The Last Believers: Memory, Mirage, and the Failed Promises of the Algerian Revolution

Morocco World

21-07-2025

Why European intellectuals and journalists—from Ignacio Cembrero to Santiago Alba Rico—cling to the myth of the Algerian Revolution, and project their disillusionment onto Morocco's success.
For decades, a certain current of Spanish and European intellectuals—figures shaped by the ideals of anti-imperialism and the global left—have continued to view North Africa through a Cold War lens. In this vision, Algeria stood for resistance, progress, and revolutionary virtue, while Morocco was cast as a reactionary monarchy: decorative, conservative, complicit in the Western order. That binary may have held symbolic weight in the 1970s. Today, it persists only as an ideological mirage.
The persistence of this outdated dichotomy is most visible in the writings of individuals like Ignacio Cembrero, a longtime critic of Morocco, and Santiago Alba Rico, a philosopher and emblem of the Spanish anti-colonial left. Both are representative of a broader trend—one that cannot accept that the revolutionary dream they once embraced has collapsed, and that the monarchy they once derided is evolving in ways they never imagined.
To understand this, one must revisit the myth of the Algerian Revolution. In the 1960s and 70s, Algeria stood at the forefront of the global South's political imagination. The FLN's triumph over French colonialism inspired admiration across Europe and the Arab world. Under Boumediene, Algeria was hailed as a radical experiment: state-led industrialization, workers' self-management, agrarian reform, third-world solidarity. It was, for many, the 'Yugoslavia of the Maghreb'—a model for decolonized, anti-capitalist development.
But that dream unraveled. The revolution, in the end, devoured its own children. Power consolidated in the hands of a military elite. Civil society was weakened, dissent suppressed, and the promise of self-governance gave way to bureaucratic authoritarianism. The violent 'Black Decade' of the 1990s revealed just how fragile the foundations were. It was not simply a political crisis—it was the collapse of the very revolutionary ideal.
And yet, many of its early sympathizers—especially in Spain—could not let go. Not because they are paid agents, as some claim, but because to accept the death of the Algerian dream would be to confront a deeper loss: the disappearance of their own ideological homeland. For Cembrero and Alba Rico, Algeria represented a moral North Star, and Morocco the convenient foil. The inversion of that dynamic—where Morocco modernizes, stabilizes, and engages globally, while Algeria recedes into authoritarian opacity—is existentially disruptive.
Morocco's trajectory over the past two decades defies the clichés of these critics. Yes, it is a monarchy. But it is also a state that has implemented real, if incremental, political reforms, made significant investments in infrastructure, embraced renewable energy, and navigated social and religious pluralism with a level of institutional agility rare in the region. Its diplomacy is proactive, its economy increasingly diversified, and its internal cohesion more durable than many predicted.
This evolution does not fit into the old ideological playbook. And rather than revise their frameworks, these critics double down. Morocco is still cast as an oppressive relic; its accomplishments minimized, its motives pathologized. The monarchy, for them, cannot modernize—it can only manipulate. The Moroccan people cannot choose—they must be victims.
In this narrative, the Polisario Front becomes the last hope of revolutionary redemption. Cembrero once described it as 'a revolution in the sand.' For him, and for others of that ideological tradition, the Polisario is not just a political movement—it is a vessel through which the Algerian revolutionary spirit might live on. Never mind its entanglement with an authoritarian regime in Algiers. Never mind its dwindling support or internal fractures. What matters is symbolic continuity.
But this is not political analysis—it is nostalgia in disguise. It is an emotional refusal to reckon with the passage of time and the collapse of cherished myths. The tragedy is not merely Algeria's failure to deliver on its revolutionary promises. The tragedy is the intellectual paralysis of those who refuse to see it.
Until they do, they will continue to attack Morocco—not because of what it is, but because of what it no longer allows them to believe. They are the last believers in a revolution that betrayed its promise. And they would rather deny the present than admit the past has let them down. Tags: Algeria and MoroccoMorocco Algeria