After reading Serfati’s analysis, I would consider his essay as an introduction to why the French state and its ruling class act the way they do at home and abroad.
France has maintained a major role on the international scene, especially militarily, despite experiencing a relative decline in world economic power since the 1990s.
In 2011, it ranked fifth in terms of military spending and sixth in terms of arms exports.
It is a major zone of capital accumulation in the world economy and is centrally integrated into the global dynamics of economic, political, and military power.
The overall closeness of elites in state institutions and large transnational corporations. French TNCs are increasingly dependent on profits earned in emerging or peripheral economies.
when analysing the role of France in Africa, one must consider an interrelated set of economic, geopolitical, and domestic socio-political drivers.
In 2009, France ranked third as a trading partner with Africa as a continent, behind China and the US.
Although Africa accounts for only a modest share of French military exports, it remains an important ground for testing and using the weapons that France produces.
The level of capital flight from former French colonies is impressive.
According to the French NGO Survie, between 1960 and 2009 the French military officially intervened more than 50 times in African states, that is, more than once a year on average.
French imperialism has always been sheltered from democratic scrutiny and even from parliamentary discussion. Specifically, it has been a domaine reservé for the Heads of State, who establish their own networks [réseaux] to manage the special relations with Africa and run the cellule Afrique from the Palais de l’Elysée.
The FranceAfrique networks have been part of the transfer and laundering of money derived from resource extraction, government taxation, and development aid in Africa.
For the most part, there is a strong tendency in French political culture, including the left, to read imperialism through the actions of the United States alone, to downplay or ignore the French role in managing neocolonialism in Africa, and to see France itself as a ‘citadel’ besieged by US- and China-based competition.
Very few protests were registered in France against the military complicity of France in the Rwandan genocide of 1994–5 and in backing Zaire’s Mobutu.
The key point is this: since the formulation of the ESDP (European Security and Defence Policy, 2003), the EU has launched 25 civilian and military operations, the great majority of them in Africa.
All of the recent European interventions in Africa have relied upon the military and political capacities of France, which, according to the Ministry of Defence, deployed in August 2010 over 17,800 soldiers overseas. At the same time, the ‘Europeanisation’ of intervention in Africa has not ruled out unilateral operations by French imperialism, such as those in the Ivory Coast (2011)120 or in Mali…
France received Niger’s assent for a military deployment to protect Areva’s industrial activities in that country, now the world’s second largest uranium supplier.
The French imperial project has been recalibrated. By ‘turning to Europe’, the French state helped to create an institutional framework for the EU to act, firstly, as a ‘broker’ of different national views on security and defence, and secondly, as a propellant of militarism, or of a new ‘liberal imperialism’.
The contention… is that the development of European institutions is not only increasing the domination of capital and its expansion abroad, but also expanding the imperialism of its individual member-states. The implications of this are two-fold: the EU is not subjugating, but transforming member nation-states; and EU imperialism would not exist if core member-states were not imperialist in the first place.
The actual configuration of the world capitalist system is one dominated by a hierarchical, transatlantic bloc in which key European states play an independent, yet secondary role to US imperialism. [The wars in Ukraine and the war on Gaza support the continuity of this hierarchy Serfati did highlight in 2015.] Furthermore, even in cases of cooperation amongst imperialist powers, rivalry and competition continue.
The objective of EU militarisation is not to rival the US, but to combine the exercise of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power of European nation-states at the international level, while further controlling any potential ‘enemies within’ the EU.
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