Most scholars have explained post-independence state-formation in Morocco by looking solely at institutional and domestic factors. They argued that the bourgeois Istiqlal had failed to establish a power base in the countryside and that the sultan exploited this weakness by playing off royalist rural elements against the urban elites. However, this view is incomplete, because the nationalists’ local and global activities were so interwoven that we cannot understand them apart from each other. Many of the Istiqlal's leaders spent more time abroad in exile than on Moroccan soil during the two decades preceding independence. The official party structure of the Istiqlal also constitutes an inadequate unit of analysis for understanding Moroccan nationalism. The Istiqlal had never been a self-contained actor in itself, but merely the institutionalized nodal point of a number of overlapping networks. I argue that the very structure of the nationalists' non-hierarchical and flexible international propaganda network helped them prevail in their struggle against the French, but also enabled the Sultan to co-opt it after independence and turn the Istiqlal into just another opposition party. Its informal nature, the lack of a clearly defined membership and loyalty, and the absence of a coherent ideology proved beneficial in the short-run, but detrimental in the long-term. Furthermore, the skills, resources and personal connections, which the nationalists acquired during their international activities, fell into the hands of the Sultan and strengthened his position once he had pocketed many of the network’s participants. At its core, this project deals with two issues: the relationship between domestic and foreign factors in shaping political systems, and the short- and long-term effects of informal ways of organizing political activism, as in contrast to institutionalized ones.