Nicolas Sarkozy’s Foreign Policy Should Be Vindicated
George W. Bush and his acolytes are these days fond of claiming that history will eventually judge the administration of the former American president kindly. This is supposedly especially true of their foreign policy legacy: the “freedom agenda.” They went as far as to claim the “Arab spring” as vindication.
Bush and the neoconservatives are unlikely to ever find their swan song adequately praised in history manuals but by no means is foreign policy out of fashion as far as swan songs go.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency for one was controversial enough but unlike Bush’s, his track record may yet be vindicated.
In France itself, Sarkozy is currently reviled for his collaboration with Germany and toeing the line of “austerity” as far as dealing with Europe’s financial crisis goes. This, too, while more of a domestic legacy may also be vindicated as François Hollande’s reforms seem to amount to a “spare no expense” doctrine in a country on the verge of financial collapse. Then again, that was what he was elected to do.
In terms of foreign policy though, the Sarkozy doctrine should stand as a standard for future foreign policy decision-making. Not only did it promote French business interests; it promoted Paris’ strategic imperatives in the European Union.
Sarkozy had his ups and downs and his tactical populism did not always serve France well. Polemics over the Chinese Olympics for instance were unnecessary and France’s ties with China may have suffered from it. Equally less worthy of praise was the overall reaction to the Arab spring where Sarkozy and his government, while weary of the outcomes of the revolts, still chose the populist path of appealing to the success of the rebellions.
However, in policy arenas from Europe to the United Nations, France was extraordinarily assertive, pragmatic and ultimately efficient.
Facing an ever more independent Germany, Sarkozy chose to safeguard the Berlin-Paris axis as far as European questions were concerned but sought to hedge France’s bets by re-approaching Britain and the United States and reconstituting the Atlantic allies. France rejoined NATO’s political structure—mind you, at a time in which NATO’s political coherence is far from what it once was—thus pleasing its transatlantic ally—and paired with the United Kingdom in a number of industrial, military and geopolitical projects.
Germany, in spite of the French president’s efforts, turned out to be a bit of a challenge. Berlin united with the Central and Eastern European member states to downgrade Sarkozy’s Union for the Mediterranean into a meaningless discussion forum and inefficient member bloated exercise. The original plan, however, had been good. The point was to endow the EU’s southern neighborhood with a Finlandized area of its own. Open to preferential trade with the EU, willing to apprehend European values but devoid of actual membership—tout sauf institutions.
Sadly, Germany’s insistence for the inclusion of all EU member states in the Mediterranean Union would finally prevent it from ever emerging as a meaningful institution. It managed nevertheless to alter the EU’s paradigm of political approach to its southern neighborhood from a post 9/11 belief in promoting normative reform in illiberal regimes, to a more pragmatic and non-interfering engagement.
It was also Germany that prevented an easier French triumph in the Libyan war. France followed its diplomatic victory in Côte d’Ivoire, where it succeeded in replacing the regime with a more reliable one while using relevant international organizations as the Economic Community of West African States and the United Nations, with another impressive diplomatic mobilization of international organizations into adoption of the French narrative in Libya; Paris now being very likely to inherit the preferential commercial and military ties Tripoli used to respectively maintain with Italy and Russia and freed from Muammar Gaddafi’s nefarious influence over Françafrique.
Sarkozy wasn’t shy in advocating a heavy hand against Iran, a state which seeks to undermine Western interests in the Middle East. Along the way, apart from making France a front seat player in the world’s major developments and organizations (two successive French presidents of the International Monetary Fund) Sarkozy was good at securing a ceasefire between Georgia and Russia which for the most part secured the previous status quo (appeased Moscow, cooperative Tbilisi).
The truth is that Nicolas Sarkozy served the French people well in foreign affairs. One hopes that they are sensible enough to apprehend as much.
(Originally published in the Atlantic Sentinel)
Drôle de Paix II – Extraverting Françafrique
One of the nefarious consequences of nowadays’ entitled generation is the necessarily idealist distortion of reality. The 60s counterculture was bought by social endowments but also by a pretence vision of the world which keeps their moral reflexes at ease. The maps of the world are a politically correct UN fairy tale façade. Apart from most of the northern hemisphere and parts of Asia, there are no states in the world. There are regimes, protectorates and ungoverned territories. Such is the case with Côte d’Ivoire and most of Africa.
Jean-François Bayart coined the term ‘extraversion’ to explain how in Africa the inherited European state apparatus is subverted by the local realities. This is exactly the case in Côte d’Ivoire where the governmental apparatus has been hijacked and transformed into an ethnic based transnational rent-seeking enterprise. The whole territory is not culturally unified except for having French as lingua franca. In this circumstance each ethnicity competes for power within the internationally prescribed borders, even if these don’t correspond to the ethnic territorial distribution. During the reign of Houphouët-Boigny the ethnic inconsistencies were kept under balance but ever since his death the elites of the south and those of the north have been competing for power, i.e. control of the government.
