ESTABLISHING UTOPIA: EXPLORING THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF ECONOMIC POLICY IN ALGERIA

Kay Adamson

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to suggest that a part of understanding the current problems which face the Algerian economy and, consequently, possible solutions, requires a re-examination of the life and work of the late French economist François Perroux. Perroux, who was a significant figure in both post-World War II French and post-independence Algerian economic policy-making, also left behind an immense body of economic writings. The Algerian 'economic model' which took shape in the late 1960s and 1970s and was then implemented by President Boumedienne, was an attempt by Perroux and others to put into practice an economic theory of growth and development. Whilst there is a substantial body of criticism of the outcomes of this experiment, that critique has attributed its failings to the political sphere; thus the model itself has been subject to rather less scrutiny. Yet authors such as De Soto (2000) and Frank (1998), on the one hand, and Castells (1998), on the other, have not only offered very different visions of the way in which economies of the developing countries work but also of the way in which economic activity at the global level works. It is not simply a matter of technical adjustment of the Algerian economy that is necessary, but of a deeper rethink of some of the starting points from which the current structures have developed.

This chapter revisits a number of issues concerned with the relationship between ideology and systemic economic and political change. Part of the reason for doing so stems from the distance, highlighted by three recent studies, that lies between the different solutions to what has previously seemed to be an intractable problem - how to account for the gap between the industrialised economies of the West and the poorest of the rest of the world. The disparity in the nature of the agenda for change which they each offer, is an indication of the absence of consensus, not about the existence of the problem of economic inequality between states, but about the reasons why it has persisted irrespective of whether or not the countries concerned have followed a 'Left' or 'Right' economic and political agenda. Three of the authors referred to - Hernando De Soto, Andre Gunder Frank and Manual Castells have all, over many years, made contributions to the discussion; indeed it was Frank whose evocative 'development of underdevelopment' thesisinspired a generation of commentators on political and economic problems in the Third World. Since then, Frank has taken up the challenge posed by the world systems' theory associated with Immanuel Wallerstein. ReOrient (1998) is Frank's response to the arguments raised by Wallerstein. In contrast, Castells who has been examining the impact of the technology shift encapsulated by the phrase the 'information age' explores the capacity of different types of societies to benefit from the rapid technological changes of the last ten years (Castells 1998). De Soto who was intimately involved in economic reform policies under the Peruvian president, Alberto Fujimori, offers, in The Mystery of Capital (De Soto 2000), a deceptively simple argument for why poor countries have remained poor. His argument has two principal strands. The first is that the poor of the developing countries are only poor because they are unable to realise the capital resources, which are in their possession. De Soto then identifies property as the most significant of these capital resources. His argument is that it is the non-realisation as a capital resource of property that imposes limits on the capacity of poor people to escape their poverty. The second part of his argument is that the difficulties in registering title are the consequence of the existence in poor countries of large bureaucracies, which depend upon the operation of long and complex procedures to register title. The result is that most individuals are deterred from the attempt to register title by the nature of the processes involved and as a result are prevented from making maximum use of their capital resources.

Castells, Frank and de Soto however, can be seen as reflecting a concern which was originally posed when the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South America won their political emancipation in the nineteenth century, and which has preoccupied economists and others ever since. It was a concern that took on a new meaning in the 1960s and 1970s when the political emancipation of European colonial empires in Africa and Asia took place. It was this central question of what political emancipation meant for the economy, which inspired Perroux, Hirschman (1981) and others in the 1950s and 1960s, and led to a focus on the nature of economic growth and the links between growth and economic development. Frank can be seen in many ways as representative of a critical perspective on the work of these authors; and yet it may also be argued that they all actually shared a fundamental assumption, which lies at the heart of not only the programmes for growth and development but also the critique. This fundamental assumption, apparent also in De Soto, was that articulated by Brenner (1977). Brenner's argument was that work on development, irrespective of its Left/Right credentials, was reliant upon Adam Smith's thesis on capitalist development in Book I of The Wealth of Nations (1776). As a result, both Left and Right had a tendency to perceive the question of development as a problem primarily of markets. Certainly, by perceiving the issue in this way, what is offered is the possibility that issues of economic development can be resolved by appropriate processes of adjustment, that is, it can be imagined in terms of the adoption of the right policies. However, if the core problem is not one of markets but is instead an outcome, as Brenner argues and as Castells also argues, of production relations or technology, then the economic development issues are very different and, equally importantly, much more difficult to overcome.

