I can only speak to the case of North African (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) national liberation movements so it is highly unlikely that I will be able to comprehensively answer your question, but hopefully it will shed some light on the issue. The three countries of North Africa have a degree of shared history while also having very significant particularities that separate them from each other. These particular differences are what kept the respective national liberation movements from taking shape in the same way for each country.

I will begin with the different conditions of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco during the Ottoman period of influence in North Africa. On the eve of 1830 (when France invaded Algeria and began its involvement in North Africa) Morocco was an independent Sultanate that had resisted Ottoman influence and in which the Sultan exercised both religious and political authority as the inheritor (sharif) of the legacy of The Prophet through a divine authority known as baraka. Algeria was nominally independent and generally weakly constructed state that was governed by a Turkish military elite which drew its legitimacy from that fact that it generally imposed few to no taxes on the population. Tunisia was a peripheral province of the Ottoman Empire that was governed by a native Turko-Tunisian elite which had developed a robust administrative apparatus as a result of a fruitful agriculture surplus. These different conditions will shape how France conquered and in turn administered each of these countries differently which will then shape the specific ways in which each country ultimately won its independence from France.

France conquered Algeria militarily in a series of stages through which it defeated first the central Turkish elites, then the semi-autonomous regional governors, after that the nearly autonomous trans-Saharan semi-nomadic tribes, and finally the Madhist revolts in the oases of the Sahara itself. Over time, through land appropriations and government policies to promote the settlement of French citizens turned it into a settler colony. This resulted in a French Algeria that was fully incorporated as three provinces into the French Republic and was characterized by a dominant white, mostly French, upper and middle class that held the lion's share of arable land, wealth, and political power. While there was a small Muslim Algerian upper/middle class, the vast majority of them worked as laborers either in the cities or on the estates of French landowners. France directly administered Algeria as it did in the metropole, with the exception of citizenship rights for most Muslim Algerians. This method of administration would shape the resistance to French rule

Tunisia was was brought into the French sphere of influence through economic means after which it was driven into debt by attempts by its Bey at modernizing reforms and forced into subservience by the debt holders, the International Financial Commission (IFC) headed by France and Italy. Tunisia was then was the subject of negotiation between the two European countries during the Berlin Conference of 1871 in which France was granted Tunisia by the other European powers. Then France exercised its authority in Tunisia through the person of the Bey and while it attempted to turn the country into a settler colony along the lines of Algeria, French attempts at industrialization did not entice enough French settlers to even outnumber the Italians living in Tunisia. As a result, the French had to continue governing through the Bey although he was almost completely controlled by the French which is in contrast to the case of Morocco, which is why the respective national liberation movements of each country took on very different forms.

Morocco was the last of the North African countries to be brought under French control, yet that control was always tenuous. Although the Sultan ruled as the ultimate religious and political authority in Morocco, his control of local military leaders (Qaids) was never supreme and they often acted as local warlords who, while acknowledging the Sultan's baraka and religious authority nevertheless conducted their own affairs, such as kidnapping prominent Europeans for ransom. One of best known qaids was Moulay Ahmad Al-Raisuni whose ransom rackets drew the ire of even Theodore Roosevelt. The actions of these qaids and the inability of the Moroccan Sultan to bring them to heel gave the imperial European powers a justification for their desire to conquer Morocco. After tensions between France and Germany, France and Spain were granted permission from the international community to conquer Morocco. Spain never entirely subjugated its portion of Morocco, so France came to govern nearly all of Morocco. This governing took the form of a protectorate in which the Sultan was kept in power and had authority over certain aspects of Moroccan while the French Governor-General held power over other aspects. This system of indirect rule will have direct consequences on the formation of a Moroccan national liberation movement.

Part 1