Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  The rhetoric of Empire 2.0, the global trading nation, did not translate into a global profile for Great Britain for a simple reason: the fantasy sought to cover the country’s international weakness and isolation. A good example of this was Theresa May’s decision to participate with the United States on 14 April 2018 in air strikes on the chemical facilities allegedly used by President Assad of Syria to attack the population of the Damascus suburb of Douma, said to be harbouring rebels. This was a replay of the crisis of 29 August 2013 when Parliament had discussed retaliation against Assad for his bombing of Ghouta, but decided against it. Theresa May joined the air strike without recalling Parliament and was accused of being ‘Mr Trump’s poodle’. Grilled by the Commons after the event, she claimed that she was acting to ‘uphold and defend the global consensus’ against chemical weapons and that not to intervene would have been ‘a stain on our humanity’. Her critics suggested that global consensus required consulting the United Nations while humanitarianism should have dictated a generosity towards Syrian refugees fleeing the bombing that the government had refused for five years.31 The sole plausible justification for air strikes was to make Britain appear like the vestige of a great power.

  In the period after June 2016 France might have gone the same way as Britain. She might have embraced a narrow nationalism in order to defend her borders and her national identity, and distanced herself from a Europe regarded as a superstate run by Germany. This defensive attitude would have made it difficult for her to play a significant world role. In the event, France took a different path from Britain. She embraced Europe and saw no contradiction between a leading role in Europe and her global ambitions. She also began to work through the difficult legacy of the French Empire, making an apology for the evils of colonialism in order to act with a freer hand on the world stage.

  The day after the Brexit vote Marine Le Pen had herself photographed with a poster reading, ‘Brexit, and now France!’32 There was plenty of evidence of ordinary people in France struggling with globalisation and immigration. Brittany had voted on the Left and for Europe in recent times but Fougères, a former shoe-making town near the border with Normandy, was suffering from the closure of factories, agricultural crises and threats to jobs. In late June 2016, Louis Pautrel, mayor of a nearby rural commune, said that the Front National was polling up to 35 per cent in local elections. ‘People feel very abandoned’, he said, ‘a Frexit vote would get 60% here, easily’.33

  Frexit required Marine Le Pen to become president of France in elections scheduled for May 2017. The victory of a populist politician in France seemed a strong possibility after Brexit, and even more so after the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. In France, however, there was a political earthquake which catapulted Emmanuel Macron to power as the youngest ever president of the French Republic. Not beholden to any of the old parties, he had a free hand to remake France’s destiny. If he had a guiding star it was that of Charles de Gaulle, or even Napoleon Bonaparte (Figure 10.2).

  Figure 10.2 Emmanuel Macron as Napoleon: carnival float in Mainz, 12 February 2018.

  Getty Images / FABIAN SOMMER / AFP / DPA / 917363126

  Macron had pursued an elite trajectory: a graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration and member of the corps of financial inspectors, he switched to merchant banking and then moved into politics, working for François Hollande in the Élysée and appointed minister for the economy and industry in 2014. Calculating that the Socialist Party would crash in the 2017 presidential elections, he resigned from the government and announced his candidature for the presidency in November 2016. He founded his own movement, largely of young people, called En Marche! (Forward!) and took on the established parties. In the first round of the presidential elections, in April 2017, he saw off the conservative Republican François Fillon, the Socialist Benoît Hamon, who secured a derisory 6.4 per cent of the vote, along with the left-populist candidate Jean-Luc Mélanchon. Pitted in the second round against Marine Le Pen of the Front National, he defeated her by 66 per cent to 34 per cent, taking nearly 90 per cent of the votes in Paris. In the end struggling but hopeful Fougères voted 23 per cent for Le Pen and 77 per cent for Macron.34 En Marche! now became a political party, La République en Marche, which took 308 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly on 18 June 2017. This enabled Macron to choose a new direction for France, appealing particularly to young people.

