences of the contemporary states of the Maghrib.2
