French Algeria Question

So let's say by 1950 the population of Algeria is roughly split with 50% Arab (Muslim) and 50% French (Catholic), instead of 85%/15% ish. How would the outcome to this day be different.

RyanBrune said:

So let's say by 1950 the population of Algeria is roughly split with 50% Arab (Muslim) and 50% French (Catholic), instead of 75%/25% ish. How would the outcome to this day be different.

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Actually, only 10% of the population was of European descent (mainly French and Spanish, but also Italian and Maltese). There were also 140 000 Jews.
As for the Algerian Muslims, people say they're "Arabs" but almost all of them are actually Berbers. We call them "Arab" because they adopted both the language and the culture of the Arabs who arrived in North Africa 14 centuries ago. Most of the independentist leaders were unable to hold a convesation in literary Arabic, that's why they brought thousands of Egyptian Arabic teachers in the 1970s in order to arabize the Algerians.

RyanBrune said:

So let's say by 1950 the population of Algeria is roughly split with 50% Arab (Muslim) and 50% French (Catholic), instead of 75%/25% ish. How would the outcome to this day be different.

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Where do you get the figure that in OTL it was 75-25? "In contrast to Indochina, Algeria had a stronger settler presence, with about 11 percent of the population in 1950 made up of *pieds noirs*... http://books.google.com/books?id=lfskAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT286

"During the present [twentieth] century, immigration slowed, but a natural increase of 1 percent a year was maintained, raising the number of Europeans to 833,000 by 1926, a peak of 14 percent of Algeria's total population, and 1,054,000 in 1954, 11 percent of the total." http://books.google.com/books?id=iaBTAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT85

It makes a difference, because as difficult as it is to imagine a POD which doubles the European population share, turning 25% into 50%, to nearly *quintuple* it is even more difficult...

If the French focused their immigration into Algeria, then perhaps some parts of it could be held as exclaves (a la Ceuta and Melilla). Oran might be a candidate. I don't there's a chance of holding onto Algeria, certainly not with a post 1900 PoD.

oops said 75%/25%, meant to say 85%/15%

Onkel Willie said:

If the French focused their immigration into Algeria, then perhaps some parts of it could be held as exclaves (a la Ceuta and Melilla). Oran might be a candidate. I don't there's a chance of holding onto Algeria, certainly not with a post 1900 PoD.

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Redraw the border so that Constantine and Annaba (Bone") at least are within Tunisia. Maybe also the populated coast all the way to Algiers. Move the coast and hills from Oran to the Moroccan border into Morocco. Then make sure that the entire sparsely populated Haut Plateaux and all of the Sahara from Mauretania to Chad is part of France. The Sahara is where the mines happen to be in most cases. And where the population is very low.

Another problem: French Algeria was administered directly as part of the metropole. In my opinion this made things worse rather than better, particularly because the colons often held the balance of power in the rather unstable Fourth Republic. Whenever the Government in Paris indicated it would make compromises with the Algerian natives this colon bloc support was withdrawn and very often the Government would collapse.

Having Algeria administered separately, ie as a proto-dominion, will not solve all the problems. Indeed, if things are not handled carefully there could be a Rhodesia type situation develop. However I'm confident that in the long term it will lead to a negotiated solution where majority rule is implemented and a significant minority of French settlers continue to live there today. It might be too optimistic to hope that this post-independence Algeria would have full parliamentary democracy given Africa's history. But even so, consistent with other post independent African states, so long as the colons stay out of politics under the new regime they will probably be OK.