When ‘national growth’ means royal power: court-centred monarchy, national identity, and the politics of development

This article examines how development constructs national identity in a court-centred monarchy by distinguishing growth claims from the criterion by which national advance is defined. It analyses thirty rule-defined Moroccan royal addresses (2011–2025), in Arabic, alongside an institutional counter-corpus; descriptive counts use twenty-seven recoverable coding records without imputation. The evidence supports bounded royalisation without monopoly: governmental and specialised institutions exercise substantive developmental agency, while the hereditary, supra-governmental centre recurrently authorises, recalibrates, and nationally frames overarching direction. The New Development Model provides a strong counter-case, and a bounded comparison with Egypt distinguishes this configuration from leader-centred developmental rhetoric.