When Americans think of the word border, we usually think of tidy lines on a map that separate one polity from another. Overlapping and uncertain claims are to be tidied up through the work of diplomats who make compromises and settle disputes in a sensible and reasonable matter, something that has always been the American way, whether it has come to its own international borders or the spaces of the tribal lands in between. This is not to say that there have not been untidy conflicts between states over internal boundaries, some of which have been designated with the term “war” and involved actual armed conflict, or that the diplomatic process has not at times involved a certain amount of force and fraud. The history of treaties with various tribes throughout American history has always involved a high amount of both force and fraud, it must be remembered. But for Americans, at least, there is a different sense that exists between borders and frontiers, a distinction that does not necessarily hold for other cultures and in other languges.

The area of Morocco has, for at least a couple of thousand years, been an example of a frontier country in ways that others may not expect or appreciate. During Roman times, it was the land that separated the Romano-Moors who were under the influence of Roman rule and the spread of Latin culture, which created an enduring hybrid state long after the fall of the Western Roman Empire itself from the tribes of the interior who did not receive that same influence. Later on, the area, recently conquered by the Umayyads, became the springboard for the invasion of Spain, and later on it became the springboard for the invasions of the Almoravids and Almohads as well as the forces of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. This is no mere tidy border, but a borderland that has frequently had a great deal of importance as a base for military invasions. Perhaps for this reason the area has also long been sought by French, Spanish, and Portuguese interests as a springboard for European influence the other way as well in the last few centuries.

Morocco is an untidy frontier in other ways as well. The nation has a substantial Berber minority, but the public face of the country has always been the Arabic cities that have drawn tourists and civil governors. The country was once an imperial possession divided between the Spanish and the French, but it retained its monarch during this period, and the country itself quickly became an imperial nation after independence when it invaded and has continued to hold Western Sahara despite the wishes of those people to be free, thus negating a great deal of the good will that it might have earned as a postcolonial nation thereby. Similarly, the nation had an equivocal role as a member of the nations of the Barbary Coast that was nonetheless more reasonable than its piratical peers. In few cases has the nation’s role been clear or unequivocal, but rather the nation has been a strange case.

Once a nation or area finds itself to be a contested borderland area, that state can last for a long time. The Treaty of Verdun divided the nations of Western and Central Europe between the three grandsons of Charlemagne, and while two of those realms remained basically stable as France and Germany, the middle ground remains contested between the dominance of the other two and a patchwork of peripheral areas and small states. The Balkans have been contested border spaces for at least the last 4000 years or more between a dizzying array of peoples settled in Anatolia and the Greek mainland and islands on the one hand and invaders from the steppelands of Eastern Europe and further east all the way into East Asia, and remain so today with their baffling ethnoreligious difficulties. And Morocco too remains a boundary space between the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds, between Europe to its north, the band of North Africa in which it resides, and West Africa to its south. Once such untidiness and such conflict becomes endemic in an area, it is hard to get rid of that kind of state of being.