SPECIAL REPORT: France and Africa Under Bonaparte Sarkozy

Posted October 21st, 2007 by Guest Blogger

Nicolas Sarkozy’s Africa by Achille Mbembe; Sarkozy and Africa: Misunderstanding or Change? by Roland Marchal; France's new Bonaparte by Hassan Nafaa; Imagining Immigration in France by David Tresilian

Nicolas Sarkozy’s Africa by Achille Mbembe

What credibility can we afford such gloomy words that portray Africans as fundamentally traumatized beings incapable of acting on their own behalf and in their own recognized interests? What is this so-called historicity of the continent which totally silences the long tradition of resistance, including that against French colonialism, along with today’s struggles for democracy, none of which receive the clear support of a country which, for many years, has actively backed the local satrapies? How is it possible to come to promise us a fanciful Eurafrica without even mentioning the internal efforts to build a unitary African economic framework?

If they’d had the chance, the majority of French-speaking Africans would have no doubt voted against Nicolas Sarkozy at the last French presidential elections. It’s not that his rival of the time, and even less the Socialist Party, had anything particularly convincing to say about Africa, or that the Socialists’ past practices demonstrated any desire whatsoever to radically change relations between France and its former colonies. The new French president would have simply paid a high price for his attitude to immigration when he was Jacques Chirac’s Minister of the Interior, his alleged collusion with the racist extreme right-wing and his role in sparking the riots in France’s deprived suburbs in 2005.

How is it possible to come to Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar at the start of the 21st century to address the intellectual elite as if Africa didn’t have its own critical traditions and as if Senghor and Camara Laye, respective champions of black emotion and the kingdom of childhood, hadn’t been the object of vigorous internal refutations?

Violation of Language

On his first tour of sub-Saharan Africa, he thus arrived in Dakar preceded by a terribly negative reputation: that of a hyper-active and dangerous politician, cynical and brutal, power-crazy, who doesn’t listen, speaks his mind and more, doesn’t skimp on the means and who, with regard to Africa and its people, shows nothing but condescension and contempt.

But that wasn’t the whole picture. Many were nonetheless willing to hear him out, intrigued if not by his political intelligence, at least by the formidable efficiency with which he has handled his victory since his election. Surprised by Rachida Dati or Rama Yade’s nominations to the government (even if there were more ministers of African origin in the Republic’s ministries and assemblies in the colonial era than today), they wanted to know if there was some kind of grand design behind the manoeuvre: that is, a true recognition, on France’s part, of the multiracial and cosmopolitan nature of its society.

He was, therefore, keenly awaited. To say he disappointed would be an understatement. Of course, the cartel of satraps (from Omar Bongo, Paul Biya, Sassou Nguesso to Idris Déby, Eyadéma Jr. et al.) were delighted at what clearly transpires as the choice of continuity in the running of “Franceafrique”, as is dubbed the system of reciprocal corruption which, since the end of the era of colonial occupation, has tied France to its African accomplices.

But, if one is to judge by the reactions expressed here and there, the editorials, the letters to the press, the interventions on private radio stations, the debates on the Internet, a very large part of French-speaking Africa - starting with the youth he chose to address - found his words absolutely incredible, if not frankly shocking. And understandably so. In all relations in which one of the parties is not free nor equal enough, the act of violation often begins with language - a language which, on the pretext of simply expressing the speaker’s deepest convictions, excuses all, refuses to expose its reasons and declares itself immune whilst at the same time forcing the weakest to bear the full force of its violence.

Regression

For those who expect nothing from France, the words pronounced at the University of Dakar were nonetheless highly revealing. Indeed, the speech written by Henri Guaino (special advisor) and delivered by Nicolas Sarkozy in the Senegalese capital offer an excellent illumination into the power to harm - conscious or unconscious, passive or active - which, over the next ten years, might well arise from the paternalistic and hackneyed vision that some of the new French ruling elite (on both the left and right) continue to project onto a continent which has nonetheless constantly undergone radical changes, especially during the second half of the 20th century.

In all his “candour” and his “sincerity”, Nicolas Sarkozy openly revealed what, until now, went unspoken: that is that, both in terms of form and content, the intellectual framework underlying France’s policy to Africa literally dates back to the end of the 19th century. It is thus a policy whose coherence depends, despite a few new touches here and there, on an obsolete intellectual heritage that is over a century-old.

The new French president’s speech shows how, trapped in a frivolous and exotic vision of the continent, the new French ruling elites claim to shed light on realities that they consider their worst fears or their fantasies (race) but which, in reality, they know nothing about. To address “the elite of African youth”, then, Henri Guaino contented himself to lifting, almost word for word, passages from the chapter Hegel devotes to Africa in his work Reason in History, which I again, after many others, recently criticized in my book On the Postcolony.

According to Hegel, Africa is a land of unchanging substance and dazzling disorder, the joyful and tragic country in Creation. Black people, as we see them today, are as they have always been. In the immense energy of the natural arbitrariness that dominates them, neither the moral moment, nor ideas of freedom, justice and progress have any place or particular status. Whoever wants to discover the most appalling manifestations of human nature can find them in Africa. Strictly speaking, this part of the world has no history. What we understand, in short, going by the name of Africa, is an ahistoric, undeveloped world, entirely prisoner of its natural spirit and whose place remains on the threshold of universal history.

