Editor’s Note: Safae El Yaaqoubi is an independent senior policy analyst with a focus on North Africa and the Sahel. The former State Department-accredited journalist has reported extensively on Morocco, US-Morocco relations, and regional security dynamics.

By Hafed Al-Ghwell, Senior Fellow and Director, North Africa, Mediterranean, and the Sahel Program

Thirty years have passed since the last Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) summit, and Algeria and Morocco have kept their borders closed for just as long. The two neighbors share more history, geography, and social fabric than their estrangement would suggest, which makes their failure to integrate all the more telling. Every anniversary, the same question returns: What will it take, politically, to break the regional deadlock?

It is the wrong question, and asking it repeatedly is part of why the Maghreb stays stuck.

The Maghreb’s integration failure runs deeper than a political deadlock, because its institutions were never designed to function when politics turned hostile, and reconciliation, even if it came tomorrow, would not repair what is structurally broken. The AMU has not been held back by the absence of a political breakthrough so much as by the absence of the institutional shock absorbers it was never given.

Stoppage implies reversibility: The right conditions will restart what was paused, while collapse means the system lost the capacity to function at all. Confusing them is how you spend 30 years applying the wrong remedy.

When political consensus broke in the early 1990s, the AMU did not pull back to some reduced level of activity but stopped entirely at once: summitry, ministerial coordination, technical commissions. Intra-regional trade remained stuck between 2 and 5% of total trade, leaving the Maghreb among the least integrated regions in the world. No residual cooperation survived below the level of elite political agreement. When the political ceiling caved, the floor went with it; the AMU had never had one.

What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Design

The standard explanation points to political will: the Algeria-Morocco rivalry, Western Sahara, and accumulated mistrust. Political hostility explains why cooperation became difficult, but not why every channel failed simultaneously, no technical track continued by default, or why thirty years of diplomatic effort produced de-escalation that never accumulated into anything structural.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) provides a useful contrast, as an example of institutional continuity under pressure. Its Secretariat operates with a mandate and budget defined in its Charter, and its senior officials and ministerial meetings are embedded in a standing calendar of organs rather than convened only by political invitation. When paralysis comes, it is political, and the institutional process itself survives

The AMU was built with none of these features. Under Article 11of the Treaty of Marrakesh, the Secretariat’s location, mandate, and leadership are defined by the Presidential Council rather than fixed in the treaty.

Decision-making runs on unanimity at the heads-of-state level, allowing a single bilateral rupture to block all institutional output. This logic extends across the treaty. Article 7describes Prime Ministerial meetings as convening “if need be,” making even the second tier of governance discretionary rather than automatic.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Charter made similar choices in 1985. Under Article X, decisions at all levels require unanimity, and bilateral and contentious issues are excluded from deliberation, preventing the institution from addressing its most politically sensitive questions. The AMU produces the same structural constraint through different treaty language, with the same effect. SAARC has not held a summit since 2014, just as the AMU last met in 1994. Two organizations, different continents, the same institutional logic, the same outcome: not coincidence but a pattern with an explanation.

The Deliberate Bypass

When Algeria and Morocco signed the Treaty of Marrakesh in 1989, both states got roughly what they wanted: a framework that signaled regional ambition without creating binding obligations. A secretariat with real autonomous capacity would have generated institutional momentum neither government was prepared to manage, and standing committees with procedural mandates would have kept working even when relations soured, forcing Algiers and Rabat to honor or reject their outputs publicly. It would also make the political cost of deteriorating ties uncomfortably visible in ways both states preferred to avoid.

What looks like failure from the outside is often how the system is meant to work. The AMU was effectively designed to be switched on and off, and both states have treated it that way. Since the last summit, member states have sustained rhetorical commitments to Maghreb integration while investing elsewhere. Morocco applied for membership of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 2017, a bid that remains unresolved but whose submission signals where Rabat’s regional priorities lie. Tunisia, for its part, formally joined the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) the same year. Each move reflects what the Treaty of Marrakesh implied from the outset: the regional architecture was not the primary vehicle but a deliberately weak fallback. Morocco’s 2020 normalization agreement with Israel followed the same logic: a major strategic shift carried out without regional consultation because no framework existed to absorb or contest it, and that very absence expanded Rabat’s room for maneuver.

Algeria publicly declared the Arab Maghreb Union to be “in a coma” with “no activity, not even a secretary general with the prerogatives of a secretary general,” in the words of Foreign Minister Ahmed Attaf. In the spring of 2024, Algiers then convened Tunisia and Libya in a new trilateral grouping, the G3, explicitly bypassing Morocco at a moment when Rabat’s regional influence was visibly expanding. The G3’s timing and membership made it hard to read as anything other than an instrument of containment. Algeria had decided the institution was no longer useful and built a replacement that excluded Morocco entirely. Both governments have made this choice repeatedly, and in full view of what it costs.

The Outsiders’ Blind Spot

For three decades, external actors have approached the Maghreb with a shared assumption: Political reconciliation is the main obstacle, and once Algeria and Morocco resume dialogue, the regional project can move forward. Reconciliation may be necessary, but it is not enough. Neither country currently has much incentive to build the kind of institutional mechanisms they chose to leave out in 1989, precisely because those mechanisms would limit the flexibility they now benefit from.

External actors’ bilateral relationships with individual Maghreb states have not bypassed the AMU so much as priced it out. The 2004 US-Morocco Free Trade Agreement and the same-year Agadir Agreement (with Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia, excluding Algeria) showed Rabat would not wait for the AMU. The EU followed the same logic: The 2008 Advanced Status with Morocco was negotiated with no regional conditionality. Tunisia’s mid-1990s association agreement, now facing calls for revision as unbalanced, shows how quickly a single bilateral pillar can fracture when no regional framework exists to share the strain. Bilaterally rational choices have produced a regional architecture in which external partnerships substitute for intra-Maghreb integration rather than complement it.

A rapprochement between Algeria and Morocco would not solve this problem. The missing variable is not the state of relations between two capitals but the institutional framework that was never built into the 1989 Treaty of Marrakesh. Neither state has since developed an incentive to build it. Non-integration is a condition both governments have separately found useful, and external partners have reinforced that with every bilateral deal signed in lieu of a regional one. The practical implication is not a different strategy but a more accurate diagnosis: The Maghreb is a structural condition that has been actively maintained, not a regional project that stalled. Engaging with it as the latter changes what success looks like, what capital is worth spending, and what outcomes are worth expecting.

Header image: Commemoration of the Saharawi Republic’s 30th anniversary in liberated territories of Western Sahara. By Jaysen Naidoo