That delicious sentence was written by a woman born Umm El-Banu Assadullayeva, and comes from Days in the Caucasus, her memoir’s first volume. It reveals a distinctive juxtaposition in her prose, in this book and in its sequel, Parisian Days. There’s a curious self-effacement combined with a resolute lightheartedness and flashes of wry wit, the work of a woman whose life was a rollercoaster of heartache, love and adventure.

She was born in 1905 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, and came to be known in twentieth-century Paris as the writer Banine. Her mother had died giving birth to her, her three sisters were quite a bit older and her father didn’t remarry for many years, though the family “welcomed polygamy and disapproved of celibacy.” The family she wrote of were “oil millionaires” — stupendously, one might say ridiculously, rich — who in one generation had leapt from peasantry to plutocracy from the oil discovered on their land.

She was a lonely but happy and imaginative child. Her father, still in his thirties and, like his brothers, thoroughly Europeanised from his travels, had hired a Baltic German governess for his daughters. Fraulein Anna was Banine’s mainstay, a mother substitute and “guardian angel” who schooled her in German and encouraged her to learn the piano.

But her paternal grandmother, “a large, fat, authoritarian woman, veiled and excessively fanatical,” ruled the roost, sticking to the old traditions. She loathed Christians, spoke only Azeri, a Turkic language itself a sub-branch of Azerbaijani, wore the clothes typical of observant Muslims at the time, and preferred sitting on floor cushions to any of the sumptuous European-type furniture to be found in the “reception rooms” of Banine’s father’s apartment.

Thus, here was a young girl buffeted between two radically different influences and traditions, though apart from the grandmother the family was not particularly religious. Banine took refuge in books and daydreaming, the necessary humus for any writer it seems, although it took many years before she became one.

Azerbaijan (Persian “land of fire,” for the spontaneous fires occasioned by its oil slicks) was part of the Russian empire. Its people were mainly Christian Armenians and Shiite Azerbaijanis who, as Banine describes it, periodically massacred each other in revolving reprisals. A smattering of Georgians and Russians also lived there. In the year of her birth the empire was in turmoil, until Tsar Nicholas II made his small, grudging concession to democracy.

Then, early in 1918, the year Banine turned twelve, Nicholas was forced to abdicate, not long after which the province became the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and Banine’s father, now remarried and father to a son, was its minister of commerce. When the Bolsheviks solidified their control, the province lost its independence. Her father was thrown into prison.

The family’s traditionally pragmatic attitude to sex and marriage is relevant here. Polygamy was normalised in Islam, as was same-sex coupling for young unmarried males. For Banine’s father and others of his generation this was changing, but marriage in the upper class was still essentially a business proposition with love reserved for extramarital liaisons.

In this scheme of things the hymen was the husband’s trophy, pleasure an incidental consideration. Banine’s cousin Gulnar, for instance, was eager to get married so she could indulge her sexual appetite with a succession of partners in addition to her promised husband. But Banine, the dreamer, longed for a different trajectory, and had fallen deeply in love with a dashing Bolshevik commissar. Unlike any of Gulnar’s conquests, hers was an intensely romantic affair fuelled by a mutual love of literature (he her Prince Andrey, she his Natasha) but had yet to be consummated. There were plans, though, for her to elope with him to Moscow and be wedded there.

Knowing nothing of this, the family had two other suitors in mind. One was another cousin, the other a man who’d ingratiated himself by helping get Banine’s increasingly weak and emaciated father released. Then there was the problem of getting her father to Paris, where his wife and young son were waiting, and it was this same man’s connections he depended on for that. Still the dutiful daughter, and even though she hated her father for “blackmailing” her, she agreed to marry the man.

“Filial affection,” as she wistfully defined it, won the day. Without a word to her commissar, she failed to turn up at the designated rendezvous that would have swept her off with him to Moscow. Instead she was yoked to a man twenty years her senior whom she loathed with all her heart. She was all of fifteen.

The tone of the memoir’s sequel is even more bittersweet. In Days in the Caucasus she had written of her father and two sisters eventually finding refuge in Paris. Parisian Days finds her on the Orient Express to join them. In Paris her father and stepmother are renting a large, luxurious apartment on the fashionable Rue Louis Boilly, where they stay until they run out of jewellery: “the sole, slim remains of our oil barons’ fortune, democratised, collectivised, nationalised, volatilised in the revolutionary explosion, which consumed all our privileges in its flames.”

From the moment of her arrival, Banine is enthralled with Paris. She is even happy when her father’s “last pearl” is sold and they are all forced to move from the Rue Louis Boilly apartment. Now on her own, she is lent a maid’s room seven flights up in a building on the Champ de Mars, and like many Russian émigrés of the day, some of whom were princesses, she finds work as a mannequin in an upscale Parisian fashion house.

What are they to make of her too-Oriental looks, her large derrière, not to mention the over-fuzzy Azerbaijani hairstyle? She moves to another, more simpatico house, and there she picks up tricks of the trade. But although she makes friends easily there and the job is her only means of survival, she is unrelievedly bored. Augmenting their pitiful wages as courtesans, the women talk exclusively of beauty, clothes and catching ever more wealthy men. They dub Banine the “little Caucasian goose.”

Salvation comes in the form of an older sister. Zuleykha, a painter, had settled in Paris long before, and she and her Spanish husband José, another painter, set up a bohemian salon in their studio compound. (Banine referred to it as Josézous.) “The guests drank, ate, debated and danced with the passion of youth and exotic temperaments prone to excess of all kinds. We couldn’t get away without a bullfight, almost as noisy as a real one.” Her sister and brother-in-law introduce her to the Montparnasse nightclubs and Paris’s huge community of Russians who’d fled the revolution.

These are the Années folles, those crazy years that spanned the end of the first world war and the onset of the Depression. And though she is definitely the young hanger-on, the timid third wheel, she revels in the company and ambience. She is watching, listening, slotting it all into memory.

In a curious way, poverty has released her, as it has softened her father. Regretting her coerced marriage, he readily sanctions divorce. (Because of her refugee status and the husband’s Turkish residence, this is more easily said than done.) Nonetheless the conjugal experience leaves her resolutely chaste for years. The Montparnasse campaigns to correct this routinely fail, even when intensified by the surprise arrival of long-lost cousin Gulnar, who has finally made it out of Baku through her own particular version of the legerdemain that émigrés were forced to adopt. Within a matter of minutes, Gulnar has Banine abandoning her seventh-floor maid’s room and sharing a flat with her.

Was Gulnar the full-blown sexual predator portrayed? The relationship was doubtlessly complicated, yet I detect the writer at work here. Striking, full-lipped Gulnar is the perfect foil, a gift to any memoirist. As is Jerome, the cultured Frenchman who acts as a kind of psychopomp, ushering the two women through the high life of Paris, its sparkling nightlife and the tangles of their love lives. As for Banine, she finally succumbs to the blandishments of one of Jerome’s rich friends, an older Orléans widower surgeon to whom she was unaccountably mean and who, after some time and hardly surprisingly, unceremoniously dumps her.

And so Parisian Days ends. Gulnar has sailed off to America, having bagged a handsome, young, fabulously rich Texan. As generous as she is acquisitive and life-loving, she has left behind all her money for Banine, the handsome husband offering her a pension. Needless to say, Banine is stunned. “My cousin whom I had so often envied and hated overwhelmed me with largesse.”

Alone now, she finds her way to the Bois de Boulogne, considering her future. Because of Gulnar’s wholly unexpected legacy, she can contemplate leaving the fashion house and chance her arm at writing. The book’s last sentences encapsulate the special amalgam of bravery and self-deprecation that characterises its protagonist throughout: “Life was waiting for me. I had to go and meet it despite the burden of my reluctant heart.”

Banine’s first published work was a novel, Nami. Set in Baku and Russia, and based on her experiences of the revolution and civil war, it appeared in 1942. She made her name in Parisian literary circles with Days in the Caucasus, published three years later. Parisian Days appeared in 1947. She wrote in French, which by then had become her natural language. I Chose Opium deals with her conversion to Roman Catholicism. It too had a sequel, After. She also supported herself translating Dostoevsky’s books and those of other writers into French.

Banine is in the process of being rediscovered. Anne Thompson-Ahmadova, the translator of these two books into English, tells us that Days in the Caucasus was reissued in French in 1985. Banine revised Parisian Days in 1990, and it is this version that Pushkin Press has published. The Soviets invited Banine to Baku after Days in the Caucasus appeared, but she declined the invitation, a decision she regrets in an author’s note to its reissue. An Azerbaijani translation didn’t appear until 1992, the year of Banine’s death.

Not having read Banine in her original French, and as is the case with any such translation, I can only take Thompson-Ahmadova’s on trust. Once or twice I came across a phrase where the English rang just a little too colloquial, but overall she seems to have captured the flavour of the author’s voice, and the vividness of the people and events she brought to life.

It’s always exciting to see a long-neglected writer resurrected, and what a gift to readers Days in the Caucasus and Parisian Days are. Others have praised Banine for being another Colette, and there is some truth in that. But I doubt if there’ll ever be another Banine. •

Days in the Caucasus
By Banine | Pushkin Press | $34.99 | 274 pages

Parisian Days
By Banine | Pushkin Press | $34.99 | 255 pages

The post To Paris, from the land of fire appeared first on Inside Story.

As we walked across the village’s central playing field after church, Wea described the scene there just over thirty-five years ago: seven French military helicopters, two dozen army trucks, and some 300 French special forces and police sharpshooters ready for action. In the bush near Gossanah, nineteen Kanaks were holding twenty-three French police hostage. They had raided the island’s gendarmerie, met more resistance than expected and killed four police before decamping to a remote cave with seized weapons and their hostages.

The raid was intended to be part of a territory-wide show of force by the Melanesians in support of independence for the country they called Kanaky. Seven months earlier, in September 1987, a narrow majority of white and other settlers had voted in a referendum to remain with France. The Kanaks had boycotted the poll in the belief that the result had been preset by officially encouraged immigration in previous decades. Kanaks had occupied traditional lands in the north of the main island, a settler ambush had killed ten Kanaks, and in January 1988, a sharpshooter had killed a Kanak would-be guerilla leader holed up in a seized farmhouse.

Despite the planning, the Ouvéa rebels found themselves acting alone in April–May 1988 — and a tough reaction to the kidnapping offered France’s ambitious conservative prime minister, Jacques Chirac, a chance to boost his prospects in the looming national presidential elections.

Just three days before Chirac faced off with Socialist incumbent François Mitterrand in the second round of the election, and after half-hearted negotiations for a peaceful surrender, Chirac ordered an all-out assault on the cave. Sixteen Kanaks were killed during the attack, two executed after their capture, and their leader was allowed to die of wounds without medical attention. Two soldiers died, and all the hostages were freed.

As it turned out, Mitterrand prevailed in the election. Chirac was replaced as PM by a Socialist, Michel Rocard, who brought the shocked Kanak leader, former Catholic priest Jean-Marie Tjibaou, and the loyalist leader, businessman Jacques Lafleur, to Matignon near Paris, locked them in, and presented a plan. Putting off a vote on independence for ten years, it pledged more training and involvement for Kanaks, and more investment in rural and island lands.

Tjibaou made a unilateral decision and signed the deal. Lafleur did too. They shook hands for a photo. And so the Matignon Accord was born. A decade later, in 1998, the Nouméa Accord postponed the independence decision for another fifteen to twenty years, when it would be put to three spaced-out referendums to make sure every voter made a considered choice.

Many Kanaks — among them Charles Wea’s uncle, a former protestant pastor named Djubelly Wea — had misgivings. A strong believer in independence, Djubelly had been among Gossanah villagers detained and roughed up by French troops looking for the cave. After the troops’ assault, he and twenty-eight others were jailed for several months in Paris without trial.

When Tjibaou came to Ouvéa on the first anniversary of the cave attack to speak at the burial site of the nineteen Kanaks, Djubelly stepped forward, shouted, “Long live Kanaky! Long live independence!” then pulled out a pistol and shot dead the former priest and his deputy, Yeiwéné Yeiwéné. A bodyguard then fatally shot their assailant too.

Walking through Gossanah, Wea and I came to a small, tiered garden with walls of coral rock that turned out to be Djubelly’s grave. Back in Nouméa, his victim, Tjibaou, is venerated as a kind of Gandhi or Mandela of the Pacific, and an Oceanic cultural centre designed by Renzo Piano is named after him. I asked Charles how his uncle’s reputation stands now.

His answer shocked me. “A lot of people think he was right,” the Kanak diplomat said. “They are saying: after more than thirty years of talk, where have we got?” Shocking it might have been, but his answer chimed with the sense that the politics of New Caledonia have come in a grand circle since 1987, with an increasing risk of an explosion like the Ouvéa cave drama.

When the time came for the series of three independence referendums promised in the Nouméa Accord, the French government was back in the hands of a conservative president, Emmanuel Macron. Like his predecessors, left and right, Macron was against giving the Kanaks any more voting weight than other French citizens, though the accord had “frozen” the electoral roll at 1998 to keep out later immigrants.

In the first referendum, in 2018, the vote for independence was 43 per cent. By the second, in 2020, it had grown to 47 per cent. The third vote was looming as a close-run thing at the end of 2021. Then, in September that year, Covid-19’s Delta variant swept through New Caledonia, quickly infecting over 13,000 of its 270,000 people. More than 280 of them died, about 60 per cent of them Kanaks.

With its communities having embarked on the customary year of mourning, the Kanak parties begged for the referendum to be postponed for a year. Quarantine restrictions limited movement, adding to the disadvantages faced by Kanak parties campaigning with village meetings while the urbanised loyalists could rely on the internet.

Macron, for his part, was facing his first re-election test in April 2022. His competition came from the further right, notably Marine Le Pen. He needed a boost for French national pride, especially after Scott Morrison delivered his humiliating submarine decision in September 2021.

When he and territories minister Sébastien Lecornu insisted the New Caledonia vote go ahead, the Kanak parties decided on a boycott. Participation fell from around 86 per cent in the earlier two independence votes to 43.9 per cent, with the non-voters concentrated in Kanak regions. Of those who voted, 96.5 per cent chose No and only 3.5 per cent Yes.

The result was immediately declared “null and void” by the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a forum of Vanuatu, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. The Pacific Islands Forum — a wider regional grouping that includes Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian states as well as Australia and New Zealand — was more diplomatic: the boycott needed to be considered in “the contextual consideration and analysis of the result.”

Unfazed, Macron declared that “France is more beautiful because New Caledonia decided to stay.” Local opponents of independence were also jubilant. “Tonight we are French and we will stay that way. It’s no longer negotiable,” said fervent loyalist Sonia Backès, president of the Southern Province region. To her, the Nouméa Accord was defunct, allowing the electoral rolls to be thrown open to more recent arrivals and special economic support for Kanak-dominated regions to be wound up.

Macron echoed these sentiments when he visited New Caledonia in July this year accompanied by a squadron of Rafale fighters and their air refuellers and transports designed to demonstrate France’s ability to swing military power into the Pacific. New Caledonia was French because it had chosen to be French in three referendums, he told a crowd of 10,000 tricolour-waving Europeans and Polynesians in Nouméa’s Place des Cocotiers.

Now the next stage of economic development could begin, he said, transforming locally mined nickel into a low-cost green-energy industry and expanding agriculture. The voice of France would resonate across the Indo-Pacific, boosted by a new military academy in the territory for the region’s armed forces. “If independence is to choose tomorrow to have a Chinese base, here, or be dependent on other fleets, good luck!” he declared.

On the political future, he invited loyalists and independence parties to a trilateral dialogue, mentioning more than once that the freeze on the electoral roll had always been “transitional” and had led to “exclusions and frustrations.” He had already inducted Backès into government as a junior minister, responsible for citizenship.

Macron then travelled on to Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, where he declared France was an “enhancer of sovereignty” for Pacific island nations, helping protect them against a “new imperialism.” The ironies were not lost on his audiences.

Kanak and loyalist parties were back in Paris for those talks last month, and will continue negotiating in Nouméa later this month. In Paris, Macron’s prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, now presiding over a minority government, put forward what was described, strangely, as a document martyr, a paper to be chewed over and torn apart before taking any final form.

On the critical question of electoral eligibility, the new external territories minister, Gérald Darmanin, revealed voters in territorial and regional elections would need to have been born in New Caledonia or resident for ten years. Whether or not the pro-independence alliance, FLNKS, agreed, the electoral roll would be “unfrozen” in this way before provincial elections due by May 2024.

Questions of self-determination, meanwhile, would be deferred for at least “two generations” from a new accord, Darmanin said — probably about sixty years. “There is no longer a sword of Damocles,” he added, although only the loyalists had felt thus threatened.

Aside from the backlash among Melanesian countries, Macron’s decision is seen as folly by some seasoned observers in New Caledonia, and appears likely to raise tensions and threaten unrest. Mathias Chauchat, a public law professor at the University of New Caledonia, says Macron is being likened to Bonaparte, who listened to no advice, even from his own ambassadors. “The French politicians are living in the past, in the 1960s,” he tells me. “I don’t understand it. It’s crazy. France is not a modern state like the other democracies.”

Others I spoke to wondered if the Kanak leadership would have the stomach to abandon their comfortable positions, as Macron is gambling they won’t. But being ousted after the electoral roll changes could harden their attitude. A return to violent protest was likely, and could happen without much warning. Chauchat shares those fears. “If you lose the majority, you have to go on the street, the terrain,” he says. “It would lead to unrest.”

I recount the remark Charles Wea had made at his uncle’s grave to Patrice Godin, a social anthropologist who has studied and lived among the Kanaks for decades. For Godin, Wea’s remark reinforces the risks of changing the electoral system to make any real decolonisation unimaginable for a long time.

“When political negotiations fail, it is not the most open and moderate leaders who prevail, but the most radical,” says Godin. “One wonders whether the French government is aware of this. I am currently sensing great concern among Kanak elected representatives and political decision-makers. If they fail to change the government’s policy, they know that their activists, their voters and the majority of the Kanak population will withdraw their support.”

These leaders are already facing a great deal of criticism, he adds. “If the government doesn’t listen to them, it will contribute to the rise of a new generation of Kanak politicians who will be less conciliatory than those they are discussing with today. This may take time, but it is inevitable. Kanak demands are too far advanced for the movement to die out.”

True, Godin says, the thirty-five years since the Matignon Accord have changed the Kanak people and their way of life, producing more graduates, managers and intellectuals. “But this evolution has in no way altered the Kanak desire for decolonisation. Quite the contrary, as shown by the results of the three referendum consultations on the way out of the Nouméa Accord. We might even say that this desire is more considered and it is a result of the changes that have taken place.”

The nationalist idea has matured to the point where the Union Calédonienne’s Daniel Goa and some other Kanak leaders are talking of “interdependence” with France following a transfer of sovereignty, an arrangement that recalls the pacts of free association the Cook Islands have with New Zealand or the Marianas with the United States.

While full independence was “false gold” for the Kanak parties, “it’s very difficult for them to ask for an associated state because they think France will lie to them,” Chauchat says. “There is no trust between the current French government and the Kanaks. If you want an agreement, you need trust first.”

Such an idea was proposed by Mitterrand’s high commissioner in Nouméa, Edgard Pisani, during the 1987–88 troubles, and would achieve decolonisation while maintaining French military bases. (The Kanak parties have no interest in building their own military.) But the option has since been studiously ignored by Paris, perhaps because it might win local support.

“There is no other solution, and definitely no solution in France,” says Chauchat, adding: “France never honours its words. It has always failed in its decolonisation processes… It will end in tragedy like everywhere.” The best option now for the Kanaks is to prevent the opening up of the electoral roll and keep the dream of independence alive, he says. “We have to wait.”

Macron still needs to persuade New Caledonia’s parties to agree to his new plan, and then his minority government must win a 60 per cent vote of approval from a joint sitting of the national assembly and senate to amend the French constitution, into which the Nouméa Accord is written. He is hoping his show of French force against China will win regional sympathy, which seems unlikely. The island states have no particular liking for China, but they will take its money and projects, and they will use its perceived threat to get more out of the other powers.

“If, as President Macron claims, France’s project is to contribute to the creation of an Indo-Pacific axis to stem Chinese expansion in the region, it will have to be admitted into the club of states of the region,” Godin says. “For the moment, this is proving difficult. The small island states see France as it is in the region, one of the last old-style colonial powers. All these countries are in favour of New Caledonian independence, and more or less openly support Kanak nationalist claims.”

France lacks the resources for a region-wide aid and development effort. And the United States and its allies need the support of the island states against Chinese coercion. “From this point of view, France is more of a pebble in their shoe than a reliable and legitimate ally,” says Godin. “By clinging to the last shreds of its colonial past, France is in fact a cumbersome ally.”

Still, Macron’s ambition, recalling Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, has its fans. Many Australians sympathise with Macron over the submarine affair and appreciate the way he called out Morrison as a liar. Richard Marles, the defence minister, is said to have struck a rapport with his French counterpart, Sébastien Lecornu, the same man who as territories minister helped push through the third referendum in New Caledonia. Marles is due in Nouméa in December for a gathering of Pacific defence ministers hosted by Lecornu.

Potentially complicating Australia’s approach was foreign minister Penny Wong’s appointment in March of Australia’s first ambassador for First Nations people, Justin Mohamed. The ambassador’s office, she said, “enables deep engagement with many of our closest partners including the Pacific family” and embeds Indigenous perspectives in Australian foreign policy.

Yet when she visited New Caledonia in April, Wong failed to acknowledge that the Kanaks — who were the first to settle its islands some 3000 years ago and now make up 42 per cent of the population (with Europeans accounting for 24 per cent, according to the most recent census, in 2019) — should be accorded a special right of decolonisation. “Institutional arrangements in New Caledonia are a matter for the people of New Caledonia and the French state,” was as far as she went, while repeatedly praising the French contribution to “security and prosperity in the Pacific.”

Of course, if Wong does want to raise the First Nations angle at some point — always difficult given Australia’s history — a No majority in our own referendum this month won’t help.

Meanwhile, though, pro-French loyalists are losing ground overall in the Pacific. In French Polynesia, the independence party led by veteran nuclear-testing opponent Oscar Temaru has won a majority in the assembly and now leads an autonomous government. In New Caledonia, a Kanak has just won a seat in the French senate for the first time after a vote-swapping deal with a dissident loyalist who beat Backès for the other seat. Every year recently, about 2000 white residents pack up and leave, gradually shifting the demographics, and métissage (intermarriage) between Kanaks and Polynesian migrants is on the rise.

Bonapartist or Gaullist, Macron is unheeding. His policies could well be driving New Caledonia back to the tense days of the 1980s, a condition of civil war. Younger Kanaks may see violence as a way of speeding up the French exodus. “Emmanuel Macron seems to be blinded by his ambitions for France and to understand nothing of what is happening today in New Caledonia and in the Pacific,” says Patrice Godin. “I still want to believe that it’s not too late to wake up.” •

The post France’s stubborn grip appeared first on Inside Story.

That triumph, and Pétain’s subsequent success in controlling a mutiny among his troops, gained him considerable prominence. He was named Marshal, a rarely awarded honorific title rather than a formal military title, in 1918. Commander-in-chief of the French army in the interwar years, he twice served briefly as war minister before being appointed ambassador to General Franco’s Spain. He was recalled to Paris in 1940 to take up the position of defence minister but quickly found himself leading the wartime government.

It was this government that would notoriously suspend the French constitution, dissolve parliament and grant him plenipotentiary powers as head of state. In this capacity, Pétain signed an armistice with the Nazi invaders and initiated a policy of collaboration. Three-fifths of France was occupied from 1940 until 1942, then the whole territory. For his role, Pétain was tried in 1945 for treason.

Why was this eighty-four-year-old military figure, effectively a political novice, appointed to the top job? Historian Julian Jackson considers this question early in his new book, France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain. An authority on mid-twentieth-century France, Jackson’s best-known books include France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (2001), The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (2003) and A Certain Idea of France: A Life of Charles de Gaulle (2018).

The urgent need for a new prime minister arose from the rout of the French army by the Germans and the growing political pressure for a settlement with the invading forces. Paul Reynaud, France’s president at the time, “lacked the authority” to resist the push for an armistice, writes Jackson, and when it came to naming a new prime minister the choice was between two generals anxious to settle with the Germans.

Of the two, Maxime Weygand, now the army’s commander-in-chief, was a monarchist and therefore unacceptable to Reynaud. Pétain, meanwhile, “had never been associated with disloyalty to Republican governments.” Pétain was also “revered,” writes Jackson, prudent in his associates, and considered a humane commander.

Harbouring political ambitions, Pétain had “kept in touch with events in Paris” while in Spain; and it was the “impending catastrophe of defeat” by the German army that “gave him his opportunity.” Rumours of a Pétain government had spread during the final years of Reynaud’s presidency, and Pétain had been accused of participating in a plot to achieve this end.

Appointed to form a government on 16 June, Pétain was not granted full powers until 10 July, when parliament reconvened in the central French town of Vichy. “The very next day,” writes Jackson, “Pétain issued a series of ‘constitutional acts’ which effectively made him a dictator and put Parliament into abeyance.”

Tellingly, Pétain had topped an opinion poll in 1935 “to discover who would make the most popular dictator for France.” But he had not been the figurehead of a single faction during the 1930s and 1940s. The left had some distrust of him, but generally went along with his image — the aura of military success, the handsome looks and noble bearing that “seduced crowds” — until the suspension of the constitution.

“Pétain’s tragedy,” says Jackson, “was to be an unremarkable person who had come to believe in his own myth.” Those who didn’t believe the myth were the most cynical of his supporters. His close aides considered that he was influenced by the last person he spoke to on an issue. Pierre Laval, the government’s most enthusiastic supporter of collaboration with Germany, thought Pétain deserved only to be a bust on a mantelshelf. His vanity and his public persona, in other words, led him to be eminently manipulable. But his position as the head of the regime inevitably made him responsible for its actions.

Kidnapped by the Nazis in August 1944, not long after the Allies began their push into France, Pétain was held in Germany ostensibly for his own protection. Jackson recounts the grimly amusing story of Germany’s pretence of a French “government in exile,” not to mention the absurdity of the behaviour of its members and of Pétain’s eventual “release.” In what his defenders presented as a “gesture of noble heroism,” he insisted on returning to postwar France to defend himself before the French population.

Pétain’s trial was held in 1945, very soon after Germany’s surrender. The war hadn’t yet ended, and Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government was barely a year old. Finding “legally robust procedures” for trials after the liberation was imperative but difficult, Jackson writes. Politicians accused of treason in the prewar Third Republic had been judged by the Senate sitting as a High Court, but “it was not even yet decided whether France would keep the same constitution, and most members of the Senate elected under it had voted Pétain full powers in 1940.” A new High Court was created to try the Vichy leaders.

The reputation of the Paris judiciary had been “severely compromised” during the war. The Bar had been purged of its Jewish members, and its remaining members recused themselves on the grounds that impartiality would be difficult for them. Further complicating the picture, both the judge presiding over the preliminary interrogation and the prosecutor in the trial had “murky” wartime pasts. The former was undistinguished in legal circles and probably out of his depth. The conduct of the trial did not maintain decorum.

And what was Pétain to be tried for? Eventually, he was indicted for signing the armistice, for the constitutional acts that made him a dictator, and for “abominable racial laws.” But no evidence was brought concerning this third matter, and Jackson devotes a whole chapter to “The Absent Jews.” France had to wait until 1995 for Jacques Chirac’s acknowledgement of French responsibility for the deaths of 75,000 Jews.

Pétain was eventually convicted of “collusion with the enemy” — treason, that is. Jackson recounts the trial in detail. He profiles the lawyers, jury members and witnesses, and draws on the court record and other contemporary documents to create a blow-by-blow account of the debates. More horrifying than amusing, the proceedings reveal the judicial chaos of post-liberation France.

But what of Jackson’s title, for which he thanks a friend? Did the court action against Pétain really put France on trial? This is the question that pervaded the trial and pervades the book.

From the moment of liberation, de Gaulle insisted that France was a nation of resisters that had been betrayed, in Jackson’s words, “only by a handful of traitors who needed to be punished.” To understand this belief, we need to remember that the Gaullist resistance was a nationalist movement, and ideologically conservative. We also need to remember that de Gaulle’s principal aim from 1944 on was to have France recognised as a participant in the war effort and accepted among the Allies at the negotiating table for decisions concerning postwar Europe.

Jackson is sympathetic with this account, deeming it “necessary.” But it was necessary only in the relatively short term; in the longer term, it has been a major cause of France’s difficulty in coming to terms with its history. It surely lends respectability to the national nostalgia for a “certain idea of France,” a nation — notably not a “state” — whose “greatness” would rest on its ideological and cultural homogeneity.

As Jackson remarks elsewhere, France’s wartime population consisted of resisters — a small number at the start, more towards the end — a great number of supporters of Pétain and Vichy, and many people on the fence, waiting to see how the cards would fall. Even if attitudes had been more homogeneous, France could not be tried, if only because a criminal trial necessarily focuses on the accused person and his or her intentions, as was reiterated several times during the proceedings.

At the same time, some prominent intellectuals acknowledged at the time that France as a whole shared some responsibility, that “each of us was complicit,” in the words of one. One of the defence lawyers argued that “if Pétain was guilty so were the French — so was France,” thus suggesting the grounds for an exoneration of the accused. But neither the armistice, nor the abuse of the constitution, nor France, nor even the “widely shared complicity” of the French in the actions of Vichy was on trial. Hence the prosecutor’s insistent focus on the person of Pétain.

The title promises more than the book can give. In what sense was this trial a “case” of putting France on trial? Granted, we may be dealing only with a metaphor, but the metaphor is not apt. When the French judge their own actions under Vichy, it is for collaboration in all areas of social and economic policy. But collaboration does not figure in the penal code.

Under an alternative construal, “case” might refer to a case study, and hence to the work of the book itself. Jackson suggests this in the introduction when he tells us that the trial affords an opportunity “to watch the French debating their history.” In this sense, Jackson’s research serves “as an example” to those “future historians” whom the prosecutor invokes as doing a different kind of work from the court’s: “We are not historians,” he insisted to his colleagues.

Importantly, case studies acknowledge the singularity of each case. This is also the task of historical research. It is in these terms that we can identify the achievement of Jackson’s book; it is an admirable narrative history whose accomplishment lies in its detailed scrutiny of the particularities of Pétain’s trial and the specific aftermath of its verdict.

The final part of France on Trial demonstrates the continuity from the anti-republican sentiment of the 1930s, through the Pétain cult of the war years, to the persistence of extreme-right politics in France in the present day. It is not paranoid to trace this continuity as far back as the Dreyfus affair — not only because of the persistence of anti-Semitism but also because the nefarious role of the army was central.

For Jackson, “the Pétain case is closed” because the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen has walked away from her father’s fidelity to Pétain. But her more radical niece has not; and this, together with far-right figure Éric Zemmour’s strident anti-Muslimism, leaves me more sceptical than optimistic. Pétain and Vichy governed France; they have been the names of a long strand in France’s “civil war.” If those names no longer attract a following, so much the better, but their echo persists. •

France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain
By Julian Jackson | Allen Lane | $55 | 480 pages

The post Case closed? appeared first on Inside Story.

Kremer and I met the day after the announcement of the decision to close a daily newspaper published for more than fifty years. Staff were still coming to terms with the news, uncertain whether they would be paid their final wages and benefits.

It’s true that New Caledonia, a French Pacific dependency of 274,000 people, has a vibrant media landscape, with a range of weekly magazines, two TV stations and many commercial radio outlets. But the death of its sole daily newspaper comes at a crucial time, with supporters and opponents of independence debating future relations with France.

Founded in 1971, Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes soon saw off its only daily competitor, the venerable France Australe, which closed its doors after ninety years in 1979. To begin with, the new paper was a partisan broadsheet, promoting the interests of local business owners and campaigning against independence from France. It made little pretence of impartiality during the armed conflict that divided New Caledonia in the mid 1980s, denigrating indigenous Kanak and editorialising in favour of the anti-independence party, Rally for New Caledonia in the Republic.

The paper was bought in 1987 by Groupe Hersant Média, France’s largest media conglomerate at the time. A decade later, after the death of founder Robert Hersant, a financial crisis forced Hersant to sell off many media outlets, including Les Nouvelles, at fire-sale prices. In 2013, three local business figures formed the Melchior Group to take over the paper and affiliated businesses. Melchior’s majority owner was New Caledonian businessman Jacques Jeandot, with mining magnate Charles Montagnat and former supermarket owner Charles Lavoix sharing the remaining 41 per cent.

“Hersant sold the paper for global reasons related to its media group and the great difficulties it was facing in Europe,” explains Kremer. “That wasn’t the case in New Caledonia, where it was making a lot of money. At the time, Mr Jeandot had been considering setting up a newspaper in competition with Les Nouvelles, so he seized the opportunity by investing in the paper.” It was an investment driven by the heart, adds Kremer, who believes Jeandot never made much money from the paper.

The Melchior Group also owned printing presses, a range of giveaway magazines, Les Editions du Caillou publishing house and radio station NRJ-Nouvelle-Calédonie.

From the start, the new owners faced significant competition, including from French government–owned TV and radio stations. Many advertisers moved onto social media, and partisan media organisations received subsidies from the administrations in New Caledonia’s three provinces. A long delay in upgrading the Les Nouvelles website and investing in new technology contributed to a loss of readership.

The Covid-19 pandemic added to the financial pressures. Advertising slumped further and costs rose, prompting a hiring and investment freeze and an effort to reduce expenses by refusing to replace departing staff. Then in late 2022 the company decided to drop the paper’s print edition. It sold off its largest printing presses and went completely online at the end of December, placing a question mark over the future of other Melchior publications, like the weekly Le Gratuit, which used the daily’s print distribution network.

These dramatic changes reverberated across New Caledonia. The rural Northern Province and the outlying Loyalty Islands Province relied on the paper and smaller local media such as Caledonia TV, the monthly magazine Le Pays and occasional newssheets issued by the provincial governments. For Pierre-Chanel Tutugoro, mayor of the east coast town of Ponerihouen, one of Les Nouvelles’s strengths was its local inserts and regular reports from the provinces and rural towns. “For local mayors,” he says, “it was an important way to reach out to the community. Now that’s gone and it’s unfortunate.”

As has happened elsewhere, the rapid spread of smartphone technology has transformed New Caledonia’s media landscape, though unevenly. Nearly half the population can access the web through their mobile phones, but access to quality broadband — and even electricity — varies greatly between urban centres and isolated villages in the central mountain chain and the outer islands, where the population is majority Kanak.

Tutugoro, who is also secretary-general of the largest independence party, Union Calédonienne, believes the decision to halt the print edition undercut the economics of Les Nouvelles. “They went online, but that effectively meant they were giving it away,” he says. “Even in the deep valleys in the mountains near Hienghène or in Ponerihouen where people have 4G, you could get the news each day at 6am. People who had a subscription were sharing the online version on social media.”

The shift to digital-only was too little, too late. On the afternoon of 10 March, less than three months after the print edition closed, Melchior’s owners announced that the company would file for liquidation. Supporters of the group’s 120 employees rallied in front of the Les Nouvelles offices, but the court announced the liquidation of the company a week later.

“It’s a brutal procedure,” the paper’s executive director, Yves Delauw, told local media. “We have to do things very quickly, because we could not make this announcement several weeks in advance and continue working in this context. From the moment the court pronounces the liquidation, everything goes very quickly.”