It is Brenner's contention that to understand capitalist economic development, the first thing that needs to be understood is how the social productive relations, which underpinned the accumulation of capital on an extended scale, originated (Brenner 1977: 27). The key to the problem, he argues, is not therefore the organisation of exchange relations and markets but the social/class relations which pertained. This same question can be posed in a slightly different way, as Mohammad Saad did in a thought-provoking presentation which explored the role played by 'culture' in determining the nature of a country's economic development style. In doing so, he also pointed to the failure of models of economic development, which focus on development exclusively as an issue of markets, financial institutions and the quantitative aspects of the infrastructure of production processes. Thus, from its point of conceptualisation, the economy is viewed through the restrictive prism of exchange relations, and, as a result, it becomes divorced from its own system or systems of cultural signification. One consequence of this narrowing of perspective is that such questions as the manner in which society views ideas of the 'good' are not considered to be of the same importance as the nominal presence of banks, firms and markets. However, what constitutes the idea of the 'good', i.e. 'good' development, 'good' employment, 'good' conduct, have a fundamental impact on the processes of economic development itself. In other words, just as there is a sense in which there are considered to be, on the one hand, 'good' jobs and, on the other, 'bad' jobs and that deciding which are which involves cultural and/or moral views and decision-making as much as an economic process. In this sense, it seems useful to reflect upon some of the ideological underpinning of the choices which were made about the direction of Algerian economic policy in the first ten years after independence. Central to the decisions which were taken about economic policy in the 1960s was the premise that the Algerian economy would be able to catch up and more quickly if it made certain specific choices about the types of industries that would underpin her economy and be promoted by the state. Even if those decisions were, as was argued above, premised on the availability and accessibility of markets, it was still the case that not all of the decisions which were taken reflected the economic aims of either the state or its advisers. Some of the choices were also concerned with how it was felt things ought to be, hence the importance, at the political and the ideological level, of the place given to the relationship between industry and agriculture. This relationship was and is essentially problematic, not least because the precise nature of the articulation between it and other areas of economic activity is obscured by the concern of social thinkers, dating back to the nineteenth century, with the consequences for society of the social dislocations which are perceived to accompany processes of industrialisation. As a result, there has been a tendency towards an idealisation of the place of agriculture in post-colonial economies and the accompanying tendency to solve political and social problems arising from the uncertainties of industrialisation by means of the manipulation of the agricultural sector.

One way to begin to explore these questions is to revisit the ideas of two French economists who both directly and indirectly, played significant roles in establishing the actual framework of post-independence Algerian economic and industrial policy, i.e. François Perroux and Gérard Destanne de Bernis. There are a number of reasons for focusing on both Perroux and de Bernis, in that whilst it is de Bernis's perhaps somewhat technicist interpretation by which the model has come to be known in practice, yet much of the theoretical basis of the model is contained in the work of Perroux himself. Furthermore, although the attractiveness of the Perroux model was due to certain innovative arguments about the role, in particular, of 'power' in economic relations, there are clear links between the ideas of Perroux and other contemporary economists, such as Albert Hirschman, and between Perroux and nineteenth-century economic and political ideas including those of Saint-Simon and Karl Marx. In a sense, what needs to be subject to scrutiny are some of the fundamental ideas which have underpinned both centre left and radical economic thinking. At the same time, whilst it might seem that such models have been left well behind as a result of the economic reforms of the 1990s, nevertheless there is still a critique of the changes which have taken place in which fundamental elements of the critique reflect the original ideas of the Perroux model, for example, Said Bouamama's Les Racines de l'Intégrisme (2000). In this sense too, it is necessary to consider the two presumed social negatives of economic growth, namely the inability of agriculture to grow at the same pace as the industrial sector, and the incapacity of the reforms to deliver employment. However, neither the policies proposed by Perroux and de Bernis, nor the critique to which these policies have been subjected, took place in a vacuum; they had deep roots in French and European social and economic thinking of the nineteenth as well as the twentieth centuries. This means that it is necessary to look beyond the policies themselves in order that a better understanding of their meaning can be achieved.