The new French elites do not believe anything different. They share this Hegelian prejudice. Unlike the generation of the “Papa-Commanders” (de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand, or Chirac), who tacitly espoused the same prejudice whilst avoiding openly offending their interlocutors, France’s “new elites” now consider that one can only address societies so deeply plunged into the night of childhood by speaking unguardedly, with a sort of virgin energy. And that is indeed what they have in mind when they now openly defend the idea of a nation no longer “hung-up” about its colonial past.

In their eyes, it is only possible to speak of Africa and to Africans by following the path of sense and reason in reverse. It doesn’t matter if this is done so in a context in which each word spoken is so in a blanket of ignorance. It suffices to pile on the words, to employ a kind of verbal plethora, to advance in a suffocating wealth of images - all the things that give Nicolas Sarkozy’s Dakar speech its abrupt, faltering, and blunt character.

Try as I might to make allowances, I find in guise of an invitation to exchange and dialogue only rhetoric in the long Dakar monologue. Behind the words above all loom injunctions, orders, calls to silence, to censorship even, gratuitous provocations, and insults hand-in-hand with the empty flattery - an unbearable arrogance which, I imagine, can only be displayed in Dakar, Yaoundé and Libreville and certainly not in Pretoria or Luanda.

The Ethno-Philosopher President

In addition to Hegel, the “new French elites” without the slightest complex recycle a second source: the collection of commonplaces formalized by colonial ethnology at the end of the 19th century. It is through the prism of this ethnology that a considerable part of the discourse on Africa is nourished, not to mention some of the exoticism and frivolity that constitute the prime features of French-style racism.

Lévy Brühl attempted to construct a system out of this accumulation of prejudices in his reflections on “the primitive” or even “pre-logical mentality”. In a collection of essays about “inferior societies” (Mental Functions in Primitive Societies in 1910; then Primitive Mentality in 1921), he strove to give pseudo-scientific backing to the distinction between a “western man” gifted with reason and non-western peoples and races trapped in the cycle of repetition and mythico-cyclical time.

Presenting himself - a customary habit - as “the friend” of Africa, Leo Frobenius (whom the novelist Yambo Ouologuem virulently denounces in Le Devoir de Violence) widely contributed to spreading elements of Lévy Brühl’s ruminations by highlighting the concept of African “vitalism”. Granted, he didn’t consider “African culture” the simple prelude to logic and rationality. In his eyes, nonetheless, the black man was, at the end of the day, a child. Like his contemporary Ludwig Klages (author, amongst other things, of The Cosmogonic Eros, Man and The Land, The Spirit as Enemy of the Soul), he considered that western man’s excessive assertion of will - the formalism to which he owed his power over nature - had engendered a devitalization generating impersonal behaviour.

The Belgian missionary Placide Tempels, for his part, discoursed on “Bantu philosophy”, one of whose principles was, according to him, the symbiosis between “African man” and nature. In the good father’s opinion, “vital force” constituted the Bantu man’s very essence. This was deployed from a degree near to zero (death) to the ultimate level of those who turned out to be “chiefs”.

They, along with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, are indeed the main sources of Senghor’s thought, who Henri Guaino endeavoured to mobilize in the effort to give the presidential discourse indigenous credentials. Is he not aware, then, of the inestimable debt that, in his formulation of the concept of negritude or in the formulation of his notions of culture, civilization and even cultural blending, the Senegalese poet owes the most racist, most essentialist and most biologizing theories of his time?

But there’s not only colonial ethnology, that pseudo-science of conquerors and other inventors of an imaginary Africa, whose difference they, in their splendid isolation, readily invent to reveal the presence of exotic and unchanging forms in others, the evidence of a humanity of another kind. There’s Maurice Delafosse (The Negroes of Africa, 1921), Robert Delavignette (Les paysans noirs, 1931) and other demiurges of the “African soul” - that ridiculous notion of which the French elites are so fond. There is also the legacy of the colonial exhibitions, the tradition of human zoos that Pascal Blanchard and his colleagues have analyzed, and that of travel narratives each more fantastical than the next - from Du Chaillu’s explorations of Gabon’s massifs to Marcel Griaule and Michel Leiris’ Dakar-Djibouti (L’Afrique fantôme), not to mention the “discoverers” of African art, starting with Pablo Picasso.

It is all of this which in turn nourishes an, often unconscious, racist life form, which mass culture then reproduces in films, advertising, comics, painting, photography and, a logical consequence, the “Yes massa”, “Uncle Ben’s” politics. In these mass cultural productions, people strive to create attitudes that, far from encouraging a real process of accepting the Other, instead turn the latter into a substitutive object whose attraction resides precisely in his/her ability to unleash all sorts of fantasies and impulses.

The French head of state’s special advisor thus reiterates this logorrhoea, along with the main points of the pontiffs of African ontology’s theses (that he elsewhere claims to refute). To make Nicholas Sarkozy the ethno-philosopher he perhaps aspires to be, it is from this colonial and racist library that he picks his key motifs. He then proceeds as if the notion of a “black essence”, of an “African soul” of which the “African man” is the living manifestation, as if that murky and ultimately ridiculous notion hadn’t been radically challenged by the best African philosophers, starting with Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, whose work, La Crise du muntu, is a classic in its kind.

How then, can one be surprised that his definition of the continent and its people is ultimately purely negative? Indeed, our ethno-philosopher president’s “African man” is above all characterized either by what he hasn’t got, what he isn’t or by what he has never managed to achieve (the dialectic of lack and incompletion), or by his opposition to “modern man” (read “white man”), an opposition which apparently results from his irrational attachment to the kingdom of childhood, the world of night, to simple pleasures and a golden age that never existed.

