Artículo World Politics Review, 05.01.2022 Howard W. French, corresponsal extranjero y analista de asuntos globales
In mid-December, with little forewarning, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he would soon be visiting Mali, a country in West Africa’s Sahel region that, along with several others there, has been afflicted with rising communal violence in recent years.
It seems that the surprise Macron trip was conceived in order to serve multiple goals. Foremost was the desire to call Mali’s interim leader, who took power in a military coup last May, to heel, and get him to commit to a calendar for democratic elections early in 2022. By the same token, Macron surely also wanted to personally warn the coup leader, Assimi Goita, that France would not abide the involvement of a Russian security company called Wagner as an operational presence in Mali’s ineffectual fight against violent Islamist groups.
In order to make his point all the more effectively, the French government announced that Macron would be accompanied during this diplomatic visit by two African heads of state : Mahamat Deby, the de facto ruler of Chad, another of France’s longtime Sahelian client states; and Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo, who currently holds the rotating presidency of the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS.
Paris’ well, and secretly laid plans, however, fell through, and therein lies a tale of huge and growing dysfunction in France’s relations with the African continent.
Nearly a decade into France’s military intervention in Mali aimed at stemming fundamentalist insurgents there, communal violence has spread so widely throughout the region that the French weekly Le Canard Enchaine recently quoted an unnamed general saying “if [our] soldiers were not [in the region], there is not a single government in the Sahel that would survive.”
Paris’ crisis in its relations with the countries of the Sahel—all leading sources of immigration to France—is much more than a matter of failed counterinsurgency or even so-called nation-building. The recent, much-used analogy for French troubles in the region—the United States’ failure in Afghanistan—poorly expresses the complexity of Paris’ problematic relations on the continent. And the inability to come up with a mental model that more adequately describes what is going on in this part of West Africa makes fixing things there all but impossible.
France’s crisis, and the crisis of all of its client states in Africa, is nothing less than a crisis of stalled decolonization. Paris both wants to let go of the region and doesn’t want to leave, and most of its former African colonies are stuck in the same paralyzing ambivalence, loudly insisting on their sovereignty when it suits them, while calling on France to help address their most intractable problems and blaming Paris when it doesn’t do so.
Mali’s crisis encapsulates all of this with surprising neatness. Its new military leader, Goita, clearly resented the high-handed, unilateral way that Macron arranged and then announced the planned visit to his country, including the roping in of African sidekicks, to increase the pressure on him. The French president invoked COVID-19 concerns as the reason for calling off the visit just as suddenly as it had been announced. But the real reason for the cancellation was probably the Goita government’s plans to support anti-French demonstrations in the capital, Bamako, during Macron’s visit, which would have publicly embarrassed him months before a difficult reelection bid back home. Anti-French sentiment runs strong throughout the region, including in relatively prosperous, non-Sahel states like Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal.
Paradoxically, what drives much of the tension between fragile states like Mali and prosperous France, though, is that Paris refuses both to bear more of the burden for fighting insurgencies and to accept blame for the inevitable disruptiveness of even its limited military intervention, including so-called collateral casualties among civilians. France has also ignored requests from successive governments in Mali, as in other Sahelian states, to do more to help relieve poverty in a region with some of the world’s lowest per capita incomes.
What does France want? Just about the opposite. It longs for the governments of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad to handle more and more of their own security and development burdens, and to do so effectively. It wants them to display steadily more Western-defined state capacity and good governance, instead of what it perceives as corruption, clientelism and, perhaps above all, creeping passivity. In the case of Mali, Paris also wants a return to at least formal democracy, meaning civilian rule and elections.
On the surface, Paris’ wish list seems like something positive. The problem is that France’s attitudes toward democracy in Africa remain highly inconsistent and situational. Chad, for example, Paris’ closest security partner in the region, has been ruled by the military in all but name for decades and just experienced a constitutionally dubious father-to-son transition, which France immediately endorsed.
Paris supports many other client dictators who hide behind the fig leaf of rigged or noncompetitive elections in places like Gabon, Togo and Cameroon, ruled by 88-year-old President Paul Biya, whose arrival in power I covered way back in 1982. Biya—who spends most of his time in Europe, effectively ruling in absentia—was recently received by Macron at the Elysee Palace looking so old and frail that he struggled to walk to his own limousine.
Decades ago, in one of its most notorious interventions, France used the dirtiest of methods to enforce its writ in nominally independent post-colonial Cameroon. This included the assassination in 1960 of Felix Moumie, an anti-colonial Cameroonian politician, by French agents in Geneva using radioactive thallium, long before Russian President Vladimir Putin resorted to such tactics to eliminate critics.
France employs more genteel methods nowadays, but it still wants to maintain preeminent political influence in the region. This means the ability to summon leaders on a moment’s notice, change their political decisions with a mere phone call and preserve dominant positions for French companies in the most lucrative sectors, from large public works to utilities to trade logistics.
In Mali, Paris wants to see the government show more dynamism and commitment to fighting insurgents, but it draws the line at calling in non-French actors like a Russian mercenary group—not so much on principle, but because this would dilute France’s traditional influence and perhaps set a precedent for others in the region.
In all of this we see that the crisis of decolonization is not just a matter of the decolonized. During the Cold War, Western countries obsessed about African countries becoming satellites of the Soviet Union. Much more recently, we have seen a replay of this moral panic involving China. What this really betrays, though, is a dread of losing the continent as a Western satellite, and no European former colonial power has clung to its neocolonial privileges as tightly as France, which still sees the retention of influence in Africa as key to its grandeur.
It is by now forgotten how hard Britain worked to retain its influence in Africa in the postwar period and throughout the early stages of decolonization. This, in large measure, is what its Commonwealth of Nations was about. In addition to this, Britain kept as many of its former colonies as possible within a monetary union known as the Sterling Zone, allowing London to continue its mercantilist practices with them, including by forcing them to bank their reserves in the U.K., where Britain shaved off a lucrative margin for the mere courtesy.
London’s privileged political and economic position among its former colonies has largely faded away as Britain’s power has been subsumed by its largely subordinate relationship with the United States. But France’s ties in Africa still sustain many of these same neocolonial features. The fact of the matter is that African states will never settle their governance problems until they have become more sovereign. This needn’t mean squeezing France out of the picture altogether, as Paris fears. But it will require making Paris just another competing partner, among many.