1. Locating Algeria in French Economic and Political Ideas

It is important to understand the role of Algeria as an interface in the articulation of economic and political ideas because it helps to explain aspects of both post-independence economic policy-making and its critique. At the same time, the idea of Algeria as such an interface should not be restricted to the twentieth century and the post-independence period. This is because her economic base and the foundations of economic ideas about the nature and character of the economic development that would be possible were laid in the nineteenth century. They were also constructed using the same basic understandings of the capitalist economic development process.

Algeria played a role in the articulation of French visions of a just society from a very early stage in France's colonisation, as is evident from the range and number of reports which appeared on the nature and future of the colonisation project. These were sometimes the result of investigatory visits to Algeria - Prosper Enfantin (1842), Adolphe Blanqui (1840), or they represented a mix of general political reflection supported later by an investigatory visit - Alexis de Tocqueville, or it was simply impossible to exclude a consideration of the place of Algeria in a wider French vision of her political and economic role in the Mediterranean region - Michel Chevalier, or Algeria was viewed as a new land of opportunity where it would be possible to realise the republican dream of equality - Pierre Leroux. In this way Algeria was not only incorporated within the wider vision of the world that revolution and counter-revolution had bequeathed to Frenchmen, but she also provided the empirical evidence for the social and economic processes of capitalist development. If this seems to be a large claim, it has to be remembered that one of the major influences on political and economic ideas of the period was Claude Henri Saint-Simon, and that many of those who found their way to Algeria were directly or indirectly influenced by his ideas. These include Enfantin, Blanqui, Chevalier and Leroux, and, as will be seen later, Perroux himself would draw upon Saint-Simonian ideas. Other figures in the development of socialist ideas in France, such as Jules Ferry and Jean Jaurès would also visit Algeria and report back to a French public their findings. This special place of Algeria as being part of, but not quite, France would be manifested again in the immediate aftermath of independence when a range of commentators expressing a variety of different socialist visions would attempt to influence post-independence Algerian economic policy-making just as they had attempted to do over a century earlier.

The influence of Saint-Simon on French nineteenth-century thinking and beyond, however, represents only one side of the equation. On the other side is the influence on French economic thinking of Adam Smith in particular but also other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-Scottish economic ideas and the effect of both of these strands on the way in which economic development in Algeria was seen. To illustrate different aspects of these influences, the contributions to contemporary nineteenth-century debate by Enfantin, Blanqui and Chevalier are particularly useful. Of these three, it is only Enfantin who sought by his visit as a member of the 'Algerian Scientific Commission of 1840-42' to apply Saint-Simonian ideas directly to Algeria. Blanqui, who was sent by the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1839 to examine the economic situation in Algeria and prospects for a French colonial project, was sympathetic to some Saint-Simonian ideas but also to Anglo-Scottish economic ideas and, in particular, those of Adam Smith - he wrote the Introduction to the 1843 translation by Garnier of The Wealth of Nations. Chevalier's association with the Saint-Simonians may have been brief but it left a visible legacy in his thinking, whilst he was politically the most influential of the three through his advocacy, negotiation and finally successful signing of the 1860 Anglo-French free trade treaty.