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France in Africa: African Politics and French Foreign Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Daniel Bourmaud
Daniel Bourmaud*
Affiliation:
Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France
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Extract

French policy in Africa is at a crossroads. Forced to consider among choices that appeared entrenched in the past, France now hesitates to implement essential reforms. The reluctance to carve out a new conception of French-African relations is in part tied to the magnitude of the changes which have affected African states south of the Sahara since 1989, but it is also tied to the generalized failure of French aid policies since the Second World War. The result has been a conceptual vacuum in French policy towards Africa, reflected in the oscillation between the old practices, including very controversial ones, and the structural adjustments in which France is little more than an interested observer.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , 1995 , pp. 58 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1995 

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References

Notes

This paper was first presented to the conference on “Brazzaville + 50,” sponsored by the Boston University African Studies Center and held in Boston, October 1994. The author is grateful to the organizers of that conference, and particularly to Prof. Edouard Bustin, for permission to publish the paper in this forum.

1. It would be useful to analze more exactly the attitudes of the French press on African questions over the last thirty years. Except for a few specialized publications, the principal newspapers, both daily and weekly, have always been silent on this aspect. The change in tone is recent and owes much to the work and analytic clarity of the daily Libération.

2. On this subject, see the analysis of the Rwandan crisis by Vershave, F. X., Observatoire Permanent de la Coopération Française (Paris 1994)Google Scholar.

3. J. F. Médard, “Les relations familiales dans la politique africaine de la France,” a presentation to a conference held at Fribourg, 1994.

4. See “Questions à 40 milliards,” a booklet edited by the NGO “Survie,” created in 1984 “to re-state the obligation to save the living...by transforming French development policies,” according to a statement published by 120 Nobel laureates.

5. E., Fottorino, C., Guillemin, and E., Orsenna, Besoin d’Afrique (Paris: Fayar; 1992)Google Scholar.

6. Cited in the Duffaure Report, Conseil Economique et Social, p. 329.

7. Viven Report, pg. 2.

8. On the opacity of aid, see Marchesin, Ph., Le mystère des chiffres ou l’opacité du système français d’aide au développement (Paris: Observatoire permanent de la Coopération Française; 1994)Google Scholar.

9. During the 1981 electoral campaign, François Mitterrand had criticized Valéry Giscard d’Estaing for his complacency towards the U.S.S.R. following Giscard’s meeting with Leonoid Brezhnev during the Afghanistan crisis.

10. Nonetheless, against its wishes, France would be marginalized during the Middle East negotiations.

11. J. F. Deniau, “Le rang de la France,” Le Monde, 7 September 1994.

12. The publication “Les socialistes et le Tiers-Monde. Eléments pour une politique socialiste de relations avec le Tiers Monde” (1977) seeks to develop a doctrine for the Socialist Party. It is notable that this work addresses the debate over the complexity of ministerial and administrative structures to the detriment of the Ministry of Cooperation.

13. On this subject see the Autumn 1994 issue of La Revue International de Politique Comparée, on “la francophonie,” and especially my contribution to that issue.