Obliviousness Stunts Friendships

America has, in its relations with the world, the blinding defect of its power: It has great difficulty getting interested in other nations before they fall into one of the four following categories: potential competitor, area of strife, source of oil or other raw materials, or just openly anti-American.

The United States, when it gets interested, gets interested too late and usually only after it has been involved in a thousand acts of disastrous clumsiness. In effect, American “interest” in suchor-such a region has become synonymous with disaster.

Since Morocco doesn’t fit into any of these categories, the moments that America will give it - as it did last month with the visit of our new sovereign, King Mohammed VI, to the United States - are few. But we regard them as precious chances that we must grasp as opportunities to talk and to know each other, and to try to identify our common philosophical, political, strategic and economic interests. They are chances to establish a relationship, excluding the extremes of indifference or conflict, based on understanding and cooperation - first and foremost pragmatic, but one that does not preclude evolution into partnership.

The need is therefore to speak and to speak frankly. What is said in a prudent way must be translated into clear terms. Our relations remain too summary, incidental, political, ambiguous and feeble to let us create any ambitious perspectives. Who is to blame? Given the weight of the United States and the decisive and constraining character of its choices for the world, it is difficult to impute the deficit to Morocco’s unwillingness. The question, therefore, is why?

Americans are only vaguely interested, or, let’s say, only from very high up above, in other nations. We cannot force Americans to change their opinions. When some in America’s politics, news media and universities deign to actually consider a country such as Morocco, they do so superficially and in such haste that the result is often worse than total indifference, worse than the friendly average American, who says, when Morocco is evoked, “Ah, yes, Monaco!”

There are even some pitiful productions of universities that confuse ‘60s anthropological impressions with the analysis of Morocco today. These absurd cliches would have produced smiles if they had remained in the stacks of any library devoted to “Near East Studies.” This ostentatious ignorance of Morocco’s reality shapes attitudes in Congress, the State Department, major newspapers, even U.S. services in Morocco. American analysts do, it is true, compile reports on Morocco. These are more or less realistic facts assembled, often with little signification, from the same marginal sources and selected according to the same mechanical vision - a synthesis of fast-food anthropology and sensationalism.

Then there is the notorious schizophrenia of some anti-Moroccan activists in the United States.

But the real Morocco is far from any of these versions!

Many of our American friends are familiar with this criticism of U.S. attitudes. We have told them here and in the United States. This is not to put the good faith of the majority of Americans in question but rather to note the refusal to make an effort to understand Morocco.

Our American friends, in the political appreciation of Morocco, commit a fundamental mistake: They overlook the fact that Morocco is a democracy. However, the construction of a productive American-Moroccan relationship reposes on that reality.

Morocco, culturally and historically in a region foreign to the idea of democracy, made an audacious choice, one that was in its time extremely risky and is still very fragile. That was the choice to follow the path of democracy and pluralism. The evolution of democracy, despite cultural and sociological resistance and economic difficulties, has caused Morocco to adopt universal norms and values of human rights. This has been the reality for a number of years. Democracy and human rights have advanced against the inherent resistance of the Moroccan historical reality.

Morocco’s democracy is a dare, a young and fragile hope - a bet where there remains, of course, much to do.

Here we are in the presence of a unique model in the African continent and in the Arab and Muslim world, and quite rare outside of Western Europe and North America. We are witness to the denial of what has been long alleged to be the fatalism about dictatorship, chaos, fanaticism and war that bedevil the so-called underdeveloped world.

We believe, here in Morocco, that we made the choice of freedom, democracy and progress. We expect that the world of freedom, democracy and progress, especially its most powerful member, the United States, will actively support the Moroccan project. Americans know that the difficult and ambitious choice of freedom and democracy is threatened in Morocco by other temptations, other ideologies opposed to freedom and democracy, and everything else that weakens reform in Morocco.

Yes, we believe that common values and belonging to a political camp that is fundamentally liberal and strongly democratic must cement a strategic alliance between the United States and Morocco. The rest must flow from it: commerce, business, cultural exchanges - all of which spontaneously benefit this “pact of values,” and will reinforce it.