Algeria since 1962: nationalist politics and the nation-state in question The form of politics which, by 1962, had established its practical monopoly of representation of the Algerian national idea proved able initially to promote two central aspects of the nationalist agenda – the recovery of sovereignty in relation to the exterior in general and the former colonial power in particular and the development of national society through the vigorous promotion of an ambitious strategy of economic and especially industrial development. The abandonment of this strategy from 1980 onwards was accompanied by a corresponding abandonment of the nation-building agenda in favour of a divide-and-rule strategy which sought to guarantee the power of the governing politico-military élite by playing off sections of the nation against one another. This tendency, apparent by the early 1980s, reached its logical extreme in the protracted violence in the 1990s and the simultaneous emergence within elite circles of the self-serving concept of “the revolutionary family” in shocking contrast to the FLN’s original rhetoric of “by the People and for the People”. Among the political premises of this evolution have been the element of “substitutionism” in the outlook of the original FLN and the militarist mind-set which has sought to emulate the French “Jacobin” strategy of nation-building at the expense of Algerian nationalism’s original preoccupation with the enfranchisement of the Algerian people.