by Christian Jacobs
“Fraternal, colorful, and electrifying! A multitude of colors on the main stage, from the African dancers on Sunday night to Quilapayun on Saturday, and Anne Vanderlove in between. Everywhere, the crowd laughed, danced, and stomped with a single agenda: joy… Anti-racism has once again been victorious.”[i] This is how the local newspaper described the “Fifth Moussem of Moroccan Immigration in Europe,” held in 1985 in the Parisian suburb Gennevilliers. Moussem referred to a traditional Moroccan custom of hosting festivals in celebration of local cultures. The first European Moussem was organized in 1980 in the city of Argenteuil on the outskirts of Paris, the second in 1981 in Brussels, the third in 1982 in Amsterdam, and the fourth in 1983 in Düsseldorf. These transeuropean festivals had several thousand visitors and grew every year in size. The fifth version, held in Gennevilliers in 1985, was planned for 20,000 visitors with a budget of several hundred thousand Francs.
In contemporary historical imaginaries, the 1980s are the period in which European integration accelerated. According to recent works on European history, the European Community established its position as the central forum of European integration in this decade (Patel 2020, 42). In 1985, Jacques Delors became president of the European Commission. Today, the “architect of a united Europe” stands like nobody else for the development of Europe into a political and monetary unit, with its building blocks: the “Single Market, the Euro, Schengen, enlargements and Erasmus” (Martelli 2023).
In this context of political integration, it does not come as a surprise that, across the continent, civil society also started to develop and promote cultural identities that integrated Europe. Nonetheless, because the Moussem festivals of this period made actors from other continents into integral parts of Europeanization, they do not sit comfortably alongside dominant contemporary imaginaries of European integration. Despite organizing at the European level, the festivals were about “the culture of Moroccan workers abroad.”[ii] And their cultural imaginaries extended further outwards, too: For instance, the Moussem’s organizers integrated the Chilean music group Quilapayun and “African” dancers in their cultural festivals. The Moussem festivals’ intercultural, expansive vision of Europeanization challenged, but was ultimately superseded by, the narrower imaginary that accompanied political integration.
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The Moussems were organized by four Moroccan workers’ organizations from France (Association des travailleurs marocains en France), the Netherlands (Komitee van Marokkaanse Arbeiders in Nederland), Belgium (Regroupement démocratique marocain en Belgique), and West Germany (Marokkanischer Arbeiterbund Deutschland). The groups had formed in the 1960s and 1970s in the Moroccan diasporas. In the 1960s, Moroccan activists had mainly rallied behind attempts to organize the anti-imperialist opposition in Morocco from abroad. In the 1970s, these organizations increasingly turned to the situation of Moroccans in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and West Germany. Speaking mainly from a class-struggle perspective, the groups began to connect national migration regimes in their adoptive countries to anti-imperialist political struggles in Morocco and the Arab world. In their eyes, the neocolonial world order caused both the exploitation of “immigrant workers” in Europe and the authoritarian government in Morocco. In the 1980s, the groups continued to criticize the authoritarian government in Morocco, but they also fought racist discrimination against Moroccans in Europe and engaged in local strikes, such as the large strike movement in the automobile industry in Greater Paris from 1982 to 1984. Moreover, the groups increasingly coordinated across Europe (Merizak 2009; El Baroudi 2021; Gay 2021).
Far from a small side-project, the organization of the European Moussem festivals served as another, expanded form of anti-imperial struggle by Moroccan workers’ organizations, who devoted significant resources to them. With the Moussems, the organizers turned to their situation as not just workers in general, but as “Moroccan workers” in Europe, with their own culture. A flyer for the 1983 Moussem in Düsseldorf read:
Our Moussem is about the culture of Moroccan workers abroad. We express our social and political consciousness, our resistance, and our struggle for liberation from exploitation and oppression inside and outside Morocco. Our culture should not be that of a fossilized tradition whose weight holds us down, but that of a tradition from which we can draw the strength for our emancipation. When we celebrate Moussem in Europe, it is to experience our culture together here, to meet each other and share our experiences. It is also an opportunity to acquaint the German people with our culture. Here, the foundation for mutual understanding and a common struggle can be laid.[iii]
The organizers utilized and transformed the traditional Moroccan concept of Moussem in order to perform a culture specific to Moroccans in Europe. They directly linked their diasporic culture to the political struggles against exploitation and oppression that they faced as “Moroccan workers abroad.” In the flyer, the festival organizers asserted a self-understanding of their culture as dynamic and shaped by its surrounding contexts. Because the experiences of exile and migration shaped Moroccan culture in Europe, they were closely linked to the political situation and struggles of Moroccan workers’ organizations in France, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
The Moussem organizers understood all cultures as dynamic and thus as important sites from which political change might be stimulated. Since this conception linked cultural dynamism to political efficacy, the Moussem’s key quality was its facilitation of cultural exchange. By performing their own culture, Moroccan workers abroad could engage in a dialogue within both their community and majority society, transforming both in the process. The organizers targeted local audiences and printed flyers in the local languages: German, Dutch, or French. The sheer numbers of participants and reports in local newspapers suggest that the festivals successfully attracted non-Moroccans. What the organizers called “intercultural dialogue” was thus an instrument for building political solidarity between Moroccan activists and non-Moroccan supporters and allied groups.[iv] The material of the German, Dutch, French, and Belgian organizations all employed this rhetoric of intercultural dialogue. The French ATMF wrote, for instance: “Our dream is to allow a dialogue between young Europeans and those of the Maghreb, Africa, and—why not?—elsewhere.”[v]
Their festival programs document how the Moussem festivals put the intercultural dialogue into practice. Different groups presented theater plays, music, and dance performances. At the 1982 Moussem in Amsterdam, most of the performers were, of course, Moroccans. Still, the organizers also invited a Spanish theater group, a Dutch opera singer, and Surinamese flute players to foster the dialogue between cultures. Additionally, workshops tackled specific problems Moroccans faced in Europe, for instance, regarding migration laws and migrant experiences.
