Sarah Leah Whitson is the Executive Director of DAWN.
*Published in World Politics Review on September 5, 2024
On July 31, with little fanfare or attention, France formally recognized Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara, abandoning its decades-long support for the United Nations-mandated referendum process to determine the territory's final governance status. Long seen as the West's diplomatic leader on the Western Sahara conflict, France is the most important country to fully throw its weight behind Morocco's unlawful, unilateral annexation of the territory.
But it is hardly the first to do so. Israel did the same in 2023, and Spain shifted its stance on the conflict to align itself more closely with Morocco's position the year before. But it was the United States under then-President Donald Trump that opened the floodgates in 2020, recognizing Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for Rabat's normalization of relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords.
This formal recognition of Morocco's de facto sovereignty over the territory—a massive swath of mainly desert that is home to a mere 600,000 inhabitants—may not at first glance appear to have global ramifications. But it will indeed have reverberations around the world, eroding the rule of international law that prohibits the acquisition of territory by force as well as the recognition of such an illegal act by other states. For occupying powers, including Russia and Israel, it provides invaluable precedent as well as encouragement that, sooner or later, their "might" will also one day "make right," as they observe how even states that profess commitment to the rules-based international order abandon it for their short-term political and economic interests.
The history of the Western Sahara conflict is not as widely remembered today as other contemporaneous liberation struggles. Spain colonized the territory from the 19th century until 1976, when it pulled up stakes shortly after the Sahrawis—the territory's indigenous population—formed an armed liberation group known as the Polisario Front. After the Spanish withdrawal, Mauritania and Morocco both claimed parts of the territory and fought to control it. While Mauritania soon renounced its claim and withdrew its forces, the Moroccans continued waging a war with the Polisario Front until 1991, when the two parties agreed to a cease-fire and peace process that was to include a U.N.-organized referendum on self-determination.
The referendum never took place, however, due largely to Moroccan obstruction. Meanwhile, Sahrawi refugees had found shelter in camps in Algeria, where just over 100,000 of them continue to live under the control of the Polisario Front, which essentially acts as an unelected Sahrawi government-in-exile. Despite three decades of intermittent peace efforts, the conflict remained largely frozen until 2020, when new incidents of fighting broke out.
The U.N. and the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, both strongly affirmed the status of Western Sahara as occupied territory at the beginning of the conflict, though the U.N. appears to have watered down its position over the decades. In 1975, the ICJ rejected Morocco's claims of sovereignty, ruling that the Sahrawi people had a right to self-determination. The U.N. Security Council buttressed the court's decision by issuing a resolution reaffirming this right and demanding a referendum to allow the Sahrawis to decide who would govern them. Morocco initially accepted the referendum but soon after rejected it as "impracticable," instead offering up a plan for limited, local Sahrawi autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty, which the Polisario Front continues to reject.
Over the years, the conflict has often been a source of tension in Rabat's relations with its international partners. But after Trump announced U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in 2020, Morocco declared that such recognition would be the absolute benchmark determining its relationships with other countries. And it didn't hesitate to follow through, damaging ties with a range of European partners, including Spain and France.
In 2022, Spain patched up fractured relations by supporting Morocco's autonomy plan, while stopping short of recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the territory, in return for Rabat's cooperation on limiting migration and boosting trade ties. French President Emmanuel Macron decided to go further than Spain and specifically recognized Morocco's annexation essentially because Morocco, emboldened by the U.S. and Israeli recognition, had grown more strident in its demands. And after a year of backroom haggling to repair its own rocky relationship with Morocco, France caved.
Algeria, which has historically been the Polisario Front's principal backer, withdrew its ambassador to France and threatened to cut gas and oil exports in retaliation. But as a relatively small source of fungible energy supplies to France, Algeria's threats were not enough to deter France from choosing to placate Morocco.
The cards that Morocco holds over France—and threatened to play against it, in what the former French ambassador to the U.S. Gerard Araud characterized as "blackmail"— were simply much stronger. We still don't know the exact terms of the deal that Morocco and France cut, but it almost certainly includes three main components: France's valuable trade and business interests in Morocco; Rabat's assistance in controlling migration flows to France; and counterterrorism intelligence-sharing and cooperation.
France is Morocco's top foreign investor, with tens of billions of dollars of investments in the country, to say nothing of their lucrative trade ties. In recent years, Morocco had shown its willingness to punish France for its refusal to recognize Western Sahara as Moroccan territory by withholding contracts and trade deals. Notably, just as France made its recognition announcement, Morocco announced that it would award a French-Moroccan consortium the contract to supervise construction of a high-speed rail line between Kenitra and Marrakech, even though its bid was $8 million more than its Spanish competitors.
Morocco's control over migration flows to Europe, dubbed "migration blackmail," has also long been a bargaining chip that it has used to gain concessions, given the increasing political salience of the issue in Europe. In 2021, Spain accused Morocco of relaxing migration controls and encouraging the rapid, massive migration of 6,000 Africans to the Spanish-controlled Ceuta enclave, as punishment for Madrid having allowed the leader of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali, to enter the country for medical treatment.
The pressure tactic appeared to have worked, however, as evidenced by Spain's acquiescence the following year to Morocco's autonomy plan. That was followed in 2023 by the signing of a package of 20 trade, investment and migration agreements, in which Morocco promised to protect Ceuta and Melilla—Spain's other North African enclave—from further irregular migration. France, which has faced its own migration pressures, has long tried to incentivize Morocco to turn off the migration spigot by offering financial and technical support. Given Morocco's proximity to vast terrorist and criminal transit networks in the Maghreb and Sahel, intelligence-sharing and counterterrorism cooperation is also an important lever in Morocco's hands.
However valuable the deal with Morocco is to French interests, however, there has been no accounting for its human costs. These will be borne first and foremost by the Sahrawi people. Sadly, neither they nor the Polisario Front have valuable chits to barter with powerful states to ensure their right to self-determination. What France and Spain have signaled is that, for the right price, they will abandon any commitment to defending such basic rights as well as the international laws that undergird them.
But it is doubtful they would have been emboldened to do this without the Trump-led Abraham Accords. These swapped U.S. recognition of Morocco's illegal annexation of Western Sahara for Rabat's normalization of ties with Israel, whose own illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories was recently characterized by the ICJ as apartheid. Indeed, since the U.S. recognition, several African states have opened consulates in Western Sahara, and the United Arab Emirates, another Abraham Accords party, has announced several trade and investment deals there with Morocco. With France now falling in line, we can now expect many other countries to follow suit. In fact, just a week after Macron's announcement, Finland endorsed Morocco's autonomy plan for Western Sahara. In effect, the Sahrawi people have been among the first non-Palestinian casualties of the Abraham Accords.
Yet the costs are broader still, and the international community will continue to foot the bill. France's decision to disregard the Sahrawis' right to self-determination erodes one of the most fundamental tenets of international human rights and humanitarian law, as well as of the rules-based international order itself: the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force. This rule has served to discourage nations from seeking to conquer other states and contributed to global peace and security for decades since the end of World War II.
But now, all is fair game. Occupying nations like Israel and Russia will relish France's action, which provides support and precedent to justify their own annexations. It will encourage them to continue to defy the orders of international courts and the U.N., and even continue to annex more occupied territory. While France's action may appear to be mere wheeling and dealing among nation-states, it has and will continue to have profoundly harmful global ramifications. France has made a grave mistake in prioritizing its short-term interests, and the world will pay the price for decades to come.
