In January 2010 the king Mohammed VI set up a new phase on the Moroccan regional policy with the creation of the Consultative Commission on Regionalism (CCR), entrusted with the task of drawing up a new regionalization model. The aim of reinforcing the Moroccan conflict-solution strategy of autonomy for the Western Sahara was one of the reasons behind the promotion of this regional reform. This article explores the potential impacts of the advanced regionalization law in the current situation of the Western Sahara conflict, analyzing to what extend the CCR's reform gives autonomy to the territory in conflict as well as other parallel political measures adopted by the Moroccan state.
By Ángela Suárez
Collado and Raquel Ojeda García
Image Attribute: Ait Benhaddou,
Ouarzazate Province, Morocco, PnP!/Flickr
Creative Commons
In a speech to
the nation on 3 January 2010, King Mohammed VI announced the creation of the Consultative Commission on Regionalism (CCR) with the objective of entrusting this organ with the task of preparing a
project that would lay the foundations for a future plan of decentralization
(see Benyahya 63, Yaagoubi 12). He asked the Committee to set a model of
advanced regionalization for all of the country’s regions, based on four
fundamental aspects: a strong commitment to the nation’s sacred and immutable
values (the unity of the state, of the nation and of the territory); the
principle of solidarity; a balanced distribution of resources between powers and
local authorities, central government and the institutions concerned; and the
adoption of an extensive devolution within the framework of an efficient
territorial governance system based on harmony and convergence.[1]
This initiative
must be considered as the third phase of the Moroccan decentralization process
initiated in the mid-seventies (Osman 101-05). The region appeared for the
first time in 1971 as the means to respond to the country’s needs regarding
development and growth. That regional model turned out to be economically
inefficient, but very politically useful for controlling peripheral dynamics
through the renewal of local elite networks. It was not until the mid-nineties
that the region received legal recognition as a territorial collectivity in the
1992 constitutional reform. The second regional reform was part of the 1996
constitutional revision and 1997 regional law, which established sixteen
regions with a weak capacity for legislative initiative and a limited number of
powers. Another important element of the 1997 law was regional decoupage,
explicitly delimited with the idea of breaking the country’s old cultural,
historical, linguistic and tribal identities. In both regionalization
processes, Moroccan regional policy was defined more by the development of a
policy of deconcentration than by a decentralization policy of power,[2] because
of the limited transfer of human and financial resources from the state to the
regions. The dominant idea in both models was the necessity of a centralized
state to ensure the maintenance of political control and the country’s
territorial integrity, cohesion and homogeneity, to the detriment of the
region, which was left without political and economic power (see Ojeda 25-28).
Following the
official discourse, regionalization had to be considered part of the
institutional reform initiated by the Monarch after ascending to the throne, in
which good governance was the main objective, “the key to democracy and
development,”[3] which had to be achieved through different transformations:
reform of the judiciary, advanced regionalization, extensive devolution and a
new social charter.[4] The need to implement these wide-ranging reforms,
announced on different occasions by the Palace, was connected to both foreign
and domestic pressures: in the international arena, the European Union
requirements imposed on Morocco in the framework of the European Proximity
Policy, the 2007-2013 EU-Morocco Action Plan and the Advanced Status agreements
(see Fernández Molina and Bustos 8-9); and in the national arena, the pressures
emerging from the need to find a solution to the question of Western Sahara
(see Ben-Meir 93, and Zoubir 162), to provide a political framework where the proposal
of an Moroccan Autonomy Plan could be credible and admissible (see Kausch 1),
and to find a solution to two other major problems in the system: its inability
to reproduce new elites to replace the traditional ones and the discrediting of
the institutional political sphere (see Tozy 6).
The creation
of the CCR generated intensive activity among institutional and non-institutional
political and social actors. As in the seventies and nineties, political
parties and important sectors of civil society attributed a democratizing power
to the regionalization process. That expectancy provoked a significant number
of activities and debates all around the country focused on this question, and
contributed to the reform of the Moroccan regional system being considered the
greatest political project of Mohammed VI’s reign. In fact, the King himself
had encouraged the participation of social and political forces among the
Moroccan population as a whole, and he had asked the CCR to take their
proposals into consideration. Over the fourteen months the CCR spent doing its
work, several social and political actors, such as political parties, trade
unions and associations, governmental institutions, such as governmental
offices, control agencies, national development agencies and other national
institutions, as well as different international organizations, forwarded a
total of 124 written and oral proposals to the Commission.
However,
public attention to the reform decreased once uprisings erupted in North Africa
and spread to Morocco, despite the fact that on 9 March 2011, two weeks after
the first demonstrations, Mohammed VI again placed the regional reform on the
political agenda, proclaiming the creation of an Advisory Committee for
Constitutional Reform (CCRC). Meanwhile the King’s announcement was seen in
Morocco and abroad as a strategic response to pre-empt a popular uprising in
the country promising reform from the top; for him it was simply continuing the
implementation of his regionalization plan (see Ottaway 2). Notwithstanding,
the CCRC and the constitutional reform focused the attention of political
parties, organizations, associations, institutions and citizens on other issues
such as the role of the monarchy, the separation of powers and the independence
of the judiciary. At that time, democratization was more important than
decentralization for them. Thus, from that moment on, regionalization and
decentralization became residual demands, and only the Monarchy kept the
regionalization process at the center of its concerns.
Endnotes:
[1] Speech to
the nation, 3 January 2010
[2] “Decentralization”
refers here to the transfer of competencies and resources to local elective
authorities, while “deconcentration” refers to administrative decentralization.
[3] Speech to the
nation on the 10th Anniversary of the Day of the Throne, 30 July 2009.
[4] Speech at
the opening of the Parliament, September 2009, speech on the 56th anniversary
of the Revolution of the King and the People, August 2009 and speech to the
nation on the 10th Anniversary of the Day of the Throne, 30 July 2009
This article is an excerpt from a research paper, titled - "The Effects of the Moroccan Advanced Regionalization Process
in Western Sahara" published by eScholarship for TRANSMODERNITY:
Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 5(3),
Download The Paper - LINK
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