The thirty-strong branch of the Société des Journalistes at Les Nouvelles deplored “the refusal of management to listen to the proposals and suggestions that we have made in recent years.” Management’s reluctance to take on new journalists and invest in new technology for the digital edition had led, staff believed, to a downward spiral.

While commercial considerations drove the decision, the complex politics of French colonialism was also a factor in the demise of Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes.

In the early years of publication, Les Nouvelles and the French government broadcaster RFO were the main sources of daily news for New Caledonians. Both were fiercely critical of the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, a coalition of pro-independence parties.

In 1985, faced with these dominant conservative voices, the independence movement sought support from trade unions in Australia, New Zealand and various Pacific island nations to establish a community station, Radio Djiido. Together with the short-lived magazine Bwenando, Djiido was the only outlet to provide alternative views during the violent clashes of the 1980s.

Decades later, Radio Djiido still operates on a shoestring, broadcasting news, talkback, feature interviews and music. Commercial radio stations and government broadcaster NC1ère, meanwhile, continue to air more conservative views. Coverage of competing perspectives has certainly improved in recent years, but most media outlets still editorialise against the FLNKS and oppose ending French colonial rule.

“Even though Les Nouvelles was controlled by Mr Jeandot, Mr Lavoix and Mr Montagnat — all businessmen who might be described as loyalists to the French Republic — we remained a neutral newspaper,” says Thierry Kremer. The paper’s openness was its “added value,” he goes on, “but it created problems, in that you need to be aligned to a political group or party in order to receive major subsidies.”

Independence activists don’t agree with that assessment of the paper’s strengths. While journalists like Yann Mainguet sought to maintain comprehensive coverage of statements from FLNKS leaders, many activists scoff at the notion that Les Nouvelles was an impartial voice. They haven’t forgotten the appointment of Fabrice Rouard, a former spin doctor at Noumea Town Hall, a bastion of the loyalist parties, as editor-in-chief in December 2013. Rouard notoriously told staff that the flag of Kanaky, the symbol of the independence movement and the Kanak people, should not appear in photos on the front page of the paper.

“Fundamentally, this country lacks balanced media,” says long-time independence leader Roch Wamytan. “In terms of the written press, it’s completely unbalanced. When you look at Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, you can’t say that it supported us!” In radio, by contrast, he sees more open debate. “We have a radio station that supports independence, and the other parties have stations like RRB. But for newspapers and magazines, there’s no such balance. There are monthly or quarterly newsletters, but the independence movement has never been able to find the finance to create a daily here.”

In his role as president of the Congress, New Caledonia’s legislature, Wamytan quickly issued a statement of concern about the decision to close Les Nouvelles altogether. French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc was more measured: “This emblematic daily newspaper has provided information to the population of New Caledonia for more than half a century. Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes benefited from various assistance to the press, particularly during the Covid pandemic, which, alas, was not enough to maintain activity.”

For staff members like Thierry Kremer, these sentiments provide little comfort. “We didn’t receive any support from the Southern Province, the Northern Province or the Government of New Caledonia, even when we were in some difficulty,” he says. “It is my personal opinion that, for them, it’s not a bad thing that we’ve closed. There are now people speaking out to help us as employees, but they weren’t there when we were in trouble.”

The paper’s journalists express anger or disdain at the muted response of New Caledonia’s political elite. As the Société des Journalistes noted in its formal statement, “The loss of the only daily press title in the country, with an indifferent response from politicians and institutions, is a disaster for democracy, in particular in view of the electoral deadlines awaiting New Caledonians.”

Les Nouvelles’s demise comes at a time when New Caledonians need accurate information more than ever. After three referendums on self-determination between 2018 and 2021, political leaders are now debating whether to replace the 1998 Noumea Accord, an agreement that has governed politics, society and the economy for the past twenty-five years. Time is short to strike a deal before the next provincial and congressional elections, scheduled for May 2024.

Three separate delegations travelled to Paris in mid April for bilateral discussions with French prime minister Élisabeth Borne and interior and overseas minister Gérald Darmanin. Despite the positive dialogue, fundamental differences remain over the way forward.

Embedded in the French constitution, the Noumea Accord can only be changed by a three-fifths majority in a joint meeting of the French National Assembly and the Senate — a level of support that seems unlikely at the moment. President Emmanuel Macron lost his majority in the National Assembly in France’s June 2022 legislative elections. His recent decision to force through changes to pensions and the retirement age has crippled his standing in public opinion polls and eroded his political capital.

The French government has nevertheless proposed a short timetable to agree on a new political statute that would keep New Caledonia within the French Republic. After last month’s talks, the overseas minister will visit Noumea in late May, with Macron following — possibly in July — in the hope of finalising an agreement by September. For the French government, this would open the way for reform of the French constitution in early 2024.

The independence movement, rejecting this timetable, has so far refused to engage in trilateral negotiations with the French state and loyalist anti-independence parties. Union Calédonienne’s Pierre-Chanel Tutugoro says the FLNKS wants Paris to agree to a new treaty and a clear timetable for a transition to an independent and sovereign state.

“Our proposed treaty highlights issues related to interdependence with the French state, during a period of transition after independence,” he said. “This will ensure there is no rupture with France. We’re following in the footsteps set by our forebears, seeking independence with full sovereignty, but with ongoing, albeit different, ties with France.”

Within this complex debate, Tutugoro says the closure of the daily newspaper makes it difficult to share accurate information across the community. “If we do nothing,” he says, “we leave our community at the mercy of social media, where many people get their news. But on social media, there’s not much filtering of ‘fake news’ or political posturing or outright lying — so it’s irresponsible to rely on it.”

Not surprisingly, Thierry Kremer agrees. “I hope that, for New Caledonia’s sake, a daily paper can be revived,” he says. “But would such a paper be as neutral as we were? The problem is that there will soon be provincial elections, which will be very important. I don’t understand why the French government didn’t step in, given the political context and the need to maintain neutral, accurate information in the territory.”

What’s next? The Les Nouvelles website and photo archive are a historical resource that must be preserved, but they are also a valuable asset as the liquidators seek to pay off staff, shareholders and creditors. (Disclosure: as a long-time subscriber to the newspaper I am technically a creditor, though I’m not holding my breath awaiting a small refund for the balance of my annual subscription.)

Les Nouvelles is gone, but in an increasingly polarised political context, new media may yet emerge. Local conservative politicians and business figures are discussing new projects, with conservative magazines like Actu.nc and Demain en Nouvelle-Calédonie looking at the economics of daily publishing.

Last year, businessman and former right-wing politician Didier Leroux made a significant investment in the radio station Océane FM, as the basis of a new TV station. The new channel, dubbed NC9, would likely receive significant financial subsidies from New Caledonia’s Southern Province under its president Sonia Backès, leader of the loyalist bloc in New Caledonia’s Congress.

Backès also serves as citizenship minister in the French government in Paris. With the audiovisual sector under the control of the French state rather than the government of New Caledonia, approval for editorial outlets opposed to independence will likely receive a sympathetic hearing. Commerce and politics are transforming the media landscape. •

The post Death of a newspaper appeared first on Inside Story.

France’s high commissioner to New Caledonia, Patrice Faure, announced last month that the vote would proceed as scheduled on 12 December, despite pleas from Kanak customary and political leaders for a delay until after next year’s French elections. “New Caledonians who wish to go to the polls on 12 December will be able to do so in peace and calm,” said Faure. At town halls and polling booths, they will be able to choose between Yes for independence or No to remain within the French Republic.

Despite this, the independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, and other independence forces have chosen not to participate in this weekend’s referendum. FLNKS spokesperson Daniel Goa has called on all Yes voters to stay at home on Sunday, and “to stay away from the polling booths to avoid any confrontation with people turning out to vote.” The non-participation of many Kanak and other supporters of independence “will obviously result in an overwhelming victory for the No,” says Goa, “in a proportion that will totally discredit the popular consultation.”

The vote is the third in a series under the Noumea Accord, a 1998 agreement between the French government and supporters and opponents of independence. After more than twenty years’ transition involving the devolution of powers from Paris to New Caledonia, the referendums ask, “Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?”

In the first referendum, in November 2018, the Yes campaign won 43 per cent support; in the second, in October 2020, this rose to 46.6 per cent. The FLNKS was hoping for majority support in the third and final vote in late 2022, but France’s rush to hold the vote this week led to their change of policy.

“This referendum is the culmination of the Noumea Accord, the culmination of a decolonisation process,” says Victor Tutugoro, president of Union Progressiste Mélanésienne, or UPM, one of four FLNKS parties. “The FLNKS, as a representative of the indigenous people, the colonised people, has said that the referendum should be delayed and we will not turn out to vote on 12 December. Despite this, the French state has gone ahead to organise the poll without the first people, the colonised people. So who will turn out to vote? People who have never been colonised?”

In a rare sign of unanimity, all pro-independence forces — political parties, trade unions and customary leaders — have formed a joint committee to back the call for non-participation. With the likely absence of tens of thousands of independence voters, Kanak and non-Kanak, the poll has little credibility. It does nothing to resolve the current political impasse that divides supporters and opponents of independence. There’s trouble ahead and the French government is responsible.

Opponents of independence have forged Les Voix du Non — the Voices of No — an alliance of political parties who want to maintain New Caledonia within the French Republic.

“We’re seeking to mobilise people who have voted No in the past, to ensure that they will turn out on the twelfth,” spokesperson Christopher Gygès tells me. The pandemic means “it’s very hard to estimate the likely turnout, even with opinion polling about voting intentions. But we’re getting a feeling about attitudes on the ground, because we’re out and about, talking to people.”

“Our objective — a very ambitious objective — is to maintain the same No vote that we obtained in 2020,” says Thierry Santa, leader of the anti-independence party Rassemblement-Les Républicains. A key member of Les Voix du Non, he served as president of New Caledonia between 2019 and February this year, and remains a member of New Caledonia’s multi-party government under his successor, President Louis Mapou. “But one problem is that some of our supporters, especially those who live deep in the valleys, in the tribes, are unlikely to turn out because of the call from the independence movement. In a small village, they may face some pressure and so they won’t go and vote.”

Complacency also exists among pro-French voters, he adds: “We have tried to maintain our mobilisation, despite the non-participation of independence parties, which means some people think ‘we’ve won, so there’s no need to go and vote!’ At the same time, there is the health crisis which continues to worry sections of the population. So we’ve really been trying to reach out to those people, telling them that they have to get out and vote.”

Like other anti-independence leaders, Santa welcomes greater autonomy from Paris while wanting to retain French sovereignty. “I think that we already have a very great autonomy, and that an ongoing decolonisation process can extend that autonomy within the French Republic, without completely cutting ties with France. This is the basis for the discussion that we will inevitably have, to forge a consensus between us, to recognise the recognition of identity that is at the heart of the independence struggle, even while recognising the diversity of ethnic communities that make up the New Caledonian kaleidoscope.”

The large Wallisian and Futunan community in New Caledonia has historically backed the conservative anti-independence parties, but a new generation of Polynesian voters are more open to engagement with the independence movement. The Eveil Océanien (Pacific Awakening) party, led by Milakulo Tukumuli, has said “No, not now” to independence. But Tukumuli has told members and supporters they can freely decide whether to participate in Sunday’s vote or stay at home. Many people in this islander community, hit hard by a recent wave of Covid-19, have other priorities.

The rush to hold the referendum is polarising the nation. Last April, key independence parties called for the third poll, but wanted it held in late 2022, after the French national elections. The decision on the earlier date of 12 December 2021 was taken by the French government following discussions at a roundtable in Paris last June.

At the time, leaders of the largest pro-independence parties expressed concern at what they described as a “unilateral” decision about the date rather than a consensus of delegates at the roundtable. France’s overseas minister, Sébastien Lecornu, agreed that this was a decision from Paris: “I would like to point out that this date is not the subject of a consensus… It’s an initiative that we are taking within the strict framework of the powers of the French state.”

In the lead-up to the first two votes in 2018 and 2020, former French prime minister Edouard Philippe invested extensive time and effort to forge a consensus over the date, registration of voters and other contested issues. But the French government under his successor Jean Castex has been distracted by wider concerns.

For months, and especially since the latest surge of Covid-19, Kanak customary leaders and independence politicians have called for a delay in the poll until 2022. But the young and ambitious overseas minister has forged ahead, despite warnings and cautions from across the spectrum. The final confirmation of the December date came not from the prime minister but in an offhand statement by high commissioner Faure. “We are shocked that it was the high commissioner who made this announcement, rather than the overseas minister or the prime minister,” UPM’s Victor Tutugoro told me, “because the issue of New Caledonia is their responsibility.”

Many French and New Caledonian commentators have highlighted the ambitions of the thirty-six-year-old Lecornu, who is a fervent supporter of Macron’s LREM party. One Kanak leader told me the minister is “young, ambitious and arrogant — a bad combination in a politician.”

Rassemblement’s Thierry Santa, a pro-French loyalist, is more diplomatic, but notes, “To be honest with you, Minister Lecornu has his own way of working, that involves breaking many of the traditional codes of practice. This has allowed things to move on a bit faster than usual, but it’s also shaken things up and caused some tension. His way of working today is criticised more and more. I agree that there are issues about his level of experience and the need for respect.” Things have moved faster, he adds, “but it’s a problem if this throws up roadblocks… His way of working is now less and less accepted and has created reactions that have stopped things moving forward.”

The rush to the referendum and Lecornu’s “crash through or crash” style has provoked a flood of condemnation from diplomats, academics, Pacific island leaders and other people with a deep knowledge of the French dependency.

Among them is Denise Fisher, a former Australian consul general in Noumea, who has described France’s plan to continue with the December referendum as “the most stunning, the most disappointing and the most consequential decision in the last twenty years.” The refusal to delay the poll “undermines the legitimacy of this decisive vote,” she says.

Vanuatuan prime minister Bob Loughman has called for a delay in the vote, while the five-member Melanesian Spearhead Group, or MSG, has issued a joint statement to the United Nations: “We are deeply concerned, like many New Caledonians, that the prevailing circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic in New Caledonia… does not present a conducive environment for a fair, just, credible, transparent and peaceful conduct of the self-determination referendum.” The MSG warns that “the integrity and credibility of the referendum process and its outcome are seriously at stake.”

This concern is echoed by a group of eminent figures from Polynesia and Micronesia, including former presidents of Kiribati, Palau and Marshall Islands, the outgoing Tuvalu prime minister, a former US congressman from Guahan (Guam) and the outgoing secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum. Through the organisation Pacific Elders Voice they have written to President Macron urging him to “be open to the voice of the leaders of the Kanak people and show consideration and respect for their wishes. We urge this so that the situation does not turn to violence and the dialogue remains open.”

In France, an open letter from sixty-four leading specialists on New Caledonia — historians, anthropologists, researchers and more — questioned the French government’s refusal to delay the vote until 2022: “A self-determination vote in New Caledonia without the Kanaks? It’s not only a political and moral mistake: it is a flashback that evokes the gloomy ‘events’ of 1984–1988 [a period of armed conflict in New Caledonia].” They went on: “We witness with amazement and concern the complete challenge to the 1988 Matignon Accords and the 1998 Noumea Accord which, out of Ouvéa’s ashes, had given rise to immense hope: that of a peaceful and inclusive decolonisation.”

These concerns are echoed by New Caledonian historian Louis-José Barbançon, a leading intellectual among the Caldoche (New Caledonians of European heritage, born and bred in the islands, who often regard with some scorn the “metros” from Paris). Writing in Le Monde, Barbançon says that “in their own country — the only one they have — the Kanak should never be seen as enemies; otherwise, we will always remain in a colonial situation.”

Independence supporters are especially concerned that the French authorities have pressed on with the process in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. New Caledonia avoided large numbers of coronavirus cases for more than eighteen months, but since 6 September there’s been a terrible surge of the Delta variant. The current tally rests at 12,385 cases and 279 deaths in a territory of just 272,000 people.

In this climate, the mood in the towns and tribes is markedly different from the earlier referendum campaigns, which involved large public meetings, street rallies, concerts and other mass events. Today, far fewer flags can be seen — either the blue, white and red French tricolour or the multicoloured flag of Kanaky — and campaigning has been disrupted by a lockdown and declaration of a state of emergency. Even today, with fewer daily cases and the lifting of the state of emergency, large gatherings are still limited until 19 December, curtailing the capacity of political parties to mobilise and enthuse their supporters.

Beyond the FLNKS call for “non-participation,” the lived experience of the pandemic will depress turnout for Sunday’s vote. While people from every community have been affected by Covid-19, the death toll has fallen disproportionately on indigenous Kanak and islanders from the Wallisian community, reflecting disparities in housing, income, and access to information and health services in rural areas and squatter settlements.

The official Institut des Statistiques et Etudes Économiques has confirmed the impact of the pandemic, reporting that “the number of deaths recorded in September 2021, 1.8 times higher than the 2015–2019 average, appears to be quite exceptional.” A recent ISEE bulletin reported, “All causes combined, the municipalities of New Caledonia recorded a total of 310 deaths in September 2021 and 250 deaths the following month.” This is “a 144 per cent increase for September over previous years” and “for October, double the average usually observed.”

With dozens of extended families in mourning, Kanak and islanders face cultural obligations and significant expense to mark the death of loved ones. Many people have little time for the blah, blah, blah of politicians — even for such an important referendum. “We are in national mourning and we are not even out of lockdown,” Basil Citre of the Dynamique Autochtone party told journalists last month. “Talking about politics and referendums when many families are in mourning is not the right option.”

For the French government, the poll will not be invalidated by a low turnout. Voting is not compulsory in France, and national and local elections are often marked by low numbers and abstention.

For Francis Lamy, a councillor of the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, French judicial case law is clear: “A low turnout is not a sign that the ballot is irregular. I remind you that voting is not compulsory in France and that there is no minimum turnout required for this referendum.” Lamy heads the official Control Commission that oversees the vote (alongside electoral observers from the United Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum).

Les Voix du Non’s Christopher Gygès echoes the government view: “We think that a certain number of independence supporters won’t follow the orders issued by their leaders, but even without their participation, the referendum is legitimate.”

This narrow legalism ignores political realities. A decolonisation referendum without participation by most indigenous Kanak — the colonised people — lacks credibility. The two previous polls have been marked by very high turnout (81% in November 2018 and 85.6% in October 2020). This year, the absence of tens of thousands of pro-independence voters will be a blow to the credibility of the outcome — especially as non-participation will likely be highest in Kanak-majority areas in the Northern Province and outlying Loyalty Islands.

The FLNKS and other pro-independence forces have called for “non-participation” in the vote, rather than an “active boycott” that could lead to disruption of polling or clashes with the hundreds of extra soldiers and paramilitary police deployed to New Caledonia in recent weeks. These include fifteen extra squadrons of gendarmes mobiles, amounting to 1100 officers, supported by a small contingent of military personnel on attachment to the police. Paris is dispatching thirty armoured cars and extra helicopters to support this deployment.

The conservative leaders of Les Voix du Non are not expecting serious problems, because of this show of force. “We are confident that the same message is coming from the loyalists and the independence parties: that the process should be peaceful,” says Gygès. “We think it’s helpful that the French state has deployed the ‘forces of order’ to avoid any disruption. At this stage, we’re confident about a smooth running of the referendum and the period afterwards.”

Former president Thierry Santa acknowledges the vast majority of Yes voters will respect the FLNKS watchword on non-participation. “However there will be some who will vote on 12 December, because there is some pressure from the new generation of independence activists, who complain against the elders who are still in positions of power.”

Santa also thinks that Sunday will be calm. “I’m not worried about conflict because I think the term ‘non-participation’ is designed to avoid any disruption,” he tells me. “By saying ‘non-participation’ instead of ‘boycott,’ I think that’s a way of saying they want the referendum to go ahead. So I don’t think that access to the polling booths will be blocked, or the ballot boxes will be smashed with an axe! I’m quite optimistic about the way that the vote will proceed, apart from a few young radicals here or there. Clearly the independence parties are calling for a peaceful process and not an active boycott of the vote. They’re happy for people to go fishing or to their gardens.”

Regardless of the outcome, this week’s vote marks the last referendum under the 1998 agreement known as the Noumea Accord, a decolonisation process that has framed New Caledonia’s politics and economy for more than twenty years.

The French government now proposes replacing the Noumea Accord, which has devolved many powers to its Pacific dependency and restricted voting for local political institutions to indigenous Kanak and long-term New Caledonian citizens. Overseas minister Lecornu has announced that the transition to new governing arrangements must be completed in just eighteen months, by 30 June 2023, to be followed by a vote on a new political statute.

Southern Province president Sonia Backès — leader of the right-wing Les Républicains Calédoniens, or LRC, party — has called for a revision of the clé de repartition (an agreement that divides revenues among New Caledonia’s three provinces). Criticising the FLNKS for its “lack of political courage” in avoiding the vote, Backès wants a new deal to reduce the share of revenue allocated to the Kanak-majority rural provinces.

“With the clé de repartition, it can’t go on as it is,” says Christopher Gygès, a member of the LRC. “While we need to continue development in the Northern Province and the Loyalty Islands Province, it can’t continue to unbalance the South. We’re all united as well on the voting rights and the electoral roll: the ‘frozen’ electoral roll can’t continue as it is. The French state has also written that after the third referendum, the electoral roll can’t remain frozen.”

Such changes to electoral registration for the local provincial assemblies and national Congress would enable more recently arrived residents to vote for the local political institutions. This pressure for thousands of extra French nationals to be added to electoral rolls will be fiercely resisted by the independence movement.

Gygès regards the outcome of Sunday’s vote as a foregone conclusion: “Regardless of the opinion of the independence movement, the people of New Caledonia will have spoken three times to say that New Caledonia should stay within the French Republic. We’re certainly open to dialogue about what should come next, but it’s up to the independence movement to say when they’re ready to talk.”

That clearly won’t be any time soon. Leaders of all the major pro-independence parties issued a statement last week saying bluntly that “the political timetable for discussion imposed by the French state in the aftermath of 12 December 2021 is not ours and only commits them. Therefore, we reserve the right to initiate discussions with the state after consultation with our respective political structures. We also wonder about the legitimacy of the current interlocutors, even though the national elections have not yet occurred.”

Rassemblement’s Thierry Santa agrees that little can be resolved until there’s a new government in Paris: “It’s clear that any future statute for New Caledonia can only be finalised by the new president, the new prime minister and a new overseas minister, who will only be determined as a result of the ballot in the presidential and legislative elections next year. Personally, I don’t think we’ll see a roundtable involving all three partners until after the elections.

“There will be bilateral talks between us and the French state, between the independence leaders and the French state and even between us here in New Caledonia,” he adds. “But I’m convinced there won’t be three-way talks until the new government is in place after the national elections. The current government can’t solve the problems of New Caledonia in the next few months, especially in the middle of an election campaign.”

UPM’s Victor Tutugoro stressed to me: “They just want to talk about yet another statute, for the nth time. We tired of this discussion of statutes — we want our independence. We will challenge this fake referendum, locally and internationally, at the United Nations, calling for a real referendum for the colonised people.”

And Australia’s role? In recent years, France and Australia have strengthened their strategic partnership in the Indo-Pacific region, concerned over rising Chinese influence. But the relationship has been damaged by the recent decision to cancel the $90 billion submarine contract between Australia and the French corporation Naval Group.

As Australia joins Britain and the United States in the new AUKUS strategic partnership, Thierry Santa says, “It’s absolutely certain that the ripping up of the submarine contract by Australia and the United States has influenced France’s attitude towards New Caledonia. I think that for a long time, France was relying heavily on its relationship with Australia to strengthen the Indo-Pacific axis. The fact that Australia has turned its back on the submarine contract has really made France realise that it’s on its own in the Pacific territories.”

With President Macron publicly describing Scott Morrison as a liar, and both France and Australia moving to elections within the next six months, the issue has become highly politicised. As he seeks re-election in April, Macron faces stiff competition from extreme-right figures like Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, and the short-term temptation to act tough — regardless of the long-term interests of New Caledonians — is overwhelming.

Even a loyal supporter of the Republic like Thierry Santa recognises the significance of rushing to a referendum before the French elections.

“The debate over the submarines has focused attention in metropolitan France about the role of the Pacific territories,” Santa says. “This whole issue will be debated during the French presidential elections, requiring President Macron to show to his more nationalist adversaries that he has a commitment to New Caledonia remaining French.”

Facing a massive boycott, Sunday’s vote does not address, but only delays, the resolution of this longstanding issue: will France remain a colonial power into the twenty-first century?

FLNKS leaders continue to stress that the colonised Kanak people have an “innate and active right to self-determination.” In a statement last month, they reaffirmed that the quest for independence will continue: “We reiterate to President Macron and his government our wish to build a new link with France — a link to tie together the French state with a sovereign state, free to co-construct interdependence. But if we absolutely have to choose between our freedom and these relationships, then we will choose our freedom.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

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So what went so terribly wrong? What could possibly explain last week’s sudden and abrupt decision to throw the project overboard and substitute a vague promise of embarking on a new build in two year’s time? Defence analysts increasingly believe the only way to make sense of the move is to see it as the first step in the creation of an independent nuclear deterrent.

The key is in the vessels themselves.

It’s evident the new submarine must offer something pretty special, although there’s been no indication, so far, of exactly what this might be. The public statements have been anodyne, simply emphasising the advantages of nuclear propulsion and building on an existing design. Both points are accurate. Conventional submarines regularly have to “snort,” rising to the surface to take in oxygen and expel contaminants, increasing the risk they’ll be located. Nuclear vessels don’t. They can remain on station for months and possess far greater range than normal subs. There’s much more to it, though, than just this.

These new submarines will be nuclear-powered general-purpose attack submarines, or SSNs. The critical issue is capability. The design that’s been abandoned, the so-called “Attack class,” would have delivered (roughly) 5300 tonne vessels with six torpedo tubes capable of firing Harpoon anti-ship missiles, which have a thirty-four-centimetre diameter and range of about 300 kilometres. At 7400 tonnes, however, the Astute class (on which the new design will be based) is much larger and with size comes huge potential. They carry larger, fifty-two-centimetre diameter silos capable of holding Tomahawk Block IV cruise missiles. As well as accurately hitting a small target (something the size of a house) from more than 1600 kilometres away, the route of these weapons can be changed in flight.

Perhaps most crucially, they can also be fitted with nuclear warheads.

The massive range of the weapon dramatically changes the nature of the boat’s capabilities. Instead of being forced to sail close in, where it becomes vulnerable, the vessel stands off, lurking deep in the ocean well away from land. This submarine represents a sudden escalation in Australia’s strategic capability, which perhaps explains why concern has come not only from China but more particularly from Indonesia and Malaysia. They understand how this decision could change the world.

There are, of course, no current plans to acquire nuclear missiles. Indeed, such a capability hasn’t been mentioned in all the speeches and interviews. But that’s not the point.

What’s relevant is that owning this sort of submarine is a game changer. It opens up options Scott Morrison (and, perhaps more particularly, defence minister Peter Dutton) are well aware of, and are probably seeking.

Perhaps this is the vital background to why the French project was abandoned.

Both weapons systems are potent. But the shift can’t be explained away as simply an acknowledgement that Australia’s submarines need to be nuclear-powered. If this was the only requirement, talks would have already begun with the French, who produce highly sophisticated nuclear vessels. Indeed, we’ve been working hard to convert one of their nuclear subs to a conventionally powered boat, so swapping in a new engine block would have been simple.

The only way to make any sense of the move is to understand it as, quite possibly, the most significant strategic decision Canberra has made since the second world war, wedding the country decisively to a US/UK alliance and catapulting Australia into the ranks of potentially nuclear-armed states.

This also explains the initial silence from navy officers who were surprised — or perhaps stunned is a better word — by Morrison’s out-of-the-blue announcement.

At press conferences like last week’s, viewers would normally expect politicians to be surrounded by a phalanx of uniformed commanders, bedecked with medals. But the military was conspicuous by its absence, underlining the implicit change in the strategic role such vessels might have and lending weight to the thesis that the change originated with the politicians rather than the strategists. Similarly, the lack of a plan to immediately commence work doesn’t sound like the way the navy would initiate work on the submarines. In fact, absolutely nothing other than “scoping” — perhaps another submarine analogy — will be done for at least eighteen months.

The other possibility — one that’s almost too depressing to contemplate — is that Morrison was persuaded to overturn decades of careful defence planning by a couple of determined advocates in his own inner circle of advisers. The remarkable secrecy surrounding this announcement suggests the PM’s office was well aware it faced the danger of significant pushback. Perhaps that’s why the deal was presented as very much a fait accompli. The possibility remains that Morrison has just tossed away billions of dollars and years of research, in return for vague promises of future cooperation on subs that will, inevitably, be built overseas.

The best way to understand what’s happened is to go back to the very beginnings of the fraught program that Defence once labelled SEA 1000: the project to build twelve “regionally superior” conventional submarines in Adelaide. Back in 2009 Kevin Rudd promised (with trademark aplomb, if slightly less engagement with possible realities) to build a fleet that would not merely defend the sea lanes but also provide a foundation for industry and kick-start a vibrant technological and scientific future. What was not to like?

It offered a single, neat solution to a multiplicity of different issues — defence, industrial and intellectual. It was about using knowledge to do things better.

But then, just two years later (and before any work on fleshing out ideas had begun) Rudd was gone, replaced by Julia Gillard. She didn’t hesitate to shelve the project and concentrating instead on budget repair. Then it was Tony Abbott’s turn to move the project forward. He chose to adopt a Japanese design only to have his plan aborted when a Liberal senator from South Australia threatened to vote against the government if the build didn’t remain in Adelaide.

Having caved in, Abbott bequeathed the problem to yet another PM, Malcolm Turnbull. By 2016 the prospect of building a dozen world-leading conventional submarines as a cornerstone of the country’s defence had become deeply problematic but the big difference was Turnbull had an energetic “can do” defence minister in Christopher Pyne.

Pyne engaged again with the original problem, never for a moment doubting that he could pull a solution out of the hat and, if it was one nobody else had thought of, well, so much the better. He looked around again, noticed the French, and liked what he saw. Voilà!

Naval Group — once known as Direction des Constructions Navales — had been around, in one form or another, since Cardinal Richelieu had taken command of France’s shipbuilding policy back in 1624. It had produced France’s ultimate deterrent, when Le Redoutable entered service as a ballistic missile submarine in 1971. It made everything from aircraft carriers to drones and, to Pyne, appeared as reliable as a good glass of fine Bordeaux.

Australia had already dated, and discarded, Japanese, German, and Swedish partners. A second-rate French conventional design — not the one that would be perused by Pyne — had already been ruled out as inadequate. Canberra’s traditional allies, London and Washington, only made nuclear submarines and, as these were out of contention, a flirtation with the French began. Perhaps they would be prepared to convert their nuclear boat to a conventional one?

Of course there would be problems because that’s what relationships are like. But “how hard,” Christopher asked, “how hard could it really be to pull out the nuclear power-plant and slip in a conventional engine?” Naval Group was willing.

There was enthusiasm, excitement, on both sides: a preparedness to experiment and, who knows, even the prospect of a massive breakthrough in submarine technology.

But the detail of the abandoned project reveals much more about Canberra’s incapacity to focus on the future than it does about the failure of a huge company to listen, or the simple preference of the French for a long lunch and fine wine. If this breakdown is the result of a culture clash, well, there were certainly two parties at fault.

It’s difficult to determine the exact moment disillusion entered the union.

Perhaps it was because this was never, really, a partnership of equals. Although both sides — the French builders and the Royal Australian Navy — wanted to end up in what was the same place, there were still fundamental theoretical disagreements about exactly where this might be. The rapid speed of technical progress further complicated issues. A pre-2020s design was attempting to anticipate an operating environment some twenty or thirty years into the future, but the constricting envelope of the submarine meant that difficult decisions needed to be made early in the process.

One simple example was propulsion. Obviously the system would involve some form of battery — but which type? The tested and reliable solution was lead-acid, but new advances in lithium–ion technology looked as if they’d soon offer significant advantages. It wouldn’t be simply possible to rip one type out and replace it with the other, though. The boats’ weight, trim and basic stability would be dramatically altered.

Technical arguments raged over this and other issues, including what used to be called torpedo tubes, or the way missiles would be launched from the vessel. Should these be located forward, in the bow, or would upward, as in the original design, and appropriate for firing a ballistic missile? How many and what size of missile would be stowed?

With limited space available choices like these inevitably affected not merely the capacity of magazines but also the number and type of weapons that could be carried. These questions are critical because they went to the task and possible missions the boats could be sent on. It was a given that there would never be enough space, so what should the room that was available be allocated to? Spare missiles, or room for commando teams and food? Extra diesel, or more batteries?

The real problem was there were no “right” answers, simply choices that would result in different outcomes. Fundamental disagreements were inevitable, and festered until minor cultural difficulties had grown to become seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

The French team felt the Australians were making impossible demands, but they adopted the new requirements and the cost kept growing. The navy felt Naval Group wasn’t listening or working with them to achieve a positive result. Feelers were put out to SAAB Australia, the company that had built the earlier (and initially trouble-plagued) Collins class submarines and was now working on an interim refit of these vessels.

Details of what was happening were scarce — submariners aren’t called the “silent service” for nothing — but it was obvious big issues were in play. The original contract with the French had been broken into different parts precisely so that either side could opt out at fixed points. The conclusion of the design phase appeared to be the obvious point to make the breach final. As that came and went, however, it appeared as if both sides had reconciled their differences and would move forward together.

That was not to be.

On 13 June this year Morrison was in Cornwall, where he’d been invited as a guest to attend a scheduled meeting of G7 leaders. There, beside the sands, Morrison quietly sealed a deal with British PM Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden to scrap the French team’s efforts. Macron was also in town but had no idea a plot was being hatched behind his back to dump Naval.

Exactly what had happened is still obscure. Naval Group makes the damaging charge that it was string along while secret negotiations began with the British, first, and the United States second. They believe Morrison, prodded by new defence minister Peter Dutton, had already made a firm decision to switch builder long before he finally met French president Emmanuel Macron for private talks in Paris on his way home from Britain.

It was all smiles and warmth as the two leaders reviewed ranks of be-plumed soldiers from the steps of the Elysée Palace. Macron even dispensed with the cold elbow-bump and instead pulled the Australian PM into a traditional Gallic embrace. Incredibly, Morrison seems to have said nothing of his plans to his host. If he’d intended to give any hint to Macron that an irreparable breach was imminent, he failed badly. It’s the secrecy accompanying the Australian manoeuvre — together with the way the sudden switch to build a nuclear submarine was announced without any consultation or pre-warning — that’s more than partly responsible for the almost universal negative worldwide reaction.

What changed in Canberra was the political leadership. Morrison didn’t share Turnbull’s appreciation of the French or nuanced understanding of international issues. He and Dutton brought a new determination to make things happen and to do so in their own way. They looked for allies where they were comfortable; they found them in the Anglo-sphere.

The only other alternative is to assume the government really is completely incompetent and has been sold a pup.

This story really ends where it began — in politics, driven by personality.

Sometimes, huge defence industrial projects — like Australia’s attempt to build the best conventional submarine in the world — simply fail. And sometimes there’s more to the story than first appears. Nobody will, or is even likely to provide the full facts in the middle of all the acrimony. All one is left with are questions — but one, in particular, stands out.

