his paper chapter examines how the tension between French planning and Algerian socialism intersected with global ideological struggles during the Cold War. It begins by studying the negotiations between the European Economic Community and the Algerian government, arguing that a specifically French style of planning (la planification française) was seen as a tool to enhance French prestige on the world stage after Algerian decolonization. The paper explores these dynamics through a study of the census of 1964, which was undertaken within the framework of cooperation between France and Algeria. In addition to Greek Trotskyists, Polish economists, and the Ford Foundation, the French were also dismayed at the active involvement of Hungarian consultants in Algerian economic planning. The census of 1964 thus reflected how economic orthodoxies were central to the conflicting visions of human nature and geographical organization that defined the emerging post-colonial order. The new division between first and third worlds – which was both a political and racial concept – was intimately linked to the disputes regarding economic planning and the relationship between markets and society.

This paper explores the convergence and subsequent divergence of the socialist and communist movements in Tunisia in aftermath of the First World War, demonstrating the extent to which this moment of uncertainty fostered a diverse range of political views not yet foreclosed by the ascendancy of ethno-centric nationalism. In particular, during the early 1920s, Tunisian leftists cultivated ties with Jewish communities as well as French and Italian settlers, engendering vigorous debates about the prospects of trans-Mediterranean cooperation, the role of the international community in ensuring self-determination, and the radicalism of demands for colonial reform. While the hindsight of Tunisian nationalist historiography has had seemingly little to say about the impact of the First World War on popular political consciousness, recent historical approaches have pushed us to consider the sheer contingency and uncertainty characteristic of the postwar years. Far from a foregone conclusion, Tunisia’s nationalist direction was still in its formative stages in the early 1920s, negotiating and competing in a political field which also included strands of socialism, communism, and even Zionism and pan-Islamic Ottoman revival. Beyond a simple causal chain leading from discrimination and disillusionment at war to anti-colonial nationalist fervor for Tunisia’s tens of thousands of conscripted soldiers and laborers, a close look at the itineraries of postwar political activists paints a more complicated picture. In particular, this paper will compare the trajectories of the “radical” veteran-turned-communist Mukhtar al-‘Ayari and the “moderate” socialist Hassan Guellaty through their writings in the popular Arabic and French press and through police archives, demonstrating the ways in which the Tunisian political field was constructed and contested in the wake of the First World War. These two figures’ transnational encounters crossed and eventually diverged by the mid-1920s, marking the narrowing of Tunisians political horizons which had briefly been blown open by the war. This paper argues that early Tunisian communists’ and socialists’ evolving positions, even in the midst of mounting ethno-nationalist sentiment, reflected both the persistence of trans-Mediterranean cooperation and the insufficiency of terms such as “moderate” or “radical” to explain the diverse political horizons found across the Arab world in the early 1920s.

This paper explores the relationship between communism and Tunisian nationalism in the Gafsa phosphate mines, from the acceleration in strikes against the mining company in the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The rise of Tunisia’s phosphate industry in the late 1890s attracted workers from around the Mediterranean – particularly from Italy, France, Algeria, Libya, and Morocco – to meet the French-owned Gafsa Phosphate and Railway Company’s demand for cheap labor. This transnational labor diaspora brought to Gafsa leftist ideas and techniques of resistance that circulated around the Mediterranean basin during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. As these ideas and techniques interacted with local practices of anti-colonial resistance while confronting the reality of racial discrimination in the workplace, debates arose over the possibilities and limits of transnational labor solidarity in the Gafsa mines. In the 1940s, these debates became particularly salient when the Union générale tunisienne du travail (UGTT) broke from the communist-led Confédération générale du travail (CGT) to organize Tunisian workers on a national basis. By documenting the history of collaboration and competition between communist and Tunisian nationalist unions in the Gafsa mining basin, I argue that the UGTT’s post-independence emergence as Tunisia’s dominant labor organization was not inevitable, and that the political engagement of Gafsa’s Maghribi and European workers played a decisive role in the processes that led to this outcome. I draw on Gafsa Phosphate and Railway Company records, documents generated by Gafsa’s labor unions, oral histories of Gafsa miners who were active in the anti-colonial resistance, French military and security documents, newspapers, and colonial and post-independence administrative records housed in both Tunisia and France. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on the role of labor contestations in nationalist movements while also challenging dominant paradigms in Tunisian nationalist and Western historiography, which center on the political and social elite in Tunis. Instead, I argue that outcomes in Gafsa were determined by local actors operating within the context of both national and transnational leftist movements. I show how Gafsa’s residents imagined alternate visions for Tunisia’s political economy that played a decisive role in the 1940s and 1950s, even as these possibilities did not materialize in the 1960s. Nationalist histories – not only of Tunisia but also of other post-colonial states – have elided these divisions and contestations, yet they are essential for understanding the processes by which the post-independence nation was constructed.

“Transnationalism and nationalism: the case of Egyptian communism (1920-1965)”   The communist movements of the first part of the twentieth century were dominated by foreign activists. Many of them were archetypal cosmopolitans. Among them were Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Russians, Egyptian Muslims and others. Egypt under the British rule attracted many foreigners of European origins among them thousands of Jews who were geographically mobile. They looked at Egypt as a country of opportunity not necessarily materialistically. Some emigrants like Joseph Resenthal, the founder of Egyptian communism, maintained strong transnational ties. His admiration to the Marxist-Leninist doctrine made him enthusiastic to import, implant, develop and execute such revolutionary ideas in his host country which he regarded homeland yet wanted to see her going through a social revolution, and consequently be inextricably bound up with Soviet Russia – the homeland of communism. In my paper, I will examine ideas, issues, groups, and practices which have crossed national boundaries. Transnational ideas and practices were more noticeable in the interwar period yet we can easily point at their existence also in the post-World War II years (including the revolutionary era) – a period that is commonly known as the nationalist phase in the history of Egyptian communism. However, the shift towards socialism in the very outset of the 1960s with the participation of Marxist intellectuals who moved in international circles, and the implementation of the social revolution by the Nasserite regime, were a good example of the impact of transnational ideas upon the new socio-political order. Indeed, the new ruling doctrine was heavily influenced by foreign nationalist socialism imported from abroad by intellectuals and politicians who took pains to accommodate it with Egypt’s special circumstances and conditions.