For the rest, the new French ruling elite’s Africa is essentially a rural, magical, phantom Africa, partly bucolic, partly nightmarish, inhabited by peasant folk, composed of a community of sufferers who have nothing in common other than their common position on the margins of history, prostrate as they are in a outer-world - that of sorcerers and griots, of magical beings who keep fountains, sing in rivers and hide in the trees, of the village dead and ancestors whose voices can be heard, of masks and forests full of symbols, of the clichés that are so-called “African solidarity”, “community spirit”, “warmth” and respect for elders and chiefs.

The Policy of Ignorance

The speech thus continues in a beatific will for ignorance of its object, as if, during the second half of the 20th century, we hadn’t witnessed a spectacular development in the knowledge of the long-term changes in the African world.

I’m not referring just to the African researchers’ own inestimable contribution to the understanding of their societies and to the internal critical analysis of their cultures - criticism to which some of us have widely contributed, sometimes with severity, but always with humanity. I’m talking about the billions of its public funds that the French government has devoted to this grand oeuvre and which hardly explain to me how, after such an investment, people can still, today, articulate such unintelligible arguments about the continent.

What is behind this policy of voluntary and assumed ignorance?

Furthermore, what has happened to the knowledge built up over the last fifty years by the Institut de Recherche sur le Développement, by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique’s research laboratories, by the many thematic calls for proposals that have brought together African and French researchers and which have so greatly contributed to renewing our knowledge of the continent - often generous initiatives with which I, for that matter, have more than once, been associated?

How is it possible simply to act as if, in France even, Georges Balandier hadn’t, already back in the Fifties, revealed the profound modernity of African societies; as if Claude Meillassoux, Jean Copans, Emmanuel Terray, Pierre Bonafé and many others hadn’t demonstrated the internal dynamics of the production of inequalities; as if Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Jean-Suret Canale, Almeida Topor and others still hadn’t highlighted the cruelty of the concessionary companies and the ambiguities of colonial economic policies; as if Jean-François Bayart and the Revue Politique Africaine hadn’t debunked the illusion according to which Africa’s underdevelopment can be explained by its “disengagement from the world”; as if Jean-Pierre Chrétien and other geographers hadn’t proved the inventiveness of agrarian techniques in the long term; as if Alain Dubresson, Annick Osmont and others hadn’t patiently described the incredible hybridity and blending of Africa’s towns; as if Alain Marie and others hadn’t shown the resilience of individualism; as if Jean-Pierre Warnier hadn’t described the vitality of the mechanisms of accumulation in West Cameroon, and so on and so forth?

Denial of Responsibility

As for the same old tune about colonisation and the refusal to “repent”, this is directly inspired by the speculations of the likes of Pascal Bruckner, Alain Finkielkraut and Daniel Lefeuvre. But who’s going to believe that there’s no moral responsibility for acts perpetrated by a State in the course of its history? Who’s going to swallow that to create a humane world, you must throw morals and ethic to the wind because in this world, there’s no justice for complaints or justice for causes?

In order to exonerate an iniquitous system, there is a temptation today to rewrite the history of France and its empire, portraying it as a history of “pacification”, of “the valorization of empty, leaderless territories”, of “the spreading of education”, of “the founding of modern medicine” and of the creation of road and rail infrastructures. This argument is based on the old lie that portrays colonisation as a humanitarian enterprise that contributed to the modernization of old primitive, dying societies which, left to their own devices, would have probably ended up committing suicide.

In portraying colonization this way, such people authorize themselves, as in the Dakar speech, an intimate sincerity, an underlying authenticity so as better to find excuses - in which they alone believe - for a particularly cruel, abject and vile enterprise. They claim that the wars of conquest, the massacres, the deportations, the bloody incursions, the forced labour, the institutionalized racial discrimination, all that was simply “the corruption of a grand ideal” or, as Alexis de Tocqueville explained it, “an unfortunate necessity”.

Asking France to recognize, as the very same de Tocqueville put it, that the colonial government was a “harsh, violent, arbitrary, crude government”, or to ask it to stop supporting Africa’s corrupt dictators amounts neither to denigrating nor hating it. It’s simply asking it to assume its responsibilities and to practice what it claims to be its universal vocation. This request is absolutely necessary in today’s context. And with regard to France’s colonial past in particular, the policy of unlimited irresponsibility must be the object of firm, intelligent and unrelenting criticism.

Furthermore, there is a need for coherence and to stop articulating discourses on colonization that change according to circumstances: some for domestic consumption and others for export. Who, indeed, will believe in France’s good faith if, behind the proclamations of sincerity such as those proffered in Dakar, one seeks to exonerate the colonial system by trying to posthumously nominate figures as sinister as Raoul Salan field marshal, or in seeking to build a memorial to killers of the likes of Bastien Thiry, Roger Degueldre, Albert Dovecar and Claude Piegts?

Conclusion

The majority of Africans don’t live in France, or in the former French colonies. They are not seeking to emigrate to France. In the daily exercise of their trade, millions of Africans depend in no way whatsoever on any kind of French aid network. They owe strictly nothing to France for their survival and France owes them strictly nothing. And that’s as it should be.

Having said that, deep intellectual and cultural ties link some of us to this old nation where, what is more, we were in part trained. A large minority of French citizens of African origin, the descendants of slaves and former colonial subjects, live there, and we are far from indifferent to their lot, or to that of the illegal immigrants who, even if they have broken the law, nonetheless have the right to a humane treatment.