The fact that the intercultural festival and the workshops made sense to Moroccans from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and West Germany reveals that the organizers saw similarities between their situations across these nation-states. The ATMF underlined the European situation of the new generation in their publications and connected the rhetoric of the “intercultural” dialogue to the European dimension: “If the Moussem is a key moment for our specific cultural expression, it is necessarily part of an approach ofintercultural exchange between … popular European and immigrant cultures.”[vi]
Despite the different national laws regarding labor migration, all four of the involved Moroccan communities went through similar developments. These countries had all facilitated workers’ migration until the early 1970s and had then hardened migration laws followed by rejuvenation and feminization of migrant communities (Chin 2017; Berlinghoff 2013; Comte and Paoli 2026). The coordination group, which synchronized the efforts of the four Moroccan workers’ organizations, argued that these parallel developments had led to shared concerns across Western Europe. The formats of the Moussems expressed the new importance of the European dimension. The 1983 Moussem in Düsseldorf was preceded by a coordinated series of events in all four countries throughout May.[vii]
There was also something specifically Moroccan about this shared transeuropean diasporic experience. I have not come across other migrant communities organizing similar transeuropean activities. While the organizers regularly spoke of “immigrant cultures,” the Moussems were closely linked to a specific Moroccan diasporic history in Europe. As mentioned, the festival picked up on a traditional Moroccan custom, and all organizing groups referred to themselves as Moroccan. The fact that Moroccans constituted important communities in all four countries partly explains the avant-garde role of Moroccans in the “immigrant” Europe that they proclaimed.
Two broader political contexts further encouraged “immigrant” Europeanization. Firstly, activist Europeanization developed hand-in-hand with European institutions in a favorable context created by nation-states. The Moussems drew upon the financial support of powerful donors. Files on financial aid show the immense work put into fundraising at various institutions, such as the Council of Europe, UNESCO, ILO, the Christian NGO CIMADE, and municipalities like Nanterre. Nonetheless, the vast majority of financial aid came from European nation-states. In 1985, the French ATMF received funding for the Moussem from the European Commission (12,000 European Currency Unit), from the French state’s Fond d’action sociale (80,000 Francs), and the French Ministry of Culture (80,000 Francs).[viii] European nation-states played an essential role in fostering the “intercultural exchange between … popular European and immigrant cultures.”
Another context that pushed activists to think about Europe as a space of political activities was their disillusionment with the notion of the “Third World,” which had opened up a popular imaginary of political utopias in the 1970s. Third Worldism—the belief that the anti-imperialist movements in the former colonies would liberate themselves and then everyone else in an imminent world revolution—declined in the years around 1980 (Kalter 2015, 76; Mohandesi 2023, 10). The Moussems show how the disillusionment with post-decolonization nation-states (in this case, with Morocco in particular) also led to an increasing interest in Europe as a space for political activism.
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The European Moroccan Moussem festivals were attempts to develop a specifically migrant form of Europeanization in the 1980s. Scholarship has identified the decade as a period of increasing Europeanization, defined “as a variety of political, social, economic and cultural processes that promote (and modify) a sustainable strengthening of intra-European connections and similarities through acts of emulation, exchange and entanglement and that have been experienced and labelled as “European” in the course of history” (Hirschhausen and Patel 2010, 2). This definition precedes an edited volume that examines how intellectuals and politicians developed influential forms of Europeanization. The Moussems show how “immigrant” activists from a marginalized position also contributed to Europeanization.
This finding broadens our understanding of European integration. Hirschhausen and Patel have already claimed that Europeanization operated not only within Europe, but also imperially, as Europe reached outwards, and we know from the history of Algeria’s role in the European Community and from histories of concepts such as “Euroafrica” that African territories could be integrated into concepts of Europe. However, if the transnational dimensions of Europeanization partly involved Europe reaching outwards, the Moussem demonstrated an inverted version of that story. Migrant communities from the former colonies also appropriated Europe as a diasporic space from which to resist the nascent European migration regime.