After spending massive sums of money attempting to convert a nuclear submarine into a conventional one, if all that was required was a nuclear powered boat, then why not just revert to the original successful French design? What extra oomph did the British vessel (widely believed to be the frontrunner as replacement) offer to make it worth the angst and furore that’s accompanied the decision to scrap the project? Is it really worth a close to $3 billion write-off, simply so we can pay more to get an Anglo design that will probably be built overseas anyway?

This is especially the case when the British boats have been plagued for years with their own technical problems and also suffered (in the case of their first submarine) similarly huge cost blowouts.

Apportioning blame for what’s happened is as pointless as pontificating on the breakdown of a bad marriage. Perhaps, in the end, each partner just wanted something different and it simply took a while to work it out. Maybe in the end there were so many reasons cascading together, large and small, that dissolution became inevitable.

If so, the problem appears to spring from an attitude that seems to encapsulate Scott Morrison’s entire approach to politics. Change partners swiftly, strike and never look back; whether your aim is to become PM or buy a new submarine. By partnering in AUKUS, Australia’s back in an older, much more familiar relationship — and, what’s more, a threesome! What’s not to like about that? It comes with all the excitement and hope that springs from the sudden blooming of a whirlwind romance.

What could possibly go wrong? •

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We know about the bushman’s interest in Balzac, Flaubert and Hugo because it was recorded, no doubt with satisfaction, by Paul Maistre, the French consul in Melbourne at the time. A career diplomat, Maistre dabbled in poetry and cherished his time away from work. In this instance he was using his spare time to explore the region east of Melbourne.

Maistre was one of the figures I encountered after I moved to Australia in 2007 and started reading about the French men and women who had made l’Australie their home (in his case, for nearly twenty years). I read about the peasants who migrated from regions like Aquitaine, the wine growers, the dynasties of wool buyers from Roubaix and Tourcoing, the courtesan-cum-countess who lived on the goldfields, and the cabin boy who lived for seventeen years with an Aboriginal family on the Cape York Peninsula. I was looking for a genealogy of belonging to create a place for myself in this new country.

Some of these people, ordinary and extraordinary, went back to France; others disappeared quickly into the population, leaving only faint traces: an exotic-sounding surname, perhaps, or an intriguing family legend of sometimes dubious aristocratic origins. In all, though, the stories of these migrants never quite crossed over that illusory line that separates strangers, and the French largely remained adjuncts to Australian history.

In my new book, French Connection: Australia’s Cosmopolitan Ambitions, I try to bring the strands together: the bushman and his treasured miniature book, the wool buyers and their families, the migrants who stayed, and a cast of other Australian characters. I do this by focusing not on the French as a migrant group but rather on the idea of Frenchness as performance, a doing rather than a being.

I ask why a connection to France and French culture mattered not only to French migrants but also to colonial Australians, and how they used it in their social lives. Did reading or simply owning a French book make you look chic and worldly? A Parisian dress, sophisticated? I wanted to put my finger on that elusive je ne sais quoi. Could a French connection mean more than personal distinction in a set of settler colonies on the cusp of federation? What role, I wondered, did the French empire in the Pacific play in all this? And what did the French themselves in Australia make of it all?

What struck me most as I dug into the archives was how French culture had, by the nineteenth century, become a global culture that could exist without the French.

As the historian Inga Clendinnen once wrote, “particular cases” are “where the action is.” I focus on those encounters and moments of conflict where different understandings of Frenchness are most salient. And so we start with the Australian artist Norman Lindsay surreptitiously watching two female lovers at Paris’s Olympia Café. We dwell on the decade-long conflict that pitted Melbourne women of the colonial bourgeoisie against the French consul in a battle for control of the Alliance Française, and watch colonial governments trying to demonise French convicts from New Caledonia in the push for federation. And in the end, the book considers the changing nature of an attachment to France for immigrants themselves, as they gradually become Australian.

These interconnected stories are an invitation to consider how Australia has always been fashioned by international influences. I chose to focus on the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century because of the influence those years of national formation continue to have on our national psyche. The “Australian legend” — of white egalitarianism, mateship, irreverence for authority, and the rugged manliness that culminated in the bloody sacrifice at Gallipoli — has become what the historian Pierre Nora calls a lieu de mémoire, or a site of memory, an almost unshakable foundational myth. As a foreigner wanting to belong, the legend did not give me a way in, so I tried to retell the story, looking for other cultural and material ways in which Australia and Australians were connected to the world outside the British empire.

As we continue to struggle with a global pandemic, the temptation for parochial protectionism is strong. But the idea of “Fortress Australia” is nothing new, and now might be the ideal time to reflect on how cosmopolitan our history truly is, and how much we owe to strangers — even the French. •

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Twice this month, large numbers of people have gathered at demonstrations in French Polynesia’s capital Papeete. As they prepare for Macron’s arrival, church and community organisations have joined with the independence party Tāvini Huira’atira nō Te Ao Mäòhi to call for action on the health and environmental consequences of thirty years of atmospheric and underground testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls. Under the banner “Mäòhi Lives Matter!” thousands of people have rallied seeking reparations for people affected by the radioactive fallout that spread across French Polynesia’s five archipelagos.

During a 2016 visit to Tahiti, Macron’s predecessor François Hollande pledged action — still incomplete — on nuclear clean-up and compensation. Now it’s Macron’s turn to make the same pilgrimage. More pledges are expected from the French president, but many locals fear he won’t be able to fulfil his commitments before the next presidential election in April 2022.

To frame the president’s three-day tour of the Marquesas Islands, the Tuamotu archipelago and Tahiti, the French government organised a roundtable on nuclear issues in Paris on 1–2 July. But the idea of discussing nuclear legacies in Paris rather than Papeete raised hackles among nuclear survivors.

The leaders of Moruroa e Tatou, an association uniting Mäòhi workers who staffed the nuclear test sites, announced they would boycott the meeting. They were joined by church leaders and Association 193, an organisation that aids nuclear survivors and educates a younger generation. Reverend François Pihaate, president of the Église Protestante Mäòhi — the largest religious denomination in French Polynesia — joined other Mäòhi leaders to dismiss pledges from François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron.

“It’s always the same song, it’s just the singer that changes,” says Pihaate. “The health and dignity of the Mäòhi people, scarred by these tests, is not negotiable at a roundtable.”

Opposition politicians Gaston Flosse and Oscar Manutahi Temaru — both former presidents of French Polynesia — condemned the roundtable as a stunt. Two of French Polynesia’s deputies in the French National Assembly also refused to attend: Moetai Brotherson of the opposition Tāvini Huira’atira party and Nicole Sanquer of the governing Tapura Huira’atira.

Announcing her boycott just days before the roundtable, Sanquer made clear her disagreement with the leader of her party, French Polynesian president Édouard Fritch. “The delegation organised by President Fritch to participate in this meeting is not representative of our country,” she said in a statement. “The community associations and political movements that have fought for several decades to obtain more truth on this question will not participate, for legitimate reasons that they have already indicated or simply because they haven’t even been invited. It is necessary to state that behind all the speeches and the posturing, little has really changed.”

Moetai Brotherson tells me he was initially undecided about attending. “On the one hand, I don’t usually support a policy of ‘the empty chair,’” he says. “I thought it might be important to be a direct witness of what was happening behind closed doors. But now I’ve seen what happened, I’m so glad I didn’t participate in this farce, with the total lack of respect to the Polynesian people and to the victims of the nuclear tests.”

Despite these criticisms, President Fritch and an eighteen-member delegation attended the roundtable. The Reko Tiko (“speaking the truth”) delegation joined a series of discussions chaired by French health minister Olivier Véran, overseas minister Sébastien Lecornu and Geneviève Darrieussecq, who goes by the impressive title of “Minister Delegate to the Minister of the Armed Forces, in charge of Memory and Veterans.”

The differing perspectives and priorities among participants quickly became clear. The French government may have a minister in charge of memory, but it wants to ignore the passions that still drive the survivors of thirty years of nuclear testing.

French officials briefed the media that the meeting would study the issues “without emotion,” in an “objective” manner. The overseas ministry pledged an open book, proposing “the objective of sharing information without taboos, both on the period of the tests and on the impacts of the bomb in French Polynesia, in a meeting held under the banner of transparency.” The health ministry wanted to develop an up-to-date body of knowledge “because there is a need to rely on scientific knowledge to objectify and reduce uncertainties and misunderstandings.”

While Darrieussecq acknowledged that “we must take responsibility for all the consequences, human, societal, health, environmental and economic,” she said there would be no apology from France. “We are not at all in the business of forgiveness. We are addressing national matters and the construction of our national defence. French Polynesia continues to be an essential link in our military forces today.”

On the sidelines of the meeting, Darrieussecq briefed Agence France-Presse that “there had been no lies by the State.” It is this claim that so annoys most French Polynesians — especially coming from a minister responsible for “memory.”

Even as a loyal supporter of the French Republic, president Édouard Fritch has acknowledged that many politicians lied about the hazards of the testing program. As he told the Assembly of French Polynesia in November 2018, “For thirty years we lied to the people that the tests were clean. We lied. I was part of this gang. Why did we lie when our own leader saw a bomb go off? When you see an atomic bomb go off, I think you realise that it can’t help but hurt. For thirty years we said the truth is ‘it was clean.’ This is the reason why I am investing myself enormously today in this affair, recognising I owe a lot to my people.”

Other Mäòhi recall the silencing of those who dared to challenge the nuclear build-up, including the unjust conviction and exile of Tahitian nationalist Pouvana’a a Oopa in the 1950s, and the 1985 sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, an act of state terrorism that caused the death of Fernando Pereira. Today, in Aotearoa New Zealand and across the region, people have not forgotten: Auckland Museum has just launched an exhibition on “Remembering Moruroa.”

France’s claims of transparency are also belied by the ongoing debate about the declassification of archival documents from the nuclear testing era. For decades, many crucial documents — especially those detailing levels of radioactive contamination — have been inaccessible to independent researchers, medical experts and even the government of French Polynesia.

Darrieussecq pledged after the roundtable that a working group “including a Polynesian representative” would be established in Paris in September to look at how to open up the nuclear archives. “We have nothing to hide,” she added, “apart from information that could be used for weapons proliferation and which endangers the security of France and the world.”

For French Polynesian deputy Moetai Brotherson, this pledge is sleight of hand, given that a longstanding legal case to open up the national archives was already before France’s highest administrative court. “It has nothing to do with the roundtable,” says Brotherson. “This was already in the pipeline, pending at the Conseil d’État.”

At the same time as the roundtable, the Conseil d’État overturned provisions of 2011 legislation that had extended the classification of documents from twenty-five to fifty years, especially those related to national security. One objectionable provision of the law was that any document with a classified stamp had to be restamped “declassified” before it could be released, but that action could only be undertaken by the agency that classified the document in the first place. The fifty-year timeline was measured from the last, not the first, document contained in a file.

Many French historians and researchers remain sceptical that the army and defence ministry will open up their archives in a timely way to fill in the gaps in what’s known about the nuclear program. Will French bureaucrats be eager to reveal the sorry history of public disinformation issued by successive governments over many decades?

This debate over paperwork angers many former Moruroa workers, whose compensation claims are repeatedly rejected because they can’t provide documentary evidence of their work on the test sites. The classification of radiation dose levels makes it hard to prove a connection between their service on Moruroa and current cancers, leukaemia or other health effects.

Debate about the radioactive legacies of French nuclear testing exploded again last March, after the publication of Toxique, a book by investigative journalist Tomas Statius and Sébastien Philippe, a researcher at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. Statius and Philippe analyse more than 2000 documents from the French defence ministry, now made available on the Moruroa Files website. While much of the book draws on work by previous researchers, it re-evaluates the extent of the radioactive contamination between 1966 and 1974. It shows, for example, that the 17 July 1974 test codenamed Centaure spread fallout as far as Tahiti, exposing the 80,000 inhabitants of Papeete to hazardous levels of ionising radiation.

Toxique has caused a stir in France, although the authors were not invited to the recent roundtable to discuss their work. Many people in French Polynesia, however, have been documenting this reality for many years. Before his death in 2017, researcher Bruno Barrillot published a series of books detailing the exposure levels of workers at Moruroa and hazards to communities on neighbouring islands.

Barrillot also served as key technical adviser to a 2005 inquiry into nuclear testing conducted by the Assembly of French Polynesia. This parliamentary commission, chaired by Assembly member Unutea Hirshon, published two volumes of findings the following year that drew on the testimony of nuclear survivors as well as official archives. Hirshon says the inquiry was only possible after the local elections that brought independence leader Oscar Temaru to the presidency in 2004, an era known as the Taui (change).

“A few weeks after we won the elections, I was given the opportunity to preside over the special committee into the consequences of atmospheric nuclear testing,” she recalls. “Because this inquiry was within the parliament, it was very hard for the French or the local authorities to prevent us asking people to testify: whether they were involved at that time, or people from the weather bureau, scientists and specialists.”

The time was right for the inquiry, she adds, because people felt safe to testify. “Many were local people who knew a lot about the testing, but they had been scared. There was like a cloud: ‘You don’t talk!’ So it was during the Taui, this time of change, that we could show there had been impacts on the population and damage to the environment.”

Back in Paris, one of the few positives to come out of the roundtable was a government commitment to increase resources for the Comité d’Indemnisation des Victimes des Essais Nucléaires, or CIVEN, a commission established in 2010 to evaluate compensation claims for civilian and military personnel who staffed the test sites. Over its first five years of operation, CIVEN approved only 2 per cent of claims. Changes to the law since 2017 have improved the compensation process, but political and community leaders in French Polynesia continue to push for further reforms.

In June, Moetai Brotherson put forward draft legislation to the French National Assembly seeking support from Macron’s La République En Marche party to increase funding to French Polynesia’s Caisse de Prévoyance Sociale, or CPS, the fund that provides medical pensions and social security for French Polynesians. Pledges at the July roundtable mean little, he says, alongside the brusque rejection of this legislation.

“I had a law proposal that tried to encompass the main requests from the victims, the associations and our CPS social security system,” says Brotherson. “I worked for two years on this proposal that was presented on 17 June. But of course it was dismissed by the majority here.”

Patrick Galenon, the former CPS chair, joined the Reko Tiko delegation at this month’s roundtable. Speaking to journalists in Paris, he highlighted the striking burden of cancer facing many Polynesians: “According to our CPS data, Polynesian women aged between forty and fifty years old have the highest rate of thyroid cancer in the world.” Back in Tahiti, Galenon says he was disappointed by how the discussions unfolded: “We have provided the French state with a lot of data concerning the situation of CPS, how the twenty-three radiation-induced diseases have cost the community more than eighty billion Pacific francs since 1985.”

Today, the French Polynesian government is seeking reimbursement of this massive A$1 billion cost. Community organisations are also calling for France to fund research into the possible intergenerational impact of radiation on the children and grandchildren of Mäòhi workers who staffed the test sites.

Medical researchers want more resources to track the burden of cancer among French Polynesians. Earlier this year, the French medical research agency Inserm released a major report on the health impacts of the nuclear testing program and called for a more comprehensive cancer register in Tahiti and better documentation of cardiovascular and congenital abnormalities among French Polynesians.

Will President Macron use his visit to recommit to the pledges by successive governments over many years? Moetai Brotherson worries that “the message delivered by Emmanuel Macron when he comes to Tahiti will have very little to do with the Polynesians — in fact, it will have much more to do with the interests of France in the region.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post Macron, memory and Moruroa appeared first on Inside Story.

Under a 1998 agreement known as the Noumea Accord, two referendums have already been held on New Caledonia’s political status. In both cases, a majority of registered voters opposed independence. But the narrow victory for the No vote — 57 to 43 per cent on 4 November 2018 and an even closer 53 to 47 per cent on 4 October 2020 — worried the French government and anti-independence leaders in New Caledonia.

If a majority votes Yes on 12 December, says the French government, local leaders will need to negotiate a new constitution for the independent nation Kanaky New Caledonia, to be put to a popular referendum. But only eighteen months would then be allowed for new agreements on finance, passports, security and other issues between France and the independent state.

A No vote would open the way to a different set of negotiations. The French government proposes replacing the 1998 Noumea Accord, which has devolved many powers to its Pacific dependency. But some local leaders are worried it may unilaterally reform the law that introduced the Accord into the French constitution, rendering unconstitutional the many gains the indigenous Kanak people have made over the past twenty years.

Whether the vote is Yes or No, overseas minister Lecornu says that the transition to new governing arrangements must be complete by 30 June 2023.

While political debate has been intense in New Caledonia, the independence question is exciting little interest in France. Amid austerity, the pandemic and the debate about Europe’s future after Brexit, many ordinary citizens see little point in pumping taxpayers’ money into the network of overseas dependencies that make up the French empire. One opinion poll, taken in late April, shows 66 per cent of those surveyed would support New Caledonia’s “separation” from France. This figure worries anti-independence leaders who say, correctly, that it doesn’t reflect the opinion of French nationals of European heritage living in New Caledonia.

With the second referendum held just eight months ago, calling another vote in December has angered independence leaders, who had proposed that the third poll take place in September or October next year. Anti-independence leaders pushed for the earlier date, believing they can stall the momentum towards independence.

The debate over timing is also driven by domestic French politics. Emmanuel Macron will face off against the extreme right’s Marine Le Pen in next April’s French presidential election. In the second run-off vote, he will desperately need support from centre-right voters and the conservative Les Républicains party. Macron’s own party, La République En Marche, may seek to win friends on the right by promising to back Les Républicains against New Caledonia’s current deputies in the National Assembly — Calédonie ensemble’s Philippe Gomes and Philippe Dunoyer — in next June’s elections for the French legislature.

Over the past two decades, the transition to a new political status for New Caledonia has been monitored by regular meetings of the cross-party Committee of Signatories to the Noumea Accord. But since the first referendum, in 2018, that process has been fraught. With the two votes having raised the stakes, the multi-party government of New Caledonia has often seemed paralysed, unable to agree on key policies and budgets.

Five pro-independence members of the collegial government resigned in February, bringing down president Thierry Santa, leader of the conservative anti-independence alliance Avenir en Confiance. Despite the election of a new eleven-member executive by New Caledonia’s congress in April, Santa has remained caretaker leader because of a dispute over his replacement between the two main pro-independence groups in parliament, UC-FLNKS and Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance.

To break this cycle of mistrust, the young, ambitious Lecornu has promoted informal networks for dialogue. After last year’s conflict over the sale of nickel assets in the Southern Province, Lecornu established the Leprédour group, an irregular meeting of five politicians from anti-independence parties and five from the FLNKS, rather than seeking consensus in the Committee of Signatories.

He then called a meeting of key New Caledonian leaders in Paris between 25 May and 3 June, supposedly for a roundtable discussion but in reality to ram through a series of decisions. Speaking after the meeting, he made clear that the decision to proceed to a referendum this year was made by the French government. “This date is not the subject of a consensus,” he said, “It’s not an agreement. It’s an initiative that we are taking within the strict framework of the powers of the French State.”

Returning to Noumea after the roundtable, Gilbert Tyuiénon, a leading member of the largest independence party, Union Calédonienne, expressed concern that French domestic politics rather than New Caledonian interests were driving the agenda. While he acknowledged that the choice of referendum date is in the hands of the French government, he argued that it had “taken advantage of the constraints of the national electoral calendar, rather than the expectations expressed by the independence movement. The date of 12 December was therefore not the subject of a consensus decision.”

Louis Mapou, a leading independence activist in New Caledonia’s Southern Province and one of two candidates contending for the presidency of New Caledonia, says the rushed timing imposed by the French state is promoting deep anger among grassroots independence supporters. “Our activists are advocating a boycott, because all Kanak say that this is too much of a rush,” said Mapou. “We have long pleaded that the referendum not be held before the end of the year. Can this guarantee that the independence movement will participate? And beyond this, who can guarantee that we in the leadership will be followed?”

When he announced the roundtable in Paris, Lecornu hoped to engage key political leaders across the spectrum. But a number were reluctant to participate, arguing the format would restrict the topics that needed to be discussed. Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance leader Paul Néaoutyine, president of the Northern Province, boycotted the meeting and UNI delegation members Louis Mapou and Victor Tutugoro then refused to attend. Union Calédonienne leaders agreed to travel to France but said they had come to present their point of view, not to negotiate.

Long-time conservative politician Pierre Frogier, New Caledonia’s representative in the French Senate, also declined to participate. He also attacked the “deep state” of French bureaucrats for their lack of interest in the concerns of New Caledonians. His boycott highlights the classic fear among pro-France politicians that sections of the French government are eager to walk away from France’s overseas colonies — a claim that surprises FLNKS leaders who argue, with more evidence, that the opposite is true.

Other politicians — including Milakulo Tukumuli and Vaimua Muliava, leaders of Éveil Océanien — travelled to Paris hoping to participate in the week of meetings. Even though their Wallisian party holds the balance of numbers in New Caledonia’s congress, they were unable to join key meetings. “We did not actually meet the prime minister,” complained Tukumuli, referring to Jean Castex, “quite simply because we did not have an appointment with him.”

Much of the discussion in Paris was framed around an official French government document setting out its views on the legal, constitutional and financial implications of both a Yes and a No vote in a third referendum. A draft of the document was sent confidentially to chosen participants before the meeting, but was quickly leaked to the conservative blog Calédosphere in the hope that elements of France’s response to the vote will scare New Caledonians away from supporting independence.

The leaked draft states, for example: “In the event of independence, as the funding currently granted by the French State becomes null and void, the new State [of Kanaky New Caledonia] will have to mobilise resources to finance its public service and social services. The question of the settlement of financial debts and investments made by the French State, as well as its property and property rights, will also have to be dealt with by the new State.”

It also states that “France does not exercise judicial jurisdiction outside its national territory. In the event of independence, therefore, the judicial system will have to be defined and managed by the new State… In the event of independence of the territory, the overseas tax exemption mechanisms provided for by French law, being reserved for companies present on national territory, will no longer be applicable on the territory of the new State at the end of the transition period.”

The independence movement will shed few tears that the tax lurks and financial subsidies that have benefited a small segment of the European elite in Noumea will be withdrawn. Many Kanak will also welcome the opportunity to reform the judicial and legal system to reflect local realities, replacing the French jurisprudence that has seen indigenous people making up 80 per cent of prisoners in Camp Est, New Caledonia’s main prison. Despite this, French funding for secondary teachers is a major budget item, and there are few Kanak lawyers, doctors and professionals, even after nearly 170 years of colonisation.

The FLNKS has long recognised that a Yes vote will be followed by a transitional period before the new nation can be born. Indeed, an FLNKS policy statement released in 2018 proposed negotiations over finance, technical assistance and security to develop a new relationship with France, but also new agreements on trade and economic support with Australia, New Zealand, the Melanesian Spearhead Group and other neighbours. The decades-long struggle for independence has always been based on the notion that New Caledonia must be better integrated into its regional environment rather than always look to Paris for solutions, even though many of the legal and cultural ties created during the colonial era will persist.

Yet the French government says it will rapidly withdraw funding amounting to more than €1 billion a year, and that future support will be determined only after tough political negotiations. Not surprisingly, anti-independence leaders have seized on the Yes/No document’s tight timeline to argue that New Caledonia will face a fiscal crisis and a collapse of the local bureaucracy before new arrangements are settled.

“Part of the French State’s financial transfers will come to an abrupt end and the other part progressively over time, but in a very short period,” anti-independence leader Sonia Backès told journalists in Paris. “Our degrees will no longer be recognised and it will require lengthy approaches to other countries (France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada…) to have them welcome our students into their countries. Our currency will be devalued: wages may be cut in half.”

Despite the disagreement about the timing of the referendum, Union Calédonienne’s Gilbert Tyuiénon believes the Paris meeting had a number of positive outcomes. The French government made clear the “irreversibility” of the Noumea Accord, he says, “confirming that the accord won’t lead to a political vacuum, whatever the result of the third referendum; that France would not call for the withdrawal of New Caledonia from the list of non-self-governing territories at the United Nations; that an audit of the decolonisation process would be undertaken; that a process involving restrictions on the right to vote would still be possible within the framework of a new agreement; and that a double nationality would be possible for citizens of the future nation.”

The French government also rejected “any form of partition of the country,” he added. For Kanak, the vast majority of the population in the North and Loyalty Islands provinces, this is a welcome response to efforts by some anti-independence leaders to shift more power to the Southern province, in the vain hope that part of the main island might somehow remain a French dependency after independence.

Meanwhile, many New Caledonians will again be making their own calculations about the pros and cons of independence.

A few years ago, I had a long discussion with a French friend about whether he would stay in an independent Kanaky. He gave me a detailed account of the advantages provided by a French passport, with work and education opportunities for his children in Europe and the enormous tax benefits and subsidies that come with living in a French overseas dependency. He had obviously thought a lot about the issue and was reluctant to become a citizen of the new state unless he could also retain French nationality.

The Noumea Accord created a distinct group of New Caledonian citizens — indigenous Kanak and long-term residents — who gain employment rights and can vote for the three provincial assemblies and national congress. (A separate electoral roll with different residency requirements includes New Caledonian citizens seeking to vote in the referendums on self-determination.) But tens of thousands of French nationals living in New Caledonia are ineligible to vote for local political institutions, even though they are enrolled to vote for the French presidency, the National Assembly, the Senate, the European parliament and municipal councils. Anti-independence leaders are pushing for a revision of these voting rights, opening up the local electoral rolls to more French nationals.

The leaked Yes/No report argues that “the restricted, fixed electorate in particular constitutes a restriction that cannot be sustained in its current configuration,” but this push is being fiercely resisted by the independence movement. Many Kanak fear they will be made an even greater minority in their homeland, like Maori in Aotearoa–New Zealand.

Anti-independence leaders are quick to highlight the potential loss of French and EU passports for French nationals who take out citizenship in the new state. “In the event of independence,” says the draft Yes/No report, “nationals of the new State would lose the benefits of European citizenship.” France and the newly independent state might try to negotiate a system of double nationality but “French nationals who have not acquired the nationality of the new State at the same time will also be foreigners in New Caledonia. They will therefore be subject to the law of foreigners determined sovereignly by the new State.”

Some French nationals appear to already be packing their bags. The latest census, in 2019, reported 271,400 inhabitants of New Caledonia, with the population having increased by only 2600 people in the last five years (a much lower number that the period from 2009 to 2014). According to New Caledonia’s official Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies, the decline in the rate of population growth “is mainly explained by an increase in departures, combined with a decrease in arrivals. For the first time since 1983, the migratory balance is negative.”

Many more French nationals are likely to desert New Caledonia if they face losing access to their EU passport and the high salaries and tax benefits that come as a resident of France’s overseas empire. Although the Yes/No report says that, beyond departing French public servants and soldiers, “the number of those leaving is difficult to calculate with precision,” it also claims 10,000 people are certain to leave if independence goes ahead, and “up to 70,000 departures are possible, impacting the labour force, domestic consumption and taxation receipts.”

When Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech on French–Australian relations from the deck of HMAS Canberra in Sydney Harbour in May 2018, he highlighted the potential for an “India–Australia–France axis” in the Indo-Pacific region to help contain China. This re-framing of the Asia-Pacific region as the “Indo-Pacific” has become the new trope as the Biden administration reinforces and expands the US alliance structure in the aftermath of the chaotic Trump era.

With New Caledonia a key pivot point in France’s Indo-Pacific strategy, it’s no surprise that Macron’s administration is encouraging New Caledonian politicians to increase collaboration with Australia and New Zealand. The ANZUS allies now see France as a “democratic, stable and Western power” in the region, and both Canberra and Wellington have given up any public criticism of French colonialism, as they boost defence cooperation.

In Paris last month, overseas minister Lecornu acknowledged that the debate over New Caledonia’s political future is overlaid by geopolitics. The referendum is a time, he said, “when the government looks at what New Caledonia contributes to France. Where we must reflect on France’s ability to be present in the Pacific, where the world is carved up between the USA and China.”

Others were less subtle about playing the China card. “I plan to meet the United States, New Zealand and Australian embassies,” Sonia Backès bluntly remarked en route to Paris last month, “to make them aware of the China threat in the case of independence.”

On 7 June, after visiting the US embassy, Backès met with Australian ambassador Gillian Bird as part of her schedule of meetings with visiting New Caledonian political leaders. A spokesperson from the NZ foreign affairs ministry confirmed that Backès also met with NZ ambassador Jane Coombs, stating that “France remains an important and like-minded partner for New Zealand in the Indo-Pacific region and globally.”

After meetings with prime minister Jean Castex and France’s overseas ministry, some of the New Caledonian delegation also met with the defence ministry and senior military officers to discuss “the role of military forces in the Pacific and the strategic implications of French positioning in the Pacific Ocean and the Indo-Pacific axis.”

The French government claims to take an impartial stand on the outcome of the next referendum. But given the implications for other Pacific dependencies such as French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna and Clipperton Island, it is eager to maintain colonial control in New Caledonia.

Under the Noumea Accord, France retains control of the “sovereign powers” of defence, justice and military security, which has given it increased access to regional security programs through New Caledonia’s membership of the Pacific Islands Forum. But in the absence of a new defence cooperation agreement with an independent Kanaky New Caledonia, the French government is proposing a rapid departure of its military forces in the territory, the Forces Armées de la Nouvelle-Calédonie.

Many Kanak, remembering the role of the French army in the armed clashes of the 1980s and the 1988 Ouvea massacre, would welcome this. But a newly independent government would still need vessels to patrol its fishing grounds and vast exclusive economic zone. Would it seek an extension of French military deployments (as occurred in post-independence Algeria)? Would it look to Australia’s Pacific Maritime Security Program? Or might it perhaps seek support from other partners, in the way Timor-Leste looks to China as well as Australia for patrol boats and security training?

With just six months before the 12 December referendum, there’s no guarantee that the timetable can hold. The FLNKS and other independence forces are discussing the best way to respond to the rushed, unilateral decision on the referendum. The ominous silence of many Kanak leaders should not be taken as consent, and France’s current manoeuvres should worry Australia, New Zealand and other member states of the Pacific Islands Forum. The perception that the French government has broken its word, abandoning a past commitment to forging consensus between supporters and opponents of independence, will have significant repercussions in Melanesian culture.

The decision facing New Caledonians is stark: whether to retain the familiar ties with the French motherland or take a leap into history. The overwhelming majority, both supporters and opponents of independence, have accepted the outcome of the two previous referendums as broadly free and fair. But will they respond in a similar way after this third referendum, if the process has been curtailed to fit in with President Macron’s re-election bid? •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post Third time lucky in New Caledonia? appeared first on Inside Story.

In France itself, of course, the reality was more complex — as was the Le Monde letter itself, which in its less inflammatory sections raised important questions about sex and censorship and the limits of personal testimony. #MeToo is an adaptive phenomenon, moulding itself to local conditions. The French movement against sexual violence continued to grow, extending to high-profile actions against the film and music industries, and to the gay community, with #MeTooGay gathering the testimonials of gay men who had been abused. “New” feminisms emerged, sometimes dismissed along crude generational lines or as American imports. Some issues cut right through the debates, however, namely incest and child sexual abuse, prompting widespread calls for action and a cultural reckoning.

It was against this charged backdrop that Pauline Harmange’s I Hate Men and Vanessa Springora’s Consent: A Memoir were published last year in France. Indeed, Springora’s finely calibrated account of the sexual relationship she’d had when she was fourteen, some thirty-five years earlier, with the fifty-year-old French writer Gabriel Matzneff marked a tipping point. What had once been tacitly accepted now needed to be named for what it was and is, and punished accordingly. Springora was hardly Matzneff’s only victim — he groomed many teenaged girls and boys, and wrote openly about his sexual desire for them. He will be tried in September this year for promoting the sexual abuse of children.

The genesis of I Hate Men is less confronting, but also newsworthy. Harmange, a twentysomething aspiring writer, wrote a blog post flirting with the idea of misandry as a response to feminist burnout. Republished as an essay by a small press, it caught the attention of France’s gender equality minister, Ralph Zurmély. Without having read the book, Zurmély declared it a “sex-based incitement to hatred” and called for it to be banned. Not surprisingly, a mainstream publisher picked up the essay and it became a bestseller, launching Harmange’s career and provoking predictable online harassment and death threats. Zurmély, meanwhile, is no longer gender equality minister.

Both books have now been published in English, each crisply and effectively translated by Natasha Lehrer. They arrive as “French literary sensations,” but beyond a shared historical moment and cultural context, and beyond sharing a translator, these are very different books. Harmange’s polemic is essentially an extended hot take, written in the spirit of the times and the blog format. Easily read in one sitting, the palpably provocative I Hate Men is good fun but hardly incendiary. Its title may bring to the minds of some readers Valerie Solanas’s searing SCUM Manifesto (1967), but while Solanas called for the elimination of men altogether, Harmange is married to one, a situation that allows her to reflect on how loving a man or some men need not preclude “hating men as a social group, and sometimes individual men too.”

Here and there, Harmange dutifully provides statistics about gendered violence and gender inequality at home and at work, but she harbours no pretensions about the depth of her research. The strengths of I Hate Men are in the observations of lived and shared experience and the clarity with which Harmange defines, defends and expands on misandry, as distinct from misogyny and as a potentially galvanising force. She gives short shrift to men who moan about #MeToo and “all this feminist bullshit” and to men who claim to be feminists.

Like many popular feminist books written from the first-person perspective, Harmange doesn’t offer much in the way of feminist strategy other than praising the value of female friendships, including in “book clubs, pyjama parties and girls’ nights out.” I Hate Men, in-your-face title aside, is gateway feminism. As an insight into French feminism, it could come from any vaguely approximate society with a history of white woman–centred feminism.

Springora’s memoir, on the other hand, is a mature work, and marks the literary debut of a talented writer who grew up loving books but turned her back on them in the aftermath of her relationship (for want of a better word) with the famous author, whom she refers to as G.M. when discussing the public figure and G. when describing the controlling and abusive man she came to know. Opening with a reflection on the power and purpose of fairytales, Springora launches her book as an act of revenge and reclamation. The prey will now “ambush” and “ensnare the hunter in his own trap,” the trap being words and books. Like Carmen Maria Machado’s virtuosic memoir of an abusive relationship, In the Dream House (2019), Springora’s book reads as though it has gestated for exactly the right amount of time to produce an instant classic.

Clocking in at less than 200 pages, Consent is both economical and evocative. Springora inducts the reader into her world, aged thirteen, on the precipice of her life-altering first meeting with “G.” at a dinner party. Her parents have split, her father neglectful and mostly absent, her mother loving but distracted. Springora’s sexuality is developing, but she is insecure about her looks and her friendship with her best friend Julien. “All the necessary elements,” she writes, “were now in place.”

Other “necessary elements” included the intellectual circle in which her mother, “a feminist of the May ’68 generation,” moved, if only peripherally, and in which Springora grew up during the 1980s. In this world, G.M. was not only tolerated but venerated. His 1974 essay, Under Sixteen, “a manifesto of sorts calling for the sexual liberation of minors” boosted, rather than undermined, his literary career. A few years later it was G.M. who initiated an open letter in support of the decriminalisation of sexual relations between minors and adults that was published in Le Monde (of course) and signed by intellectual luminaries including Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes. His public and private writings overflowed with details of obsessive love affairs with young girls and sexual encounters with teenage boys in the Philippines. Springora indicts G.’s generation and its version of sexual revolution, as well as the special privileges afforded to writers, noting that apart from artists only Catholic priests have historically been “bestowed such a level of impunity.”

She is unflinching when describing what it was like to be involved with G., including sexually, and she does so with the impeccable pacing of the most gripping fairytales. Eventually the “spell” began to lift, but “no Prince Charming came to my aid to slash through the jungle of creepers that bound me to this kingdom of darkness.” Trying to disentangle herself from G., Springora was a girl alone.