Since Fanon, we know that it is the world’s entire past we must analyze; that we cannot laud the past at the expense of our present and future; that “the black soul” is a white invention; that the black man doesn’t exist anymore than the white man; and that we are our own foundation.

Today, even amongst French-speaking Africans whose servility to France is particularly flagrant and who are seduced by the sirens of nativism and the posture of victim, many are pertinently aware that the continent’s lot, and its future, do not depend on France. After half a century of formal decolonization, the younger generations have learnt that there is little to expect from France, or from the other world powers. Africans will save themselves or sink on their own.

They know too that, judged in the light of African emancipation, some of these powers are more harmful than others. And given our past and present vulnerability, the least we can do is to limit this power to harm. This attitude has nothing to do with hating anything. On the contrary, it is the prerequisite for a policy of equality without which there will be no common world.

If, then, France wants to play a positive role in the advent of this common world, it needs to abandon its prejudices. Its new elites need to undertake the difficult intellectual reflection without which the politically-motivated proclamations of friendship will remain vain. It isn’t possible, as in Dakar, to speak to one’s friend without actually addressing him/her. Being capable of friendship is, as Jacques Derrida pointed out, to know how to honour in one’s friend the enemy he/she can be.

Today, the cultural and intellectual prism through which the new French ruling elites consider Africa, judge it, or doll it out lessons isn’t just obsolete. It leaves no place for the amicable relationships that would be a sign of freedom because coextensive with relationships of justice and respect. For the time being, when it comes to Africa, France simply lacks the moral credit that would allow it to speak with certitude and authority.

That is why Nicolas Sarkozy’s Dakar speech will not be heard, and even less taken seriously by those he was supposed to be addressing.

From Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres

Sarkozy and Africa: Misunderstanding or Change? By Roland Marchal

Is France changing? Over the last few months, the new French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his flamboyant Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bernard Kouchner, have clearly stated that the traditional Gaullist bashing of the United States is over. On Iran or Sudan, the new French policy looks much closer to Washington’s. To what extent do these shifts represent a genuine change? And most important for those who follow African affairs, how will French policy on Africa be reframed by the new team?

To answer these questions, this essay explores the backgrounds of the individuals involved in the French policy making process on Africa, the actual policy priorities of the new French administration, and the main challenges it is going to face in its Africa policy.

We can draw three major conclusions. First, Nicolas Sarkozy is still behaving like a presidential candidate rather than a President. On Africa, it is his closest political friends rather than expert advisers who are influencing his thinking regarding the continent. As a consequence, Bernard Kouchner is unable to influence effectively France’s strategic policy on Africa or the world, beyond his specific humanitarian touch.

Second, two main priorities seem to frame French Africa policy: the control of immigrants and the management of African crises. The first, though affecting only a few African countries, allows President Sarkozy to keep a strong constituency on the French right. The second priority is a way both to demonstrate ”breakthrough” by endorsing stances closer to Washington (as on Darfur), and to cast himself as a major actor on the international stage, comfortable in the glare of TV cameras.

Third, there won’t be a structural redefinition of policy toward the African continent at this early stage of the French presidency. For the time being, changes will be decided on a case-by-case basis, but the discrepancy between the real French economic interests in Africa and the countries where French policy focuses will eventually decrease.

Nicolas Sarkozy and his “dream team”

Although Nicolas Sarkozy could be considered the heir to former interior minister, Charles Pasqua, a character in the Françafrique drama of the past three decades, he has not shown any genuine interest in Africa or African leaders. During the presidential campaign, although he gave his views on the colonial debate (“Is France “guilty” because it colonized Africa?”), Africa was mentioned only because of its humanitarian crises, notably eastern Chad and Darfur, and the immigration issue. (African migrants are the perfect scapegoats for the rifts in the social fabric illustrated by the riots of November 2005).

The team handling the Africa file at the presidential palace, in a sense, reflects this weak interest. While all the team members are respected within diplomatic and expert circles, their connection to Nicolas Sarkozy is circumstantial rather than visceral; fate conspired to bring them into Sarkozy’s orbit. It is notable that the team leader, Bruno Joubert, was previously working hand in hand with the Africa cell of Jacques Chirac. The only characteristic that makes him closer to the current president is his alleged dislike of Dominique de Villepin, the former Prime Minister and Sarkozy’s arch enemy among the Gaullists.

After his election, Sarkozy appointed Bernard Kouchner Minister of Foreign Affairs; Jean-Marie Bockel Minister of State for Cooperation and Francophonie; and Rama Yade Minister of State for Human Rights and Foreign affairs and Human Rights. Although Rama Yade’s appointment has some symbolic significance (she was born in Senegal in 1976), and although she is reputedly close to Sarkozy, her portfolio is vague. It is more than likely that Kouchner and Bockel will be the ones designing Sarkozy’s Africa policy. And yet, even for them there are potential pitfalls ahead. Because they are former opponents rallied to Sarkozy after his election, their individual portfolios have been carefully shorn of influence. The Elysée has centralized most of the decisions; they do not carry the same weight as they would have had they been real allies. And they may not be long in going. Bernard Kouchner has already embarrassed the President, making a number of diplomatic blunders related to Iraq, Iran, Libya and the African Union. But he is popular in France and willing to keep his position as long as possible.

