Propos recueillis et traduits par Vincent Hiribarren (English version below).
Questions à Jeffrey Byrne, Assistant Professor à l'University of British Columbia (Canada). Son dernier ouvrage Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order vient d'être publié par Oxford University Press.
Pouvez-vous expliquer le titre de votre dernier livre ?
Vous avez analysé des documents du Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) qui ont été peu utilisés par les historiens précédents. Qu’avez-vous découvert ?
Votre livre s’est concentré sur le concept de «Tiers Monde». Comment expliqueriez-vous l’évolution du sens de cette expression ?
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Can you explain the title of your latest book?
The term “Mecca of Revolution” is how Amilcar Cabral, the national liberation leader from “Portuguese« Guinea-Bissau, described Algiers in the 1960s. I chose this for the title of my book because I am particularly interested in the way that Algeria became a important nexus in the worldwide network of revolutionary and guerrilla movements. The Algerians helped to train revolutionaries from South Africa (including Nelson Mandela), Palestine, Angola, Venezuela, and many other places: much of the military and political doctrine that shaped the postcolonial Third World was disseminated from Algeria. The book’s subtitle, “Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order”, reflects one my key arguments: that the transnational, subversive nature of anti-colonial internationalism transformed into the surprisingly conservative state-centric postcolonial order. That is, »Third Worldism” evolved from a form of transnational resistance that undermined the authority of the colonial state into a very regimented and orderly diplomatic process that reinforced the authority of the postcolonial state. In other words, the state-centric nature of decolonization was a surprisingly conservative and restrictive outcome given the radical tenor of anti-colonial politics.
You have analysed FLN documents that have been hardly used by historians before. What did you discover?
In terms of research, my major breakthrough was to gain access to the archives of not only the Algerian FLN (1954-1962) but also those of the Algerian state after independence—including the archives of the Algerian foreign ministry, the presidency, and the FLN party post-1962. Because of Algeria’s dynamism in international affairs in that era, this new evidence sheds new light on the postcolonial history of Africa, the Arab world, and the Third World movement as a whole. These archives contain detailed records of the Algerians’ interactions with countries like Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Tanzania, Yugoslavia, China, and Cuba, among others. For example, insights that surprised me include Frantz Fanon’s urging Patrice Lumumba not to confront the Americans and his condemnation of Kwame Nkrumah for encouraging the Congolese prime minister’s suicidal course of action; the deliberately aggressive nature of non-alignment as conducted by countries like Algeria, Mali, and Indonesia, who confided to one another that they feared a reduction in Cold War tensions; the way that such countries actually saw American-French and Sino-Soviet competition as much more important to the Third World than American-Soviet competition; the rivalry between concepts such as Pan-Africanism, Maghreb unity, and Arab nationalism; and the intense diplomacy that surrounded the Algerian coup d’etat in June 1965, which deposed Ahmed Ben Bella.
Your book focused on the concept of ’Third World'. How would explain the evolution of its meaning?
For too long, the study of Bandung, Afro-Asianism, Non-Alignment, and Third Worldism has focused on rhetoric and inspirational speeches, obscuring the fact that these were geopolitical initiatives instigated by statesmen. The atmospherics and imaginaries of Third Worldism are certainly very important, but we must not forget that the participants in these events desired very much to progress beyond atmospherics in order to achieve profound transformations in global political and economic structures. Therefore, from a historian’s perspective, one of the really valuable aspects of Algeria’s involvement in the “Third World project” was that the country’s own diplomats spoke of the need to translate the rhetoric of Bandung into a realistic, practicable foreign policy. My book describes their surprisingly successful efforts to do so.
Indeed, in many respects, the “Third World project” is actually more relevant to today’s world than it has been for several decades. Third Worldism’s continued and growing relevance is evident in African opposition to Gaddafi’s overthrow, Latin American support for Iran’s nuclear program, state collapse and the resultant migration crises, as well as recent breakthroughs in global climate negotiations. Ultimately, the “postcolonial world” is the entire world. It is a matter of urgency that we learn the history of the so-called “periphery” in order to understand our collective future.
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