Brexit was a vehicle for Paris to lead Europe. But, instead of grabbing the opportunity, it’s chosen to appeal to far-right populism and pathologise a segment of its cultural heritage.
The defence of Charlie Hebdo magazine’s right to caricature Prophet Muhammad and offend a belief with about one and a half billion followers, is a radicalising policy. This is the reason President Emmanuel Macron’s remark that Islam is “a religion that is in crisis all over the world,” is a vituperation of an unskilled statesman.
Macron’s solution is a contradiction for an old empire that was built jointly with Muslims. Germany, for some, is the predicted post-Brexit leader of Europe based on its economic size, but France, aside from being the only nuclear-armed EU member after Brexit, projects mightier soft power. Germany hasn’t entirely overcome its pariah status since the Nazi-led misadventures, and has neither nuclear power nor neo-colonial stranglehold overseas.
Through its Mission Civilisatrice project during the colonial rule, which was designed to civilize the colonies, Paris imposed the French identity on the colonized. But Macron seems to have skipped the chapter of colonial history that documented how the policy of assimilation failed. This is why his bid to re-assert a mono-cultural identity in 21st Century France is a mockery of the old empire’s history.
Since the French, who had pillaged the Americas, the Caribbean and India, invaded Africa in 1830, they have not left. They killed millions of natives to build the largest colonial empire on the continent, conquering, among others, Emir Abdelkader in Algeria, Samory Toure in Mandinka Empire, and King Behanzin in Dahomey. The conquests were characterized by mass killings, enslavement, decapitation, sexual violence, and hanging.
And when France declared war on Germany, after the Nazis invaded Poland in the Second World War, it embarked on recruitment of soldiers from across its colonies, most of which were from Muslim majority places. These colonial soldiers from the west, north, and central Africa, the French West Indies and Indochina were fated to massacres during the war, for being assigned dangerous roles by their white French officers. Those caught as prisoners of war were separated from their white colleagues and killed in demonstrations of German Army’s white supremacy. These were sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of Muslims fighting in a war that wasn’t theirs, just to save an empire under threat.
The “clash of civilizations” unfolding in France today is an ingratitude to the Muslims who died to defend France and whose resources were, and are still being, exploited to salvage what’s left of the diminished empire. The clash jeopardizes France’s soft power, which is its surest staircase up to the pinnacle of the European power equation.
But the Islamophobia rippling out of France isn’t alien to it. The French government once demanded people of its Muslim colonies to renounce their Muslim faith as a condition for becoming French citizens by naturalization. The Muslims in Algeria could only gain citizenship from 1919, and under strict requirements that included owning a company and being a war veteran. The cultural iconoclasm and identity reconstruction were supervised by France for several decades.
Although the French Empire eventually collapsed on May 10, 1940, after a humiliating loss to Nazi Germany in the Second World War, and was breastfed to life by the American Marshal Plan, France’s global influence was kept alive by the majorly Muslim former colonies in Africa. This was driven by the Françafrique policy that has retained France as head of an imaginary empire.
From playing a role in the 1974 Seyni Kountche-led coup that ousted Niger’s president Hamani Diori, testing its nuclear weapons in the Algerian Sahara in the 1960s, deploying its colonial soldiers to fight post-war revolts in its former colonies, imposing the CFA franc as the currency of Francophone West Africa, and to having military bases scattered across its former colonies and influencing elections there, France’s relevance in international politics has been tied to the people whose religion it otherises so unfairly.
Macron’s policing of Islamic identities, following in the footsteps of his predecessors who banned the wearing of headscarves in a country with estimated 6 million Muslims, is a cowardly pursuit of far-right terrorism. The only justification for Macron’s anti-Islam “revolution” would’ve been returning to 1830 to reverse France’s incursion in the Muslim world and exploiting their resources and manpower to build and sustain an empire on the sweat and the blood of the same Muslims being treated as outcasts today. The headscarves should be the least of France’s problem, with anti-Muslim bigotry spreading and the threats of terrorists intensifying.
France’s worst mistake would be underplaying the reactions to its anti-Islam stance. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a speech in Ankara, called on Muslims “not go near French goods.” The outrage was justified by Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Imran Khan, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, and Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Jordan, and Iran. Malaysia’s former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, went as far as saying “Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past”.
When, in late 2005, Muslims raged in similar fashion over an offensive cartoon of Prophet Muhammad by a Danish newspaper, the consequent boycott of Danish goods led to a 15.5 per cent drop in the country’s total exports in just four months. Denmark’s export to Saudi Arabia and Iran fell by 40 per cent and 47 per cent, respectively. The boycott registered impacts across the Middle East.
But France isn’t Denmark, it’s at worst risk. The boycott of French goods isn’t the worst that can happen to Paris, it’s its soft power. France is dependent on its former colonies, many of which are predominantly Muslims for raw materials to power its economy and has vast assets in those countries. The 100 per cent of uranium required by France to keep its nuclear facilities running is from Niger and Gabon, and also about 70% of the French oil company, Elf-Aquitaine’s global extractions have been from African deposits.
Most of these former colonies are at the threats of terrorism, and what’s required of Paris is a de-radicalising stance to legitimize the voices of West-leaning Muslims in the region’s counterterrorism. France can’t detach itself from its colonial legacy.
In a 2013 co-authored paper, one of my professors at the LSE, Tarak Barkawi, advised UK’s foreign policy elite on ways to prevent further decline of what’s left of the British empire. The UK, the authors said, must let go of the racial hierarchy that had treated its old colonies as inferior and outsiders. The paper presents an image of a Brown Britain, one of convergence of cultures and acknowledgement of the people, histories and economies of its former colonies in the country’s quests for soft power.
If Britain—whose colonial policy of association allowed its subjects to retain their identities—pursues multiculturalism, then France too must learn from Barkawi this wisdom and necessity of acknowledging its colonial history. This wreck of the French empire under Macron’s supervision is an estate in which the Muslims have earned a place—the ancestors of these Muslims were a part of the reason France is still standing.
It’s tempting for domestic politics to inspire a decision as dangerous as Macron’s, but Paris isn’t paying attention to the dynamics of the international system. As the US hegemony shrinks, China is selling benign alternatives in places that France’s economic and political interests are likely to be resisted if Élysée Palace fails to read the writing on the wall. This could catalyze the end of its soft power, and the final collapse of its imaginary empire.
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