Sarkozy’s first trip to Africa took place in July and illustrated the problems inherent in his approach to the continent. The choice of Senegal and Gabon as the countries to be visited hardly suggested an aggiornamento or spirit of change in Africa policy. Sarkozy’s speech at the University of Dakar was a political error, widely seen as racist and patronizing – and justifiably so, with its evocations of “the African peasant…who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons” and its assurance that Africans need not “be ashamed of the values of African civilization.” These remarks were a reflection of who really is in charge of Sarkozy’s Africa policy for the time being: his inner circle, whose knowledge of Africa is debatable at best. The did not take into account advice on the speech offered by the Africa team.

What priorities?

Sarkozy’s obsession with immigration is well known. Over the past few years, he has been a vibrant advocate of controlling the flow of migrants into France. It was a policy he tested – to debatable effect – when he was Minister of the Interior, and it has now become a key component of his Africa policy.

There are different ways of reading Sarkozy’s preoccupation with African immigrants. One is that because they are readily identifiable as “foreigners” by most of the French white population, they provide him with capital to maintain his support on the French right. Sarkozy’s stance brings him the support of many who consider immigrants “The Problem” (“they take jobs, do not integrate, might even be Muslims…”). This authoritarian discourse is a comfort to many, reinforcing as it does the idea of “true” France. It is also easier to antagonise Mali than China – African governments have little leverage in France. They may protest publicly but then have to endorse whatever Paris is deciding.

This policy means that forced expulsions from France are becoming a normal feature of French Africa policy. In order to cool down concerns raised in many quarters, including from within the Gaullist party, a new rhetoric has emerged. Its effect has been to color the coercive dimension of the immigration policy with an old idea: “co-development”. It is as if promoting development projects in migrants’ countries would make a drastic difference and keep people home. Migrations, however – and African migrations in particular – are complex phenomena. They cannot be reduced to a simple construct of poverty. And African migrants cannot be made responsible for the failure of French society to adapt itself to globalisation. Neither the crisis of French youth nor the decay of the French industrial sector has anything to do with African migration.

Africa is the site of crises, particularly in Chad and Darfur, that have profoundly moved the French public. Consequently, due to Kouchner’s personal history in humanitarian causes and President Sarkozy’s desire to make political capital out of humanitarian crises, one may expect France to be more vocal than ever.

Yet, the constraints are numerous. In eastern Chad, where at French instigation a force of up to 3,000 European troops (along with 300 UN police) is being dispatched to protect refugee camps, France’s neutrality is being questioned by rebel groups because of its past armed backing for the regime. Elsewhere, crises like the ones unfolding in Ethiopia’s Ogaden and Somalia are just ignored by France. It is difficult to know whether this silence is a matter of ignorance or a political choice, and whether or not it is strategic – a conscious decision taken so as not to annoy Washington or Addis Ababa.

Around the rest of the continent, the prospects, for French policy, at least in the short term, are not very exciting. Without a clear overall strategy, it seems likely that policies will be adopted on a case-by-case basis

The ground for change

The current, slightly chaotic, management of France’s Africa policy cannot last long. As his honeymoon comes to an end, Sarkozy will likely turn his attention to problems in France and Europe. In that case, the Africa file will turn increasingly to career diplomats and the military. Bernard Kouchner seems to have little taste for managing day-to-day Africa policy and his deputy, Jean-Marie Bockel, has no record on the subject. A likely scenario, that is if they stay in charge beyond municipal elections next year, will be that their bureaucracies do the most substantial part of the work.

There should be little expectation of a new or substantive policy on how to deal with China in Africa, how to redefine the France-Africa cooperation apparatus, how to convince Europe to continue to play a role in Africa, or how to improve France’s image in the eyes of Africa’s elites. In keeping with tradition, France is focusing on its old colonies, while its economic and strategic interests are elsewhere on the continent. Nigeria, South Africa, Angola and Kenya are far more important to France than the former colonies. Adaptation, more than reform, seems likely; genuine changes would challenge bureaucratic habits and require the lasting involvement of the key policy makers.

The only real question marks concern the possible reconfiguration of the French military presence in Africa and its attitude in the face of the new U.S. policy driven by the war on terror and the establishment of the Africa Command. In terms of political philosophy, France (with Europe more generally) still has many problems with the current U.S. understanding of the war on terror and U.S. policies regarding this subject on the African continent. The French military, for good and bad reasons, will try to stress these differences and maintain a critical stance toward current U.S. policy and the Africa Command. Significant French–U.S. military cooperation on the African continent looks unlikely in the near future.

A White Paper on Defence is on the French agenda. Off the record, officials suggest that drastic changes will be made, including closing French bases in Africa. However, experience shows that while French politicians like to talk about reforms, they are not, as Jacques Chirac proved, enthusiastic about undertaking them. Having said that, there is the distinct possibility that some cutbacks will be undertaken this time around in view of the French government’s budget deficit.

The newly elected President of France likes the media, plays to public opinion, and wants to show how different he is from the old-fashioned Jacques Chirac. He conveys a sense of drastic reforms to come. The reality, however, is more prosaic. Nicolas Sarkozy had little exposure to international affairs before taking office, and his populist and hot-tempered behavior has already alienated many European leaders. He has not fared much better with African elites. Beyond an immigration policy aimed at cultivating domestic support, and his involvement in some African crises in order to raise his European and international profile, he will very likely pass on the less flashy but vitally important work on the continent to expert advisers. The breakthrough or rupture he is claiming will likely be nothing more than an adaptation to dynamics and trends that are beyond his reach, at least when it comes to Africa. In this case, in the words of an Italian newspaper, “la rupture sera faire du vieux avec du vieux,” perhaps best translated as “no more than old wine in new bottles.”