This part of the book is the most haunting. What comes in the aftermath of G. — “the imprint” — is essential to the memoir’s impact, though the force of the narrative in the final sections, mercifully perhaps, dissipates somewhat. Springora’s life eventually moves in a positive direction, but it’s also indelibly marked. A whole other book could have focused on her mother, who endorsed her relationship with G.

Unlike Harmange’s polemic, Springora’s memoir is emphatically French and immediately addressed to that context. On that front, there are signs of change. In the past week, French MPs have voted to back a new law that will set the age of consent at fifteen, a first for the country. Springora’s memoir is an acknowledged influence, but it also has wider resonance. “Silence” has been taken to equal “consent,” she writes in the closing pages, but it is “at last, the turn of the victims to speak out” and break it. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post French sensations appeared first on Inside Story.

The clash on 7 December followed a month of roadblocks and demonstrations across the French Pacific dependency of New Caledonia. The protests were called by the “Usine du Sud = Usine Pays” collective, which unites customary chiefs, environment groups, trade unionists and members of the independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS.

The immediate dispute was over which consortium could bid for the Goro nickel smelter and the other assets of Vale Nouvelle-Calédonie. The company, which began nickel smelting in 2010, is the local subsidiary of the Brazilian corporation Vale, one of the largest mining companies in the world, with interests in logistics, transport, energy and steel making. Vale is pulling out of New Caledonia by year’s end, threatening 3000 jobs.

But the battle over Vale’s assets hides a deeper struggle. Can the local people control New Caledonia’s extensive natural resources, including nearly a quarter of the world’s reserves of nickel, as they move towards a new political status?

Vale’s decision to leave New Caledonia was announced in December 2019, between two referendums on self-determination — the first in November 2018 and the second in October this year. In both cases, a majority of registered voters expressed a desire to remain within the French Republic. But the narrow margin of 57–43 per cent in 2018 and the closer 53–47 vote this year suggest the territory will move to the third and final vote by 2022. As New Caledonians decide on their political future, the independence movement believes that increased local control of the mining sector will help underpin a sovereign and independent nation.

Across Melanesia, recent conflicts in Bougainville, West Papua and New Caledonia have reflected concern about environmental management and the role of transnational resource companies. Mining lies at the heart of the political ecology of these Melanesian dependencies, both as a cause of discontent — about environmental damage and the distribution of financial benefits — and as a resource for economic viability in a postcolonial nation.

Kanak nationalists have learnt many lessons from mining operations elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, Nauru and other independent nations in the region, with their tragic history of environmental damage, tax avoidance and unequal distribution of royalties. Facing off against the French state and transnational mining corporations, they have long sought to add value to the islands’ main resources, nickel ore and other strategic minerals, rather than simply ship them offshore unprocessed.

After New Caledonia’s violent conflict of the 1980s, independence leaders sought to open up the nickel sector to foreign companies. Under the 1969 Billotte laws, France guaranteed an effective monopoly over nickel smelting to the French corporation ERAMET and its local subsidiary Société Le Nickel, which operates the Doniambo smelter in Noumea. The French government used its Strategic Investment Fund to maintain a 25 per cent holding in ERAMET, and has subsidised Société Le Nickel in good times and bad.

In the North Province, where the population is majority indigenous Kanak, the provincial administration established a development arm, the Société de Financement et d’Investissement de la Province Nord, or Sofinor, which purchased the mining company Société Minière du Sud Pacifique, or SMSP, in 1990. Led by local entrepreneur Andre Dang, SMSP has developed new smelting capacity over the past three decades, as well as becoming a major global exporter of nickel.

“We don’t want New Caledonia to end up like Nauru,” Dang told me last year. “They were a world leader in phosphate mining, but they abused it and used it all up. They are a sad country. So our strategy is to add value to the resource, which can generate funds for use in sectors beyond the nickel industry, to benefit the country and future generations.”

New Caledonia’s governing agreement, the May 1998 Noumea Accord, created new political institutions and transferred administrative and legal powers from Paris to the territory, opening the way for re-equilibrage (economic rebalancing) between the wealthy South Province and two rural provinces in the North and the outlying Loyalty Islands.

The Accord could only be signed because contending parties had previously agreed on the préalable minier (mining precondition) posed by the independence movement. The February 1998 Bercy agreement had allowed the transfer of strategic deposits of high-grade nickel ore in the Koniambo Massif to SMSP and Sofinor, opening the way for the US$6 billion Koniambo nickel smelter at Vavouto, in the north of Grande Terre, the main island. Today, this smelter is operated by Koniambo Nickel SAS, or KNS, a joint venture between SMSP and the transnational corporation Glencore. In an unprecedented deal, Dang persuaded the Anglo-Swiss financial conglomerate to grant SMSP 51 per cent controlling interest in KNS, even as Glencore provides finance and technology.

SMSP developed a strategy to raise finance by exporting lower-grade nickel ore to Korea and China through joint ventures over which it had 51 per cent control, keeping higher-grade ore for Koniambo. The company now has two joint ventures with the Korean corporation Posco: one, the Nickel Mining Company, exports tens of thousands of tonnes of ore to Gwangyang in South Korea, for smelting at the other, the Société du Nickel de Nouvelle-Calédonie et Corée.

The next challenge was to export even lower-grade ore to a joint-venture smelter in China. In October 2017, SMSP signed a memorandum of understanding with Yangzhou Yichuan Nickel Industry Co. Ltd. to develop a joint project, once again with a 51 per cent majority for SMSP–Sofinor. Ore exports to China began in 2018, moving beyond traditional markets in Australia and Japan.

Despite technical delays at Koniambo and massive financial inputs, SMSP’s operations in the North can be contrasted with a series of social and environmental disasters at Vale’s Goro plant in the South Province. Since it began production in 2010, the plant’s high-pressure acid-leach technology has generated major environmental problems and the South Province only holds a minority stake in Vale’s operations.

The Goro smelter and Vale’s nickel ore reserves are located in the Kanak customary region of Djubea-Kapumë, which makes up the southernmost portion of Grande Terre. In the two decades since the project was conceived, Vale has engaged in tense struggles with local customary leaders operating through the Rhéébù Nùù committee (“eye of the land” in the local Drubea language), which seeks environmental protection, jobs and opportunities for local subcontractors.

After violent protests in 2006, Vale and Rhéébù Nùù signed a cooperation pact to govern relations with local Kanak tribes. But once operations began, a series of acid spills from the Goro smelter damaged the freshwater ecosystem that provides resources and livelihoods to local villagers. A major leak of acid effluent from Goro in May 2014 sparked violent clashes with unions, neighbouring Kanak tribes and subcontractors, amid calls for the smelter to be closed.

Today, buffeted by these local disputes and the rollercoaster of global nickel prices, Vale wants out.

The value of nickel has fluctuated wildly in the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia initially flooded the market with its reserves, sinking the price on the London Metal Exchange; later, when the booming Chinese economy increased demand, new smelters — including the Koniambo and Goro plants — were set up to ride the wave. But overproduction overlaid by technological delays and financial pressure left KNS, Vale and ERAMET–Société Le Nickel struggling with debt and falling share prices.

All three ventures were looking forward to a bonanza when more nickel will be needed for electric car batteries. But the recent slowdown in China’s growth and the impact of the 2020 pandemic has made it hard to maintain existing markets. Vale was the first to crack, announcing in December last year that it would sell its New Caledonian operations. The sale is being managed by the Rothschild bank, which issued a public offer and called for bids.

Nickel smelting is a specialised industry, and relatively few companies have the technical expertise to run the complex acid-leach technology while meeting environmental standards. With the financialisation of the global economy in recent decades, the nickel industry has become the target for speculators rather than long-established metallurgy companies like France’s ERAMET or Canada’s Inco and Falconbridge.

Because of its use as an alloy and for manufacturing stainless steel, and with demand fuelled by China’s remarkable growth, “nickel has become one of the sexiest metals on the planet,” writes natural resources expert Laurent Châtenay. “It has aroused the interest of a large number of financial mercenaries, who bought out the main gems of this industry (notably Inco and Falconbridge) and contributed to a gradual change in the culture of the nickel industry.” Xstrata, Glencore, Trafigura and other “financial nomads” undermined the industry’s culture, adds Châtenay, “enticed yesterday by the development of China and today by the prospect of the development of the electric battery.”

In April, the North Province’s development arm, Sofinor, announced a preliminary bid for Vale Nouvelle-Calédonie’s assets, in partnership with Korea Zinc. The Korean corporation is one of the world’s leading producers of zinc and other metals, and has extensive industrial experience in hydro-metallurgy. Under the bid, the three provinces would jointly hold a majority shareholding in a new venture, giving control of the smelter to New Caledonia. Some 20,500 hectares of mining titles would be returned to local control, amounting to nearly 8 per cent of the mining area of the territory.

But conservative politicians in Noumea opposed any expansion of Sofinor into the South Province. “This is unfeasible economically and unthinkable politically,” provincial president Sonia Backes, a leader of the anti-independence coalition Avenir en Confiance, told journalists. “Those who propose this have a desire to economically colonise the southern province.”

Vale began discussions with the Australian company New Century Resources, but after widespread local opposition New Century withdrew from talks on 8 September. By then, Vale Nouvelle-Calédonie’s managing director, Antonin Beurrier, had revealed details of Sofinor’s bid, indicated it was not acceptable and sought other partners. He offered exclusive negotiations until 4 December, with the aim of closing the sale in January 2021.

Then, in a late October surprise, Beurrier announced the creation of a new company, Prony Resources Nouvelle-Calédonie. Half of the shares in this entity would be held by New Caledonian interests, while the Swiss commodity trading house Trafigura would hold another quarter. FLNKS leaders were angered that Trafigura would be given priority over the bid from Korea Zinc. “Trafigura is only an intermediary,” said the FLNKS’s Victor Tutugoro. “It’s only interested in buying the smelter and the mining titles in order to resell them when the market for nickel is more active, drawing down the maximum amount of profit.”

Daniel Goa, president of the largest independence party, Union Calédonienne, entered the fray, calling for France to intervene in support of the Sofinor–Korea Zinc project. Nearly 3000 jobs would be saved, he said, “but much more than that” — in the spirit of the Noumea Accord, he asked France to “fulfil its role as a partner, regaining through control of the southern smelter all of the social and environmental impacts that are vital for the future of our country, whatever its political or constitutional future.”

For Goa, Vale’s announced withdrawal is “a triple opportunity” for New Caledonia. “It’s an opportunity to salvage the southern smelter. It’s an opportunity to hold 56 per cent of the capital in the enterprise instead of the current 5 per cent and to do this without becoming indebted. Thirdly, it’s an opportunity that would allow the return of the Goro holdings to the country and to protect its status as metallurgical reserves in a similar manner to the Koniambo reserves.”

In October, leading anti-independence politician Philippe Gomes told me that violent clashes were likely if the sale of Vale’s assets was rushed through without proper consultation. “There is the danger of mobilisation on the ground, something we’ve already lived through in the South,” he said. “I was president of the southern province between 2004 and 2009 when there were violent protests by the Rhéébù Nùù committee. They plundered the site, causing three billion Pacific francs in damage, they destroyed equipment, some fired on police vehicles. These were real clashes and it took hundreds of hours of discussion in order for work to begin again.”

Calling for Vale to reopen dialogue with local Kanak leaders, Gomes stressed that “you just can’t hand over a smelter that’s in the middle of four Kanak tribes, who live through hunting, fishing and agriculture. It just can’t be done and we are saying, hang on, you need to be transparent and open up dialogue. The more people are fearful, the more they will drag their heels.”

To press the case for Vale to delay the sale, customary leaders in the South formed a negotiation structure, the Instance Coutumière Autochtone de Négociation, or ICAN. This body includes the eight high-chieftainships and the customary council of Djubea-Kapumë, together with the Rhéébù Nùù committee. ICAN’s call for protests was echoed by the Usine du Sud = Usine Pays collective.

In early November, Union Calédonienne’s Daniel Goa called on his members to support the protests. As part of the month-long series of protests, rallies and blockades were held in the North, leading to the closure of some municipal services. In the South, protesters gathered outside the Blue House, the imposing headquarters of the South Province on Noumea’s waterfront. At the urging of provincial president Sonia Backes, the police moved in on 17 November, firing tear gas to disperse the crowd. Young protesters hurled stones at the police, then faded away to fight another day.

These actions by indigenous activists were backed by members of the pro-independence trade union confederation USTKE, who launched a series of strategic strikes that disrupted the economy and raised the stakes for president Thierry Santa’s government of New Caledonia.

Christopher Gygès, who is responsible for the economy, trade and finance in the government, expressed reluctance to accept any delay in the sale. “The offer from Sofinor and Korea Zinc has been rejected by Vale and by the Rothschild bank, which is in charge of the negotiations,” he said. “The relentlessness shown by the partisans of this process reveals that it is designed to allow the independence movement to take control of the southern smelter. This is not what one might call a national project.”

Tough words, but the ongoing protests and blockades eventually forced the French government to intervene. On 26 November, France’s overseas minister, Sébastien Lecornu, announced that he would organise a roundtable to discuss the future of the Vale smelter and more broadly the prospects for the nickel sector in New Caledonia. Lecornu stressed that the priorities for the French state include “respect for the law, the protection of employment at the site and the preservation of the environment.”

In a letter replying to Lecornu, Union Calédonienne’s Daniel Goa said that the independence movement would add another priority beyond jobs and the environment: “Respect for the general interests of the Kanak people and New Caledonians more broadly, who today are trying to build a country free from the pangs and torment of colonial dependency.”

The tense debate amplified long-running differences between the conservative party Calédonie Ensemble and the three other anti-independence parties that make up the Avenir en Confiance coalition. Under leader Philippe Gomes, Calédonie Ensemble announced it was open to a visit by technical experts from Korea Zinc to clarify their preliminary bid. Given the difficulties for travel and quarantine during the pandemic, Gomes called for Vale to delay a decision on the sale of its assets until major bidders could present equally detailed submissions.

An initial online discussion with Lecornu was followed by a formal roundtable in Noumea on 3 December, the day before Vale was due to sign an agreement with Trafigura and Prony Resources. After discussions late into the night, the participants agreed to approach Vale to delay the proposed sale to Trafigura, suspend blockades and protests, and allow Sofinor–Korea Zinc to conduct due diligence of Vale’s nickel assets before making a definitive bid.

Within three days of the roundtable, however, stone-throwing youth were again clashing with police at the entrance to the Goro smelter. The French high commission in Noumea ordered riot police to break up any protests, echoing the law-and-order rhetoric of the South Province leadership: “The damage and stone throwing that have caused several injuries in the ranks of the police must be condemned, and those responsible will face the full force of the law.”

In response, French loyalists armed with hunting rifles mounted roadblocks, leading the French authorities to ban the transport or carrying of weapons.

Angering his conservative counterparts, Calédonie Ensemble’s Philippe Gomes joined key FLNKS leaders to write to French president Emmanuel Macron on 6 December, calling on him to intervene and calm rising tensions in the South. On social media, Gomes argued that Vale “was acting like a conqueror, imposing its timetable for the sale between the two referendums. This is unacceptable. For Vale to withdraw is one thing. But setting fire to the country as they leave is another.”

Protests and clashes surged again in Noumea on 7 December. But the culmination of a troubled day came that evening, when Korea Zinc, in a shock decision, formally withdrew its bid. A day later, Vale accepted the offer from Prony Resources and Trafigura.

ICAN vowed to maintain its opposition, worried that when Vale walks away at year’s end, New Caledonians will be left to clean up after the company. “We call on Vale to assume full responsibility for its decision to withdraw from New Caledonia,” said John-Rock Tindao, chair of the Djubea-Kapumë customary council. “This responsibility involves the environment, especially in terms of the acid effluent tailings pond which should not be exposed any longer.” Possible breaches of the dam “could lead to forty-five million tonnes of toxic waste spilling into the lagoon.”

It was one more round in the quest for a sovereign and independent Kanaky-New Caledonia, built on a sound economy. The anger evident in the South has been exacerbated by fighting words on law and order from the authorities, and the deployment of riot police. Government rhetoric about the “independent decisions” of overseas investors won’t calm the growing tension, nor mask the failure of the French state to resolve the crisis. •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post New Caledonia’s triple opportunity appeared first on Inside Story.

This is the second referendum held under the Noumea Accord, an agreement signed in May 1998 by the French government, anti-independence leaders and the independence coalition, Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS.

At a time of economic uncertainty, many voters worry whether it’s the right time for change. But for Kanak leader Paul Néaoutyine, “our accession to sovereignty is inevitable.”

In the lead-up to New Caledonia’s first referendum in November 2018, conservative politicians predicted the independence movement would get only 30 per cent support. In the event, 43 per cent voted in favour of independence, disheartening many opponents of independence and opening the way for this weekend’s referendum.

When I ask Roch Wamytan, speaker of New Caledonia’s Congress, whether the independence movement can win, he responds cautiously. “I am hopeful that we will increase our score,” says the veteran member of the independence party Union Calédonienne. “I’m not sure whether we’ll get more than 50 per cent and may have to wait until the third referendum, but we certainly hope to get a few more percentage points beyond the 43 per cent obtained in 2018. This will strengthen us in the discussions that we will have to undertake with the French state.”

If a majority of voters say Yes on Sunday, the FLNKS has proposed a three-year transition to nationhood. Negotiations with the French government would cover the transfer of sovereign powers such as defence, foreign policy, currency and the justice system; partnerships with France on nationality and dual nationality; membership of the United Nations, the World Bank and other multilateral institutions; and funding to replace the many French public servants who staff the local administration.

If there’s a majority against independence, the status quo is retained, maintaining political structures and legislative powers created under the Noumea Accord. But another No vote opens the way to a third referendum in 2022, and the FLNKS has already stated it will continue down this path to decolonisation.

It was the shock result in the 2018 referendum that led to the formation of a conservative alliance of six anti-independence parties, says Kanak politician Roch Wamytan. Dubbed “The Loyalists,” this coalition wants to roll back the achievements of the Noumea Accord.

“Last time, the anti-independence camp was almost drunk, intoxicated by opinion polls that suggested the No vote could be as high as 75 or 80 per cent,” Wamytan tells me. “But the final result on the night of 4 November 2018 showed quite the contrary.” The debate has sharpened since then, says Wamytan. “This time, the anti-independence groups are more on the offensive.”

Louis Mapou is leader of the Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance, one of two independence groups within New Caledonia’s Congress. He agrees that this year’s debate is more polarised, and dismisses pledges by the French government that they remain impartial above the fray: “As a partner, the French state has become biased in favour of a No vote for the referendum on 4 October.”

Just three months ago, French president Emmanuel Macron reshuffled his cabinet, appointing Jean Castex as his new prime minister. It took Castex until this week to make a parliamentary statement on New Caledonia, stunning supporters and opponents of independence alike with his prolonged display of apparent indifference.

For months, Union Calédonienne president Daniel Goa has been sharply critical of the new French prime minister. “Since his appointment, we have had no discussion, no exchanges,” says Goa. “He is not interested in this territory. President Macron has also sent us a high commissioner who is nothing more than a governor, and who lacks the profile for New Caledonia, which is in a process of emancipation and decolonisation.”

The FLNKS has long provided a framework to calm the often-fractious relationship between its two largest members, Union Calédonienne and the Parti de Libération Kanak. The two parties challenge each other during provincial and municipal elections, but unity has held during the referendum campaign and a number of smaller parties supporting independence have also joined the campaign.

In the lead-up to the 2018 referendum, the left-wing Parti Travailliste and the trade union confederation USTKE advocated “non-participation,” criticising concessions by the FLNKS and arguing that only the colonised Kanak people should vote. This year, however, both the Parti Travailliste and USTKE are calling for a Yes vote, joining with other indigenous activists to form the Mouvement Nationaliste pour la Souveraineté de Kanaky, or MNSK. Although smaller than the FLNKS, the MNSK will mobilise pockets of support among voters who abstained last time in the rural north and Loyalty Islands.

The Parti Travailliste promotes Kanak sovereignty, but founder Louis Kotra Uregei says the objective is “to truly build the case [traditional house] of Kanaky, to welcome all those who have come to live with the Kanak people and become the people of Kanaky. Our struggle is not just for the Kanak, but for all those who have been recognised as ‘the victims of history’ — people who have been in the country for a long time, and who face the same problems as the Kanak face today.”

The 2018 referendum reflected the broad polarisation of New Caledonia’s politics, with most Kanak supporting independence but most non-Kanak communities opposed. The FLNKS must draw support from non-indigenous voters to win the referendum, given the Kanak people only make up 40 per cent of New Caledonia’s population, and a minority of Kanak voters are still reluctant to support independence.

Today, however, there are signs of a shift towards pro-independence sentiment among younger voters, in rural areas, and even among the many islanders who have migrated to New Caledonia from Vanuatu, Tahiti, and Wallis and Futuna.

The creation in March last year of a new political party, Eveil Océanien, highlights the desire to move beyond a Yes/No binary. Drawing support from the large Wallisian and Futunan community — more than eight per cent of the electorate — the new party has created an “islander majority” in Congress by supporting the independence groups in key votes. Last July, for example, EO’s three votes contributed to the re-election of Union Calédonienne politician Roch Wamytan as head of the legislature.

For the first time, Eveil Océanien has said its supporters should decide for themselves whether to vote Yes or No, a significant shift from the historical loyalty to France in the Wallisian community.

Significant cultural and political shifts are also evident in the Northern Province, which has been managed by a pro-independence administration for more than thirty years. Living and working together is slowly changing opinions among Caldoche farmers, descendants of French colonial settlers, who have lived in the north for generations and were bitterly opposed to independence during the conflicts of the 1980s.

In an interview with Le Monde, provincial president Paul Néaoutyine highlighted the economic “rebalancing” in the north created by the Noumea Accord.

Néaoutyine is the long-time leader of the Parti de Libération Kanak and the Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance. He said that his administration is focused on reducing social and economic inequality in the rural north. “In the Northern Province, where I preside, we make sure that the benefit of our political actions goes to these people, and not in the pockets of a privileged minority,” he told the newspaper. “The law prioritising local employment would never have existed without the struggle of the independence movement. But it benefits all the citizens of the country, not only Kanak.”

One key objective of the independence movement since the 1970s has been to break French control over mining and nickel smelting, key sectors in New Caledonia’s economy. For decades, governments in Paris guaranteed a monopoly over smelting to the French corporation ERAMET and its local subsidiary Société Le Nickel, which operates the Doniambo smelter in the capital Noumea.

The signing of the Noumea Accord in May 1998 was preceded by a deal that transferred strategic deposits of high-grade nickel ore to the Northern Province, through its development agency SOFINOR and the SMSP mining company. This opened the way for the construction of a new nickel smelter at Koniambo in the north of the country — a major project that many conservatives predicted would never happen.

Patricia Goa, a key adviser to Paul Néaoutyine and herself a member of the national Congress, lives in the tribe of Baco, outside the provincial capital Koohne. She has seen the rural north transformed by the construction of the smelter in a joint venture between the province, SMSP and the transnational corporation Glencore. She stresses that SOFINOR and SMSP hold 51 per cent control of Koniambo Nickel SAS, an unprecedented deal for a resource project in Melanesia.

“KNS is a major player in the economic rebalancing of our country,” says Goa. “New Caledonia holds one quarter of the world’s nickel and the nickel sector is the largest employer in New Caledonia. But nickel resources are not renewable. We really have to think about how we are working for future generations — that’s what our cultural heritage is saying.”

To add value to New Caledonia’s vast mineral resources, the FLNKS has looked beyond simply exporting ore to traditional markets in France, Japan and Australia. The Northern Province administration has established offshore smelters in South Korea and China, through joint ventures between SMSP and the Korean company Posco and the Chinese corporation Yinchuan.

New Caledonia’s president, Thierry Santa, a leader of the anti-independence Loyalist alliance, recognises that historical differences between elements of the independence movement are being replaced by unity over resources policy. “The attitude taken by Union Calédonienne about control of the minerals sector has sharply radicalised compared to the past,” Santa tells me. “Until now, UC had always been more pragmatic and less doctrinaire. They recognised the necessity of maintaining mining across the territory, and the need for diversity of production — for domestic use, for export, and for use by the overseas smelters. Now we see a united policy from all parts of the independence movement opposed to the export of ore, except to the overseas smelters.”

Among those calling for a Yes vote were hundreds of young demonstrators who marched through central Noumea on 19 September, bearing the multicoloured flag of Kanaky. But the vibrant protest masked a more serious mood among young Kanak, who see training and education as a crucial part of the struggle.

“Even if we are losing our direction, we must continue to go to school to become better trained adults,” twenty-four-year-old Pauline told journalists. “When you have a degree, you have more chance to build our country, to move it forward. You have to be serious. You can’t just go crying ‘Kanaky’ everywhere and expect to change things.”

As hundreds of first-time voters turn out in 2020, it’s worth remembering that the Noumea Accord was signed before they were born. The armed clashes of the mid 1980s are ancient history for voters who have grown up under a multi-party government that includes both supporters and opponents of independence.

Despite this, the 2018 referendum saw a massive turnout of young Kanak voters, and the FLNKS is working hard to mobilise people who are wary of old rivalries among politicians. Last July, FLNKS spokesperson Daniel Goa called for a general mobilisation of all political forces, calling on young people to participate: “Our youth must get involved and be active at local level. It is their fight and it will be their victory.”

Today, as a leading Yes campaigner in the north, Magalie Tingal says the independence movement has been forced to adapt to twenty-first-century realities, using social media and talking to youth who are wary of division within the political elite.

“We can feel on the ground that people want more information,” she says. “There are plenty of young intellectual Kanak who want more and more information about what independence means. Campaigning for independence in this millennium, we use a lot of social media, and even ten years ago we didn’t have that type of campaigning. People are listening but have done their own studies, so we can’t campaign like we did ten years ago.”

She highlights the need to decolonise minds as well as institutions: “Independence is scary for some people here, so we have to educate people through meetings, discussion and information. We are talking about living together.”

This referendum is framed by broader global realities. France has markedly improved its diplomatic relations with neighbouring Pacific states, undercutting historical support for the FLNKS. Australia — as the largest member of the Pacific Islands Forum — has forged a strategic partnership with Paris, seeing France as a bulwark against Chinese influence in the region.

At the same time, the coronavirus pandemic has caused more than 31,000 deaths in France and led to border closures and an economic downturn in New Caledonia. China is New Caledonia’s main export market, but US–China tensions and the global recession create uncertainty in the nickel sector.

The No campaign seeks to roll back many economic, social and political advances created by the Noumea Accord. But the flourishing of bleu-blanc-rouge French flags during their campaign belies the reality that many New Caledonians are looking to regional partners like China, Korea and Australia for trade, tourism and services.

Charles Wea has represented the FLNKS in Australia and says that an independent Kanaky-New Caledonia would maintain ties with France but build new relationships in the Pacific region. “If New Caledonia were to become independent tomorrow, we would establish relations with countries that we share values with,” says Wea. “Secondly, we would build relations with countries where we have economic, political and cultural interests. For example, we already have an offshore smelter in Korea, so that’s the sort of country where we have to establish a bilateral relationship.”

Today, through the Melanesian Spearhead Group and Pacific Islands Forum, New Caledonians have already built new trade and commercial ties to neighbours like Vanuatu and Fiji. The government of New Caledonia has begun to place representatives in French embassies in Canberra, Wellington, Suva, Port Vila and Port Moresby. “For the FLNKS,” says Magalie Tingal, “independence doesn’t mean we close our doors to France or anyone. Independence opens us up to the international stage.”

Patricia Goa agrees that a Yes vote won’t lead to a rupture with France. “I’m not against France,” she says. “I have spoken French since I was six years old, although I have my own language. I breathe French because of colonisation, that’s the fact. I know French history, maybe more than the French themselves. What we are saying is, we’ve come to a stage where the people are asking for sovereignty. What’s wrong with having cooperation with China and others? The difference is, we want to choose that relationship as a free state.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post “Our accession to sovereignty is inevitable” appeared first on Inside Story.

Five weeks earlier, Australia had sent its first diplomat to the Pacific islands seeking information about the level of support for Charles de Gaulle. The London-based Free French leader had called on France’s overseas possessions to rise up against the collaborationist regime led by Marshal Philippe Pétain.

It was a crucial time in the relationship between Australia and one of its closest Pacific neighbours, and this history of mobilising defence and diplomacy against a rising Asian power has echoes today.

The path to war during the 1930s had already transformed colonial relations in the Pacific. Facing US embargoes, Japanese militarists looked south to the oil resources of Southeast Asia and to strategic mineral deposits throughout the Pacific islands. New Caledonia’s massive reserves of nickel were also coveted by Germany, and the Japanese had increased their investment and trade with the French colony. From 1933, the fascist powers even began to manufacture solid nickel coins as a way of stockpiling this crucial resource for arms manufacture.

But Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria and the 1937 Sino-Japanese war raised fears of a wider regional conflict. With war raging in China, anti-fascist trade unionists in Australia blocked shipments of slag metal to Japan in late 1938, to the anger of attorney-general Robert Menzies, known forever after as Pig Iron Bob.

Long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, some French officials in New Caledonia had tried to limit the sale of nickel to Tokyo, fearing it would be onsold to Nazi Germany. By 1940, Australian officials were negotiating with New Caledonia’s largest producer, Société Le Nickel, to purchase nickel as a way of encouraging the French colony to cease exports to Japan.

Australian politicians had been promoting a policy of “strategic denial” in the Pacific since long before Federation. At the start of the second world war, with Britain and France entangled in the European conflict, the Royal Australian Navy needed more information about political developments in strategically important New Caledonia.

Naval historian Ian Pfennigwerth has documented RAN intelligence operations at the time. “Director of Naval Intelligence Rupert Long had organised some human intelligence sources in Noumea,” he writes. “He had arranged to have William Johnston appointed as Admiralty Reporting Officer Noumea on 15 April 1940. He had also organised through Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Denis, the French military commander in Noumea, that a French naval officer would provide the Naval Intelligence Division with intelligence.”

Anxious to get more of its own information independent of the British, the Australian government decided in mid July 1940 to send a French-speaking lawyer, Bertram Ballard, to Noumea to observe and report back.

Eighty years on, Ballard’s successor as Australia’s representative in New Caledonia is consul-general Alison Carrington. Last month she organised a ceremony in Noumea to commemorate the arrival of Australia’s first diplomatic representative in the Pacific islands.

“This year, we’re celebrating eighty years of an official Australian presence here in New Caledonia,” she tells me. “The nomination of Ballard was quite an important moment: it represents our fourth diplomatic mission overseas. Before Noumea, there was only London, Washington and Ottawa.”

Bertram Ballard had previously served as Australian government solicitor in neighbouring New Hebrides (today, the Republic of Vanuatu). The government’s decision to send him to New Caledonia followed Charles de Gaulle’s famous 18 June call for French overseas colonies to rally to a Free France. “New Caledonia hadn’t actually done that,” says Carrington, “so Ballard’s mission was to come to Noumea, report on political and economic matters and basically take the temperature of the place during this time of global upheaval.”

With the Germans having occupied Paris, New Caledonia’s governor, Georges Pélicier, an ageing colonial civil servant, was wavering between supporting the exiled Free French forces or Marshall Pétain’s regime, headquartered in the French spa town of Vichy. The governor angered Gaullist supporters in Noumea when he published Vichy’s new constitutional laws on 29 July.

Pélicier had asked the Vichy regime to send a warship to Noumea, and it deployed the vessel Dumont d’Urville from French Polynesia in late August, commanded by Toussaint de Quièvrecourt. The French aristocrat, a fervent colonialist, reported to Paris that Australia was subsidising local Free French agitators with the objective of annexing New Caledonia.

A month after he arrived in Noumea, Ballard wrote to Canberra reporting that most New Caledonians would “welcome and follow” a governor appointed by de Gaulle. As Alison Carrington explains, until Australia had someone on the ground in Noumea “we weren’t aware of quite the level of support for Free France here. I like to think that having an official representative on the ground at the time contributed in some small way to assisting the decision to send HMAS Adelaide to escort Henri Sautot into New Caledonia, which ultimately led to New Caledonia rallying to Free France.”

Sautot was French resident commissioner in the neighbouring Condominium of the New Hebrides, which had been jointly colonised by France and Britain. With British support, Sautot had rallied French colonists in Port Vila to support the Gaullist cause. After extensive debate, the Australian government decided to transport Sautot to Noumea, deploying HMAS Adelaide as protection.

John Lawrey’s classic study, The Cross of Lorraine in the South Pacific, documents this successful episode of gunboat diplomacy. The Australian warship, under the command of Captain Harry Showers, escorted the Norwegian ship Norden from Port Vila to New Caledonia, with Sautot aboard. Arriving in Noumea early on 19 September, Showers was under orders not to fire unless fired on by the Dumont d’Urville or French army shore batteries. Facing off against the French ship, Sautot was transferred from the Norden onto the Australian warship. A popular uprising was under way onshore.

An uneasy days-long stand-off ended with the Free French forces prevailing under the watchful eye of the RAN warship. Following an unsuccessful revolt by pro-Vichy officers on 23 September, Ballard and Showers convinced Governor Sautot to arrest the remaining pro-Vichy leadership. To forestall any further trouble, Showers drafted a letter for Sautot to send, inviting Dumont d’Urville to depart. The French ship soon left port, carrying pro-Vichy officials to Saigon in French Indo-China.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, an Australian commando company was deployed to New Caledonia to train “native scouts” for a guerilla campaign against an invading Japanese force. From 1942, Noumea was transformed by the influx of tens of thousands of American troops, preparing to fight their way across the Pacific islands towards Japan.

These tumultuous events inspired a young Australian to write his first book. Hailing from the small town of Poowong in the Victorian farming district of Gippsland, Wilfred Burchett visited New Caledonia in 1939 and 1941. He travelled throughout the islands, gathering stories from a range of ordinary people — nickel prospectors and Javanese mine workers, Kanak villagers and French farmers.

Published in 1941 as Pacific Treasure Island, Burchett’s words from eight decades ago still resonate today, as New Caledonia strengthens ties with Australia and the Pacific region. “Whatever the fate of the French empire,” he wrote, “it is certain that relations between New Caledonia and its Pacific neighbours will become ever closer, and it is high time that all we Pacific neighbours began to know each other a little better.”

This perception of Australia and New Caledonia as neighbours was uncommon in the 1940s. Since then, community contacts between the two neighbours have ebbed and flowed through periods of cooperation, exploration and mutual suspicion.

From the mid 1970s, as Papua New Guinea gained independence and ni-Vanuatu battled Britain and France in the New Hebrides, some Australians engaged with Kanak cultural and political activists. Links expanded through unions and ecumenical church networks, regional sporting competitions, cultural exchanges and the thousands of young Australians who travelled to study the French language.

Even before the founding in 1984 of the independence movement Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, Kanak leaders such as Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Yann Céléné Uregei visited Australia to lobby for government support. Between 1984 and 1988, trade unions, churches and community groups supported the Kanak independence struggle through the period of violent clashes known as les évènements.

As New Caledonia descended into armed conflict, friendly relations between Canberra and Paris disintegrated. France’s ties with the Pacific Islands Forum were already strained because of regional opposition to French nuclear testing. The 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior by French intelligence agents and the deployment of thousands of troops to New Caledonia in 1986 won France few friends, in the region or internationally.