The Europe of the Moussems was based on “intercultural dialogue,” allowing the organizers to use Arabic as a transeuropean lingua franca and to include Surinamese flute players. This particular form of Europeanization that included diasporic actors and anti-imperialist traditions is an example of what Isabelle Löhr and Christiane Reinecke (2024, 8) have called “past alternatives”: “those pasts that do not directly lead to the now, but away from it.” Past alternatives show the historicity of terms and open up alternatives to our present. In this sense, the Moussems display a vision of Europe that, unlike the integrated European market, was never realized.
My archival sources only allow me to hypothesize about the slow end of the Moussem festivals. After the attendance numbers of the Fifth Moussem in 1985 exceeded estimations and broke records, the Sixth Moussem was organized in Amsterdam in 1987. Mustapha Merizak (2009) recounts that a seventh Moussem did not take place because the German member organization boycotted the efforts, arguing that it was their turn. Conflicts between the organizing groups apparently played a role in breaking the coordination group apart. At the same time, the demise of the Moussems fits into the broader context described by political histories of the late 1980s. Rita Chin (2017, 6) argues that in these years, “British, French, and German political leaders identified immigrants as bearers of alien cultures that now rendered them ‘inassimilable’ to the nation.” Dominant voices increasingly rejected what the Moussem organizers called “intercultural dialogue” and embraced a migration regime centered on mobility within the continent and protectionist border politics towards the outside world. We still lack historical works about how this protectionist Europeanization impacted other concepts of Europe. Further studies on “past alternatives,” such as the Europe conjured by the Moussems, could fill this void.[ix]
[i] French: “Fraternelle, colorée et décoiffante ! Des kyrielles de couleurs sur la scène centrale, avec les danseurs africains de dimanche soir, aux Quilapayun de samedi, en passant par Anne Vanderlove. Partout, la foule riait, dansait, piétinait avec un seul ordre du jour: la joie. … L’anti-racisme est une fois de plus sorti vainqueur.” La Voix Populaire, 26 June 1985.
[ii] “Marokkanischer Arbeiter-Bund e.V., “Viertes Moussem der Marokkanischen Immigration in Europa” (Düsseldorf, 1983), 116AS/51, Archives Nationales.
[iii] German: “Bei unserem Moussem geht es um die Kultur der marokkanischen Arbeiter im Ausland. Wir bringen unser soziales und politisches Bewußtwerden, unseren Widerstand und unseren Kampf um Befreiung von Ausbeutung und Unterdrückung innerhalb und außerhalb Marokkos zum Ausdruck. Unsere Kultur soll nicht die einer versteinerten Tradition sein, deren Gewicht uns niederdrückt, sondern die einer Tradition, aus der wir die Kraft für unsere Emanzipation schöpfen können. Wenn wir das Moussem in Europa feiern, dann um unsere Kultur auch hier gemeinsam zu erleben, um uns zu begegnen und unsere Erfahrungen auszutauschen. Das ist auch die Gelegenheit, das deutsche Volk mit unserer Kultur bekannt zu machen.” Marokkanischer Arbeiter-Bund e.V., “Viertes Moussem der Marokkanischen Immigration in Europa” (Düsseldorf, 1983), 116AS/51, Archives Nationales.
[iv] ATMF, “5e Moussem 1985.”, 116AS/51.
[v] French: “Notre rêve est de pouvoir permettre un dialogue des jeunes européens avec ceux du Maghreb, d’Afrique et pourquoi pas ailleurs.” ATMF, “5e Moussem 1985.”
[vi] French: “Si le Moussem est un temps fort pour notre expression culturelle spécifique, il s’inscrit nécessairement dans une démarche d’échange inter-culturel entre culture et les cultures populaires européennes et immigrés.” ATMF, “5e Moussem 1985.”
[vii] ATMF, “Brève présentation de la coordination des associations marocaines en Europe et ses activités”, 116AS/51, Archives Nationales.; ATMF, “Chers amis.”, 116AS/51, Archives Nationales.
[viii] ATMF, “5e Moussem 1985.”
[ix] An examination of funding schemes for the Moussems as well as additional movement archives would be useful starting points. The archives of the Durch organization are at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.
Christian Jacobs is an independent historian with research interests in global intellectual history and post-decolonization Europe. He previously worked at the Humboldt-Universität and Freie Universität in Berlin and was a guest scholar at EHESS and Sciences Po in Paris. His most recent publications are the book The Politics of Culture (De Gruyter Brill, 2026), and the introduction of a special issue in Global Intellectual History about the intellectual history of social movements, coauthored with Ben Miller.
Edited by Zac Endter.
Featured image: Detail of event poster for for the “3rd Moussem of Moroccan Immigration in Europe,” May 1982 in Amsterdam. Reproduced with permission of First Waves.