Roland Marchal is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Studies and Research (CERI) of the National Center for Scientific Research and Sciences-Po Paris.

From CSIS Africa Policy Forum

France's new Bonaparte by Hassan Nafaa

Nicolas Sarkozy is seeking the most radical shift in French foreign policy since the founding of the Fifth Republic.

French foreign policy has been relatively stable since de Gaulle laid down its general precepts at the beginning of the Fifth Republic. Continuity has prevailed over change even when non-Gaullists were in power, regardless of whether they were from the right (Giscard d'Estaing) or from the socialist left (François Mitterrand). But today, just over 100 days into the term of Nicolas Sarkozy, French foreign policy has struck out on an entirely new and unfamiliar course. The irony is that this president, who was elected on 15 May, was born and bred in Gaullist ranks. The foreign policy departure suggests that France is undergoing an anti-Gaullist coup spearheaded from within the Gaullist camp. As for the causes, they are many. Some are connected with Sarkozy's personality and beliefs, others with more concrete factors related to developments in France, Europe and the world.

Sarkozy appears to be a man whose ambitions know no bounds. Since coming to power, the short, thin, haughtily confident president who talks endlessly of the need for change has behaved as though he were a latter day Bonaparte, divinely ordained to restore France to a former glory. He has emerged as France is facing a range of new and disturbing challenges. Within the last two years political and social unrest has reached such tumultuous levels that the army has had to be called out and a state of emergency imposed. Regionally, the project for a united Europe has floundered on the failed ratification of a single European constitution, at the same time as the French, like others around the world, have been infected by mounting fears of the fallout from the so-called war on terrorism which threatens to erupt into a fully-fledged clash of civilisations.

Sarkozy took stock of two important considerations: the French people's need for change and the readiness of others to accept this change if there was someone dynamic enough to lead it. Seeing himself as just the man for the job, he pounded at the door of the Élysée, intoning the magic word "change" until it opened before him. Then he took his comfortable majority of 53 per cent of the vote as a mandate to forge ahead with the transformation with himself at the command. From his electoral platform, his statements during and after the campaign, and his actions since becoming president, Sarkozy is set on implementing an ambitious vision.

He wants to thoroughly overhaul economic policies and structures to make them more efficient and effective. His vision in this regard is inspired by the model of Anglo Saxon economic liberalism. He is also determined to bolt the doors to illegal migrants, allowing only those who meet France's economic and technological needs into the country. Immigrant communities in France are to be rehabilitated and indoctrinated so as to conform with the prevailing value systems in French society, the general motto being love it or leave it.

At a regional level, Sarkozy is bent on introducing sweeping structural and policy changes into the EU. He believes that the EU must halt its expansion in order to preserve its character and identity as a Christian club. He has called for a restructured Euro-Med partnership, primarily in order to absorb and contain Turkish ambitions for EU membership. He also plans to push for an overhaul of the sluggish EU bureaucracy so as to erect a strong and powerful Europe, led by a single president and prime minister. Towards this end he envisions a simplified treaty requiring the ratification of the EU parliament without having to pass through a referendum. Predictably, he sees France as best qualified to lead a refurbished Europe politically and militarily, and intends to equip his country for this role, by seeking to breathe new life in the long moribund Franco-German engine.

Internationally, Sarkozy aspires to a world order in which France occupies a unique position. Towards this end he is working to eliminate the accumulated residue of ill-feeling between France and the US with an eye towards building a permanent strategic alliance between the two countries. He plans to rehabilitate France's place and stature in NATO's military structures and, simultaneously, to promote Europe's autonomous defence capability. He hopes to promote dynamic and effective inter-European and European-American coordination in combating terrorism, illegal immigration, environmental pollution and transcontinental epidemics.

Sarkozy wants to build a strong France, a strong Europe and a strong global order. He believes France can't be strong until it dispatches with the ills of illegal immigration and socialist thought; Europe can't be strong until it sheds its cumbersome red tape, shakes off Turkey and is led by France in coordination with Germany; and the world order can't be strong without Franco-American harmony and a powerful NATO.

It is difficult to fully comprehend the significance of this vision without taking a look at Sarkozy's personal background. He is the scion of a family that hailed from Hungary, where it ranked among the nobility. In the 17th century Emperor Ferdinand II knighted one of his forefathers in reward for his services in the war against Ottoman Turkey. After the Red Army liberated Hungary from the Nazis in 1944, established a communist government and confiscated his property, Sarkozy père fled and finally settled in France where he married the daughter of a Jewish surgeon who had converted to Catholicism. Sarkozy junior, baptised as a Catholic, was raised and educated in Paris, obtaining his licentiate in business law from Nanterre University. After a period of practicing law he was drawn into politics where his star quickly soared.

Sarkozy kept his eye on the presidency despite President Chirac's lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy. With the former French president favouring de Villepin, Sarkozy realised that his only chance for winning would be to rally behind him the segment of the French right that has long backed the ultraconservative and ultra-xenophobic le Pen, and to secure the support of French Jews and Jewish opinion abroad. He believed the fastest route towards these ends would be to display an open contempt for Arabs and Muslims and to flatter the US and Israel. He certainly went about this with unrestrained zeal. He lashed out at the leaders of the uprisings in the poorer urban areas as "racaille", fully aware that the majority of the population of these quarters comprised Arab and African Muslims. As interior minister he approved measures that gravely offended against Arab and Muslim employees at Charles de Gaulle airport on the entirely fictitious grounds that they were members of Al-Qaeda. During a visit to the US less than a year after Washington launched its attack against Iraq he voiced his admiration for the American way of getting business done. He also met Bush, who was the first to congratulate him following his election as president. He campaigned ardently for harsh penalties against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and branded Hizbullah and Hamas as terrorist organisations. For these and other stances he was lauded by Zionist organisations in France and abroad. Netanyahu hailed his election victory as a "gift from God to the Jewish people". But Sarkozy's stances are not merely campaign postures; they are fully consistent with his family and class background. They reflect his beliefs and designs.