The context of these elections is nothing surprising: Côte d’Ivoire as mishmash of ethnicities and clan structures sees a dispute between major ethnic groupings. Monsieur Ouattara represents the northern ethnic groups and Mr. Gbagbo the southern ones. The difference is that the southern ones are Christian, richer and they reap the benefits of being closer to the oil wells, cocoa fields, fishing areas and commercial ports. Mr Gbagbo is thus supported by the urban ethnicities and Ouattara by the Muslim rural ones. To be clear though, the victory of one of the sides would not alter the underlying reality of Côte d’Ivoire, for the different ministries and state companies would have to be shared among ethnicities comprising the winning clan confederacy power bid – just as has been the case so far.
Côte d’Ivoire’s instability dates back to the decolonisation process. Sub-Saharan Africa was politically stable prior to the European colonisation when the local polities – be they ethnic groups, clans, tribal confederacies or chiefdoms – managed their own power relations. The arrival of the European powers destroyed this reality and Africa has seen its power politics dictated by the rulers of the Atlantic Ocean ever since. The Europeans ruthlessly ‘globalised’ Africa but ultimately the biggest change was not slavery but instead the forceful inclusion of all of Africa into the international trading system. Allegedly decolonisation was to liberate the African peoples and return the continent back to its idyllic days. This is not what happened: there was no decolonisation but rather the process was a scapegoat for the replacement of European hegemony for American and Soviet control, the borders were not changed and peoples were not liberated because generally speaking there were no nations or states to liberate from occupation and the liberation movements did not seek to revert the political reality back to the tribal system, the main markets and biggest military powers in the Atlantic are still European and American and therefore power relations are naturally influenced from the north.
In the case of Côte d’Ivoire the main external power is France which dominates every sector of the country’s economy, from telecommunications and construction to finance and military. Apparently the Quai d’Orsay does not trust the Gbagbo government to be able to serve its interests in the foreseeable future. The why is unknown: perhaps the southern elites believe they can govern without dependency on the French, perhaps they wish to liberate Côte d’Ivoire from the intrinsic meddling of neighbouring countries. Burkina Faso counts many Burkinabés living within Ivoirian borders and other bordering countries depend on commerce made with the north of Côte d’Ivoire, which has for many years been de facto free from the Ivoirian government, both in taxes and security.
Whatever the reason for Gbagbo’s loss of French patronage, Ivoirians are still a French protectorate and they cannot go against the wishes of Paris without external support. So far the US and Britain support France’s narrative and the electoral victory of Alassane Ouattara, leaving only Brazil as willing to support the Gbagbo government but constrained from publicly doing so given France’s co-option of the UN, the African Union and Francophone Africa, along with the timing and coordination difficulties brought about by the process of the new Brazilian government’s taking of office. Russia and China, always looking for an opportunity to penetrate western dominated markets, sent representatives to President Gbagbo’s swearing in, which was officially attended only by the ambassadors of Angola and Lebanon.
With France, Britain, the US and the EU preparing sanctions packages against Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria led ECOWAS threatening to mobilise the ECOMOG against Yamoussoukro, the loyalty of the army and Gbagbo’s apparatchiks may not last longer. Add to this ECOWAS’s decision to stop printing money for Côte d’Ivoire and the regime has its days numbered.
While Gbagbo’s decision to resist the Élysée is ill-advised, the crisis may very well be prolonged by such organs as the ICC which may be causing Gbagbo’s clique to fear loss of power and international war crimes indictments from the universalist institution.
So far, the reactions to the political crisis in Côte d’Ivoire can be divided into three categories: the ones who recognise Ouattara as the winner and demand Gbagbo to step down, those who realise there is a deficit of popular cohesion and stand for a power-sharing agreement (namely Russia, China, Angola and Equatorial Guinea) and finally the ones who only accept Gbagbo as the solution to the entanglement. Given that the bulk of the international community and virtually all stake-holders are against the final two solutions, the likely outcome will be the ousting of Gbagbo. Zimbabwe is often pointed as an example of possible intransigence but even Mugabe has Angola to support him.
The UK, the US and France favour Ouattara but how sustainable will France’s yield on Côte d’Ivoire be with the US involved? Equally important to observe is Angola’s position vis-à-vis that of Nigeria’s. Luanda comprehensibly dislikes all the democratic resonance of France’s campaign against Gbagbo. If the UN and the African Union intervene under a democracy-enforcement mandate, José Eduardo dos Santos will resent the precedent, even if at the service of the specific interests of France and Nigeria…
There is a national debate in Côte d’Ivoire about who can claim Ivoirian identity. The problem is that the region never had borders, and multi-ethnic states without a historical tradition of political coexistence or a hegemonic ethnicity tend to disaggregate, all the more when their borders are artificial and they’re subject to the influence of more powerful states. Anthropology explains that social bonds are adapted to the geographical environment where they evolve. If in Europe its individualistic cultures, small family aggregates, natural borders isolating cultures in islands or peninsulas, gave rise to the modern bureaucratic state, how can the same be true for West Africa where we find the exact opposite reality? If indeed Côte d’Ivoire’s southern elites plan to make of it a sovereign state, they are in for a bitter surprise.
The Westphalian Post 