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Algeria
Toward a Modern Society
At independence Algerian society differed greatly from its condition
at the beginning of the struggle for liberation. The exodus of
Europeans in 1962-63, left a society composed primarily of illiterate
peasants and sizable numbers of urban laborers. It was estimated
that less than 1 percent of the 1964 population had belonged to
the middle and upper classes during the 1950s. Educated persons
remaining in the country were insufficient to staff all the positions
in government and industry vacated by the Europeans. A criteria
of prestige stemming from the war had also entered the social
reckoning; those who had participated actively in the fighting
or suffered loss because of it became eligible for special benefits
or consideration.
During the colonial period, the country's most significant social
distinctions had been those that separated Europeans from Algerians.
Europeans had ranged from great industrialists through middle-class
businesspeople, professionals, and farmers to unskilled workers.
The Algerian population had also covered a range from well-to-do
business and professional families to landless rural laborers.
Distinctions, however, were blurred by the disabilities and discrimination
suffered during the war by all Algerians and by the ideological
emphasis on the unity of the Algerian people.
The removal of the European community permitted the appearance
of the rudiments of a modern class system in which probably the
most influential group consisted of French-trained technocrats,
civil servants, army officers, and senior functionaries of the
National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale--FLN).
The few indigenous industrialists lacked great influence, but
the bureaucrats and technocrats who managed the government and
its expanding enterprises began to form a conspicuous and highly
influential group that was to contribute upper-echelon personnel
for public administration and state enterprises. Education, more
than any other single factor, became the criterion for membership
in the new elite.
Houari Boumediene, who was president from 1967 to 1978, headed
a government that was dedicated to furthering Islamic socialism
and held that, because early Islam in Algeria had its own egalitarian
tendencies, no contradiction was involved. The pursuit of socialism
since the 1960s, however, has produced its own rich assortment
of social contradictions and tensions.
The Boumediene government at times has been criticized for its
state capitalist tendencies because of its single-minded pursuit
of industrialization, which led to the emergence of a prosperous
and reasonably competent elite. After 1968 Boumediene gradually
brought more and more educated young bureaucrats and technocrats
into government service; by the late 1970s, they formed part of
an administrative and managerial elite who staffed the government
ministries and planned and operated the state industrial sector.
Largely in control of the country, the new social group nonetheless
shared status and influence with the army and functioned under
the supervision of senior political officials. Although the explicit
ideology of the government discouraged the formation of social
classes, this relatively wealthy and powerful elite seemed to
represent an important barrier on the road to an egalitarian society.
The technocrats and bureaucrats tended to be modernizers influenced
by Western ideas. In general, they subscribed to the modernist
view of Algerian society and believed that all members of society,
including women, should participate actively to change the environment
to suit the needs of society and its members. In socialist-oriented
Algeria, the concepts of the nation-state, self-determination,
and state planning came to the fore among members of the elite;
local loyalties and family ties declined in importance as the
society became more modern, urban, and educated.
Aside from the bureaucratic and technocratic elite, the middle
class consisted of employees of state industrial and service enterprises;
small businesspeople and shopkeepers; professionals, such as teachers,
physicians, and lawyers; and artisans. Except for businesspeople,
this stratum increased greatly after independence, moving to help
fill the void created by the departure of the French and by the
demand for services and skilled labor in the postindependence
economy. Residing mostly in the cities and larger towns, the middle
class was by Algerian standards relatively well-off.
An urbanized working class had similarly come into being over
the previous few decades, finding employment, for example, in
state and private industries, construction, public works, and
transportation. As with the urban middle class, this group grew
steadily in size after 1962 as a consequence of economic expansion.
Another sizable group also found in the cities consisted of the
unemployed. Substantial number of the unemployed were young males,
many of them migrants from rural areas, who were often forced
to settle in squalid housing. Usually monolingual in Arabic, lacking
job skills, and possessing only a primary education, the migrants
and the unemployed survived on the largesse of the state welfare
system. Finally, there were the rural agricultural workers, including
small and medium-sized landowners, landowning and landless peasants,
and those who worked on large state farms. Some members of this
class benefited from land distribution in the 1970s and early
1980s. Others, such as medium-sized landowners who survived land
redistribution and the formation of large agricultural enterprises,
reportedly were enjoying a measure of prosperity and favored government
investment in roads and services in rural areas.
As the nation continued to modernize in the 1980s and early 1990s,
millions of Algerians were torn between a tradition that no longer
commanded their total loyalty and a modernism that did not satisfy
their psychological and spiritual needs. This dilemma especially
affected the nation's youth. Educated young women were torn between
the lure of study and a career and the demands of their husbands
and fathers. Young men faced conflicting models of cultural behavior
and achievement, conflict between demands for fluency in modern
Arabic and fluency in French, and conflict between devotion to
Islam and the secularism of modernization. Above all loomed the
reality of youth unemployment, which reached a staggeringly high
41 percent in the early 1990s (compared to 30 percent for the
overall working-age population). With no solution in sight, unemployment
was a prime factor accounting for the boredom, frustration, and
disillusionment that characterized the younger generation. Many
young people became major supporters of the Islamic Salvation
Front (Front Islamique du Salut--FIS) whose groups were located
on campuses and in major cities throughout the country. Young
people contributed to the clashes with government forces ongoing
since the late 1980s and to the general political instability.
To strengthen a sense of national pride in the country's culture,
in 1970 an officially sponsored "cultural revolution" was launched
to restore historic monuments and to develop the means to communicate
cultural themes via radio, television, the press, libraries, and
museums. In realms such as economics and politics where the past
offered no guidance, new structures were to be devised in keeping
with the theory of the 1962 Tripoli Program. This program rejected
capitalism, which it associated with Western colonial powers,
and disavowed an economic system that would make it dependent
on the West. Instead, it favored a socialist system that allowed
for state control both of the means of production and of the plan
for national development. The program opted for a one-party political
system that would represent the aspirations of the rural and urban
masses. Other aspects of the cultural revolution included substituting
Arabic for French and eliminating foreign teachers and foreign
influence from the educational establishment--all part of a policy
of constructing an Algeria distinctive in personality and proud
of its heritage and achievements.
The cultural revolution was fifteen years old in 1985; beyond
language and education development, however, its achievements
were hard to measure. The program had suffered from neglect and
lack of funds for projects involving monuments and archeological
sites, museums, the arts, and the publishing industry. A national
seminar on the history of the Algerian Revolution was successfully
organized in 1981, however, and in late 1983 Chadli Benjedid (president,
1979-92) issued a renewed call for serious attention to cultural
affairs and to the study of Algerian national history.
Data as of December 1993
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