In view of the foregoing, and in light of the French foreign minister's recent statements on Iran's nuclear programme which express a position more extreme than even that of the US and Israel, the Arab and Islamic worlds can only prepare for the worst. And they must now come to terms with the fact that the gap that had always separated US and French foreign policy towards the region and that had given them a margin of manoeuvrability has dwindled to the point of invisibility.

To be fair, the change taking place in French policy towards the Middle East did not arise overnight. It had its origins in the Chirac era: since the American occupation of Iraq France has bent over backwards to appease Washington and make up for wielding its veto in the Security Council in order to block a resolution that would have legitimised America's unprovoked aggression. Washington, for its part, was determined to exact the most it could. The French-American courtship played itself out in Lebanon and led to Security Council Resolution 1559, which was used as an instrument to force Syria to withdraw from Lebanon preparatory to a campaign to disarm Hizbullah and the Palestinian factions. This Franco-American engineering paved the way to the assassination of Rafik Al-Hariri and the whole chain of assassinations and other crimes that propelled Lebanon to the brink of another civil war. One could not help but be struck by the curious fact that Chirac had to meet with his good friend Saad Al-Hariri before leaving office when Sarkozy, the new master of Élysée, was on hand.

Yet it is difficult to perceive Sarkozy's foreign policy as an extension of Chirac's. Indeed, Lebanon is likely to prove the exception, perhaps because of Chirac's adamant opposition to President Bashar Al-Assad's stance over the renewal of the term of current Lebanese President Emile Lahoud and/or because of the personal friendship between Chirac and the late Al-Hariri. Apart from the question of Lebanon, France and the US stood apart on most other Middle East issues, notably the Palestinian cause and the Iranian nuclear programme. The Sarkozy government's stances on Iran not only indicate that this is no longer the case but that France is readying itself for a more active and tougher role, perhaps one reminiscent of the part it played in the 1956 Suez crisis.

There remain two important points. The first is that the Franco-American alliance, at this particular phase in the development of the global order, is unlikely to work for international peace and stability and very likely to hasten the clash of civilizations. The second is that France had, and continued, to benefit from the Middle East policy set in motion by de Gaulle. But the Arabs' current weakness has lured everyone with the inclination to offend and abuse them to do so, confident that the Arabs will not dare to respond. This is the real tragedy.

From Al-Ahram Weekly

Imagining Immigration by David Tresilian

France's new National Museum of Immigration opened last week amid what looked like official indifference. But it may have a real role to play if it can assert its independence.

Immigration, both legal and illegal, has been near the top of the political agenda in France at least since the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as French president earlier this year. And while the government has expressed its desire to bring more qualified immigrants to France in the manner already being carried out by other western countries, it has also taken measures to crack down on illegal immigration and announced that there are more such measures to come.

Quotas have been issued for the expulsion of illegal immigrants, the so-called sans papiers, back to their countries of origin in mostly North or sub- Saharan Africa, and DNA testing is planned for people wishing to join their families legally in France. According to the French minister of immigration, integration and national identity, between 30 and 80 per cent of identity documents issued in some sub- Saharan African countries are false. DNA testing is a way of finding out whether an individual is who he says he is and whether he is in fact related to others already in France.

These measures and others like them have led to much ill-feeling, and there have been a number of tragic stories: one woman, in France illegally, recently jumped to her death from the window of a Paris apartment building to escape police she thought had come to deport her. There have been rumours of "round-ups" of illegal immigrants by police patrols checking identity papers, and in some Paris districts schools have been carrying banners protesting against the expulsion of non-French pupils.

The inauguration of the new Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration on 10 October could therefore hardly have come at a more sensitive time. And, as if in recognition of this fact, the new museum, planned from 1989 but only opened this year after a series of delays, was ignored by senior members of the French government, with neither the president nor the prime minister making it to the opening. The hapless minister of culture was sent along to do the honours instead, a sign, if one were needed, that the new institution would be seen as playing a strictly second-order role, at least in official circles, and that it would likely be neither invited to get involved in present controversies nor noticed by politicians.

However, if the new institution is to have a role to play in national life then it will have to be prepared to enter the conversation on matters of public policy. Indeed, Jacques Toubon, a former minister and now president of the museum, has said as much, commenting in a piece that appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde that the museum aims to "change the way people think about immigration and make it into a question that can be looked at rationally and not in terms of fantasy."

France is a country of immigrants to a degree unusual in Europe, Toubon wrote in material circulated at the museum's opening. While the present political discourse has tended to obscure the fact, "the history of France and the construction of its identity and civilisation is largely that of the millions of men and women who left their countries of origin in order to settle in France and become French," from the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish immigrants that came to France in the first half of the last century to the Arab, Vietnamese and African immigrants that arrived in the second.