Australia reluctantly followed Island Forum countries to support New Caledonia’s return to the UN list of non-self-governing territories in December 1986. In retaliation, France suspended ministerial visits and expelled Australian consul-general John Dauth from Noumea in early 1987.

Those diplomatic dramas are long past. French nuclear testing ended in 1996; two years later, the Noumea Accord mapped a path to possible New Caledonian independence via political devolution. This transformed France’s profile in the region and ties to Australia.

“Today, we have a very good relationship with Australia,” New Caledonia’s president, Thierry Santa, tells me. “We’re developing many commercial activities because we have a good bilateral relationship. As a government, we’ve undertaken a number of visits to Australia, but the economic discussion is happening more at the level of the states. On the health front, Australia remains the primary location for medical evacuations from New Caledonia. In education, we have a number of agreements for students to move in both directions. So relations are really great.”

Over the past decade, even as independence movements in New Caledonia and French Polynesia continue to call for an end to French colonial rule, Paris has improved its diplomatic relations in the islands region. The government of New Caledonia is also basing delegates in French embassies in Canberra, Wellington, Port Vila, Port Moresby and Suva.

A key turning point, according to Australia’s Alison Carrington, was the decision by regional leaders to include the two French dependencies as full members of the Pacific Islands Forum in 2016.

“This decision really marked an evolution of the relationship for these two Pacific territories more broadly in the region,” she says. “This is something that both France and Australia strongly encourage and endorse: the increasing participation of the French Pacific territories in the Pacific region, the neighbourhood we all share.”

The consul-general says she is seeking to expand cooperation with Australia in agriculture, mining services and especially education.

“More and more Australians are aware that New Caledonia is just a stone’s throw from our east coast,” she says. “Because of that geographic proximity, for a long time there’s been a lot of back and forth between Australia and New Caledonia, for holidays, for work or study. New Caledonians young and old have been travelling to Australia to study English, some to do their primary and secondary schooling, many to study at universities in Australia. In the other direction, New Caledonia represents the closest and easily accessible place for Australians to come and enhance their French-language skills.”

Where wealthy New Caledonians once travelled primarily to France for holidays, by 2010 Australia had become their top destination. “There is a strong flow of tourists headed in the direction of Australia,” Carrington acknowledges. “The number of tourists who come from Australia by plane to stay in hotels is a bit smaller, and that is something that New Caledonian authorities seek to grow. But before Covid, we were welcoming around 300,000 Australian tourists a year on cruise ships.”

Trade between Australia and New Caledonia amounted to $721 million in 2018–19. But that year, China was the number one export destination for New Caledonia, with 31.7 per cent of trade, followed by Korea and Japan — rankings that reflect exports of nickel ore and ferronickel metal. Australia had been a primary export market for nickel ore until rogue politician and entrepreneur Clive Palmer closed the Yabulu nickel smelter in Townsville in 2016. By 2018, Australia only ranked number eleven as an export destination, receiving just 1 per cent of New Caledonian exports.

Alison Carrington sees room for more cooperation in mining services: “The technology and services part of the mining sector is an important part of our relationship. We in Australia are world leaders in this sector and have a lot to offer to New Caledonia.”

Despite this, Australia’s overall trade with the Pacific has stagnated, even as China’s has more than doubled over the past decade. In August last year, just weeks after his election as president, Thierry Santa travelled to his first Forum leaders meeting in Funafuti. “When I met prime minister Scott Morrison in Tuvalu,” says Santa, “he was very enthusiastic about us being part of PACER-Plus, the regional trade agreement between Australia, New Zealand and the independent countries of the Pacific. But we’re not really within that framework — we’d rather improve the bilateral relationship.”

At a time of geopolitical tension between China and the United States, regional interventions by Australia and France are increasingly framed by the concept of the “Indo-Pacific.”

“France is a great Indo-Pacific power,” said French president Emmanuel Macron when he visited Australia and New Caledonia in May 2018, “and it has great power in the Indo-Pacific region through its territories New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna and French Polynesia, as well as Mayotte and Reunion.” The 8000 or more French military personnel in the two oceans “project our national defence, our interests, our strategy; the region has more than three quarters of the vast maritime zone that makes us the second-largest maritime power in the world.”

Macron highlighted the strategic importance of both India and Australia, two countries where the French government is actively promoting arms sales. “Our shared priority is to build this strong Indo-Pacific axis to guarantee both our economic and security interests,” he said. “The trilateral dialogue between Australia, India and France has the possibility to play a central role in this.”

At the time, officials argued that continuing French colonial control in New Caledonia was crucial to France’s Indo-Pacific strategy. “In terms of geo-politics,” the Australian Financial Review reported, “losing control over New Caledonia’s foreign affairs and defence would undermine Macron’s strategy, of which Australia is a stated ally, to strengthen or protect France’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region — presumably as a hedge against China.”

During the visit, Macron and then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull signed a new Vision Statement on the Australia–France Relationship, extending two previous intergovernmental agreements on strategic partnership. This relationship is dominated by Australia’s $80 billion submarine technology deal with France’s Naval Group, and other ADF purchases from the arms manufacturer Thales.

After a decade of negotiation, Australia and France also signed a Mutual Logistics Support Agreement in 2018, a deal promoted as “symbolic of the strategic depth and maturity of relations between France and Australia in the field of defence.” The agreement increases intelligence sharing and allows French and Australian naval and air units to use each other’s ports, fuel and logistics in the Pacific.

Alison Carrington sees cooperation between the Australian Defence Force and the Forces Armées de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, or FANC, as a key part of the burgeoning relationship with Paris and Noumea. “Sitting here in Noumea, where the French armed forces are headquartered, this part of the relationship is a really crucial one,” she says. “For a long time, there’s been a good level of cooperation between Australian and French defence forces, preparing for and responding to humanitarian disasters in the region. But I’d say we’ve gone up from a good level to a very good level now.”

Carrington points out that Australia’s chief of the defence force made his first visit to Noumea, with his New Zealand counterpart, in January this year. She also welcomes a new ADF liaison officer, to be based in Noumea later this year. “That person will share their time between the consulate-general and the French armed forces headquarters. That will only further enhance our interoperability.”

“There’s an alignment between Australia’s ‘step-up’ engagement with the Pacific and France’s Indo-Pacific axis strategy,” says Carrington. “Both of us see ourselves committed to security in the region and meeting the security needs of the region. In that sense, France is a very important partner for Australia.”

The closeness of this relationship will be tested, however, in coming years. New Caledonia will hold a referendum on its political future on 4 October. Fearful of upsetting the global security relationship with France, Australian ministers are loath to publicly champion the “right to self-determination” for colonised peoples. But the Kanak independence movement sees status quo definitions of “security” as reinforcing France’s colonial control. The ebb and flow of neighbourly relations will continue to be affected by their call for sovereignty and independence. •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post “Before Noumea, there was only London, Washington and Ottawa” appeared first on Inside Story.

On 4 October, long-term residents of the French Pacific dependency will vote on New Caledonia’s future political status. Despite overwhelming support for independence among the indigenous Kanak people — nearly 40 per cent of the population — most non-Kanak voters want to retain ties with France. In an increasingly polarised debate, supporters and opponents of independence are seeking to mobilise their base, amidst the social and economic crisis caused by the global coronavirus pandemic.

The choice of Parc Brunelet for the rally — a green, open space in the wealthy southern suburbs of the capital, Noumea — was no accident. In the 1970s, conservative politician Jacques Lafleur used the same park to mobilise support for his new anti-independence party, Rassemblement pour la Calédonie dans la Republique. Under Lafleur’s often autocratic leadership, the party was the dominant political force in New Caledonia throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including during the violent clashes of 1984–88 known as Les évènements.

Many conservative politicians look back with longing to that era of right-wing hegemony. Decades later, Lafleur’s Rassemblement party, now led by New Caledonian president Thierry Santa, is just one of a range of conservative, anti-independence parties. This fragmentation on the right reflects widespread uncertainty about the best way to respond to the call for sovereignty from the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, and other pro-independence forces.

In a system without compulsory voting, each campaign must mobilise supporters to turn out to the polls — a process that draws on emotion as well as considered decisions. For this reason, the use of flags has become fraught during the referendum campaign, pitting the bleu-blanc-rouge against the multicoloured flag of Kanaky.

Independence parties unsuccessfully lodged a case before France’s highest administrative court, claiming the partisan use of the French tricolour undercuts the supposed neutrality of the French state during the referendum. For FLNKS spokesperson Daniel Goa, “The use of the French flag is very restricted. Here in New Caledonia, the question is not a choice between France and New Caledonia. It is to prepare for the exit of France.”

Less predictably, Philippe Gomes, leader of the anti-independence Calédonie Ensemble, says that his party’s No to independence “is not a bleu-blanc-rouge No.” Gomes, who represents New Caledonia in the French National Assembly in Paris, says the other anti-independence parties have “bleu-blanc-rouge everywhere” in their campaign materials. “For us, the flag is on the corner of our material, but we’re talking about this country, about New Caledonia. For this reason we couldn’t participate in their radical campaign, that is in part racist, very anti-Islander and very anti-independence. This can’t bring anything good to the country.”

The French state, FLNKS and conservative anti-independence parties reached an agreement known as the Noumea Accord in May 1998, setting out a decolonisation process for New Caledonia. Entrenched in the French Constitution the following year, the Noumea Accord proposed measures of economic and social “rebalancing” and set out a twenty-year transition towards a new political status. After the transfer of legal and administrative powers to local institutions between 1998 and 2018, the colonised Kanak people and other long-term residents of New Caledonia would vote in a referendum on self-determination. Uniquely, the Noumea Accord allowed another two referendums, if a first vote for independence was unsuccessful.

In November 2018, the first referendum under the Noumea Accord posed the question: “Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?” In an unprecedented turnout, 56.7 per cent of voters decided to remain within the French Republic, while 43.3 per cent voted Yes to independence. These bald figures, with a clear majority opposing full sovereignty, suggest a setback for the FLNKS. In reality, the size of the Yes vote surprised most conservative politicians and pundits, who had predicted an overwhelming and strategic defeat for the independence movement.

Today, three anti-independence parties make up the Avenir en Confiance (The Future with Confidence) coalition: Les Républicains Calédoniennes, led by Sonia Backes; Thierry Santa’s Rassemblement—Les Républicains; and the Mouvement Populaire Calédonien, led by Gil Brial. For the 2020 referendum, this coalition has created a new alliance, dubbed “The Loyalists,” with three more smaller parties: Pascal Vittori’s Tous Calédoniens; Nicolas Metzdorf’s Générations NC; and the Rassemblement National (the new name for the extreme right-wing National Front led by French politician Marine Le Pen).

Opponents of independence rally in Parc Brunelet in July displaying France’s bleu-blanc-rouge tricolour. Les Nouvelles Caledoniennes

This unwieldy grouping is united by the goal of boosting the No vote. As President Santa tells me, “Our objective is to improve the tally achieved in the first referendum. Amongst the 33,000 people who didn’t vote last time, the vast majority live in greater Noumea. I think a proportion of these people, who thought the result would be 70/30, didn’t bother to vote. But I think that the result in 2018 really disappointed them, and that will mobilise them to get out and vote the next time.”

On 7 September, The Loyalists alliance released a booklet setting out its vision for the future. Under the influence of Sonia Backes and other conservatives, it proposes policies to roll back advances made by the Kanak people since the 1988 Matignon-Oudinot Agreements and 1998 Noumea Accord.

The Loyalists plan to change the current division of government revenues among New Caledonia’s three provinces, reducing extra funding allocated to the Northern and Loyalty Islands provinces after decades of underdevelopment. Their policy proposes changes to the representation of the two Kanak-majority provinces in the Congress and also membership of the existing collegial, multi-party government that currently includes both supporters and opponents of independence. This change would allow the dominant majority after elections — currently an anti-independence majority — to propose laws to Congress.

The document calls for “dialogue” and “sharing” but promotes policies that will be fiercely resisted by the independence movement, at the ballot box and on the streets.

In spite of this unified statement, significant policy differences still exist within the anti-independence coalition — over nickel exports, the use of indigenous languages in schools and the funding of provincial administrations. But President Santa says it is vital to work together. “The key factor is that we are united and can multiply the number of activities thanks to our alliance,” he says. “We’ll be able to operate at many levels: to mobilise the members of our various parties, and coordinate actions around the country on behalf on one or another group. So I hope that the Loyalist campaign will be more effective than last time.”

Calédonie Ensemble is the only major anti-independence party that has refused to join this alliance. CE dominated local politics for a decade until 2019 provincial elections and is still a significant player: Gomes and fellow CE member Philippe Dunoyer hold New Caledonia’s two seats in the French National Assembly, and CE’s Gerard Poadja sits in the French Senate.

Shocked by the size of the 2018 independence vote, New Caledonia’s non-Kanak electorate punished CE during May 2019 provincial elections. Sonia Backes’s Avenir coalition carried the majority of the European electorate, with campaign meetings featuring the French national anthem and lots of French flags. Wealthy beachside suburbs in Noumea are a bastion of anti-independence support, and during the campaign CE’s Philippe Michel denounced Backes as a “white supremacist from the southern suburbs.”

In March 2020 municipal elections, CE also lost control of its long-term stronghold in the rural town of La Foa, where Philippe Gomes was mayor from 1989 to 2008. To rub salt in the wound, CE was defeated by a breakaway faction — Nicolas Metzdorf’s Générations NC. Metzdorf then took his new party into the Loyalists, stating, “We’re not all best buddies in the Loyalists, but at any given moment, the national interest must come first. We need unity.”

This bad blood is reflected in CE’s decision to run its own No campaign for the October referendum — a division that disappoints President Santa. “I remain convinced that there is no fundamental difference that justifies this parallel process,” he tells me. “When the Loyalist Front launched our social policies, to explain to New Caledonians our vision for the period after the Noumea Accord, we felt that there were many policies that were the same as those presented by Calédonie ensemble. So their claims that we are on a doctrinaire, anti-independence, even racist path, while they are promoting dialogue, negotiation and discussion — well, that’s just the artifice of a politician to justify his decision not to join the Loyalist alliance.”

Not surprisingly, Philippe Gomes says the opposite: “The National Front called for a vote against the Matignon Accords and also against the Noumea Accord. How could we sit around the table with people who have actively opposed the process we’ve undertaken over the last thirty years? We just don’t have the same political beliefs as those people.

“You also have the Avenir en Confiance led by Sonia Backes,” Gomes added. “The last proposal she put forward was for the partition of the country: when the Northern and Loyalty Islands provinces vote Yes for independence, they can become Kanaky while the Southern Province can remain part of France. But for us, the division of the country makes no sense. It is one and indivisible, you can’t cut it up like a sausage!”

In the lead-up to the November 2018 referendum, French prime minister Edouard Philippe and overseas minister Annick Girardin allocated extensive time and political capital to New Caledonia. Wrangling supporters and opponents of independence, Philippe managed to forge a consensus on the date for the referendum, the logistics of polling, who could vote and even the wording of the question.

But Philippe is gone. Just three months before this year’s referendum, Emmanuel Macron reshuffled his cabinet in Paris, appointing Jean Castex as prime minister and Sebastien Lecornu as minister responsible for France’s overseas collectivities.

Louis Mapou, head of the Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance parliamentary group within New Caledonia’s Congress, noted: “Until now, Edouard Philippe has been our interlocutor within the French State. The new prime minister — we don’t know him. We’ve met the new overseas minister, but not to discuss all the New Caledonian issues that are on the table since 1998.”

Overseas Minister Lecornu told the newspaper Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes that “there isn’t a day when the president of the Republic hasn’t asked me questions about what’s happening overseas in general and about New Caledonia in particular.”

CE’s Philippe Gomes is not persuaded. He says that New Caledonia is not high on the agenda in Paris, at a time when the new government faces more than 30,000 deaths from COVID-19, post-Brexit debates about the future of the EU and protests over domestic austerity.

“The French government is failing in its duty,” he says. “This year, the president of the French Republic made a major speech on television on 14 July, our national day. He talked for two hours. But the issue of New Caledonia was not even mentioned once, even though within two months we will decide whether to leave the French Republic! When the new prime minister, Castex, made his speech to the National Assembly, not one single word about New Caledonia.”

For, Gomes, this is starkly different from the first referendum. “In 2018, the government was very active,” he says. “The prime minister and the president of the French Republic both visited, they spent hundreds of hours talking with everybody and the referendum was organised after a consensus had been forged. Everyone was on board, agreeing about the manner in which the vote would be held. For this reason, the result could not be questioned, nor was it questioned. Today, the French government hasn’t done its job and the process is under challenge.”

Cynics might note that Gomes, as a member of the French National Assembly, is in a prime position to lobby the government. But he argues that the Macron administration has mishandled the process. “Even though they have a lot on their plate at the moment, they’ve made very bad decisions over the last two years in relation to New Caledonia,” he responds. “I don’t think they realise that 2020 is not simply a replay of 2018. I fear that when they do start to talk about New Caledonia, it will be too late.”

It’s worth noting that the independence movement doesn’t agree that Paris has dropped the ball. They have long argued the French government is actively working against independence, in spite of pledges of impartiality.

I spent weeks in New Caledonia covering the 2018 referendum campaign and trying to gauge the mood on the ground. Reporting from a distance this year, courtesy of pandemic restrictions, it’s still clear that the mood is more polarised and anxious. Opponents of independence seem more fearful of the future, knowing the independence vote last time was tantalisingly close to 50 per cent. And they have many questions. Will citizens of an independent New Caledonia retain their French passport and access to the European Union? Will France continue to fund a range of social services and welfare payments? What about the Chinese?

The FLNKS has mounted a public campaign to respond to these queries, but loyalist politicians have seized on documents showing the independence movement is negotiating directly with the French state, hoping to set parameters for any post-referendum transition to nationhood. The classic fear of a stab in the back from Paris motivates many conservative New Caledonians, especially those who have migrated from Algeria, Vanuatu and other former French colonies.

Given that a third referendum is possible under the Noumea Accord, Philippe Gomes believes that the independence movement can win this year without reaching 50 per cent. “We know that the independence movement desperately wants to increase their score this time, because that would be a very powerful psychological blow for people opposed to independence,” he says. “The same is true for our movement: we want to hold steady or increase our score! If they manage to increase their Yes vote by two or three per cent, our people will feel the independence movement breathing down their neck. This is another element that explains the polarisation of debate at the moment.”

Politics in New Caledonia’s Congress is heating up as the vote gets closer. This month, Calédonie ensemble joined independence groups and the Wallisian party Eveil océanien to vote for a special budget debate, reviewing proposed French loans to cope with the loss of trade and tourism during the pandemic. President Santa sees this unholy alliance as a vote of no confidence in his multi-party government, which includes members from all these groups.

Despite these tensions, New Caledonia’s political elite works together on common concerns through congressional committees, provincial assemblies and the multi-party Government of New Caledonia.

But Philip Gomes argues that personal connections among professional politicians can founder when the stakes get high: “If you look at the press statements by Sonia Backes of Les Républicains Calédoniennes or Daniel Goa of Union Calédonienne, they threaten each other that they’ll go back to the barricades, as we saw in the 1980s. We are in a period where the debate is very black and white, yes or no, for or against. Given this binary choice, people are reacting more and more with their guts and less and less with their head. That’s not good in a small island society with its multiple cultures and identities, which has already suffered too much.”

President Santa agrees that the public debate is sharper. “In my opinion, we are not yet at a stage where we need to worry, but I can’t say otherwise than there’s an increasing mood of tension. We’ve seen a radicalisation of political language. And of course, when political speech is radical, it can create a response from people at the base. This is true for both sides, not just the independence movement, but unfortunately also from the supporters of France.”

With just weeks before the vote, the path to decolonisation still faces many hurdles. •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post New Caledonia’s bleu-blanc-rouge vote appeared first on Inside Story.

France conducted 193 atmospheric and underground nuclear tests in French Polynesia between July 1966 and January 1996. Two and a half decades later, many Maohi (Polynesians) employed at the test sites on Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls are suffering from cancer, skin diseases and other illnesses.

A scheme to compensate civilian and military personnel for the effects of exposure to ionising radiation, named after then defence minister Hervé Morin, was passed by the French parliament in January 2010. The legislation created a new commission, the Comité d’Indemnisation des Victimes des Essais Nucléaires, or CIVEN, to evaluate compensation claims.

Over the first five years of operation, however, CIVEN approved only 2 per cent of claims. Although reforms since 2017 have improved the compensation process, political and community leaders in French Polynesia see recent changes to the law as a step backwards that will significantly restrict access to compensation.

Among those concerned by the latest change is Father Auguste Uebe Carlson, a Catholic priest and president of Association 193, an organisation that mobilises churchgoers in Tahiti around the legacies of the 193 nuclear tests. He believes that health problems in French Polynesia extend beyond the thousands of workers and soldiers who staffed the nuclear test sites.

“The atmospheric tests impacted on all of French Polynesia,” he says. “The French state has difficulty admitting that radiation-induced illnesses have not only affected the Moruroa workers, but the whole population over many generations.”

For decades, French politicians argued that cold war–era testing left no adverse health or environmental legacies. But there is clear evidence of radioactive fallout from French atmospheric tests between 1966 and 1974. Medical researchers have documented significant increases in thyroid cancer, myeloid leukaemia and other illnesses among the Maohi people across the five archipelagos of French Polynesia.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has documented how radioactivity from underground tests leached into the marine environment around the fragile coral atolls between 1975 and 1996. In 1998, the agency estimated that five kilograms of plutonium were dispersed through the sediments of the lagoon at Moruroa atoll.

Today, many people who once supported nuclear testing have acknowledged these hazards. In a stunning statement to the local assembly in November 2018, French Polynesian president Edouard Fritch admitted that successive governments had made false statements about the health and environmental effects. “For thirty years we lied to this people that these tests were clean,” he said. “It was us who lied and I was a member of this gang! And for what reason did we lie? Because our own leader had seen a bomb explode.”

When the Morin Law was enacted, survivors criticised the fact that compensation decisions were ultimately made by the French defence minister rather than an independent decision-maker. They were also angered that Article 4 of the law deemed that there was “negligible risk” of contamination, leaving applicants with the challenge of proving that significant levels of radiation exposure had in fact caused their illness.

Many Maohi workers lacked health records or documentation of their employment at the nuclear test sites, so this provision created a burden of proof that many found impossible to meet. Data released by CIVEN shows that between 5 January 2010 and 15 March 2015, only seventeen of 862 claims were approved from applicants from France, Algeria and French Polynesia.

Since then, protests by political and community groups in Tahiti and France have led to a series of changes. CIVEN has been transformed from an advisory body to the defence minister into an independent statutory organisation with its own chair (currently senior official Alain Christnacht, who has served successive French presidents as an adviser on Pacific affairs).

The reference to “negligible risk” was removed from the law in February 2017, resulting in a steady increase in the number of successful claims. “For applicants living in French Polynesia,” reports CIVEN, “only eleven claims were accepted between 2010 and 2017, while 154 claims were favourably received between 1 January 2018 and 22 June 2020.”

Despite this advance, the law was changed again in December 2018 through an amendment proposed by Lana Tetuanui, who represents French Polynesia in the French Senate in Paris. Tetuanui is a member of Tapura Huiraatira, Edouard Fritch’s governing party. Her amendment sets an annual radiation dose of at least one millisievert, or mSv, as a measure for making a valid claim. While this is a low threshold, it once again requires applicants to prove their level of exposure — a difficult task when the French government still restricts release of radiation data under national security laws.

The Tetuanui amendment sparked renewed calls for reform of the Morin Law, with criticism led by Moruroa e Tatou (Moruroa and Us). This association unites thousands of Maohi workers, including labourers, truck drivers and scuba divers, who worked at the test sites on Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls and the support base on Hao atoll throughout the testing era.

Following the March 2019 death from cancer of Moruroa e Tatou’s long-time leader Roland Oldham, the association’s new president is Hiro Tefaarere. The former police inspector, trade union leader and politician has long been a critic of French colonialism. Speaking from his home on the island of Huahine in the Leeward Islands, Tefaarere echoes the call for action from politicians and church leaders in Tahiti. “The Tetuanui amendment is a serious problem,” he says. “We want this amendment to be withdrawn but we also want to go much further. It’s not just the Moruroa workers. According to official government figures, more than 20,000 people in French Polynesia died of cancer between 1996 and 2016.”

Tefaarere says he has met twice with CIVEN chair Alain Christnacht, “who I believe is a man of his word. We want him to speed up the compensation of all the victims of nuclear testing — whether they were military or civilian workers or people living on nearby islands who were contaminated.”

On 6 July, French president Emmanuel Macron reshuffled his cabinet, appointing Jean Castex as the new prime minister and Sébastien Lecornu as overseas minister. For Hiro Tefaarere, it’s important for France’s new leaders to engage with nuclear survivors in the South Pacific.

“It’s vital that President Macron, his new prime minister and the new government should meet with us, to discuss all of the concerns that we are raising,” he said. “We hope that President Macron will follow his predecessor François Hollande, not just to recognise the victims but to compensate them.”

Moetai Brotherson, who represents French Polynesia in the National Assembly in Paris, agrees that the compensation process has flaws.

“If the Tetuanui amendment had not been put into law, it wouldn’t be a problem at all,” he tells me from Tahiti. “Before, you only had to prove that you were in French Polynesia during a certain period of time, and you were eligible for compensation if your illness was on the list of diseases that are linked to nuclear testing. The ‘negligible risk’ provision was taken out of the legislation and things were moving smoothly. The number of files addressed was increasing.”

Brotherson was stunned last June when a joint committee of the French Senate and National Assembly reaffirmed that the Tetuanui amendment should remain in the Morin Law. “The most shocking thing about all of this was that the decision was taken without any of the Polynesian deputies or senators being present in Paris because of the Covid crisis,” he says. “So, there was none of us there to defend the fact that we didn’t want this millisievert level put back into the law. That was really a trick played behind our back, I would say.”

A 30 June statement from CIVEN released a complex twenty-page description of its methodology, which acknowledges the uncertainty created by the Tetuanui amendment:

The reversal of presumption is very different to that of “negligible risk”… [I]t is, however, the legal and regulatory norm which CIVEN must adopt. Aware that each case is different, CIVEN admits however that it is possible in certain circumstances to recognise as a victim those people who received a dose less than 1 mSv — especially because of the age of exposure for certain cancers or the location of the worker.

Brotherson calls on the new French government to deal with these inconsistencies in the way the Morin Law is operating. “The difficulty now is that the system will operate on a case-by-case basis,” he says. “We’ve seen lately a decision by the administrative court that supported the applicant, saying that CIVEN had to prove that the person had not been exposed to at least one millisievert of radiation. But decisions of this court can vary and so it’s now on a case-by-case basis.”

In Tahiti, Father Carlson of Association 193 agrees that inconsistencies in application of the law persist, despite recent reforms. He points to the case of two sisters from the Austral Islands, who met all the conditions set by the Morin Law. “One was given compensation, the other was refused,” he says. “We don’t understand why the second application was rejected when both women lived in the same environment. When we questioned CIVEN about this, they said that the commission was given the power to determine levels of exposure by the Tetuanui amendment.” In other words, he says, “the French state is both judge and accused.”

Father Carlson says he shares the pain felt by many victims, having been born in the Gambier Islands, an archipelago just 420 kilometres southeast of Moruroa atoll. “I am one of many witnesses to the generation that was sacrificed in the Gambier Islands,” he says. “Many people have died aged in their forties or fifties, sometimes suffering from multiple cancers at the same time. My two mothers — one biological, one adoptive — both died. What has happened to my family is not an isolated case, rather it is happening to thousands of Polynesians. That is what drives my commitment to this issue.”

President Macron was scheduled to visit Tahiti in April this year, to meet the government of French Polynesia and host a France–Oceania summit with Pacific island leaders. But his trip was postponed when the French government began grappling with the coronavirus pandemic. (France currently has 181,000 Covid-19 cases and has recorded nearly 31,000 deaths.) When the French president eventually arrives, he is likely to face public protests, as church and community leaders call for action on the legacy of twentieth-century nuclear testing.

Father Carlson says that Association 193 has three crucial demands for Macron: “Firstly, the removal of the Tetuanui amendment. Next, we would like to see the creation of an independent study into intergenerational illnesses. Thirdly, if President Macron is to visit Tahiti, we would like the French state to apologise for the many nuclear tests that transformed our island paradise into hell.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

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The recent opening of British high commissions in Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu has been widely touted in the Australian media as a sign of this global engagement. At a time when China is building stronger economic and political ties with many island nations, Australia has welcomed Britain’s increased activity, along with France’s renewed focus on the region under president Emmanuel Macron.

Courtesy of its fourteen dependencies — whose maritime domain spans 6.8 million square kilometres — Britain effectively controls the world’s fifth-largest exclusive economic zone, or EEZ. But the post-Brexit dream of a revived British empire has limits.

Although its withdrawal from Europe has significant implications for all these territories, only Gibraltar was eligible to participate in the 2016 Brexit vote. Residents of The Rock, desperate to retain economic ties and easy access to Spain, voted 96 per cent in favour of remaining in the EU.

The European Commission can still negotiate direct agreements with Britain’s overseas territories as part of the EU Overseas Countries and Territories network. But Britain’s only remaining colonial possession in the Pacific is Pitcairn — the bolthole for the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian companions after they escaped Captain Bligh’s bad language. Fewer than fifty people remain on Pitcairn, but its EEZ, designated as a protected marine reserve, covers 834,333 square kilometres.

The tiny island symbolises the decline of British imperialism in the Pacific. In December 2004, the government in London announced the closure or downgrading of thirty diplomatic missions in the developing world, aiming to save £6 million a year. As a consequence, Britain formally withdrew from the Pacific Community, the main technical agency serving the islands region.

With reduced diplomatic capacity, Britain channelled significant development assistance to the region through the European Development Fund. Post-Brexit, this pathway to influence is closed.

But the push to create a post-Brexit “Global Britain” means that British Conservative governments have begun re-engaging with the region. At the April 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, or CHOGM, then foreign secretary Boris Johnson announced that London would open or reopen nine new diplomatic posts in Commonwealth. The new posts, he said, “are in regions which provide huge potential and opportunity post-Brexit for British businesses and will help us to deepen our relationships across the Commonwealth.”

The initiative followed Australian lobbying to draw more funding for Pacific nations from Britain’s overseas aid agency, DFID, at a time when Australia’s official development assistance is at the lowest level ever recorded as a proportion of gross national income. Three months after CHOGM, the 2018 Australia–UK meeting of foreign and defence ministers reaffirmed the importance of Britain’s “Pacific pivot.” “At CHOGM in April,” the ministers said, “we committed to launching an Enhanced Partnership for the Pacific to support regional stability, security and resilience. Australia welcomes the UK opening three new diplomatic missions in the Pacific, which will make it the best-represented European country in the region.”

The new missions are now in place: British diplomat Karen Bell re-opened the resident high commission office in Port Vila in July 2019, and the outgoing high commissioner to Vanuatu, David Ward, presented his credentials in Samoa in December 2019. After an absence of fourteen years, the British high commission in Nuku’alofa has reopened, with the delightfully named Thorhild Abbott-Watt taking up her post as high commissioner to the Kingdom of Tonga this month.

All this is being done on the cheap, however. During a visit to London in January 2019, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern agreed that British diplomats could co-locate with their NZ counterparts and “utilise New Zealand’s current infrastructure to make the UK’s work in the region more cost-effective and collegiate.”

Global Britain is desperately trying to draw on support from the Commonwealth, which marked its seventieth anniversary in 2019. Eleven of the fifty-three Commonwealth members are in Oceania and — in a royals-led recovery — the British government is using longstanding regional attachment to the House of Windsor as a diplomatic tool across Pacific Commonwealth states.

In 2018, just three days after the media furore over a purported Chinese military base in Vanuatu, Prince Charles and Australia’s foreign minister at the time, Julie Bishop, visited Vanuatu aboard an RAAF VIP plane. In October that year, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex toured Oceania promoting the Invictus Games for injured service personnel. In November last year, the Prince of Wales made his first-ever visit to the Solomon Islands, making a speech in pidgin and launching a new ocean conservation initiative and malaria elimination road map.

But even the royals are struggling. Charles’s younger brother, Prince Andrew, hasn’t visited the South Pacific since 1998, and is currently off the diplomatic roster because of his association with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Even as the Invictus Games celebrate the courage of wounded warriors, Prince Harry’s 2018 visit to Fiji was notable for his silence about Fiji’s nuclear veterans, who are suffering the health effects of their service in the British armed forces during the 1950s British nuclear testing program in Kiribati. Post-Megxit, the new Royal Sussex brand is more likely to find markets in North America than the South Pacific, even though British troops did burn down the White House in 1812.

Throughout this year, Boris Johnson will be renegotiating Britain’s trade relationship with the EU. Hedging his bets, though, Bojo is also looking to Commonwealth countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada as potential trade and security partners. Conservative politicians have tried to talk up liberalised trade with former British dominions and colonies, with one-time international trade secretary Liam Fox even promoting a post-Brexit “Empire 2.0.”

When I met the Commonwealth secretary-general, Baroness Patricia Scotland, at the 2017 Pacific Islands Forum, she was boosting a 2015 research report, The Commonwealth in the Unfolding Global Trade Landscape, suggesting the global network can advance the trade interests of both Britain and the Commonwealth countries.

“As the UK comes out of the European Union,” she told me, “it enables them to be freer in terms of the nature and extent of the agreements they are able to make. But trade facilitation opportunities are already there. Although we are looking for trade agreements, we need to exploit that 19 per cent advantage we already have now. What the United Kingdom had already indicated and identified even before Brexit was that there was literally gold in terms of the intensity of our relationship. There was already an awakening of a keen interest in how we trade with our whole Commonwealth family.”

But the Anglosphere powers of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, while eager for free trade deals with post-Brexit Britain, are not blind to the economic reality. Only 1.4 per cent of Australian exports go to the United Kingdom, one-third of the amount going to other EU countries. Highly regarded London Times columnist Matthew Parris, formerly a Conservative MP, describes Empire 2.0 as “a dangerous post-Brexit fantasy,” noting that “over the past half-century Australia’s trade with Asia has risen from less than a third to more than four-fifths of her total. Nothing — and certainly not Brexit — is going to reverse that trend.”

Beyond this, both the European Union and Britain have failed to expand trade relations with the island states of the Pacific, even during the good times. For twenty years, the EU failed to finalise an Economic Partnership Agreement with the Pacific under the 2000 Cotonou Agreement, despite years of fruitless preparation and negotiations. Under World Trade Organization provisions, Britain has wound down subsidies for imports of Fijian sugar. The current negotiation of a post-Cotonou treaty, to be finalised this year, prioritises African nations over smaller Caribbean and Island states.

The main interest among ANZUS allies is Britain’s potential strategic and security roles in the Pacific, through the Five Eyes intelligence network, counterterrorism coordination and possible deployments of the Royal Navy in the South China Sea. The navy has already announced that the new HMS Queen Elizabeth carrier strike group could be deployed for freedom of navigation operations alongside the US navy in the South China Sea.

