What makes the Maghreb a region

Salt flats, and where the ground drops below the sea

The record puts the lowest point of every country filed here in a salt depression: Chott Melrhir in Algeria, Shatt al Gharsah in Tunisia, Sabkhat Ghuzayyil in Libya, and Sebkha Tah, which serves as the low point of Morocco and of Western Sahara alike. Each of them lies inland and below sea level, in country that drains nowhere. The high ground is as consistent. The Atlas chain runs from the Atlantic shore of Morocco to the Tunisian Dorsale, and behind it the Sahara begins, which is why Algeria's highest recorded point stands well south of the Atlas altogether, in the Ahaggar massif.

The languages, and what the currency records

Arabic is official in every country here. Morocco and Algeria each record a second official language from the Amazigh family, entered in the catalogue as Standard Moroccan Tamazight and Standard Algerian Berber. French is used across the region without official standing anywhere in it, and the membership lists show the unevenness plainly: Morocco and Tunisia belong to the Francophonie, Algeria has never joined.

Three of the sovereign members count their money in dinars. Morocco uses the dirham, and the catalogue records the Moroccan dirham as the currency in circulation in Western Sahara as well, which is a fact about administration and not a statement about title.

Where the edges are argued

The Arab Maghreb Union was signed at Marrakesh on 17 February 1989, and its roster is not this one: it takes in Mauritania, which the catalogue files with West Africa, and it leaves out Western Sahara. Older usage was narrower still, holding to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and reading Libya toward the Arab east. The UN Statistics Division, for its part, publishes no Maghreb at all: its M49 standard files these countries under Northern Africa together with Egypt and Sudan, and states that its groupings are a statistical convenience carrying no political meaning.

This catalogue takes the wider reading, records that the narrower ones exist, and settles neither. A region here is a way of finding a page.

Western Sahara

The territory is recorded as disputed, which is a status and not a verdict. Morocco administers most of it and claims it; the Polisario Front proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in 1976 and claims it as well. The United Nations lists the territory among its Non-Self-Governing Territories and has kept a mission there since 1991 to organise a referendum that has not been held. The record carries no capital, no United Nations seat and no group memberships, and its population figure is dated 2021.