It would be a pity if this new museum for the history of immigration, promisingly situated opposite the Parc de Vincennes at Porte Dorée in south-east Paris and apparently enjoying a substantial public budget, were to be marginalised from public debate and turned into yet another "place of memory" -- with which the French capital is already littered -- without any real relation to present political choices and controversies.

The building housing the museum was built for the 1931 colonial exhibition, one of the last in a series of pre-war exhibitions designed to show off the benefits that Europe's colonies in Africa, Asia and Oceania were bringing to metropolitan societies, among them France.

While the discourse of the time chose to stress the allegedly mutual benefits of this relationship, Europe exporting "civilisation" and "development" to its colonies in exchange for their raw materials and manpower, all such notions received a body blow after the Second World War, when France's colonies first in South-East Asia and then in North and sub-Saharan Africa demanded and eventually received their independence. The French "mandate" territories of Syria and Lebanon had already broken free of French rule at the end of the Second World War.

The magnificent reliefs showing the benefits of the relationship with Europe that still adorn the building seem rather quaint as a result, and visitors to the new museum are unlikely to dwell on French sculptor Alfred Janniot's elaborate visions emblazoned across the building's main façade. Advancing along the building in massive progression, these show French colonies laying their produce in front of an allegorical figure of France perched above the building's main entrance.

For the architects charged with converting this listed colonial-era building to its new function as a museum of immigration, the task has involved allowing the building "to speak for itself" while at the same time breaking up its original meaning. The building's monumental entrance hall has been domesticated by the construction of a bookstore and a café, for example, while the central salle des fêtes, a vast space decorated with colonial-period frescos and surrounded by galleries, has been converted into a public forum. This was being used for radio broadcasts during the museum's opening week. While access to the permanent exhibition is still by way of the original stairs, an external access way is planned. Designed by Japanese installation artist Tadashi Kawamata, this can only help to refashion the building further.

On reaching the exhibition spaces at the top of the building visitors are greeted by charts showing patterns of human migration over the past century or so, including into and out of Europe. In the exhibition itself emphasis is placed on the human aspects of immigration, video projections, biographical texts, photographs and objects from the everyday lives of successive waves of immigrants being used to drive home the idea that immigration into France has meant a kind of double challenge for those involved: first, an uprooting from their societies of origin, and second, the challenge of integration into France.

Immigrants typically bring their cultures, languages and other items of mental and physical baggage with them, and the exhibition makes great play with the physical aspects of relocation. Immigrants have come to France in boats, cars, planes, rafts and on foot, bringing all manner of bags and cases with them, as well as various souvenirs of home. Films and photographs are used to visualise these successive arrivals, while display cases contain some of the different objects, many of the meanest kind, that immigrants have brought with them to begin new lives in France.

This material, evidence of the trauma of migration, is complemented by material bearing witness to a second trauma upon arrival in France. Even during the glory years of post-war immigration, roughly from the mid 1950s to mid 1970s, life could be difficult for immigrants coming to work in France's expanding industry, with long hours in physically tiring jobs and solitary rooms in workers' hostels or welfare hotels being the lot of many. However, when the post-war boom ended the lives of these new immigrants became even harder: growth slowed, unemployment began its inexorable rise, and immigrants were blamed for the economic crisis, being seen either as taking "French jobs" or as being a "burden" on a state that was falling ever more deeply into debt.

This situation has not substantially changed since the 1980s, and politicians on the right have not hesitated to blame immigration for the country's economic and social woes. The struggle of France's immigrant communities for rights and recognition is highlighted in the exhibition, as is their contribution to wider French society and culture.

The exhibition repeats some rather tired clichés here, for example regarding the contributions of men of immigrant origin to France's 1998 World Cup football team, including that of the captain, Zinedine Zidane, as well as the contributions of second and third-generation immigrants to French cultural life and particularly to the country's youth culture. However, on the whole the exhibition resists the temptation to talk up the achievements of a handful of celebrities, instead focusing on ordinary lives and the experience of more representative individuals.

According to the museum's director, the collection aims to "blend different ways of looking" at the experience of immigration, mixing historical, ethnographic, anthropological and art historical approaches. Thus, she says, the displays mix materials of very different kinds, with historical and educational material being placed cheek-by-jowl with personal reminiscences and works by artists concerned with migration or immigration. Among these are Hamid Debarrah's Chronique du foyer de la rue Très Clo"tre, which records the lives of men living in one of the French capital's workers' hostels, and an installation by artist Barthélémy Toguo entitled Climbing Down.

Judging from the crowds at last week's opening, the new museum has been enthusiastically welcomed by the French public, if apparently not by the country's officialdom. The building itself is not finished, and an auditorium is planned for 2008 and a research centre for 2009, as well as further changes to the physical fabric. While the permanent collection anchors the institution and provides a summary of its concerns, it seems that the main function of the new Cité will be to serve as a venue for talks, meetings and debate.

An ambitious programme of temporary exhibitions is planned, beginning with a season on Armenian immigration to France, together with a series of colloquiums and art installations. Anyone not speaking French is likely to be at a disadvantage at these events, with all the material available during opening week being in French including the essential audioguide to the permanent collection.

Last week's opening augers well for the future of this intriguing institution. But whether it will really play the role assigned to it depends upon how far it is able to assert its independence from France's all- enveloping cultural bureaucracy. If it can do this, then it has a chance of attracting new audiences to learn about issues of great contemporary interest. If it cannot, then it runs the risk of becoming another promising initiative lost to the forces of creeping bureaucratisation.

From Al-Ahram Weekly