But even the security sector is fraught with complications. Five Eyes relations are strained by the Johnson government’s recent decision to allow the Chinese technology giant Huawei to play a role in Britain’s 5G mobile network rollout, a policy that is anathema to hardliners in Washington and Canberra. Many analysts also question whether the Royal Navy has enough capacity and funding to prioritise naval deployments in the Asia-Pacific region at a time when the Trident nuclear submarine force is draining Britain’s defence budget. As British naval specialist Geoffrey Till has asked:

Is a significant naval presence in the Indo-Pacific really feasible these days given the dramatic decline in the Royal Navy’s numerical strength, both in platforms and people? And second, would a significantly more substantial naval force in the area contribute to regional peace and security, and would it be cost-effective for Britain itself?… There are certainly risks that it could all go horribly wrong, especially if the British return with a bombast that antagonises, or at least worries, local opinion.

The Royal Navy is also spooked by the possibility of an independent, nuclear-free Scotland — a far more likely outcome than Empire 2.0 — which could force the relocation of Trident submarines from their Scottish base in Faslane.

Despite their public enthusiasm for greater British involvement in the Pacific region, island governments are hedging their bets. In 2016 the Pacific Islands Forum formally invited Germany to become a Forum Dialogue Partner, recognising Berlin’s central role in the EU and in global funding for development.

Under Emmanuel Macron, France too is seizing the new geopolitical opportunities. In April, the French president will visit Tahiti to host a France–Oceania summit with island leaders. The 2016 decision to admit the French colonies of New Caledonia and French Polynesia as full members of the Forum has allowed Paris to assert a growing influence on regional policy on the oceans, fisheries and the exploitation of deep-sea minerals, oil and gas (despite the ownership of these resources by the colonised Kanak and Maohi peoples).

French diplomacy in the Blue Pacific is amplified by the uncertain EU status of Britain’s overseas dependencies. Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, French government ministers have been gleeful about the many opportunities the Brexit vote creates for France. At the 2017 Pacific Islands Forum, France was represented by secretary of state Sébastien Lecornu, who told me that “Brexit will create something new in the Pacific.” With France now the only member nation of the European Union in the region, “the three overseas collectivities, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Wallis and Futuna — the pays et territoires d’outre-mer as we call them — are the incarnation of Europe in this part of the world after Brexit.”

One symbol of France’s new assertiveness is the appointment in September last year of the French ambassador to Fiji, Sujiro Seam, as the new EU ambassador to the Pacific.

For France, with its far-flung colonial empire, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea provides significant advantages. Metropolitan France has only 340,290 square kilometres of EEZ in Europe, but its overseas dependencies add eleven million square kilometres of EEZ worldwide. Without these territories in the Pacific, Caribbean, Indian and Atlantic Oceans, France’s EEZ would rank forty-fifth in the world, rather than second.

More than seven million square kilometres of France’s EEZ are in the Pacific. French Polynesia has an EEZ of more than 5,030,000 square kilometres, while New Caledonia adds 1,740,000 square kilometres and Wallis and Futuna a further 300,000. Even uninhabited Clipperton Island — near the vast seabed resources of the Clipperton-Clarion fracture — has a larger EEZ than metropolitan France.

This vast maritime domain has a geo-political as well as economic role for France and the EU. As a 2014 French Senate report noted:

These are spaces which involve both the reaffirmation of the role of France’s overseas territories, but also the place of France and Europe in global governance in the 21st century… the 11 million square kilometres of EEZ and their potential resources pose an opportunity both for France and for Europe in the economic competition on the international stage. Furthermore, by their specific characteristics, France’s overseas possessions bring Europe an opportunity for opening unequalled in the world.

As the EU moves to finalise a new treaty with the members of the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States, Brexit will reverberate far beyond the English Channel. Will Britain’s old enemy across La Manche benefit most from the changing geopolitics in the South Pacific? •

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“The moral issue as I saw it,” McCarthy later reflected, “finally got down to the question of was there any proportion between the destruction and what possible good would come out of it? You started with the judgement… about people in South Vietnam wanting to have a free society. But the price of getting it was the destruction practically of a total community. You make a pragmatic judgement… you don’t pursue it to all-out destruction.”

McCarthy believed, like Johnson, that America’s goal in Vietnam was the defence of a “small and brave nation” against communist aggression; but he concluded that the end did not justify the death and destruction unleashed in its pursuit.

On 16 March 1968, four days after McCarthy’s upset result in New Hampshire and on the day Kennedy declared he was entering the race, American infantry entered the hamlet of My Lai and embarked on an orgy of unprovoked slaughter. At least 504 unarmed South Vietnamese men, women, children and babies died in the indiscriminate violence. Yet when the massacre was eventually revealed, only one soldier, William Calley, was convicted, and he received a sentence of less than four years, under house arrest, for the murder of twenty-two people.

For radical critics of the Vietnam war, atrocities like My Lai indicated that the Americans were not fighting a war in defence of South Vietnam’s freedom; they were fighting the South Vietnamese people themselves. The problem was not the price of such an endeavour but its purpose. The regime in the southern capital, Saigon, did not have a legitimate claim to represent the South Vietnamese people; the loyalties of most South Vietnamese were not with Saigon and the Americans but with the Viet Cong and Hanoi; and the United States was on the side of an autocratic client regime at war with its own people.

“In Vietnam what we were doing was trying to stop a local government from coming to power,” as Frances FitzGerald summed it up in her Pulitzer Prize–winning Fire in the Lake. In a similar vein, Noam Chomsky argued that the United States invaded South Vietnam in a manner analogous to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Which interpretation of the war is correct? McCarthy and Johnson’s? Or Fitzgerald and Chomsky’s? Was America’s war a failed but noble defence of South Vietnam’s freedom or an imperious attempt to obstruct Vietnamese efforts to determine their own destiny? In Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945–1975 prolific British journalist and war historian Max Hastings sides with McCarthy. For Hastings, America’s cause was that of the South Vietnamese themselves; and the goal of preserving a non-communist South — leaving aside the destructive excess with which it was pursued — is deserving of admiration. Over the course of 752 pages, however, he adduces an abundance of evidence at odds with this interpretation, producing the curious effect of a story that refuses to accept its own moral.

Hastings’s narrative begins with France’s palpable desire to stop a local government from coming to power in Indochina in the wake of the second world war. Following closely in the footsteps of Fredrik Logevall’s seminal Embers of War, Hastings shows how deeply implicated the United States was in the effort to re-establish European colonial rule upon Japan’s defeat — and the extent to which the origins of America’s own war in Vietnam are found in the first Indochina war.

Within weeks of president Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Harry Truman’s administration settled on a policy of implacable opposition to communist rule in Vietnam from which the United States would not deviate for the next three decades. Contrary to all Roosevelt’s instincts — expressed publicly and privately throughout the war — it determined to support the French campaign to reconquer Indochina. At the San Francisco Conference in mid 1945, secretary of state Edward Stettinius assured the French foreign minister, Georges Bidault — utterly falsely — that “the record is entirely innocent of any official statement of the US government questioning, even by implication, French sovereignty over Indochina.”

When President de Gaulle visited Washington in August, Truman confirmed that inconvenient pronouncements such as the Atlantic Charter (the wartime agreement between Roosevelt and Winston Churchill that supported “the right of every people to choose their own form of government”) had been forgotten. It was only with American air and landing craft that the French were able to send troops back to Indochina in the wake of the Japanese surrender, and Washington gave permission for American matériel, originally designated for use against the Nazis, to be deployed against the Viet Minh.

With the fall of China and the onset of the Korean war, the American commitment to French colonial rule in Indochina intensified. Hastings reports that by early 1951 the Americans were sending the French more than 7200 tonnes of military equipment each month, with an additional 130,000 tonnes delivered in the final quarter of that year. These dry numbers may have barely impinged on the awareness of the American public, but it was a different matter for the Vietnamese.

“All of a sudden, hell opens in front of my eyes,” a Viet Minh commander wrote in his diary. “Hell comes in the form of large, egg-shaped containers, dropping from the first plane, followed by other eggs from the second and third plane. Immense sheets of flames, extending over hundreds of meters, it seems, strike terror in the ranks of my soldiers. This is napalm, the fire that falls from the skies.” For the Vietnamese, American involvement in the first Indochina war was real enough.

When a young senator, John F. Kennedy, returned from a visit to Vietnam in November of 1951, he said in a moment of historic candour: “In Indochina we have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of the French regime to hang on to the remnants of an empire.” But even this forthright acknowledgement of the reality of American foreign policy was rapidly becoming an understatement. In fact, the United States was displacing France as the major proponent of the war. During a visit to Washington in June 1952, the French overseas territories minister, Jean Letourneau, publicly countenanced an armistice with the Viet Minh, reflecting growing French weariness with the war. The Americans were horrified by his proposal for international negotiations along the lines of those occurring at the time in relation to Korea, and Letourneau soon retracted under their intense pressure.

In the same month, American opposition to a French withdrawal, or any negotiated resolution to the conflict, was formalised in a National Security Council statement of policy. “By the end of 1953,” Hastings records, “the new Eisenhower Republican administration was paying 80 per cent of the cost of the war, a billion dollars a year [US$9.4 billion in today’s terms].” It may be impossible to say precisely when, but at some point the first Indochina war had become an American war.

American policy boiled down to a simple syllogism. Vietnam could not be permitted to go communist; independence would result in communist rule; independence could therefore not be permitted. As Kennedy said in his November 1951 speech to the American Friends of Vietnam, “Every neutral observer believes a free election… would go in favour of Ho and his communists.” It was an assessment that anticipated Eisenhower’s candid admission that he had “never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs, who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.”

Hastings doesn’t question those assessments: in fact, he reports their confirmation by the South Vietnamese head of state, Nguyen Van Thieu, as late as 1965. To paraphrase Kissinger’s remark with respect to Chile, the issues were far too important to be left to the Vietnamese to decide for themselves.

And so, when the French found themselves in a dire position at Dien Bien Phu in early 1954, besieged by General Giap and his Viet Minh forces, Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, explored every imaginable option to stave off defeat. Using C-119 transports, the CIA flew supplies in to the French, with additional support coming in the form of American-supplied B-26s, serviced by uniformed US air force men. When, despite this vital aid, French collapse appeared inevitable, the US administration considered options ranging from bombing the Vietnamese using B-29 Superfortresses based in the Philippines to a strike with three tactical nuclear weapons. The latter, writes Hastings, was embraced by the chairman of the joint chiefs, admiral Arthur Radford, “as a viable option.”

Ultimately, the White House settled on a plan to send in American forces to carry on the war. Eisenhower supported this option subject to two provisos: congressional support, and allied (primarily British) participation. Congressional leaders signalled that their assent was contingent on the position of allies, but the British were unconvinced. Churchill reportedly responded that, “after Britain had been unable to save India for herself… it was implausible that she could save Indochina for France” — a remark that says much about the character of the proposed undertaking. With Britain sceptical, attention turned to Australia and New Zealand. The Menzies government, if only out of a recognition of the hopelessness of the French position and a desire not to antagonise Britain, resolved that it was time to accept a political solution, to be determined at a conference about to begin in Geneva.

On the evening of 7 May 1954 a unit of Vietnamese soldiers entered the French command post at Dien Bien Phu, detained French colonel Christian de Castries, and raised the red flag of the Viet Minh. For the French, a defeat of this order was so unexpected and so humiliating that it led to the downfall of the conservative government of Joseph Laniel, with his replacement, the radical Pierre Mendès-France, promising to resign if he could not negotiate a French exit from the war in Indochina — now in its ninth year — within thirty days.

Just three days later, on 10 May, the leader of the Viet Minh’s delegation in Geneva, Pham Van Dong, basking in the glow of an historic victory, presented his opening statement to the Geneva conference. The Americans appeared to be in an impossible position. As hostile as they were to Vietnamese independence, the French were on the brink of defeat and they lacked a viable plan for a large-scale intervention of their own.

“To the amazement of the Westerners,” writes Hastings, Dong “expressed willingness to consider partition.” As Hastings observes, “what was extraordinary about subsequent events at the conference tables, was that French humiliation yielded no triumph for the Viet Minh.” The Vietnamese communists were forced to accept the temporary partition of their country, with control south of the seventeenth parallel handed to the American-allied Ngo Dinh Diem. Most disconcertingly, there would be a two-year delay until July 1956, when national elections leading to reunification were scheduled to occur.

Having spent “torrents of blood to strengthen their negotiating position,” the Viet Minh “were eventually obliged to go home with half a loaf.” How, Hastings asks, were the French — and, more importantly, their American and Vietnamese allies — able to snatch a political victory of sorts from the jaws of humiliating military defeat?

It is a perceptive question, the answer to which reveals much about the character of the war that had just ended and the war that was to follow. The immediate explanation for this remarkable turn of events lay in the attitude of the Chinese and the Soviets. “It seems almost certain that the Viet Minh had been heavily pressured by the Chinese and Russians to initiate such a proposal,” Hastings explains. For the two major communist powers, the overriding concern was to avoid another Korea — a scenario in which direct American military intervention would entangle them in another superpower confrontation. When Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai met France’s Mendès-France for bilateral talks in late June, he was candid about China’s main objective of keeping the United States out of Indochina. If the partition of Vietnam would achieve this, it was a price worth paying.

While the Vietnamese communists had contemplated the possibility of some form of temporary partition, they had not envisaged anything like the two-year delay that was ultimately forced on them. In the end, they found themselves without support from either the Chinese or the Russians. Their only brutal alternative was to persevere on the battlefield, for years possibly, in pursuit of total victory. As many in the politburo in Hanoi saw it, Zhou Enlai had sold them out.

But the Russian and Chinese posture at Geneva only reflected the deeper reality that, by 1954, the communists’ principal adversary in Vietnam was no longer France but the United States. Victory at Dien Bien Phu (and in subsequent battles in May and June) made an eventual French exit from the war inevitable and strengthened the communists’ hand at the negotiating table, but it was far short of decisive. As the Russian and Chinese calculations indicated, what really mattered was the American position.

Among all the reasons the United States would not accept a communist Vietnam, the factor that put its credibility on the line was the depth of its involvement in the first Indochina war. The advent of an independent, communist Vietnam, in defiance of the will of the United States, would bring the superpower’s postwar primacy in Asia into question. A decade later, John McNaughton, the US assistant secretary of defense (and Daniel Ellsberg’s boss), would characterise America’s goal in Vietnam as “70 per cent to avoid a humiliating defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).” Given the prestige and treasure the United States had already sunk in Vietnam by 1954, that estimate essentially applied already.

The Americans never took seriously the stipulation in the Geneva Accords that “the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.” And they weren’t going to permit Vietnam’s future to be determined by the Vietnamese themselves, at national elections. In the words of the National Security Council shortly after the Geneva Accords had been signed, the United States would “make every possible effort, not openly inconsistent with the US position as to the armistice agreements… to maintain a friendly non-Communist South Vietnam and to prevent a Communist victory through all-Vietnam elections.”

The basic syllogism had been revised: Vietnam as a whole could not be permitted to go communist; unification and national elections would allow that to happen; therefore unification and national elections had to be prevented. The partition of Vietnam — along with a friendly client regime in Saigon — had replaced French colonial rule as America’s stratagem for preventing the communist ascendancy. America had found a way of continuing the war, lost on the battlefield, by other means.

To begin in 1945 and review the history of America’s gradually deepening hostility to Vietnamese self-determination is to largely settle the debate about the nature of America’s war in Vietnam, and about whether it was a response to external aggression or an instance of it. South Vietnam was not a “small and brave nation”; it was a neo-colonial artifice designed to thwart the will of a nation. South Vietnam was born of the American refusal to accept a conclusion to the first Indochina war and its corollary, that the Vietnamese people would determine their own destiny.

Of course, many Vietnamese vehemently opposed the communists and did not want to live under their rule. Among the ample evidence for that is the exodus south of almost one million people, mostly Catholics, in the immediate aftermath of the country’s partition. But the Geneva Accords offered a process that all parties could reasonably be expected to respect: negotiated compromise and the ballot box. It was the United States and Ngo Dinh Diem who refused to accept such a process, and it was the American refusal that was decisive. The Americans ended up fighting on one side of a civil war, but they, more than anyone else, had ensured that a political conflict became a military one. As Hastings acknowledges, “Most South Vietnamese, and especially the Buddhist leadership, would have chosen peace on any terms; it was their American sponsors who rejected such an outcome…”

In time, the communists discovered that their enemies would refuse to honour the compromise they had reluctantly accepted at Geneva. When the party’s general secretary, Le Duan, returned to Hanoi from a clandestine visit to the South in January 1959, he reported to the politburo that their southern comrades were accusing them of cowardice, bitter that they were being left to fight the battle against Diem on their own.

At this point, Hanoi made the fateful decision to support armed struggle in the South by opening up the supply routes through the Annamite Range, which became known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. Resolution 15, as the decision was called, was adopted on 22 January 1959. On 8 July, Viet Cong guerrillas launched an attack on American servicemen stationed near Bien Hoa, thirty kilometres northeast of Saigon. The names of the two Americans killed, Chester Ovnand and Dale Buis, later became the first to be listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

By 1962, American helicopters and tanks were being shipped to the South en masse, Green Berets were sent to organise the Montagnards, and the US air force had embarked on its wholesale destruction of the Vietnamese countryside, primarily by spraying it with Agent Orange. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, 16,000 American military advisers were in South Vietnam.

In the final pages of Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, Max Hastings imagines the events of 1959 taking a different turn. It is “interesting to speculate upon the consequences, had the North Vietnamese refrained from sponsoring armed struggle in the South,” he ruminates. “Plausibly, the indigenous National Liberation Front could have been contained.” Taking the scenario a step further, he evinces his basic sympathy with the American objective of preserving the South under the rule of a non-communist dictatorship: “In many other Asian countries between 1960 and 1990, authoritarian military rule gave way to democracy.”

He views the war that ensued as a kind of moral tie, in which both sides stand condemned: the communists for seeking to unite Vietnam under their rule; the Americans for resisting this effort with a level of violence that could not ultimately be justified. “The communists and the United States rightfully share responsibility for the horrors that befell Vietnam after the death of John F. Kennedy,” he concludes, “because both preferred to unleash increasingly indiscriminate violence, rather than yield to the will of their foes.”

Given the history he has rehearsed, it is a remarkable assessment. The Geneva Accords had been achieved after almost a decade of war, a war against two world powers in which an improbable victory had been won through incredible sacrifice. Around 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers and even more civilians had lost their lives. If the Viet Minh and Viet Cong had yielded to the will of their foes in 1959, they would have been submitting to the artificial division of their country, a division imposed on them by a foreign power contrary to the will of a majority of their compatriots.

They would also have been meekly accepting that the compromise forged at Geneva — an agreement binding in international law, which they fought for and made in good faith — would be completely disregarded. All the while, opponents of Diem’s regime would continue to be subjected to arbitrary arrest and execution. In other words, it is implausible to imagine that they would have simply yielded to the will of their foes, and unreasonable to claim that they should have. To see this, it is only necessary to ask whether we would accept such a scenario in our own country.

Hastings’s position is all the more surprising given his own argument that, in taking the war to Diem’s regime in Saigon, the Vietnamese communists were not doing anyone’s bidding but their own. “It was significant that Hanoi was slow to inform the Russians about Resolution 15,” writes Hastings, “because Le Duan and his comrades knew how unwelcome it would be.” The United States “entirely misjudged the attitudes of Moscow and Beijing, supposing their leaderships guilty of fomenting the rising insurgency,” he observes. “Instead, until 1959 resistance to the Saigon regime was spontaneous and locally generated. For some time thereafter, it received only North Vietnamese rather than foreign support.”

Zhou Enlai reportedly upbraided Le Duan on a 1961 visit to Hanoi. “Why are you people conducting armed struggle in South Vietnam?” he asked. “If the war expands into the North, I am telling you now that China will not send troops to help you fight the Americans… You will be on your own, and have to take the consequences.” Ultimately, the Vietnamese weren’t left on their own: hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers were sent to North Vietnam, while the Soviets primarily provided matériel. But the involvement of the communist powers didn’t precede or precipitate American intervention; it followed it.

The great irony is that at the very point American leaders were espousing the domino theory, the Chinese and the Russians were trying to hold the dominoes back. When the Americans bombed the North following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, Moscow and Beijing didn’t send Hanoi sympathy cards but scolded them for having provoked the Americans. The message was reiterated by Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin when he visited Hanoi in early 1965. “The Russians were desperate to avoid further entanglement,” writes Hastings. The Americans weren’t fighting foreign aggressors in Vietnam but its indigenous independence movement.

Nothing is more demonstrative of Saigon’s submission to Washington than the American propensity to overthrow its leaders whenever they were no longer serving US purposes. The best known, the coup against Diem in 1963, has a revealing prehistory. In mid 1955, Eisenhower’s personal envoy, General Joseph Collins, made an assessment that Diem was not up to bringing the gangs and sects that then dominated Saigon into line. “At 6.10pm on 27 April 1955,” writes Hastings, “Dulles sent a cable from Washington to Saigon authorising the prime minister’s removal, much as he might have ordered the sacking of an unsatisfactory parlourmaid.” The directive was only rescinded after Diem’s army prevailed in a street battle that evening and the American mood changed.

When Diem was ultimately overthrown and killed in November 1963, the Americans greenlighted the coup partly because Diem and his brother, Nhu, were rumoured to be countenancing détente with the North. “The most ignoble aspect of Washington’s mounting interest in a coup was the impetus provided by fears that Diem or his brother Nhu might be contemplating a deal,” writes Hastings. “Charlie, I can’t let Vietnam go to the Communists and then go and ask [American voters] to re-elect me,” Kennedy reportedly told his friend Charles Bartlett.

Diem’s demise was not the last time the United States supported a coup against its South Vietnamese client because of fear it might be open to negotiations with the enemy. Hastings describes much the same scenario when Diem’s successor, General Duong Van Minh, was replaced by General Nguyen Khanh just three months after Diem’s demise. By January 1965, the Americans became concerned that Khanh, in turn, was in league with the Buddhists. “The most sinister aspect” of the relationship, wrote ambassador Maxwell Taylor, was that it “may be an important step towards the formation of a government which will eventually lead the country into negotiations with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front.” When General Khanh had the audacity to refuse to meet an emissary from Lyndon Johnson, the president flew into a rage. “The Americans began to search frantically, farcically, for a replacement,” Hastings reports. Nguyen Van Thieu, South Vietnam’s president from 1967 until its dissolution, was “haunted by the memory of Diem, fearing that if he defied the will of Washington, he would meet the same fate.”

Nor did the Americans bother to consult, or even inform, Saigon about other key decisions. Of the landing of US marines near Danang on 8 March 1965, Hastings observes: “A significant aspect of the Marines’ landing, before a throng of photographers, excited children and pretty girls distributing garlands of flowers, was that nobody in Washington, the US embassy or MACV [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam] saw fit to inform the South Vietnamese government that they were coming.” President Thieu was not even apprised of the Nixon administration’s policy of Vietnamisation — a matter of some consequence to South Vietnam — prior to its announcement. “Without any Saigon representative commanding a serious hearing” at the Paris peace talks, Hastings acknowledges, “the communists were scarcely unjust in branding Thieu and his associates as ‘US puppets.’”

The closest Hastings comes to conceding that the conventional picture of the war was a mirage is to cite the opinion of Paul Warnke, assistant secretary of defense under McNamara and then Clark Clifford. Warnke “thought that the whole story might have turned out better if Washington had imposed an honest-to-God occupation, rather than merely sought to hand-hold a grossly incompetent local government: ‘What we were trying to do was to impose a particular type of rule on a resistant country. And that required occupation, just as we occupied Japan [in 1945].’” Hastings responds that “Warnke missed the obvious point, that such a policy would have required treating the South Vietnamese as a conquered people, rather than as citizens of a supposed sovereign state.” But Hastings’s own catalogue of contempt, coups and atrocities shows the Americans did treat the South Vietnamese like a conquered people.

As his counterfactual account of the events of 1959 indicates, Hastings believes that if the United States had been successful in enforcing the partition of Vietnam and sustaining the dictatorship in Saigon, a modern-day South Vietnam could be another South Korea. The alternative was “to concede victory to the communists [and] condemn the Vietnamese people to an ice-age future under Le Duan’s collectivist tyranny, such as eventually became their lot after 1975.”

It is true that the domination of Vietnam’s independence movement by adherents of an authoritarian ideology was a wicked problem, not least because any election they won was likely to be the last election for a long time. One of the strengths of Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy is that it comprehensively documents the cold-blooded authoritarianism of the Hanoi regime, including essential Vietnamese perspectives like that of Truong Nhu Tang, who served as justice minister in the Provisional Revolutionary Government only to flee Vietnam three years after reunification. But the United States has to take its share of the blame for the way events unfolded from 1945.

In the immediate wake of the second world war the United States faced a historic window of opportunity. Acting as a true friend of the Vietnamese people, it could have helped them achieve both national sovereignty and sovereignty over their nation.

When Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam’s independence in Ba Dinh Square on 2 September 1945, he began with words that echoed America’s own declaration: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Three days earlier, he had written to President Truman, requesting Viet Minh participation in Allied deliberations on the future of his country. It was the first of around a dozen letters from Ho to the American president that went unanswered. As late as 28 February 1946, in the wake of French moves to reassert control in Hanoi, Ho wrote to Truman: “I… most earnestly appeal to you personally and the American people to interfere urgently in support of our independence and help making [sic] the negotiations more in keeping with the principles of the Atlantic and San Francisco Charters.” Again, he received no reply.

If Truman had engaged Ho, if the United States had supported Vietnamese independence and opposed a French return, as Roosevelt had envisaged throughout the war, the United States could have insisted on a commitment to free and fair elections in return for its support for self-determination. A peaceful path to power could, in turn, have strengthened the hand of moderates and isolated the incorrigible authoritarians. There are many reasons why such a policy might have failed, but it would have stood a much better chance of ultimate success than the course America actually took.

In seeking to impose its will on Vietnam, first by backing the French and then by rejecting the Geneva Accords, the United States introduced a logic of violence that only empowered hardliners. The Americans not only failed to recognise that Ho was a nationalist as well as a communist but, more critically, they also failed to appreciate that their own policy left Vietnamese nationalists with little choice but to throw in their lot with Ho. Ho Chi Minh had the overwhelming support of his compatriots in 1954 because he had just led his people in a triumphant decade-long war of resistance against foreign occupation. To support Ho, one only had to be a patriot.

In the years following the Geneva Accords, Ho and Giap were genuinely committed to securing the reunification of their country peacefully, but America made it clear that reunification was not going to happen without armed conflict. As a result, Hanoi radicalised. Ho was kicked upstairs to figurehead status; Giap was sidelined; and, in late 1957, the ruthless and uncompromising Le Duan was elected as party secretary. The hardest of hardliners had got control and would shape communist policy during the American war and its aftermath. But America had signalled that compromise was folly. What did it expect?

Eschewing the unpalatable implications of Warnke’s characterisation of the war, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy oscillates between two kinds of confusion: one about what America did in Vietnam, the other about what it ought to have done — between the unsustainable pretence of a defensive war, on the one hand, and an imperial arrogance that dare not speak its name on the other. It was a case, in Charles de Gaulle’s phrase, of the American “will to power, cloaking itself in idealism.” Hastings does not criticise American aggression in Vietnam any more than Eugene McCarthy did, because he only sees the cloak, a failed but noble attempt to defend South Vietnam.

When Hastings turns to advancing what he sees as the lesson of the Vietnam war, he only reiterates the mistake. As numerous reviews have noted, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy concludes with the words of Walt Boomer, who served as a marine in Vietnam before becoming a four-star general in command of US forces in the Gulf war. “It bothers me that we didn’t learn a lot. If we had, we would not have invaded Iraq,” Boomer says. These final words have been received as an enlightened affirmation of the folly of war and a prudent condemnation of US adventurism.

What is the lesson of Vietnam, according to Hastings? “It is among the themes of this book,” he writes, that “the foremost challenge” for the United States “was not to win firefights, but instead to associate itself with a credible Vietnamese political and social order.” Here, he sees the parallel with Iraq: “In the absence of credible local governance, winning firefights was, and always will be, meaningless.”

Hastings fails to recognise that any political and social order that requires the approval of a foreign power would lack credibility, and that any elite that owed its existence to a foreign power would not be responsive to the interests of the people. It is no coincidence that, as one American reporter put it, Diem and his successors had no relationship with their own people. That was their job description.

The lesson of Vietnam is that it is wrong to try to dominate another people, and it is wrong to commit aggression. But to learn that lesson, first aggression must be seen for what it is. Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy never fully faces up to the reality that the United States was trying to impose its will on Vietnam — or the consequences of that reality — and so it doesn’t succeed in shedding the illusions under which the war was fought. The domino theory profoundly misrepresented Moscow and Beijing, the Viet Minh and the Viet Cong, but its deepest misunderstanding concerned the United States itself. •

The post A story that refuses to accept its own moral appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite the idyllic scenery, Ouvea carries a tragic burden of history. New Caledonia’s referendum on self-determination, which takes place on 4 November, is the culmination of a twenty-year decolonisation process that began with the Noumea Accord, an agreement between the French state and local parties signed on 5 May 1998. That was the tenth anniversary of a crisis — the 1988 Ouvea massacre — that almost tipped the country into civil war. The polarisation of those days, though muted today, still echoes through political debates.

The overwhelming majority of Ouvea province’s population is indigenous Kanak, and members of independence parties have dominated nearly every provincial government over the past thirty years. But they preside over a declining population. With limited employment available on the island, some working-age people seek education, employment or enjoyment on the main island of Grand Terre. At the last census, in 2014, only 3374 people were living on Ouvea.

According to Benjamin Malie, principal of the Guillaume Douare junior secondary college, the lack of a senior high school on Ouvea contributes to the outflow of locals. “We don’t have a lycée on Ouvea, so many families move to Grande Terre to assist their children complete schooling,” he told me. “After they’ve finished, however, some of them don’t return, so many people from Ouvea are still living in the capital, Noumea, or other towns on the mainland. Our college has dropped from 200 pupils to just eighty-nine this year, and the Protestant and public schools have also seen reductions.”

Ouvea’s food and water security is threatened by a changing environment. The reef still teems with marine life, but on the ocean side of the island, near Saint Joseph, the effects of coastal erosion can clearly be seen. Local authorities are focused on dealing with the immediate effects of climate change on water and food; three desalination plants operate, and tankers deliver fresh water to homes and schools at times of water stress.

Despite these constraints, local authorities are working to create a sustainable model of development for the island and trying to overcome the challenges of expensive transport and communications, with a new wharf and warehouse welcoming three boats a week delivering supplies.

Like most outlying islands across the region, the pace here is different from the hassle of the capital. Beyond their beauty, Ouvea’s beaches are a crucial economic resource, acting as a drawcard for overseas and domestic tourists. In recent years, there’s been a particular emphasis on small-scale tourism, with gites (bungalows) established in Kanak tribes to tap the ecotourist market. The provincial government seeks to lure Noumea-based public servants looking for a beach escape during the school holidays. Locals run a range of small businesses, promoting walking tours, fishing and boating.

But New Caledonia’s economy essentially relies on the extravagant wages and bonuses paid to French public servants and the “value-adding” on imports by local business elites. Backpackers in the Loyalty Islands will find that the beer is more expensive than in independent Vanuatu or Fiji.

Even when you focus on Ouvea’s economic future, however, it’s hard to avoid traces of the past.

Driving along the island’s main road, you pass the tall green fence, topped with barbed wire, of the police station in Fayaoue. At nearby Hwadrilla, there is a roadside memorial to “the nineteen,” the Kanak martyrs of 1988. In the northern tribe of Gossanah, the old building for the École Populaire Kanak (Kanak community school) is festooned with banners calling for non-participation in this year’s referendum, an echo of the boycott of New Caledonia’s last failed referendum in 1987.

Next to the sporting field at Gossanah is the gravesite of Djubelli Wea, an independence leader from Gossanah, with a plaque that pays homage to three Kanak leaders who died in 1989, and to the reconciliation that followed: “To all generations to come — remember that on the night of 4 May 1989, blood was spilt on Ouvea. Pardon — Haiömonu me ûsoköu.”

Much as people have reconciled since the armed conflict of the 1980s, it’s impossible to understand the present without remembering the past. Next month’s referendum is the culmination of a twenty-year transition under the Noumea Accord, an agreement signed by the French state, the independence movement Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, and anti-independence politicians led by Jacques Lafleur.

In 1987, in the midst of the French army’s militarisation of New Caledonia, the FLNKS boycotted a referendum organised by France that purported to determine the future of the country. Despite an overwhelming Yes vote to stay with France, the referendum was meaningless without the participation of the colonised Kanak people.

The following year, Jean-Marie Tjibaou and the FLNKS leadership called for a boycott of the French presidential elections, in which conservative prime minister Jacques Chirac was challenging the incumbent Socialist Party president François Mitterrand. During the FLNKS protests, a group of Kanak independence activists led by Alphonse Dianou attempted to raise the flag of Kanaky over the police station at Fayaoue. In the subsequent melee, three gendarmes were killed and another mortally wounded. Twenty-seven others were taken hostage and hidden in caves in the north of the island, near the Kanak villages of Gossanah and Takedji.

The Ouvea crisis led to a major military mobilisation on the island. Villagers were mistreated and even tortured by French troops trying to find the hostages. The assault on the caves to free the captured police coincided with a final (and unsuccessful) attempt by Chirac to glean votes to win support before the second round of the presidential elections. On 5 May 1988, his government abandoned negotiations and elite police and an army commando unit stormed the cave. Nineteen Kanak activists were killed, with at least three executed after surrendering. Dianou was shot in the knee, and left to die.

The Ouvea tragedy made all parties step back from the brink. France’s incoming prime minister, Michel Rocard, proposed negotiations. The subsequent Matignon and Oudinot Accords, sealed by a handshake between FLNKS leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou and anti-independence leader Jacques Lafleur, provided for amnesties for crimes committed before August 1988.

The legacy of grief and division contributed to the assassination of Tjibaou and fellow Kanak leader Yeiwene Yeiwene the following year. They had come to the island on 4 May 1989 to mark la levée du deuil, the end of a year-long period of mourning for the nineteen. At the ceremony, Tjibaou and Yeiwene were shot and killed by Djubelli Wea, who was immediately gunned down by Tjibaou’s bodyguard.

It took a decade and a half to reconcile the families, clans and supporters of these dead. Led by customary chiefs, priests and pastors from the Protestant and Catholic churches, this cultural process of reconciliation and pardon has been vital in sealing a breach that could not be healed by judicial mechanisms.

One person who seems keenly aware of the continuing sensitivities is French president Emmanuel Macron, who visited New Caledonia in May this year, and included Ouvea on his itinerary. For the first time, a French president tried to pay homage at the memorial to the nineteen Kanaks killed by the French army.

At his home among the Kanak tribe of Gossanah, Djubelli Wea’s brother, Maki, tells me there was local opposition to Macron’s visit. Because of this, the French president left Ouvea without placing a wreath on the memorial at Hwadrilla. “They announced Macron’s arrival here without contacting the customary chiefs on the island, without contacting the families of the victims,” he says. “The FLNKS announced it in the media, but the people of Gossanah were surprised and we raised our finger to all the people over there.”

For the first time in thirty years, the people of Gossanah didn’t place flowers on the graves of the nineteen on the anniversary, he says. “The high commissioner even lobbied us over Macron’s visit. But we didn’t cede ground — we’re not like the people of the FLNKS who give in.”

“We say no”: Maki Wea of the Kanak tribe of Gossanah. Nic Maclellan

Meanwhile, like other low-lying atolls around the Pacific, Maki Wea continues to advocate for Kanak Socialist Independence, the guiding slogan of the 1980s. Since July, he has been speaking out in public, calling for non-participation in this year’s referendum, both as a member of the small Parti Travailliste (or Labour Party) and also as “a child of Gossanah.”

