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In North Africa, as in most underdeveloped countries, the increase in population has outstripped that of natural resources, because medical progress has moved faster than economic progress. The birth rate has not increased, but the death rate has diminished. France has never stopped investing heavily in North Africa, especially since the war. In Algeria, the first four-year equipment plan represented a total of $728 million; the second foresees an expenditure of $820 million. But during the first plan, it is estimated that the population increased by 9% and production by 10%. The standard of living, therefore, remained approximately the same.
To assure a higher standard of living, we must spend at least $285 million more. Continental France finances about three-fourths of this special budget. For the whole of Africa, investment expenditures now approach the neighborhood of $570 million. They should be increased by about 50% to 100% in order to ensure a rise in the standard of living.
Tne Stir or Nationalism
The population pressure is not the only cause of political conflicts, but it inevitably aggravates the conflicts which colonialism creates all by itself, even in a successful union. The French minority—colons, civil servants, shopkeepers, industrialists—are privileged in comparison to the mass of the native population. The revolt of the masses against the privileged classes, inevitable in all underdeveloped countries, is often directed against colonizers and takes a nationalist accent.
So do the aspirations of the cultivated minorities, hesitating between their traditional Moslem culture and religion on one hand, and the Western culture brought by France on the other. Their nationalistic feelings are increased, exacerbated, when their young university graduates have trouble finding work suited to their talents, and, as a consequence, feel that they have been exiled from their native land. There are too many places filled by Frenchmen in the Tunisian and Moroccan bureaucracies which could be filled by natives.
But opening wide the doors of administration to North African youth would not be enough to satisfy nationalist aspirations. The crux of the question is to find out if these aspirations can be satisfied progressively in friendly collaboration with the French, or satisfied only in conflict with them. The conviction of the majority of French opinion is that this progressive transformation is possible. And the example of Tunisia bears witness to this.
The French were divided into two schools on this subject. Some thought that cooperation could be organized within the framework with a Franco-Tunisian government. Others thought that we must grant the moderate nationalists internal autonomy, and fix, by a negotiated agreement, the rights and duties of the Tunisian state and the French minority, thus allowing a new form of Franco-Tunisian community to develop naturally. This second school has carried the day. Negotiations, in which Mendes-France took the lead, have resulted in the signature of conventions which we hope will soon be ratified. Returning in triumph to his own country, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia spoke of the independence of Tunisia but also of the interdependence of Tunisia and of France. So we find that a nationalist, steeped in French culture, has formulated the ruling thesis of French opinion.