2 - The Islamists of Morocco’s Party of Justice and Development and the Foreign Policy Problem: Between Structural Constraints and Economic Imperatives

Summary

In this chapter on the international relations of the Moroccan legalist Islamic current, in this case the Party of Justice and Development (PJD), we formulate the following hypothesis: The more institutionalized this party's actors become, particularly in an authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regime like the Sherifian monarchy, the more they normalize their presence on the legal political field and the more their discourse becomes rationalized, sanitized of the residual programmatic, protesting, even revolutionary stances that they would have adopted or favored during the party's extra-parliamentary phase, or, more recently, in the Parliamentary opposition. Just as that of any other social actors, the posture of legitimist political Islam's representatives, particularly in the area of foreign affairs, is tightly interwoven with the position that they occupy on the national political stage. By this measure, and especially in an authoritarian context, relativizing “the autonomy of the national decision makers” by rigorously paying heed to, on the one hand, the domestic systemic constraints on the actors, and, on the other, their country's actual geopolitical weight on the international scene, is indispensable. Thus, according to the periods and positions occupied in the internal political space, the Islamists oscillate between ideology and pragmatism or further differentiate “the morally desirable” from the “politically possible,” be it in their internal (national) or external (extra-national) practice.

Still, the recency of PJD's accession to power ought to preclude making definitive statements, just as any sort of prospective statements would be hasty. In fact, this Islamist party entered the government as part of a heterogeneous coalition barely four years ago, after achieving a majority in the general election of November 25, 2011. So, at most, one may venture to formulate some explanatory, by definition tentative, hypotheses that certainly take into consideration some very contemporaneous elements but still more those from the recent or more distant past. It is impossible to understand the true nature of the perception of Morocco's Islamists and sometimes of its transformations through the years, most notably in international relations, without doing a dual retrospective study.