“Today, I can’t just act like an old man, working in the gardens, without saying something, because I think of the next generations, the sons of my sons and their sons after them. For they will ask, ‘Papa, what did you do when the French state and the local right-wing parties and the leaders of the FLNKS moved away from the objective for which so many have sacrificed their lives — the goal of indépendance Kanak et socialiste?’”

He criticised those independence groups on Ouvea who campaign for a Yes vote on self-determination within France: “There are plenty of fine speeches out there: ‘Vote Yes, to remember those who died for independence.’ But we say no, this referendum is just neo-colonialism.”

As I was hitchhiking up the forty-six kilometre road that runs along the spine of the island, a young man stopped to offer a lift. We talked about fishing and Australia and the weather, and then drifted on to politics.

“I’m part of the generation who grew up after les évènements,” he told me. “So thinking about independence is different for me compared to my parents. We look differently at the referendum and I have questions about what it means.” Does that mean he will vote No or stay at home on 4 November? “Oh no, I’m voting Yes, for independence. But we have to build this independence. We have to be involved to make it happen.”

For the first time since 1958, the looming referendum poses a clear option — whether to stay within the French republic or leave as a sovereign nation. New Caledonians will vote on the question: “Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?”

Some people may go fishing on 4 November, but Wea’s call for non-participation is not accepted by most independence supporters on the island. Activists from the largest independence parties, Union Calédonienne and the Parti de Libération Kanak, have been out for weeks, seeking to mobilise people to turn out on the day. At the last provincial elections in 2014, only 65.2 per cent of eligible residents of Ouvea went to vote, so the FLNKS is seeking to boost numbers, organising community meetings to explain the significance of this year’s decision.

One quiet night, I joined a small team of activists at Hulup, near Ouvea’s airstrip. In a local community hall, twenty-five people had gathered to hear a presentation about the referendum, followed by discussion on reasons to vote (and to vote Yes).

The FLNKS has produced a short film highlighting the economic and political milestones achieved by the independence movement since the mid 1970s (such as the 51 per cent local control of the Koniambo nickel smelter in the Northern Province, an unprecedented example of engagement with a transnational resource corporation in Melanesia).

Then there’s a PowerPoint presentation setting out the FLNKS vision of a sovereign Kanaky–New Caledonia, with the current Congress transformed into a national assembly and an elected president replacing the French high commissioner. There’s also a presentation about public finances and budgetary options for an independent state, an attempt to calm fears that a Yes vote will lead to Paris turning off the financial taps.

And then there are questions and sharp comment, with a wide-ranging discussion over what independence might mean. Much of the discussion is in the local languages of Iaai and Fagauvea, leaving your correspondent adrift, but the tone of one woman’s voice suggested that the FLNKS activists have some questions to answer about who will pay for her pension.

Ouvea’s deputy mayor, Robert Ismael, talks of the potential to give greater capacity to the local municipal council, if the Article 27 powers are transferred from Paris to Noumea (currently, New Caledonia’s provincial assemblies and local Congress come under the authority of the government in Noumea, but the communs, or municipal councils, are still controlled and financed as French state institutions).

Ismael also cites the possibility of extending development partnerships with Australia, New Zealand and neighbouring Melanesian countries, along the lines of the municipality’s current engagement with health authorities from Vanuatu. “We need to decolonise our heads and be proud like Vanuatu,” he declares.

With just a week to go before 4 November, time is running out for mobilising Ouvea’s 4351 registered voters — some on the island and some planning to use “delocalised” voting booths in Noumea. Local activists are planning a final festival on the island to promote a Yes vote, and will then join a major national rally in the capital, organised by the FLNKS at Ko We Kara on 30 October. •

The post Ouvea looks forward, and back appeared first on Inside Story.

While Macron was careful to stroke the American president’s sensitive ego, he surprised many with a robust speech to Congress in which he reaffirmed the value of multilateral trade, reminded political leaders of the need to persist with the Iran nuclear deal and reaffirmed the importance of the Paris climate agreement, from which Trump has so blithely moved away. But will the French president’s soft-power strategy win concessions from Trump? Many doubt it, but only time can tell: diplomatic influence takes time and works beyond the media glare.

What was also striking was Macron’s courting of the next generation of American decision-makers at a very informal discussion with students at Georgetown University. This has become a standard feature of his international itinerary: whether he’s in India or Africa, he insists on addressing a young audience, leveraging his own relative youth to extoll the benefits of French higher education and French research and development, and projecting the message that “France is back” on the global economic and political stage.

Macron’s visit to Australia is one of a long list of international engagements, coming on top of visits to many other European countries. His arrival in Sydney brings his tally of continents to five of the seven, and no other French president has spent so much of his first year globetrotting. Where does the Australian visit fit into Macron’s political strategy? First of all, it’s important to remember that he is seeking to seduce different publics: an international one, a European one (to position himself as the next great European leader) and a national one back in France. The latter — as recent protests have highlighted — is far from being wholly supportive. For this Australian visit, a New Caledonian audience can be added, for he will visit Nouméa next, just a few months before a referendum decides whether the territory accedes to full sovereignty or retains links to France.

In this respect, Macron’s trip is full of symbolism. He will arrive in New Caledonia in time to take part in the remembrance services for the unrest in 1988 that triggered the independence negotiations and led to the Nouméa agreement of 1998, which allowed for this year’s referendum. In keeping with his self-proclaimed wish to be a “Jupiterian” president, above social divisions and political squabbles, he has been careful to stress that he won’t take any position on the referendum itself. But he has signalled that he will make an important speech before leaving the territory. It’s possible that the talks in Australia will have some influence on its content.

Macron’s Australian visit crowns four years of collaboration on the first world war centenary celebrations, which culminated in the opening of the John Monash Centre in Northern France last week. The timing puts the spotlight on the history of the military alliance and more broadly on defence collaboration, especially as it bears on the fight against Islamic terrorism. The two countries have shared terror-related intelligence since the deportation in 2003 of a French citizen, Willy Brigitte, who planned to establish an al Qaeda cell in Sydney.

At the intersection of defence and trade, Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande, secured the $50 billion contract that will see a French company build twelve submarines, designed in Cherbourg, for the Australian navy. The project led to new links between the Brittany region and South Australia, the centre of the Australian government’s new naval shipbuilding plan.

In this respect, Macron’s visit was partly after-sales service. But he also has a far more ambitious strategic vision than his predecessor, which was apparent in talks at Sydney’s Garden Island naval base, which was designed to forge a strong Franco-Australian partnership to strengthen Indo-Pacific cooperation. The “security diamond” that links Australia to the United States, Japan and India is likely to be a particular focus: in the face of growing Chinese involvement in the region, this originally Japanese initiative is designed to pursue the associated objectives of a rules-based regional order, free trade, and security for smaller Southeast Asian and East Asian countries.

During his visit to India in March, Macron aligned himself strongly with prime minister Narendra Modi’s foreign-policy agenda. France has a particular interest in the Indian Ocean. Alone among European countries, it maintains a base there, an acknowledgement of the ocean’s importance as a trade and communications route. (Three-quarters of all European trade travels through the Indian Ocean and it is criss-crossed by internet cables.) Like other Western leaders, Macron is concerned with the need to manage China’s growing presence in the region, all the more so because of Trump’s erratic leadership. China has secured a military base in Djibouti, for example, a country that was once part of the French zone of influence on the Horn of Africa.

Macron’s interest in the Indo-Pacific region is part of a broader objective: not only to become the de facto leader of the European Union but also to be the leader who fulfils the underlying French vision that fuelled the EU’s creation, to give his country a leading role in the Western alliance. In this, he is perhaps the antithesis of Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, who made the decision to put the French armed forces back under NATO central command, and much more heir to presidents François Mitterrand and Charles de Gaulle, who, despite their different political allegiances, saw “Europe” as the vehicle for France’s influence. Both men pursued economic power, but only insofar as it could push France’s cultural influence; both saw in the European Union’s multi-level, rules-based governance a civilisational model. To his credit, Macron sees the need to combat climate change, and to honour the progress made at the Paris conference in 2015, as a major aspect of this model and has reminded prime minister Malcolm Turnbull of his own earlier commitment to action on climate change.

Macron and Turnbull do share common ground but have divergent priorities. For Australia, Macron’s visit is a golden opportunity to push forward negotiations with the European Union on a free-trade agreement. This has been an objective of the European Commission for a while, but Brexit gave the project much more impetus. As Britain plans its withdrawal from the European Union, Australia fears a repeat shock, in reverse, of what it experienced when it was locked out of the British market following Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973.

Macron is very mindful, however, of the European Union’s crisis of legitimacy as a result of the global financial crisis — or rather, as a result of the way it managed the crisis under the leadership of Angela Merkel. By imposing austerity across member countries, European policy-makers have kept economic growth anaemic everywhere except in Germany itself. At a Brussels summit in October last year, Macron warned of the dangers of pushing ahead with free-trade treaties when public opinion is hostile. A number of non-government organisations, trade unions and politicians have accused the treaties of undermining social norms, environmental protections and health standards.

As a consequence, negotiations for the Canada–Europe Trade Agreement were fraught, and the deal could still be derailed if one country vetoes it. Further complicating Europe’s position is the eternal problem faced by French governments, the need to manage an agricultural sector that has been under great pressure. As a result, official declarations about Macron’s visit to Australia have stressed that negotiations would only concern bilateral commercial agreements.

Big French companies are of course in favour of such a free-trade treaty with Australia. The current involvement of French construction giants Vinci and Bouygues in Melbourne’s infrastructure revamp has demonstrated the potential for expanded operations here. More broadly, French business is acutely aware of the fact that Australia’s economy is highly interdependent with China’s and that the country could be a useful platform to make headway in the Asian market.

But business doesn’t have to worry about securing popular support. Macron, on the other hand, is acutely aware of its importance following the wave of social protest triggered by his attempts to move France to a system of collective bargaining and to prepare the country to meet the European Commission’s directive on the liberalisation of railway transport, which set 2020 as the deadline for France’s main national lines to be opened to competition. With the railway system running at a loss, this delicate issue overlaps with the question of public debt. The strengthened EU rules established following the Greek financial crisis make it imperative for France to reduce its budget deficit.

The French government’s attempt to turn the national railway, the SNCF, into a private company has met with union resistance. A decent level of public support exists for the strikers, though it is eroding as disruption continues. In many ways, the SNCF — by binding the country with a network of lines that radiate out from Paris — is a symbol of the social pact French governments struck with France as a whole after the liberation from Nazi occupation. What people fear is that the profitable lines surrounding major cities will be retained but the periphery will be left to its own devices with possible negative social and environmental consequences.

The French presidential campaign made it clear that French society is deeply divided: the half of France that still operates within a national rather than international economic environment feels it has been abandoned by governments. Some have dubbed Macron’s attempt to reform the SNCF his “Thatcher Moment,” recalling the Iron Lady’s confrontation with mining unions in the mid 1980s. Macron has remained firm in the face of the protests, and will be hoping that En Marche! members of the National Assembly, under party leader Richard Ferrand, can swing popular opinion over to its program of liberalisation.

One test will be the next electoral contest, in 2019, when the French people choose their representatives to the European Parliament. European elections have traditionally attracted less interest than national elections in France, but Macron’s promise to engineer a change of Europe’s direction, combined with the political discontent evident in other European countries, means they could be much more decisive for national politics.

During his election campaign, Macron undertook to reform the European monetary union to give the European Union the capacity to mutualise debt and drive large investment projects. But the recent German federal elections confirmed what many had suspected: Germany will not go along with such a reform.

For a while, with the retirement of Wolfgang Schäuble (the architect of austerity) and the debates within Germany’s Social Democratic Party, or SPD, a change in German policy seemed possible. It was hoped that Germany would face up to the unsustainability of its incredible trade surplus (8 per cent of GDP, more than China’s widely criticised figure) and allow the grave economic balances between countries to be corrected. The SPD’s decision to once again join a “grand coalition” and the appointment of Olaf Scholz as finance minister dashed those hopes: Scholz is just as much a fervent believer in the virtues of a “schwarze Null” (a “black zero,” or balanced budget) as Merkel and he will not push for more national spending to rebalance exports and imports between Germany and the rest of the eurozone.

To put it differently, even though Merkel’s leadership has been weakened, Germany will continue vetoing the reforms many economists now realise are needed to resolve the imbalances and recover economic growth in Europe. Added to this is the fact that the countries that have been through punishing austerity measures and have reduced their budget deficits are unlikely to follow France in a stand-off with Germany.

Macron is desperately hoping that labour reform in France will be enough to deliver some economic growth and secure French popular support for his European vision. He also hopes that his international stature will encourage not only the French electorate but also other countries to stand by him. In France, his new party does not yet have a solid electoral base and the proposed reforms are therefore a major gamble for Ferrand’s government.

Emmanuel Macron was in many ways elected by default, as the result of the disintegration of the French Socialist Party, the fear surrounding the possibility of a French Trump, Marine Le Pen, and the corruption allegations against the candidate from the right, François Fillon. It is fair to say that he is walking a tightrope and it remains to be seen whether his charisma and the hope he has inspired — both of them on display in Australia this week — are enough for him to deliver the change that France, Europe and perhaps the Western world are calling for. ●

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The history of the Summer project exemplifies the pattern. Its two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were expected to cost US$9.8 billion and go online in 2017 and 2018. A series of delays and contractual disputes saw the price blow out to more than US$14 billion and the estimated completion date deferred to the 2020s.

The final blow came when Westinghouse, the firm responsible for design and construction, was forced into bankruptcy by its owner Toshiba, which is itself threatened with bankruptcy because of Westinghouse’s losses. To get out of the Summer project, Toshiba offered the owners, SCANA and Santee Cooper, an unconditional payment of US$2.2 billion. Rather than use the funds to finish the project, SCANA and Santee Cooper have decided to cut their losses and move on.

The Westinghouse bankruptcy has also threatened the only other nuclear reactors currently under construction in the United States, at the Vogtle plant in Georgia. The owner, Southern Nuclear, has taken over the project from Westinghouse and is pushing on, at least for the moment.

Whether or not Vogtle is ultimately completed, the US nuclear renaissance is clearly over. The dozens of proposals put forward in the early 2000s have been either abandoned or put on hold indefinitely. Almost certainly, there will never be another conventional nuclear power plant built in the United States.

None of the usual excuses for the failure of nuclear power apply here. The Summer project had the benefit of tax subsidies and a favourable regulatory environment. Environmentalists may have been unenthusiastic, but with their attention focused on coal they didn’t campaign against new reactors with any vigour. The only significant protests against the Summer plant came from electricity consumers angry at having to pay for a project they correctly believed was not needed and might never be built.

The big enemy was simple economics. While the cost of gas has fallen, and that of solar photovoltaics has plummeted, nuclear power plants have become increasingly expensive. Crucially, concerns about the variability of renewable electricity supplies have abated. A combination of larger and more sophisticated electricity grids, innovative pricing and advances in storage has made variations in output much easier to manage, putting an end to the perceived need for the “baseload” supply provided by coal or nuclear plants.

The one remaining hope for nuclear power is the idea of small nuclear reactors, which would be manufactured in large numbers in factories, shipped to sites, and assembled to create a power plant. The leading proposal is the NuScale Small Modular Reactor, or SMR, currently under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The SMR has plenty of promise. But it is still in the early prototype stage, with no guarantee that costs will fall to a level that will make it competitive with renewables. Even if everything goes to plan, the SMR won’t be deployed at the scale needed to make a difference until the 2030s, at the earliest.

Every country’s electricity supply is different, but all are subject to common trends. Some countries, like Germany, have hastened the end of nuclear power by shutting down plants that still have years of life left. Others, like Britain, have done their best to keep the nuclear dream alive. Almost everywhere, however, the vision of safe, cheap nuclear power has proved unattainable.

The one historical success story, still told and retold by nuclear power advocates, is that of France in the 1970s. From a standing start, the country built fifty-eight nuclear reactors and secured its energy independence for decades. Sadly, the success has not continued. The only reactor currently under construction in France, at Flamanville, is far behind schedule and way over budget, just like its US counterparts.

The reasons for the rise and fall of French nuclear power are still being debated. Almost certainly, a strong centralised state, with a clear commitment to a nuclear strategy and a willingness to provide low-cost finance for high-risk projects, played a critical role. As these conditions changed, construction costs rose steadily.

The only place where anything like these conditions exists today is China. With twenty-one plants under construction and more planned, China is the last remaining hope for a nuclear renaissance. Even there, though, the prospects are limited. While nuclear plans have been scaled back over time, investment in solar photovoltaics has soared. And given the variability of Chinese construction standards, it’s hard to ignore the risk that a nuclear accident will derail the program once and for all.

But the dream dies hard. Despite decades of evidence to the contrary, the idea that nuclear fission offers a cheap, safe and reliable source of electricity, obstructed only by the irrational fears of environmentalists, remains strong. What the shareholders of Toshiba, Westinghouse and SCANA, and the electricity consumers of South Carolina have learned, like others before them, is that this is a costly illusion. •

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And there should be no underestimating the sense of relief in this city: had Emmanuel Macron not won the second round of the French elections on Sunday, the far-right National Front would have put France’s membership of the European Union in doubt. And while the bloc will survive the departure of the United Kingdom, the loss of France, one of the club’s founding members, would have sounded the EU’s death knell.  

But Macron’s convincing victory – and his long stroll for the cameras on Sunday night to address the crowd, to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – represents more than just a crisis averted. The election of the passionately pro-European former banker marks the beginning of the new narrative the EU had been looking for as it continues the fight against populist spot fires across the continent.

The rise of far-right, anti-EU forces is not inevitable – that’s the story the EU’s top brass will now be eager to tell. Even as Hungary’s xenophobic government challenges the legitimacy of the union, as Poland continues its war on judicial independence, as the forces of Euroscepticism triumph in Britain, Europe’s democratic values are proving resilient. The project has life in it yet.

With Macron in the Élysée Palace, the EU is back on the front foot. The union will see this as part of the same trend that saw pro-European, moderate parties dominate the March elections in the Netherlands (in spite of small gains by the far right), and in the same narrative thread that a year ago saw Austria elect Alexander Van der Bellen, the Green-aligned independent who cut short the seemingly unstoppable rise of the far right’s Norbert Hofer.

It might be a long bow, but even the electoral success of Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić in April – a political leader from a non-EU country who actually wants to join the union – is part of the new paradigm.

Front and centre is, as always, Germany, where the federal election later in the year will see the pro-EU Chancellor Angela Merkel square off against none other than Martin Schulz, the former president of the European Parliament. A country that has faced the same angst over asylum seekers as its neighbours and has expressed little sympathy for the bloc’s debt-ridden southern members has largely sidestepped the political impact of anti-EU sentiment.

The EU may also take solace from the symbolism of Macron’s defeat of Marine Le Pen, the daughter and political heir of the National Front’s father figure, Jean-Marie Le Pen. A popular figure and a strong performer, Ms Le Pen is a member of the European Parliament and a critic of everything French supporters of the bloc hold dear: the common currency, the common market, and the free movement of people, goods and services. Le Pen’s defeat will resonate through the corridors of the European Parliament.  

In retrospect, the National Front leader looked unusually vulnerable in last week’s televised debate – even as she launched some strong and personal attacks against Macron. If she had a clear set of policies ready to hit the ground running after Sunday’s poll, she was either unable or unwilling to articulate it. Macron, never a particularly strong performer, kept his cool and managed to avoid mistakes. That was all he needed to do.

If an ability to appear more credible than a far-right leader may not be that much of a political achievement, the fancy footwork required to dump his own personal baggage was undeniably masterful.

Macron is certainly an outsider by French political standards, where presidents usually come to national prominence after paying their dues in municipal politics and can flaunt a degree from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, the training ground of those aspiring to public office. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to see him as anything other than a member of those elites so vilified in the recent US presidential election and Britain’s Brexit vote.

The newly elected president’s career has included a four-year stint with investment bank Rothschild, where he specialised in mergers and acquisitions. He joined the Socialist administration of president François Hollande as an adviser in 2012, and was appointed as France’s minister of economy and finance in 2014. It was not a natural fit – Macron was a self-styled economic liberal in a country where both the left and the right of politics see pro-business reforms as an Anglo-Saxon affectation which the state would do well to temper.  

It soon became apparent that France’s Socialist Party was a sinking ship led by a president on a one-way road to an electoral hiding. (The party’s presidential candidate, Benoît Hamon, went on to secure just 6.3 per cent of the vote in the first round of the presidential poll on 23 April.) Macron decided to strike out on his own, kickstarting his own political movement: En Marche!, best translated as “On the move!”

Had Macron been running for public office in Australia, there would have been enough in his CV for the mother of all character assassinations. A fat cat from the top end of town; a political flip-flopper; an opportunist. Yet his distance from the major political parties served him well and made him possibly the best candidate to take on Le Pen – herself a child of the establishment who had nonetheless been able to position herself as the voice of France’s aggrieved social classes.

Macron emerged from the presidential election’s first round in pole position. The centre-right party Les Républicains secured 20 per cent of the vote, landing it in third place. Its leader, François Fillon, would have fared better had it not been for a scandal that revealed he had kept family members on his staff payroll, asking for no work in return. “Penelopegate” – named after Fillon’s Welsh wife – oozed a sense of entitlement on the part of established political elites that would be grist to the mill for any candidate able to claim the status of outsider – even a former banker. The times would suit Emmanuel Macron.

None of this should suggest that the EU thinks its problems are over. In spite of his economic liberal credentials, Macron will struggle to get his agenda through parliament: even after legislative elections in June, it will still be dominated by the same parties Macron has chosen to eschew. The EU will continue to clash with France over its public debt, which remains higher than the eurozone average, and the country’s penchant for championing local companies at taxpayer expense will continue to be challenged in EU courts.

Macron’s independence from the main parties may have got him elected, but those parties may yet deny him the chance to become a reformist leader like Gerhard Schröder, the centre-left German chancellor whose economic overhaul created the backdrop for the country’s current prosperity.

The EU might have bought itself some time and plenty of hope, but it can’t afford to drop its guard. There are populist storm clouds gathering in other parts of the EU facing elections – Italy, in particular, is facing a tough challenge to the pro-European stance that has dominated political thinking since the 1950s.

National elections in Italy are due by May, 2018, with the Eurosceptic Five Star Movement polling strongly and seen as a serious contender. Brussels sees Italy’s former prime minister, Matteo Renzi, as the EU’s best bet in the fight against anti-EU populist movements – both Five Star and the xenophobic Northern League. When the self-styled “demolition man” of Italian politics managed to reassert his authority of the centre-left Democratic Party late last month, the news was given a warm reception in Brussels.

The similarities between the Italian politician and Macron are cosmetic, but impossible to ignore. Both men are relatively young (Macron is thirty-nine; Renzi is forty-two); both men see themselves as outsiders in opposition to the elites dominating the party system.

Whole-heartedly pro-EU? Supporters of Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party at a conference in Turin in March kicking off his campaign to return to the leadership. Francesco Pierantoni/Flickr

Renzi himself appears hopeful that some of Macron’s success will rub off. In a recent Facebook post, the Florentine politician whose crash-or-crash-through style entranced Italy in 2014, hammered away at the parallel. “Well then, Forza Macron!” Renzi wrote. “Let’s all walk alongside him. And as Emmanuel said this week, the day after [the vote] we will all be together to change Europe and give it a future worthy of the dream of the founding fathers.”

Yet, if he returns to the prime ministership, the Italian politician’s position on the EU is unlikely to be as supportive as that of Macron. Renzi’s vicious attack on Germany after a leaders’ summit in Bratislava last September revealed a willingness to outdo the populists in anti-EU rhetoric; Italy’s close economic relationship with Russia and its work behind the scenes to water down EU sanctions amount to a serious challenge to the bloc’s foreign policy.

Which means that if Renzi manages to cobble together a coalition after the next elections, his relationship with the EU will be problematic at best. What’s more, if the EU is hoping that Renzi is the right man to save it from Five Star, it might be deluding itself. Renzi’s feisty style may serve him well when taking on opponents within his own party, but coalition-building will be the name of the game in the wake of the next elections. That’s not his forte.

Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, is hoping that parliament will be able to agree on a new voting system before the vote – the current system is widely regarded as a dog’s breakfast. But whatever system is in place, it is likely to contain at least an element of proportional representation, meaning that no party is likely to emerge with an absolute majority. To stave off the Five Star threat, Renzi will have to reach out to other leaders.

Yet there won’t be many like-minded parliamentarians to choose from. The Northern League is now too far to the right to be an option, leaving the party of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi as a choice Renzi will have to at least consider. But the very idea of a deal with Berlusconi would shock the Democratic Party’s already hostile left faction; it might also shock Renzi, whose once constructive relationship with Berlusconi came unstuck late last year in a most spectacular way.

Parliament’s vote for Mattarella to the largely ceremonial role of president in 2015 sidelined Berlusconi, who had expected to be consulted on the appointment. This centre-right politician later campaigned against Renzi’s proposed constitutional changes, which Berlusconi, given the right circumstances, could easily have supported.

Renzi’s position differs from Macron’s in another way, too. While France’s president-elect was able to rely on the support of voters horrified at the idea of right-wing nationalists taking power, the Five Star Movement is a different beast. The protest party, led by the charismatic comedian Beppe Grillo, is neither nationalistic nor particularly xenophobic. In fact, nationalism tends not to play too much of a role in Italian political discourse – possibly because Italians tend not to believe in the role of the state in the same way that the French do. So, while Macron was able to count on the support of voters who wanted to keep Le Pen out of power, Renzi won’t be able to commandeer that kind of solidarity.

Indeed, when you hear Grillo speak, he sounds like an old-school Italian lefty: vaguely anti-American, strongly against globalisation and in favour of protectionism, with a smattering of anti-science conspiracy theories. The one policy area in which his party moves firmly to the right is its intransigence on law and order, spurred by the belief that corrupt Italian politicians remain in power where they should be in jail.

The notion that the corrupt should be prosecuted and jailed would be less controversial in other countries. But Italy’s tragedy is not that there are so many criminals at large, but that there are so many innocent people in jail. In a society where the justice system is dysfunctional, the call to lock people up implies locking them up without access to a fair and timely trial. And this places the Five Star Movement to the right of the political spectrum.

But however outlandish the public utterances of Beppe Grillo and however strong his anti-EU beliefs, many Five Star politicians don’t see themselves as Eurosceptics – one of its members of the European Parliament described himself to me as “euro-cautious.” There’s a lot they don’t like about the EU, but that, they argue, doesn’t mean they want to upend the bloc entirely.

So while the Italian political landscape does not suggest that the EU can look forward to another political payoff comparable to the victory of Macron, it does give the EU reason to hope that Europe has reached the high-water mark of populism. If elected, Renzi will be recalcitrant but not revolutionary – and that’s something the EU can live with as it takes stock of what may prove to be a turning point in its history. •

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Between two evils, which one should people on the left choose? The answer seems deceptively straightforward: how could a left-leaning voter choose the Front National? But Emmanuel Macron’s arrogance and incompetence are not helpful. On Tuesday, he went on television to request no less than a “vote of adhesion” (not simply a tactical vote) against Le Pen. 

Macron might be the candidate of the political and economic establishment, but the former banker isn’t surfing a wave of popular support. An Opinionway poll carried out after Sunday’s vote shows that 54 per cent of people who voted for him did so tactically. The truth is that the former economy minister has no solid constituency backing him, and no real popularity.

Le Pen has exploited Macron’s awkwardness by pointing out that her opponent is out of touch with ordinary people. Her strategy is clear: she will portray him as the puppet of financial markets, the European Commission and “globalised and cosmopolitan elites.” By contrast, she will present herself as defender of workers, guardian of the national interest, and a true patriot.

Le Pen’s progression to the second round of the presidential election is not a mere re-run of April 2002 when, against all expectations, her father Jean-Marie Le Pen faced Jacques Chirac. Then, the incumbent president trounced the old far-right leader; today, Marine Le Pen has a small but not negligible chance of winning the vote and succeeding Hollande. 

Most commentators say this is highly unlikely. They may be right; but it’s possible to look at this issue from a different angle and ask: can Macron lose? The untested candidate could yet make terrible blunders and repel a swathe of left-leaning voters.

On Sunday night, after the first-round vote, Macron and his supporters proceeded to a plush Paris restaurant, giving the impression that they didn’t regard the outcome of the second round to be in any doubt. Le Pen showed up this week at a Whirlpool factory near Amiens that is set to close in 2018, making several hundred workers redundant. She called for “economic patriotism,” and in the coming days she’ll also be stressing the similarities between her social program and that of the eliminated left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon (who attracted 19 per cent of the vote) in order to appeal to disenchanted left-wing voters.

Despite the presence of the far-right in the second ballot, the reactions to last Sunday’s results were incredibly muted. Trade unions are more divided than ever and might not march together against the Front National on 1 May. In 2002, a million people took to the streets to protest at the qualification of Jean-Marie Le Pen for the second round. The coming together of a “republican front” (an ad hoc electoral coalition of all democrats against the far-right) was taken for granted and quickly gelled. Today, the emerging anti-Le Pen coalition is more haphazard and less resolute.

Left-wing abstention is the greatest threat of all. In social media, the “Neither Macron nor Le Pen” slogan is gaining momentum; hashtags such as “#SansMoiLe7Mai” (Without me on 7 May) are popular. These are signs of extreme political confusion and evidence of the Front National’s “de-demonisation” in voters’ minds. Some left-wingers claim that “neoliberalism is as bad if not worse than fascism” or that “neoliberalism feeds into fascism.” Others argue that a Macron presidency will guarantee a Le Pen victory in 2022. They forget that abstention might make a Le Pen victory possible as early as 2017.

A poll this week showed that though 50 per cent of Mélenchon’s voters would transfer their vote to Macron, 20 per cent would prefer to vote for Le Pen. This is a major warning to complacent politicians and media. Beating the drum of 1930s-style anti-fascism will not impress young people who don’t relate to that discourse, and further underlines the ideological weakness of the French left.

Most major politicians, parties of the left and trade unions have declared that “not a single vote should go to Le Pen.” This is fine, but it could still encourage abstention. Of all left-wing candidates, only Benoît Hamon clearly endorsed Macron on Sunday evening. Mélenchon has kept quiet until now and might not say what he will do in the second round. 

In 2002, when he was a socialist official, Mélenchon emphatically called for a vote against Le Pen. This time he has brushed aside questions, saying his supporters will be consulted on the issue and will give their “non-binding opinion” next Tuesday. If Mélenchon were to keep silent, it would be the most serious act of detoxification of the far-right in French politics. 

Between two evils, voters on the left should not hesitate to choose the lesser. First, emphatically defeat the far-right candidate by using the only means at its disposal – a Macron vote. Then start opposing President Macron by gaining a majority in the National Assembly. The left would have a chance to make a political comeback with a neoliberal president in office, but it would be trashed for good if it let the far-right come to power. •

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Britain’s new prime minister, Theresa May, elected in July, set out confidently by promising Britons a form of Brexit she now appears unable to deliver. She keeps promising voters the Brexit they want – continued free trade with Europe, but no free entry for Europeans – despite its having been ruled out repeatedly by European Union leaders.

On Sunday, French conservatives effectively elected former prime minister François Fillon as the country’s new president – pending the formality of the actual election next May – despite warnings that his bold plan to shrink France’s bloated public sector and cut 500,000 jobs runs a high risk of forcing the country back into recession.

And in Italy, social democrat prime minister Matteo Renzi has gambled his leadership on the outcome of next Sunday’s referendum, which seeks to muzzle the Senate and tame Italy’s regional authorities, stopping them from blocking his government’s reform plans. The opinion polls suggest he is likely to lose the referendum, and with it his government – which could see the unpredictable populists of the Cinque Stelle (Five Stars) movement take charge of one of the world’s most important (and vulnerable) economies.

Gamblers: Italy’s prime minister Matteo Renzi and finance minister Pier Carlo Padoan defending the government’s plans earlier this week. Palazzo Chigi

Also next Sunday, Austria’s rerun presidential election is tipped to see Norbert Hofer of the right-wing populist Freedom Party become the (largely ceremonial) head of state. Poland, the European Union’s sixth-largest member, has been run by the anti-globalist right (the Law and Justice party, long led by the Kaczyński twins, Lech and Jarosław) since last year’s election ousted the liberal globalist right (Civic Platform, once led by European Council president Donald Tusk). There, the left failed to clear the 8 per cent threshold needed to win seats.

Add in the fact that Spain is in the hands of a minority government that could be overthrown whenever the opposition parties decide they want a new election, and you can understand the widespread relief when German chancellor Angela Merkel announced that she would stand for a fourth term next year. Her government might be overrated and primarily responsible for Europe’s economic blunders, but at least she’s a known quantity, and it’s hard to see her being beaten.

Europe hasn’t been a happy place for a long time. It is slowly emerging from the crisis that crippled its banks, but the International Monetary Fund estimates that even now the economic bottom line – real gross domestic product per head – is still below pre-crisis levels in almost half the countries of western and central Europe. Some, including Italy, are still more than 10 per cent below pre-crisis levels; another four, including Britain and France, are only just above pre-crisis levels.

Unemployment in the eurozone has edged down from 12 per cent at its peak to 10 per cent now, but the IMF forecasts that it will still be more than 8 per cent across the nineteen euro nations in 2021, and more than 15 per cent in Spain and Greece. (Britain is one of the exceptions, with unemployment at similar rates to Australia’s.) It’s not surprising that the pervasive political mood across Europe is one of anger, frustration and revenge on whoever is in government.

What is surprising is that Europe’s governments have not learnt the obvious policy lessons on how to deliver growth with justice. On Monday, the OECD renewed its advice on how to do it:

• Borrow, and build. The organisation estimates that net public investment (after depreciation) is now negative in Germany, Italy and Spain, and barely positive in France. It argues that Britain, France and Germany, among others (including Australia), all have room to move the fiscal dial to more expansionary policies.

• Invest more in education, especially at preschool and primary level.

• Invest more in R&D, both directly and through incentives to business.

• Reduce excessive regulation of business to free up new opportunities for increasing employment and productivity, and hence growth and incomes.

(It gave Australia the same advice, most of which repeats what the OECD itself, along with the IMF and some of us humbler commentators, has been suggesting, to little effect, for years. For all the talk about infrastructure, actual investment in transport infrastructure by or for governments in Australia has slumped by a quarter as a share of gross domestic product: from 1.20 per cent in 2010–11 to 0.89 per cent in 2015–16. For all the talk about education, the Coalition government has abandoned its commitment to fund the well-targeted Gonski reforms. And for all the talk about innovation, funding has been cut for the CSIRO and business R&D.)

European governments, too, have rejected the advice of the OECD, the IMF and the smarter commentators, opting instead for what the OECD calls “the low growth trap”: very loose monetary policy combined with tight fiscal policy. As in Australia, so in Europe: very cheap borrowing costs appear to be pumping up asset prices rather than economic activity.

But unlike our federal governments, Labor and Coalition, which have cancelled out any budget savings they made with new spending or tax cuts, most European governments have been serious about austerity. They have raised taxes and cut government spending. Only five are running bigger deficits than Australia’s – France, Britain, Spain, Greece and Portugal – and most of that is due to unavoidable debt-servicing costs. The OECD’s advice to ease up on the austerity is far more relevant to Europe than Australia.

