François Mitterrand warned that France would be irrelevant to twenty-first-century history unless it maintained its control of Africa. Its instrument for so doing is the CFA Franc — a colonial currency entrenching French rule more than fifty years after independence.
In France’s former African colonies, imperialist monetary policies from Paris continue to cripple domestic economies and undermine democracy. Colonialism in Africa won’t have meaningfully come to an end until true economic sovereignty is allowed to flourish.
The US-dominated economic order constructed after Bretton Woods did not take the Global South into consideration. A new, just system will have to change that.
At home, French politicians mainstream far-right conspiracies about the replacement of whites by African immigrants. Abroad, they continue to intervene militarily and economically in the continent. Both are signs of a nation unwilling to accept its decline.
Last Sunday, the military rulers of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger quit West African economic union ECOWAS. It’s a major blow to the regional integration project — and a rebuke to Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to interfere in France’s former colonies.
On July 26, a coup deposed Niger’s democratically elected president, the seventh in the region in three years. The ongoing conflict threatens to divide the region between pro- and anti-Western factions, spreading the new cold war to Africa.
Today’s Africa-France summit is a typical show of French president Emmanuel Macron’s imperial grandstanding. But it wouldn’t be possible without business leaders and intellectuals who paint France’s interference in its old colonies in a humanitarian light.
The political and economic crises roiling countries like Sudan and Tunisia right now cannot be separated from the global institutions of capital and the cycles of indebtedness that they impose.
The French army’s forced exit from Niger has been wistfully termed the end of an era of great-power status. We should remember what this really meant: a zombie empire that crushed democracy in order to protect French elites’ power, both in Africa and at home.
Drawing on the War on Terror’s model of drones and special forces deployments, the French government is keeping troops on the ground in Africa.
Senegal’s government has condemned last month’s coup in Niger, even pledging to send troops to help restore the rule of law. But far from a beacon of democracy, this ally of Paris and Washington is mounting its own bloody crackdown on opposition at home.
Even if Bernie Sanders — or any other democratic socialist — had an electoral majority for our political revolution, we would have to contend with the power of capital. Investment strikes, capital flight, and the power of finance could turn the euphoria of victory into a disaster unless we have a plan to confront them.
As a young man in Paris, Ho Chi Minh embraced a radical internationalism.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s uncompromising opposition to the crimes of empire makes him a taboo figure in French culture. The French political mainstream is still in denial about the bloody history of colonialism.
The Moroccan left-wing revolutionary Ben Barka was one of the towering figures of the anti-colonial movement. His murder by agents of the Moroccan king with help from France and Israel was a major blow to socialist forces throughout the Arab world.
The novelist Albert Camus is omnipresent in French cultural life, from TV shows to comic books, magazine covers and one-man shows. Camus-mania isn’t just a literary phenomenon: it draws on a deep well of political revisionism and colonial nostalgia.