  The first task of Macron was to challenge the narrowly nationalistic, Eurosceptic views of Marine Le Pen and to make a bid for a French leadership of Europe. In the televised debate before the second round of presidential elections, Le Pen declared, ‘I am the candidate of the nation, which protects jobs and the security of our frontiers, which protects us against undercutting and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.’ The restoration of national sovereignty would allow the French to decide ‘who comes in to our country and who does not’. Macron riposted: ‘I reject the Front National’s defeatism and hatred. We have always been a generous, open country […] I am the candidate of a strong France in a Europe that protects’, for only Europe could protect France against superpowers such as Russia and China.35

  Once elected, Macron set about proposing reforms for the EU. He accepted that there was a crisis of confidence about the EU, both because of the austerity measures it had imposed to deal with debt in countries such as Greece, and because of what was perceived as a democratic deficit. On 4 July 2017 he told a joint meeting of the National Assembly and Senate that the solution was to ‘go back to the beginnings of Europe […] to rediscover the original meaning of the European project’. He developed these ideas talking to students at the Sorbonne on 26 September 2017. ‘At this moment I am thinking of Robert Schuman who, in Paris on 9 May 1950, dared to advocate building Europe’, he told them. Schuman had declared, ‘we failed to build Europe and we got the war’. Today, said Macron, was not the time for ‘retreat or timidity, but for boldness and a sense of history’. His bold idea was a more centralised and effective EU, equipping the Eurozone with a common budget, a common finance and economics minister, and a Eurozone parliament to which he or she would be accountable.36

  In setting out such an agenda, Macron was making a bid for French leadership in Europe. The moment was propitious. The British government was embroiled in Brexit negotiations and Theresa May lost her overall parliamentary majority on 8 June 2017. In Germany, Angela Merkel lost her dominant position in the Federal elections of 28 September 2017, when the far right Alternative für Deutschland made a breakthough, and took six months to put together a coalition government. Merkel was resistant to Macron’s reforms of the Eurozone, which threatened to be a drain on Germany’s finances, while Britain had voted to leave the EU altogether. Macron’s answer was a two-speed Europe: an inner circle of Eurozone countries and an outer circle of countries outside the Eurozone which wished to move at a slower pace.37 This was reminiscent of Napoleon’s European empire, an inner core based on a Greater France including Belgium, the Netherlands, western Germany and northern Italy and an outer circle including southern Italy, Spain and Poland.38 It was also reminiscent of the original Europe of the Six, which from 1958 to 1969 was dominated by General de Gaulle. Pointedly, on the 55th anniversary of de Gaulle receiving Chancellor Adenauer at the Élysée Palace in January 1963, Macron in his young pomp welcomed an Angela Merkel whose star was beginning to sink.39

  While asserting his claim to lead Europe, Macron was also obliged to deal with France’s colonial past. De Gaulle had seen no contradiction between France as a European power and France as a global power, drawing in the first place on the resources of Africa. But just as de Gaulle had been obliged to abandon Algeria before building Françafrique, so Macron had to deal with the painful debate over French colonialism before he could move on. A master of cultural diplomacy, he announced on 14 February 2017 while visiting Algiers, that French colonialism was ‘a crime against humanity, a real barbarity. It is a past that we must confront squarely and apolog
ise to those we have harmed.’40 This was the sharpest of breaks from the law of 2005 that enjoined schools and universities to teach the ‘positive role’ of French imperialism and demonstrated a commitment to begin to work through what others saw as a toxic inheritance. This was bound to be controversial. On 6 April, he was asked by a history teacher from Rouen, Barbara Lefebvre, who turned out to be working for François Fillon, how she was going to tell her pupils that French heroes such as Jules Ferry and Marshal Lyautey, proconsul of Morocco, had committed crimes against humanity. Macron replied that ‘sixty years on we have to open our eyes. Memories have been profoundly traumatised by the Algerian War […] There is a problem of divided memories. We have to reconcile memories.’41

