Franco’s “Liberal” Colonialism: Fascist Spain, the Moroccan Nationalist Movement, and al-Umma Newspaper

Historians of Morocco have usually described the European colonial administrations established in 1912 in terms of a binary: on the one hand “liberal” and “democratic” France, struggling to combine the lofty ideals of uplifting ordinary Moroccans with its concrete economic interests that were detrimental to the native population; on the other hand Fascist Spain, whose clearly undemocratic character as well as its economic underdevelopment inevitably lead to an exploitation of the Moroccan people. In other words, the trajectories of the two Protectorates emanated directly from the specific political and economic systems of France and Spain respectively.

 My paper challenges such simplistic assumptions by looking at the concrete example of the interaction between the Spanish colonial authorities and the Moroccan nationalist movement during the early 1950s. Whereas the French brutally repressed anti-colonial activities on their territory, the Spaniards adopted a much more conciliatory attitude vis-à-vis the nationalist movement inside their Protectorate. I argue that Franco Spain’s “liberal” policies towards the Muslim population created a lively public sphere in the northern zone, thus creating an inversion of the political conditions inside the European metropoles. In order to befriend the member states of the Arab League at the height of its diplomatic isolation, Madrid adopted policies capable of reversing its negative image abroad.

My paper studies specifically an important primary source that has largely gone unnoticed by scholars: the al-Umma newspaper, organ of the National Reformist Party and one of the media in Arabic authorized by the Spanish High Commissioner in Morocco. By analyzing its content and contrasting it with other archival records, the relevance of al-Umma can be inferred when questioning some firmly established beliefs about the nature of Western colonialism(s) and the era of decolonization.