ABSTRACT
Try to imagine what a scholar from Tizi Ouzou, who speaks no English and has only met a few pale skinned Protestants when they came to study under his guidance at his university, might write (presumably in Arabic, if not in Tamazight) on being invited to introduce a special issue of an Algerian Journal called ‘North European Studies’. What stereotypes of Scandinavian welfarism, public orderliness, insular righteousness, and homogeneous Otherness would she have to struggle against? How far can an outsider go in trying to disentangle Roman walls from Viking legacies; deep-seated Christian scriptural discord from Scottish Enlightenment (moderate) rationality; the thrills of empire from the traumas of out-migration; all to be distilled in a few paragraphs for a readership composed mainly of non-residents of those distant and chilly lands? The guest editor and contributors to this special issue (on ‘democratic knowledge’) of the highly esteemed Journal of North African Studies are very knowledgeable about their region, but this speculation applies to myself, a Latin America specialist and student of comparative democratisation and its cultivation (Whitehead 2011), who, like various others of his kind, has been lured by the ‘Arab Spring’ into writing about a region he has scarcely visited or studied in depth. My position here is perilously similar to that of the imagined scholar from Tizi Ouzu, but in
reverse. Admittedly, those who write in English, and from such a vantage point as Oxford, are typically disinhibited about issuing summary judgements on societies they do not live in, and about political choices they cannot articulate in the local idioms. We may not know much about Tuaregs or Kabylia; and Al Farabi and Ibn Khaldoun may mean nothing to us as compared
with Machiavelli or Hobbes, but nowadays that provides no impediment to our classifying Islamists, or prescribing gender practices, or ‘promoting democracy’ just as if we were at home. After all, Paris sports the Luxor Obelisk; Thomas Jefferson put the ‘Barbary Pirates’ in their place two centuries ago; and the British Empire has been civilising ‘mad mullahs’ for as long as it has been in business. So why should we be bashful about uttering our opinions on the ‘Arab Spring’, or how to promote civil society/liberal economy/subjective well-being (delete as required) all along the northern shores of the Mediterranean? According to the conception of ‘Europe’ enshrined in the Treaty of Rome, Turkey may be eli-
gible to join the Union, but Morocco most certainly is not. But as proclaimed in the Barcelona Process, and then recycled with the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, Brussels asserts that there is a congruence of values uniting the EU with its North African counterparts. So it is not only the old European imperial reflexes that generate confidence in the ability of outsiders to assess North African realities without troubling themselves too much over the nuances of local Verstehen; the non-imperial and recently added parts of the large world region that used to be known as ‘Christendom’ are similarly disposed. Still, when Europe’s streets and schools begin to fill up with new arrivals from the Maghreb, it turns out that various markers of language, religion, and more broadly of ‘culture’ tend to produce a certain degree of estrangement at the popular and elite levels. This is not to decrymulticultural ambitions, or to endorse ‘clash of civilisation’ essentialisms, but
merely to note that it takes effort and time to get to know other traditions and ways of life, and to incorporate them into a host society. It also requires awillingness to ‘see yourself as others see you’, and to question some of your own inbuilt assumptions, as well as to resist unacceptable forms of Difference. The mantra of western liberal virtue may not provide even anti-imperialists with all the intellectual resources they need to reach across the Mediterranean (and equally, on the other side, the Quran and the canon in Arabic may also need a large amount of challenging admixtures). So what are the essential elements that the North Africans have in common with their northern
neighbours, and where are the biggest tripwires and translation errors? I am insufficiently equipped to tackle these huge issues for the region in depth, but I can frame the questions that have been proved relevant in other contexts, and to thus encourage expert observers into refreshing their answers.
