The Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) has long held an influential position in the historiography of global decolonization, anticolonial revolutionary movements, and works on counterinsurgency as well as within the broader historiography of the French empire and its aftermath. Yet while a handful of scholars in recent decades have positioned the Algerian War as a global and Cold War conflict, in general few studies have broken from the dominant geographical and temporal perspectives of the metropole-colony relationship or the tendency to frame Algeria within a distinctive Maghrebi or MENA (Middle East and North Africa) regional history.
Jeffrey James Byrne's highly anticipated Mecca of Revolution is thus innovative in a number of ways. Perhaps the most significant element of the book for historians of Africa is his reframing of Algeria in the era of decolonization as not simply a crossroads between Europe and the Middle East, but also as a bridge between Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Through his examination of ‘the Third World as a political project’, Byrne shows how Algeria helped establish a network of South-South international relations that extended beyond the Non-Aligned Movement to enable the Third World, as it was defining itself in the 1960s, to maximize its political and economic influence in the midst of the Cold War (6). These connections were forged in new international alliances and organizations such as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 and the G77 in 1964, which came to serve as mechanisms of mutual recognition of the sovereignty and inviolability of the new nation-states of the postcolonial era even as they promoted international cooperation within the Third World.
The first half of the book is a detailed examination of how Algerian nationalists developed their leftist and Third Worldist ideology through the process of fighting the Algerian War. Byrne builds on the work of historian Matthew Connelly and shows how fledgling Algerian diplomats mobilized the global Cold War political context to challenge French colonialism. In performing the role of a powerful independent state that negotiated with the Cold War superpowers, the diplomats of Algeria's provisional government bought their not-yet-independent country legitimacy and paved the way for future Algerian leaders to see themselves as power brokers on a global scale, and for others to take them seriously in this position in the post-independence period. In a fascinating chapter about the struggles that Algerian leaders faced domestically in the immediate aftermath of independence, Byrne shows how those leaders courted external support from communist countries including Cuba, Yugoslavia, and China in order to obtain both economic assistance and political support for a socialist system in Algeria.
The second half of the book focuses more explicitly on how Algerian leaders envisioned their new role in the Third World as radical revolutionaries who could help liberation movements across the world achieve success. Byrne argues that this Third Worldist and globalist rhetoric was translated into practice as Algerian leaders attempted to build a foreign policy around it through their support of new organizations such as the OAU and in their active political and military support for liberation movements across the global south. There are many tremendous anecdotes in these chapters that illustrate these connections, such as the story of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) providing Nelson Mandela with combat training in one of its revolutionary training camps in Morocco, or Fidel Castro sending a team of doctors and nurses on a medical mission to aid Algeria's postwar health crisis while in return Algeria provided technical assistance to Argentine and Venezuelan revolutionaries. One gets a clear sense that Algerian leaders believed that they were truly revolutionizing the global order in the early years after Algeria's independence.
What is somewhat less clear from Byrne's book, however, is whether ordinary Algerians and other global leaders across the world took Algerian leaders seriously in their attempt to unify the Third World. Partly this is an issue of approach: Byrne's book is a work of diplomatic history, and the analysis is almost entirely based on printed archival sources from the diplomatic offices of the major countries involved as well as from some oral interviews with diplomats. Yet I hesitate to make this critique at all because very few historians have even attempted to write the history of Algeria post-1962, in large part because there are very few archival sources available for this period, particularly in Algeria. Byrne is, in fact, the only historian I know of who has been able to access the archives of the Algerian Foreign Ministry and the FLN in the period after 1962, which is one major reason why this book is so important. I hope that in the future historians can start to expand upon his analysis and that we can see even more of these connections he has unveiled from multiple directions. I hope as well that they will do so with as much creativity and elegance.