  The masterful cultural diplomacy of Macron often made it difficult to separate symbol from substance. Was his rejection of colonialism purely rhetorical, or was he going to uproot all remnants of the French Empire? Houria Bouteldja of Les Indigènes de la République suggested in July 2017 that Macron ‘denounced the crimes of the past to win over French postcolonialists the better to pursue his imperialist project’. She argued that only deeds would reveal France’s commitment to the global South.42 Macron indeed had very ambitious plans. On 28 November 2017 he addressed 800 students from the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, formerly the French colony of Upper Volta. He told them that the neo-colonialist days of Françafrique were over, and that archives concerning the murder in 1987 of Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso, would be declassified. He announced that France would develop the education of girls, allow students to circulate between Africa and France and back with long-term visas, invest in infrastructure projects and train local forces to combat Islamist terrorism.43

  While on his African tour Macron revived the concept of Francophonie. This had been established in the late 1960s to gather former French colonies and mandates in Africa, the Near East, Far East and Pacific, together with Canada. From 1986 its representatives met at an annual summit to debate policies but the summit was undermined by association with African dictators, rivalry for leadership with Canada and the threat of Islamist organisations which spoke for Arab-speaking masses against French-speaking elites.44 To recentre Francophonie on France and to reboot the project Macron hosted a conference under the sacred portals of the Institut de France on 20 March 2018. He proposed a French ‘archipelago of language’ that would, without the trappings of empire, challenge the British Commonwealth and the Anglosphere.

  Today, from Maradi [Niger] to Séoul, from Yaoundé to Ulan Bator, from Nouméa [New Caledonia] to Buenos Aires, the world hums with our language. It resonates through its literature, its poetry, its songs, its theatre and cinema, through cookery, sport and philosophical debate […] It is the language of journalists, dissidents, bloggers, poets in so many countries where people fight for freedom in French.

  For Macron, the French language was a vehicle of soft power that far outstripped the borders of her former colonies. It was taught to young women in Africa menaced by ‘terrorism and obscurantism’ and to refugees who sought asylum in France. It was taught in 200 international schools across the world and he wanted this number increased to 500 by 2022. He also wanted to take advantage of Brexit to raise the profile of French in Brussels.45

  France, like Britain, had claims to be a global trading nation. The difference was that for France this was not sold as an alternative to trade with the EU, but to complement it. In order to further trade Macron made an art of his cultural diplomacy. Donald Trump was invited to Paris on 14 July 2017 to watch the military display on the Champs Élysées and was dined half way up the Eiffel Tower. When Macron visited Chinese President Xi Jinping in January 2018 he flew over a horse from his own Republican Guard, as from one great republic to another, together with a harness from the 1870s and engraved sabre. He even countered traditionally anti-French sentiment in Britain by offering to lend her the Bayeux Tapestry. All this was linked to the promotion of France’s international profile and to the assertion of France’s importance as a global player. In March 2018 Macron visited India for talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His gift was a 1922 French translation of the ancient Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita. This prefaced the sale of arms and nuclear reactors but also talks on joint strategic interests in the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region and a co-chairing a conference of the International Solar Alliance. Not concerned about migration from India, he came away with much more than Theresa May, with the additional irony that all this was going on in the former British Raj.

  Macron’s popularity was significantly greater internationally than at home. He was prepared to drive through modernising legislation to weaken the power of the railway trade unions and to make French universities more competitive by introducing greater selection of students. This provoked a wave of strikes and university occupations in April 2018 and a sense that France was once again fighting the battles of May 1968, fifty years later. For Macron, born in 1977, 1968 was only history, not memory. He was also prepared to court hostility by a policy on immigration that did enough to keep future votes away from the Front National. A bill on asylum and migration was passed through the National Assembly in April 2018, with some unhappiness and even rebellion from the République en Marche party.

