ABSTRACT
Benjamin Stora Algeria and Morocco are the two largest countries, the two principal states of
the Maghrib. An Algero-Moroccan partnership has the greatest potential as the motor of dynamic economic and political development for the whole region. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the development process, its aspirations embodied in the Maghrib Arab Union, is blocked by the impasse in Algero-Moroccan relations. This article examines how, beyond the crucial Western Sahara dispute, other factors, differential contemporary relationships to space and to history, influence this problematic relationship. Different constructions of nationalism in the two cases are revealing, as is the relation of each country to its national space. These two major states of North Africa, similar and divided by so many things held in common, must seek in their recent history the means of a rapprochement. However, it is not at the level of the state, but at that of civil society that such a rapprochement is now taking place.
