In the digital and media sphere, historical controversies often take the form of a battle over narratives. It is precisely this terrain that Spanish philosophy professor Emmanuel Martínez Alcocer (EMA) entered with a lengthy viral thread on X, attacking the foundations of Morocco’s presence and claims regarding Ceuta and Melilla. Faced with this ideological construct, former Moroccan minister and academic Lahcen Haddad offered a measured, well-documented, and devastatingly thorough response.
The historiographical confrontation between Emmanuel Martínez Alcocer’s position and Lahcen Haddad’s methodical rebuttal highlights a formidable contemporary phenomenon: the digital packaging of preconceived political theses under the veneer of supposed documentary objectivity. When an observer chooses to carve fragments out of 18th-century treaties and compress them into polished infographics, he is not doing the work of a historian but that of a propagandist. “The problem begins when someone takes these treaties, puts them into pretty infographics with parchments, seals and maps, and claims they say three things they do not say: that Morocco did not exist as a state, that it was born in 1956 and that any subsequent Moroccan claim automatically lacks historical foundation,” Haddad sums up.
Faced with this shift from historical analysis to polemical staging, the answer lies precisely in refusing to succumb to anachronism and insisting that the foundational texts be restored in their entirety.
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For Emmanuel Martínez Alcocer, the Alaouite sultans supposedly endorsed, through the treaties of 1767 and 1799, the status of Ceuta and Melilla as Spanish enclaves, disputing only the surrounding agricultural or military areas. Those same treaties, he argues, demonstrate a gap in both the historical memory and legal basis of Morocco’s position. While acknowledging that a dispute exists today, Alcocer describes it as nothing less than a “military and political attack” orchestrated by Rabat. Morocco, moreover, supposedly never existed before then as a unified state: it was only born in 1956, alongside the emergence of the concept of “Greater Morocco” championed by Istiqlal leader Allal El Fassi.
The sophistry, clearly, is abundant. One example lies in the fact that Alcocer’s argument rests on a literal and biased reading of the titles used by the Alaouite sultans in the diplomatic instruments of 1767 and 1799. More specifically, “when Spain signed treaties with these sultans in the 18th century, it was not signing with the King of Morocco as though that referred to a unified state, but with the ruler who united in his person the kingdoms of Marrakech, Fez, Meknes, Souss, Tafilalet and Drâa,” he argues.
In proceeding this way, the Spanish author claims to prove that no unified state existed. Yet this argument completely ignores the composite nature of the monarchies of the Ancien Régime. In the 18th century, the Spain of Charles III was no more a centralized and homogeneous nation-state in the contemporary sense but was instead structured around a crown that brought together heterogeneous territories, fueros and jurisdictions, Haddad counters. To say that Morocco did not exist because its sovereign ruled over a confederation of traditional kingdoms would, by strict logical symmetry, amount to denying the existence of Spain at the same time. The treaties themselves, in their preambles and normative provisions, explicitly address two sovereigns, recognize two nations and regulate interactions between subjects and territories falling under a fully constituted state authority recognized internationally.
Alcocer’s textual mutilation reaches its peak when he interprets the references to the presidios of Ceuta and Melilla in those same treaties as a definitive and unilateral renunciation by the Moroccan sultans. “What existed at the time, the Alaouite Sultanate, did exactly the opposite of what is now being claimed in its name: on two occasions, under two different reigns, it signed documents in which it recognized these places as Spanish and disputed them only for the purpose of obtaining the surrounding countryside,” the argument reads.
Lahcen Haddad restores what the text actually says by invoking Article 19 of the 1767 treaty, which explicitly rejects the requests for territorial extensions made by His Catholic Majesty around the strongholds, limiting itself to establishing strict neighboring perimeters. Recognizing the physical presence of a foreign garrison or negotiating the boundaries of a military perimeter under the constraints of a particular balance of power cannot be equated with an eternal abandonment of sovereignty. Moreover, the immediate course of history formally contradicts this idyllic and frozen vision of definitive Moroccan consent: the sieges of Melilla between 1774 and 1775 and of Ceuta between 1790 and 1791 attest to the uninterrupted continuation of armed and diplomatic challenges to the enclaves. Attempts to make the agreements of 1767 and 1799 say that they settled the territorial question once and for all also run up against the evidence of the numerous conventions signed throughout the 19th century, from 1844 through to the Treaty of Tétouan in 1860, which continued precisely to negotiate these borders and security zones.
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The most absurd breaking point in Alcocer’s thesis lies in his fixation on 1956 as the absolute birth date of the Moroccan state, which he seeks artificially to tie to the ideological emergence of the concept of “Greater Morocco.” This pitfall ignores the elementary foundations of public international law. As early as 1952, a full four years before the proclamation of independence, the International Court of Justice had ruled unequivocally that the Moroccan state had retained its uninterrupted international legal personality, including during the protectorate regime established in 1912. Legally, a protectorate treaty can only validly be concluded with a pre-existing sovereign state whose exercise of public authority is then circumscribed, which by definition rules out the notion of a state born ex nihilo in 1956. Conflating the institutional evolution of modern Moroccan administration, the continuity of the Alaouite dynasty and the emergence of partisan political doctrines in the 20th century amounts to an intellectual confusion that undermines any serious historiographical endeavor.
Haddad also returns to the Spanish professor’s assertion that Rabat’s political and historical claim constitutes a “military and political attack.” For him, the verbal escalation is designed to substitute fear and melodrama for rational analysis. A territorial claim pursued through the diplomacy of a sovereign state belongs to the classic repertoire of border disputes and cannot be equated with armed aggression.
In seeking to turn historical archives into ammunition for polemics, Emmanuel Martínez Alcocer illustrates the dead ends of a debate in which the aesthetic appeal of old parchments is celebrated rather than submitting to the exacting discipline of reading them in full. As Lahcen Haddad forcefully reminds us, the articles of a treaty always end up speaking for themselves against those who try to silence them through propaganda.