  All this, however, was at the service of France’s presence on the world stage. Rather that kow-tow to President Trump’s America First policy and Israel’s settlement policy, Macron was prepared to speak his mind in favour of a more secure and more just world order. On 10 December 2017, making a serious claim to speak for Europe in the Middle East, he received Benjamin Netanyahu at the Élysée and told him that US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a threat to peace and urged him to ‘freeze the colonisation’ of the occupied territories.46 France took part in the air strikes on Assad’s chemical plants on 14 April 2018 but persuaded Donald Trump to limit the strikes rather than to ‘decapitate’ the regime and urged a political solution to the Syrian problem that would involve Russia and China.47 On 25 April 2018, addressing a joint session of the American Congress, he criticised ‘isolation, withdrawl and nationalism’ and implicitly the foreign policy of Donald Trump. The alternative was not necessarily internationalism, for the United Nations had largely ceased to function as a global policeman, but it should be multilateral:

  We can build the twenty-first century world order on a new breed of multilateralism, a more effective, accountable and results-based multilateralism. This requires more than ever the United States’ involvement, as your role was decisive in creating and safeguarding today’s free world. The United States invented this multilateralism, you are the one now who has to preserve and reinvent it […] The United States and Europe have a historic role to promote our universal values, to express strongly that human rights, the rights of minorities and shared liberty are the true answer to the disorders of the world.48

  In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, then, the British and French governments’ approaches to power and prosperity were strikingly different. One proposed withdrawal from Europe to recover the fantasy of a global empire while the other embraced internationalism and multilateralism as the best way to defend French interests. One said ‘either, or’ to Europe and the world, the other said ‘why not both?’ One made threats if it did not get what it wanted, the other perfected the use of soft power. One was trapped in its own past, the other was inspired by its best examples but had its eyes resolutely on the future.

  Conclusion

  Empire, then, has been a fantasy of glory and a chronicle of anguish. As an empire in the mind, it continues to be both. And yet in the twenty-first century, in order to move forward, European countries must recognise the anguish caused by empire and lay to rest fantasies of rebuilding empire in ever more dubious reincarnations.

  Historically, empires were built up from trading networks, from colonies of settlement and from territorial possessions from which huge amounts of tributes, taxes and soldiers could be
raised. They were portrayed to the metropolitan publics as the free enterprise of buccaneering seamen, the farms of vigorous farmers and bejewelled realms in which everyone knew their place in the hierarchy. Yet, as we have seen, the most prosperous trade was in plundered slaves, trading corporations such as the East India Company fielded large armies, trading concessions were forced on unwilling partners by gunboats and unequal treaties, and credit made over to local rulers was used to tighten the screws of imperial control. Colonies of settlement were not virgin lands but already inhabited by indigenous peoples who were driven off, expropriated and often massacred to make way for European colonists. Territories under metropolitan control were accorded a degree of control if they were peopled by Europeans; otherwise they were ruled in an authoritarian way by a European bureaucracy. Strategies of partition and divide and rule prevented ethnic and religious groups coming together, indigenous peoples were segregated, subjected to arbitrary justice and punishment, and any passive or active resistance was met with lethal force.

  Empire was always established by fraud or force or a combination of both. It was always opposed by dominated or colonised peoples, whether by fight or flight, passive or active resistance. Imperial rule constantly looked to legitimate itself, in the eyes both of its subject peoples and of publics in the metropolis who were often opposed to the brutality and cost of empire. Empire was said to bring capitalist exchange to far-flung parts of the world whose riches were as yet untapped or whose people languished in poverty. It was said to bring civilisation to benighted peoples, a natural order in which, in the words of Jules Ferry, ‘superior races’ did their duty to ‘inferior races’ or, in the words of Kipling, shouldered the ‘white man’s burden’. This legitimation fulfilled itself in what W. E. B. Du Bois called ‘the religion of whiteness’ which underpinned European empires and justified the worst oppressions, exclusions and atrocities.