It is a lesson likely to be lost on François Fillon, the leader of an austerity crusade, who will almost certainly become president of France next May. Fillon, who was prime minister of France under former president Nicolas Sarkozy, saw off his old boss in the first round of the Republican (conservative) primary last Sunday week, and then crushed another former PM, the more moderate Alain Juppé, in Sunday’s run-off. He will be joined by a sympathetic legislature in June.

Fillon is likely to run unopposed on the traditional right, whereas the failure of François Hollande’s administration means that it will be a free-for-all on the left. Hollande's surprise announcement on Thursday that he will not stand for re-election “in the interests of the country” clears the way for prime minister Manuel Valls to stand as the Socialist Party candidate: Valls reportedly had implored him to get out of the way, hinting publicly that he might run against his boss. But Valls is only marginally more popular than Hollande, and with two former Socialist ministers already running as independents, he is not expected to make the final round.

For what they’re worth, opinion polls at this stage suggest that the vote of the left will split between three major candidates and several minor ones. On their figures, Valls would be relegated to fifth place with less than 10 per cent of the vote. Emmanuel Macron, a would-be Keatingesque reformer who was Hollande’s former economy minister, would poll slightly better, as would the veteran leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, running on a Syriza-style platform. Add in the 4 per cent who plan to vote Green, and the usual rabble of splinter groups, and the most likely outcome is that every left candidate will be eliminated in the first round of polling.

The second round consequently looks set to be a run-off between Fillon and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, who is consistently polling close to the 27.8 per cent her populist right-wing group scored in the first round of last year’s regional election. But at that election, the Front’s candidates were swamped in the second-round run-offs, as traditional left and right voters coalesced behind its opponents. That will probably happen again in the final round of the presidential elections.

And yet… until the final days before the presidential primary, opinion polls suggested that Fillon had no hope of beating Sarkozy and Juppé. And if Le Pen and all the other candidates were to pick a Republican candidate they would like to run against, Fillon might well be their ideal choice.

François Fillon has been in politics for forty years. Born in 1954, he grew up as a traditional Catholic in the town of Le Mans, whose twenty-four-hour motor race seems to be his one passion outside politics and his family. He was born into an upper-middle-class family: his father was a lawyer, his mother a historian. He grew up in the right politically, and has never moved from it. He, too, trained in the law, but he joined the staff of his local MP, Joël Le Theule, as soon as he graduated in 1976. Four years later, Le Theule suffered a massive heart attack, and died in his young staffer’s arms. Months later, at twenty-seven, Fillon inherited his seat in the National Assembly.

By then he was married to a young Welsh lawyer, Penelope Clarke, who had been studying at the Sorbonne. She, too, gave up the law, and became a traditional mother to their five children; their family home these days is a twelfth-century manor house on the Sarthe river, southwest of Le Mans.

You get the picture: this guy is a very traditional, well-off conservative who has kept to the faith. He is dignified; you would cast Shaun Micallef in the role. He has clear similarities with John Howard, but part of the reason for Howard’s success was that, tribal as he was, he could empathise with those who were doing it tough, or had different values. For Fillon, it seems, that doesn’t come naturally.

In the French tradition, he combined his role as an MP with local politics. At twenty-nine, he was the mayor of his commune; at thirty-nine, president of his local department; and at forty-eight, president of his region. In the Assembly, he was on the right of the right, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and distant from his own centrist leader, Jacques Chirac. He was also distant from the pro-European ethos that Chirac fostered; in 1992 he was one of the few who opposed the decision to adopt the euro.

In 1993 he became higher education minister, then communications minister, and worked to end the monopoly of France Telecom, a reform completed by the Socialists when they won the legislative elections in 1997. In opposition, he allied himself with Nicolas Sarkozy, the rising star of the right, and stood for the party presidency but lost in the first round. But when the conservatives returned to power in 2002, he became number three in the new government, as social affairs minister.

Fillon stood out in that government. Under Jean-Pierre Raffarin as prime minister and Chirac as president, he pushed through a difficult and highly unpopular reform of pensions, which progressively raised the effective retirement age and created incentives for retirees to keep working. The change provoked months of huge demonstrations in Paris, especially by teachers and other public employees. But Fillon stuck to his guns, and the law passed. Ironically, he was later criticised for not having gone further.

That episode had a cost. At the 2004 regional elections, he was humiliated when his formerly safe region rejected his team and voted in the left. A cabinet reshuffle shifted him to education, but with similar results: after an early success in forbidding Muslim students to wear the veil, he proposed major reforms to the baccalauréat, the Year 12 qualification, which would have, among other things, entrenched continuous assessment and ended group assignments. Masses of students took to the streets, followed by repeated blockades and vandalism at schools. For the second time, Fillon had encountered the full force of French society’s resistance to reform, and this time it brought him down. A new reshuffle saw him dropped from cabinet.

It might have been the end of his career, but Fillon is not a man who gives up. Instead, he spelt out his by-now-radical free-market views in a book he titled La France peut supporter la vérité (France can accept the truth). “The more taxes there are, the fewer jobs there are,” he declared. He devoted himself to ensuring that his ally Sarkozy became France’s next president. After that mission succeeded in 2007, the new president named Fillon as his prime minister.

He remained in the post throughout Sarkozy’s mercurial five years in power. But with Sarkozy casting himself as CEO as well as chairman, Fillon had less power than any of his predecessors. The two men were allies, but not close friends. In 2010, Fillon saw off moves to dump him, and instead the boss allowed him to dump his critics and move the ministry to the right. But Fillon lacked the freedom to put his own stamp on reforms, and Sarkozy’s priorities kept swinging around. Sarko would focus on the battle of the day, Fillon on the long-term direction. For all the ideas they put out, their five years in office left France surprisingly unchanged.

When Sarkozy lost the presidency to François Hollande in 2012, he told the world that his political career was over. Fillon wasted no time in moving into the gap; he declared his candidacy in 2013, four years before the election was due, and published more books to set out his policies. France yawned; most thought Sarkozy would return, and so he did. Whenever the polls asked how Fillon would go, the public’s answer was blunt: much worse than Sarkozy, let alone the moderate Alain Juppé, Chirac’s political heir, who had the widest appeal of any contender.

As 2016 wore on, though, the endless focus on the Juppé–Sarkozy battle whittled away the popularity of both men. In the second debate between the contenders on 3 November, Sarkozy was attacking Juppé over his relations with the centrist François Bayrou, a former rival who is incidentally the mayor of Pau, when Fillon broke in incredulously: “Six million unemployed, debt at 100 per cent, Islamic totalitarianism at our doors… and the major issue of this primary is the mayor of Pau?”

Millions of viewers agreed with him, and the contest turned. In just over two weeks, Fillon suddenly shot up in the polls from 13 per cent to 20, then 30, then to 44 per cent in the first round of voting, knocking Sarkozy out of the contest and leaving Juppé to wonder what had gone wrong.

For the record, France has three million unemployed on the standard definition, not six million, and its net government debt is 89 per cent of GDP, not 100 per cent. But the exact numbers didn’t matter. Fillon conveyed that he was serious about issues that concerned conservative voters, and that was what they wanted to hear.

He is certainly a serious thinker. Most of his positions are predictable, but not all of them. He has proposed that the leading countries in the eurozone form a political council to coordinate budget policies, rather than leave the European Central Bank to try to run Europe’s economy alone. If that arrangement worked, it would address one of the main weaknesses in the euro system.

Like Donald Trump, he believes that the West should completely change tack on Russia – befriend it, engage with it, and welcome it into the Western world, as it did with the rest of eastern Europe. Unlike Trump, Fillon knows Vladimir Putin well, and his view merits serious consideration. He blames the poor relations between the West and Russia on the West’s long campaign to isolate Russia, and sees the unlovable nature of Putin’s regime as a response to that.

Similarly, he proposes switching France’s support in Syria from the rebels to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, arguing that the failure of the Arab Spring everywhere except Tunisia shows that change in the Middle East is usually for the worse – and Assad is preferable to the sort of militarised chaos that has engulfed Libya.

But for France, change is exactly what he is offering: the kind of change other countries have gone through over the past thirty years but French voters have rebelled against. A quick comparison of France now and then highlights some of the problems.

Source: International Monetary Fund.

Since 1980, on the IMF’s figures, the population of France has grown by 11.2 million, but its economy has generated only a net 2.4 million new jobs. Between 1980 and 2000, it was able to keep up a solid pace of growth – 1.9 per cent a year per head, the same as in Australia – but that pace halved between 2000 and 2007, and there has been little growth since.

Instead, as in so many Western countries, France’s governments and households have tried to compensate for the exodus of manufacturing jobs by borrowing and spending. The IMF’s records go back to 1980, and in that time, France has not run a single budget surplus. Government spending now makes up 56.5 per cent of GDP, compared to 37.6 per cent in Australia, and the IMF projects that by next year France will have overtaken all the Scandinavians to become the country with the biggest-spending government in the developed world.

As a result, France’s net government debt, which in 1983 was 13 per cent of GDP, is 89 per cent. Fortunately, household debt is only half as high as in Australia, relative to income, but nonetheless it has climbed from 66 per cent of net disposable income in 1995 to 108 per cent in 2015. All these indicators highlight a loss of global competitiveness, which successive governments have failed to turn around.

François Fillon plans to lead a crusade to turn France’s economy around, in a very familiar way: by shrinking the size of government, cutting regulation of business, cutting taxes on business and lifting taxes on consumers, increasing working hours, lowering unemployment benefits, and lifting the retirement age. Only this, he argues, will make business competitive, re-energise the economy, and replace France’s present unsustainable path with sustainable economic growth and employment.

Fillon proposes to cut 500,000 public sector jobs over five years – roughly one in every fifty jobs in France today. He aims to reduce total government spending by €110 billion across all levels of government. He proposes to reduce the company tax rate to 25 per cent and reduce other business taxes, and pay for the cuts by raising the VAT/GST. Sound familiar?

France’s controversial thirty-five-hour working week would be scrapped, and employers allowed to set their normal working week as anything up to forty-eight hours. A thirty-nine-hour week would be imposed in the public service. One of the five referendums Fillon plans would ask French voters to approve ending the special treatment of pensions; another seeks to write into the Constitution a requirement for a balanced budget.

In effect, François Fillon will be promising French voters that he will lower their standard of living, at least until this transformation is complete. That will not be an easy line to sell. Juppé tried vainly last week to convince conservative voters of that. Fillon’s agenda, he said, is one of “great social brutality… It looks like a Thatcher program. Many of his proposals are absolutely unrealistic. Some cannot be put into effect. Others, if they were, would produce negative effects.”

Fillon’s social program is what one might expect from a conservative Catholic. He says it is too late to undo same-sex marriage, which France legalised in 2013, but he will move to block gay couples from adopting children, and restrict IVF to heterosexual couples. Having already banned the veil from French schools, he wants to ban the burkini from French beaches.

On climate change, however, he is part of the bipartisanship that the French think this issue deserves. It was his government that proposed France’s carbon tax (though it later reversed the decision during the global financial crisis). Fillon recently proposed lifting the EU carbon price to €30 a tonne.

Apart from the cuts to business taxes, the one handout he proposes is increased support for families – at the least, a watering down of the means tests that exclude wealthier families from family benefits. “I plan to respond to the anguish of the middle classes, and make the family one of the bases of our solidarity,” he declared, leaving no doubt where his emotional sympathies lie.

But it is the narrow range of his empathy, and his willingness to fight for the policy causes he believes in, that allows his opponents room to hope. Marine Le Pen will not be offering to make French voters worse off. Her rallying cry is to protect French jobs, not remove half a million of them.

The first opinion polls after Fillon’s surprise victory reported that voters would favour him over Le Pen in the second-round run-off by a crushing 67–33 margin. But that election is still five months away, giving France plenty of time to take a second look at his plans. Anything could happen.

No one could accuse Theresa May of being narrow in her empathies. Her speech to the Conservative Party conference in October was so full of empathy for those left behind – and so critical of the selfishness of business leaders – that it would have gone down better at the Labour Party conference. She has reached out across Britain to everyone, and raised their expectations, and is enjoying a honeymoon just as blissful as Malcolm Turnbull’s was in the last months of 2015.

The latest Guardian/ICM poll this week shows the Conservatives holding a sixteen-point lead over Labour, their biggest lead in the polls for more than twenty years. While the next election is not due until 2020, the papers report that Tory MPs are pressuring May to seek her own mandate while the honeymoon lasts, with Jeremy Corbyn still Labour’s unpopular leader… and before she has to negotiate the terms of Britain’s exit from the European Union.

Change and stability: UK prime minister Theresa May and German chancellor Angela Merkel in May this year. Tom Evans/Number 10

But while the warm inner glow of the caring, sharing PM is spreading over the electorate, business leaders and economists are voicing their impatience that, nearly six months after Britons unexpectedly voted 52–48 to leave the EU, the government has still not formally spelt out what kind of Brexit it plans to negotiate.

Ministers are publicly sticking to the official line that Britain wants to retain free trade with Europe in goods and services but shut the door on free movement of its people. This would overturn the EU’s treasured “four freedoms” – the free movement of goods, services, people and capital. Home secretary Amber Rudd has floated stark new restrictions – including limiting the entry of foreign students, and even Australians – aimed at reducing net immigration by two-thirds.

In what appear to be unofficial preliminary negotiations through the media, European leaders have flatly rejected the idea of such a deal, which in effect would start unravelling the whole project of European unity. If Britain wants to remain in the free trade zone without being in the EU, they say, then it can – but like Norway, Switzerland and Iceland, who are in that state now, it would have to retain free movement of people, including the right of Europeans to work and settle where they choose.

The reality is that, despite her stratospheric poll ratings, May has begun her prime ministership with a tremendous blunder. Yes, the consensus is that Britons’ main reason for voting to leave the EU was a desire to end free immigration of European workers, whom they see as keeping them out of jobs. And leaders of the “leave” case, such as Boris Johnson, now foreign secretary, told voters that they could keep free trade while ending free immigration – a policy summed up in one Tory staffer’s notes as “having your cake and eating it.”

But it is unlikely that May will be able to deliver that. The EU will be in a position to dictate terms; after all, it is Britain that wants to tear up the deal, not Brussels. And it is in the EU’s interest to make Brexit as unpalatable as it can, so that no other country is tempted to follow Britain’s example. It has refused to enter negotiations until Britain gives formal notice of its intention to leave, which May says will not happen until March.

A further spanner has been thrown into the works by the unanimous decision of three High Court judges that the government cannot negotiate for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU without parliamentary approval. The government has appealed to the Supreme Court, which will hear the case next week, but it is widely expected that Britain’s top court will give the same answer. It was ultimately parliament that decided to enter the EU, and it must be parliament that decides whether to exit.

That is no minor snag. A significant minority of Tory MPs want to remain in the EU, as do most opposition MPs – and Britain has a tradition of allowing free votes on big issues. One suggestion is that there could be a compromise deal to allow negotiations for Brexit, but only on condition that the subsequent agreement would become final only if endorsed by parliament.

Every day the papers report business leaders or economists warning that leaving the free trade zone would be a disaster for Britain’s economy. London could lose its dominant role as a global financial centre. Big manufacturers will not invest in a country that could soon be excluded from free trade with Europe. Tens of thousands of deals would become unstuck, and millions of people could be forced to leave Britain for the continent, or the continent for Britain. Virtually no one is arguing in favour of such a Brexit.

The smart strategy for Theresa May would have been to celebrate Brexit as giving Britain the power to make its own rules on social policy, and to decide issues in its own courts. She should have played down the immigration issue, so that the government could ultimately back down on it with the least possible political cost. Instead, she and her home secretary have fanned the flames of anti-migrant feelings despite being unable to deliver what they promised.

One recalls Jim Hacker telling Sir Humphrey, “It’s the people’s will. I am their leader. I must follow them.”

In Britain, life is imitating art. It will end in tears. •

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Just a few words signalled a momentous change. Since its founding in 1971, the Forum has been an organisation made up exclusively of sovereign nations, linking Australia, New Zealand and independent island nations. But during their forty-seventh annual meeting at Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, the Forum’s leaders had decided to welcome two French-controlled territories as full members.

The lack of any explanation or declaration in the communiqué reflects ongoing concerns about France’s objectives among some member states, and awareness that other territories might also seek membership. The consensus decision was forged despite calls by leading Kanak and Maohi independence activists to defer a decision, in New Caledonia’s case until after a scheduled referendum on independence in 2018.

The pro-French leaders of the two territories welcomed the news. “It’s really a great thing for New Caledonia,” Philippe Germain, president of the Government of New Caledonia, told me after the announcement was made. “It will certainly allow us to participate in discussions about the management of our region in all sectors: not only the environmental questions that are worrying the whole world, but also issues of economy, health, education and governance.”

French Polynesian president Edouard Fritch, who had lobbied independent nations to give his territory a greater role in the Forum, was similarly upbeat. “This decision comes after discussions we’ve been holding with our friends from the Pacific, where we strongly expressed our desire to become full members of the family,” he told me in Pohnpei. “Despite obstacles on the path, the main reality – for us and for most Pacific countries – is that we are Pacific islanders like any other. It’s not because we are French that we’re in this meeting, but because we’re islanders.”

Any reasons for excluding French Polynesia no longer applied, said Fritch. “In contrast, many countries see New Caledonia and French Polynesia as a pathway to France and to Europe, for Europe is present here in the Pacific.”

The decision has extra historical significance because of the Forum’s origins. In the 1970s, a group of independent island states created a new gathering as a response to a ban by France and other colonial powers on political debate within the existing regional organisation, the South Pacific Commission. Leaders like Fiji’s Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara and Nauru’s Hammer DeRoburt were angry that they couldn’t discuss nuclear testing and self-determination for the colonies of the region.

After forty-five years as an organisation of independent nations, though, times are changing. Over the past decade, Forum leaders have been working to expand their engagement with the remaining US, French and New Zealand territories of the Pacific. The decision to upgrade the status of French Polynesia and New Caledonia, bringing the Forum’s membership to eighteen, fulfils the vision expressed by leaders in 2004 to better integrate the non-self-governing territories.

Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, a supporter of the change, acknowledged that it was “a political decision.” According to the incoming Forum chair, Federated States of Micronesia president Peter Christian, “There were concerns about how we are doing it, but at the end of the day, doing it the Pacific way, we agreed that French Polynesia and New Caledonia have been knocking on our doors for many, many years. One of the things that really helped us make a decision is that most of the issues we’re talking about are cross-border issues; they have no respect for political borders.”

Not all leaders favoured the change. Nauru’s president Baron Waqa and Tuvalu’s prime minister Enele Sopoaga are understood to have raised concerns during the leaders’ retreat. It was their two nations, together with Solomon Islands, that lodged a resolution to relist French Polynesia as a non-self-governing territory with the UN General Assembly in 2013, ending a sixty-five-year period during which it was absent from the list of countries recognised as colonial possessions. The success of that move was greeted with fury by French authorities because it opened the way for the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation to monitor governance in French Polynesia and the legacies of thirty years of French nuclear testing.

The rapprochement with France has worrying implications for the Kanak independence coalition, the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, which has long relied on Forum support in its quest for decolonisation. After the signing of the 1998 Noumea Accord, New Caledonia’s elected government engaged increasingly with the Forum, obtaining observer status in 1999. It was joined as an observer by French Polynesia in 2004, and both countries were upgraded to associate member status at the 2006 Forum meeting in Apia. The territory of Wallis and Futuna, another French “overseas collectivity,” also joined as observer at that meeting. (After last month’s decision, Wallis and Futuna remains a Forum observer, with no clear pathway to full membership.) US territories like Guam and American Samoa gained observer status in 2011.

Since the Noumea Accord and the end of French nuclear testing, the government in Noumea, and its counterpart in the French Polynesian capital, Papeete, have been granted significant new powers and gained the right to negotiate regional agreements in some sectors. Under the French Constitution, however, Paris still controls the military, courts, police, currency and other sovereign matters, and the constitutional power to sign many treaties still remains with the French Republic. Successive governments in New Caledonia – all led by presidents opposed to independence from France – have lobbied to upgrade from associate to full membership of the Forum, even though New Caledonia is not a fully independent and sovereign nation.

The FLNKS Congress in February this year began discussing a revised position on Forum membership. Some leaders from two of FLNKS’s member parties, Palika and UPM, support the change as part of the broader regional integration of New Caledonia with its Melanesian neighbours. But leaders from the UC-FLNKS and Nationalists parliamentary group, led by long-time independence leader Roch Wamytan, opposed full membership until after the territory’s 2018 independence referendum. Wamytan unsuccessfully lobbied Forum Secretary General Dame Meg Taylor to delay the decision.

Since New Caledonia gained Forum associate membership in 2006, all delegations have included both supporters and opponents of independence. One noticeable feature of the Pohnpei Forum was the absence of any Kanak leaders among New Caledonia’s delegates.

Last month’s decision followed a special Forum ministerial mission to French Polynesia in July 2015, led by PNG foreign minister Rimbink Pato, which assessed Papeete’s application for full membership. At the 2015 summit in Papua New Guinea, leaders deferred a decision on the mission’s report. A key concern was whether the existing governance arrangements of French Polynesia would enable its government “to participate independently and effectively as a full member, in the full complement of political deliberation, decision-making and commitments of the Forum.”

Since then, the Forum secretariat had developed new criteria for membership for consideration at this year’s meeting. Despite this, Forum leaders in Pohnpei failed to set out any clear rationale for the decision. Many observers expressed surprise at its timing, but there had been plenty of evidence that pressure from France was mounting.

The issue was raised by France’s overseas minister, George Pau-Langevin, at the 2015 Post-Forum Dialogue in Port Moresby. Then, at the November 2015 France-Oceania summit in Paris (held just before the global talks that led to the Paris agreement on climate change), French president François Hollande expressed a hope that the Pacific Islands Forum “could welcome to its breast both New Caledonia and French Polynesia as full members and Wallis and Futuna as an associate member. These three territories will be our representatives.” France and its local representatives have lobbied sub-regional bodies like the Polynesian Leaders Group and Melanesian Spearhead Group.

Regional relations with France have certainly improved since the days of nuclear testing and the 1985 terrorist attack on the Rainbow Warrior by French intelligence operatives. Today, France is an active partner on climate change, development programs and EU relations. As a major contributor to the Green Climate Fund, Paris has increased its climate finance for small island states, and President Hollande joined island leaders at a High Level Dialogue on Climate Change in Noumea during his 2014 visit to the region.

Supporters of change: Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull and the NZ prime minister John Key. Nic Maclellan

Through the governments of New Caledonia and French Polynesia and via its own bilateral programs, France has offered to bankroll a range of regional initiatives. President Fritch offered funding for a Polynesian Leaders Group secretariat, while President Germain has offered – and Paris has approved – visa-free travel to New Caledonia for citizens of Vanuatu. Other Pacific island countries have been offered improved air services and support for civil aviation, a crucial concern for smaller island states lacking good transport networks.

Through the Melanesian Spearhead Group, Papua New Guinea has been a long-time supporter of the FLNKS. But the PNG government has also been improving its diplomatic and economic ties to France, and this no doubt weighed on Port Moresby’s decision to support the two territories’ full membership this year. Prime minister Peter O’Neill’s state visit to France in June had been a first for a PNG leader. “With our strengthening relationship direct with France,” he said at the time, “I hope we will see an increase in business and tourism. France is increasingly our trade gateway to Europe and we would like to see Papua New Guinea become a significant hub for France in the Pacific.”

Alongside these political developments, the French energy corporation Total has been expanding its investment in PNG’s LNG industry. The company’s chief executive, Patrick Pouyanné, travelled to PNG last April, and later announced that his company would strengthen its partnership with Oil Search and InterOil for gas exploration. During his Paris visit, O’Neill and his ministers met with Total directors to discuss a potential US$10 billion investment by the company and its partners in PNG’s Gulf province.

Since the 2010 signing of the Joint Statement of Strategic Partnership Between Australia and France, successive governments in Canberra have supported the push for New Caledonia and French Polynesia to become full members, even before a decision on self-determination. Reluctant to be seen as advancing France’s agenda, though, Australian officials have left it for others to take the running. During his press conference on arrival in the Federated States of Micronesia, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull declined to respond to questions on the topic.

Under the 1992 FRANZ agreement, Australia, New Zealand and France have long collaborated on maritime surveillance and humanitarian responses in the Pacific. This year, Canberra also announced that the French shipbuilding corporation DCNS had won an A$50 billion contract to build the next generation of submarines for the Royal Australian Navy. The ANZUS allies will now be happy for France to upgrade its involvement in the South Pacific Defence Ministers Meeting, where Paris currently has observer status. (Paris rather than Noumea or Papeete controls all French military deployments in the region.)

In contrast to Turnbull, NZ prime minister John Key was a very vocal supporter of the change. The Key government shifted policy after a visit by French prime minister Manuel Valls last May, the first visit to New Zealand by a French PM since 1991. Key conceded that it was possible to make a case that the two territories don’t fit the Forum’s criteria for membership, but, he added, “the scale of their activities, the contribution they could potentially make, I think argues the case that they should be allowed full membership.” Pacific academics have argued that New Zealand was partly motivated by the hope that this gesture of goodwill might discourage a French veto for Helen Clarke’s bid for the post of UN secretary-general.

With other Pacific territories – including Tokelau, American Samoa and Guam – seeking greater engagement with the Forum, Samoa’s prime minister Tuilaepa referred to the particular circumstances of France’s lengthy campaign for its territories. “There are many others, but these two have a long association,” he said. “They’ve been knocking and knocking and knocking on the door.” And if others like West Papua or Bougainville come knocking? “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Meanwhile, France seems to be in the Pacific to stay. During a flying visit to Tahiti last February, François Hollande reaffirmed his country’s intention to remain a power in the region. “That’s another reason for my visit here,” he told the Assembly of French Polynesia, “to show that there are no far-off territories of the French Republic – there is only the Republic… You are not far from France, because you are France, because I am here in France.”

Some commentators have suggested that France can play a greater role in limiting Chinese power in the Pacific. But French patrol boats in Noumea and Papeete have limited military capacity and are based thousands of kilometres away from current tensions in the South China Sea. Moreover, the governments of French Polynesia and New Caledonia have both welcomed extensive Chinese investment in tourism and other sectors. This year, Noumea has expanded nickel exports to China, as traditional markets like Australia have reduced their imports of nickel ore.

Of greater importance is France’s strategic interest in maritime resources like tuna fisheries and deep-sea mining. Seeking to uphold his country’s self-image as a mid-sized global power, Hollande has reaffirmed the strategic importance of France’s seven-million-square-kilometre Exclusive Economic Zone in the Pacific.

As Pacific governments seek to expand their control of ocean resources, France and other European powers are increasingly interested in the wealth of this liquid continent. “We have to protect the EEZ,” Hollande said in Tahiti. “We have to ensure our presence so that no one can come to exploit the EEZ without our consent or authorisation. It’s our common heritage – it’s yours, it’s ours and we share it. So we must ensure that other people can’t interfere with part of our territory.”

With French presidential and legislative elections to be held in mid 2017 and New Caledonia’s referendum on self-determination scheduled for late 2018, there are uncertain times ahead. Meanwhile, start rewriting all the textbooks about governance in the Pacific. •

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In cases such as those, however, the attackers were at pains to make it clear they were acting in the name of ISIS and, even when investigations didn’t reveal prior connections with that organisation, there were clear histories of growing extremism and radicalisation. It’s still possible that investigations will reveal that the murderous truck driver in Nice, Mohamed Bouhlel, came recently under the influence of ISIS, despite not declaring a link, but so far he doesn’t fit the pattern of a radicalised individual.

Murder-suicide, including mass murder, and suicide by police have become all too common. But Bouhlel’s murderous rampage in Nice on Thursday night was not directed against a family home, a workplace or a college campus. Rather, he was acting exactly as ISIS would have him act.

At one level it doesn’t matter what Bouhlel’s motive was – his actions and ISIS’s claim make him a terrorist. At another level, however, it is vitally important to understand how radicalisation occurs if it is to be prevented or halted. And labelling anyone of Muslim background involved in criminal violence a terrorist, without any evidence of their being radicalised, only compounds the sense of alienation within Muslim communities and undermines legitimacy and trust in the difficult struggle against terrorism.

Another way in which Bouhlel’s actions conform to the pattern of ISIS attacks is that he launched an attack in his home town, operating in a familiar space. As a delivery driver in Nice, licensed to drive a heavy vehicle, his renting of the nineteen-tonne refrigerated truck raised no suspicions. He knew his way around the streets of Nice on Bastille Day and was at ease manoeuvring the heavy vehicle.

The genius of ISIS’s crowdsourcing approach to terror is that, by recruiting lone wolves, it catches authorities by surprise and, by having them work in a familiar setting, it increases the chances of their attacks succeeding. Even when that lone wolf is the sort of broken individual that other terror groups such as al Qaeda would have rejected, it does not deter ISIS. In fact, ISIS specialises in turning damaged goods into weapons. That, after all, was the story with Man Haron Monis, the Lindt Cafe siege gunman.

Many of the ISIS attacks of the past two years have been planned and directed by the organisation, and have involved dedicated cells of returned foreign terrorist fighters. But it is simultaneously crowdsourcing lone wolf attacks. In September 2014, ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani issued a call for supporters and sympathisers to attack “where you are with what you have.” Not having access to weapons was not problem: “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car.” Two days later, Numan Haider attacked two police officers in Endeavour Hills, Melbourne. Al-Adnani was again calling for such attacks in late May when he declared Ramadan a month of jihad. The call was answered in Orlando, Istanbul, Dhaka, Malaysia and Indonesia.

As ISIS loses territory in Iraq and Syria, it appears to be accelerating its campaign of attacks around the world. It clearly is under pressure. But recent developments in Turkey threaten to tilt things in its favour.

Turkey, long a stable democracy and emerging economic powerhouse, is also a key NATO ally and strategic partner in the fight against ISIS. When the civil war in Syria broke out five years ago, President Recep Erdoğan supported the flood of thousands of foreign fighters through Turkey into Syria to hasten the collapse of the regime of his erstwhile friend Bashar al-Assad. For too long this obsession blinded Erdoğan and Turkey to the real danger of ISIS. By the time they awakened to the threat early last year, Turkey was home to extensive networks of support for ISIS. Consequently, as Turkey repositioned itself to robustly oppose ISIS, it became an easy target for reprisals.

So where does this leave Turkey post the coup attempt? Since accusations of enormous corruption involving Erdoğan and his family broke three years ago, the nation has been sliding down the path of increasing authoritarianism as the president has sought to silence dissent in a nation dealing with recession and uncertainty. The accusations involved opportunistic collusion with ISIS in trading oil and munitions and have resulted in the purging of some of Turkey’s best intelligence and security officials.

After the failed coup, the masterful demagogue is looking more and more like a dictator. This is a huge tragedy for this once promising Muslim democracy. But, more than this, at this critical juncture in fighting ISIS, the global community can no longer count on the president prioritising the costly struggle against ISIS above personal interests.

A week ago it was easy to dismiss the increased tempo of ISIS attacks as a sign of weakness. That may still be true, but we now have in Nice a demonstrated method of attack that can easily be used in any of our cities. And, it appears, a reminder of ISIS’s capacity to inspire and innovate. At the same time, the relentless pressure being applied against ISIS in Syria and Iraq may just have hit a circuit-breaker. Things just got a lot more complicated and much less certain. •

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At the weekend the Front surged above the ruling Socialists and the centre-right Republicans to win the first round of voting for France’s regional governments and assemblies. From a low point of just 4.3 per cent in the national elections of 2007, the Front has been soaring in recent years. All the new issues are working for it: the flood of refugees and migrants from the Middle East, unemployment climbing towards 11 per cent, and growing fears of extremists within France’s large Muslim minority.

The party leader, forty-seven-year-old Marine Le Pen, has refurbished the old brand after wresting control in 2011 from her ageing father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, an old-fashioned racist who thumped the table about law and order and cutting back government. She has disowned his anti-Semitism, swung the party’s economic line from anti-government to anti-market, and campaigned on keeping out migrants, protecting jobs, and taking France out of the eurozone.

And then came the terrorist attacks in Paris on the night of Friday 13 November. Until then, the polls had shown a narrow lead for the traditional centre-right party, now renamed the Republicans, led by former president Nicolas Sarkozy. After the attacks, the Front took the lead.

In six of the twelve regions on the French mainland, it led the polling at the end of the first round. The second round of voting takes place on Sunday, and there is a good chance that in at least three of those regions – across northern France, and in southeastern Provence – the Front will form the new government.

It would be a huge step up for a party that has just two of the 577 seats in France’s National Assembly, despite forty years as a second-tier political force, and currently runs nothing bigger than a few small city councils. In France, the regions are a pale version of our states: while they lack ultimate autonomy, they run schools and public transport, and decide infrastructure investments. They have power.

If Marine le Pen emerges as head of the new northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, as seems likely, it could become a springboard for her ambition to be elected president of France in 2017 – at this stage, probably in a runoff with Sarkozy.

And if she is joined in government by her niece, twenty-five-year-old Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a smart Sorbonne-educated lawyer who won a commanding first-round lead in southeastern Provence, and by the man they call her “right arm,” Florian Philippot, in northeastern Alsace? This would signal that high unemployment and distrust between French traditionalists and Muslim migrants have combined to produce a sea change in the country that gave birth to modern democracy.

France’s move would follow a stream of similar shifts among disillusioned voters elsewhere in Europe: the rise of Syriza; the rise of the left-wing Podemos and the liberal Ciudadanos in Spain, which has left the traditional right with just three of Spain’s thirty largest cities; the rise of the UK Independence Party; the rise of the populist Danish People’s Party to be the largest party in its governing coalition; and so on.

France has followed a similar pattern. The National Front swept across the traditional heartland of French industry, between Paris and the Belgian border. As French competitiveness has sunk because of costly over-government and resistance to change, factories are slowly shutting down and unemployment is in double digits. Youth unemployment is 25 per cent, and polling suggests that the biggest support for the Front is among young working-class males who feel the system has let them down.

Yet it’s more complicated than that. This was just the first round of an election for regional governments in a country where regions are just one of three lower tiers of government. (President François Hollande recently merged twenty-two regions on the mainland into just twelve, citing efficiency issues.) In the second round of voting, only the three main parties will be left in the contest – and the results could be quite different.

As reported, the percentage split of votes on Sunday was:

National Front – 27.7
Republicans – 26.6
Socialists – 23.1
Minor parties – 22.6

But sort the minor parties into broad ideological camps and you get a rather different story. Two-thirds of their votes were for the Greens and other left-of-centre parties; if many of those voters turn out next Sunday to vote for the Socialists – or against the Front – that would change the outcome. And if more voters turn out, that too would make quite a change.

Suppose we count the votes not as a share of the formal vote, but as a share of the voters enrolled, the percentage split of Sunday’s voting looks very different.

National Front – 13.3
Republicans – 12.8
Socialists – 11.1
Minor parties – 10.7
Did not vote – 52.1

(Non-voters include 2 per cent who submitted blank papers or voted informal.)

On Sunday, 52 per cent of French voters abstained from the contest. In 2012, only 22 per cent abstained at this stage of the presidential election. It’s possible that the Front’s success in the first round will bring more people out to vote against it in the second. But the success of Marine Le Pen and her articulate, photogenic niece could also produce a bandwagon effect, as voters once scared off by the old Le Pen decide it’s now safe to embrace the new.

The Front’s prospects have been boosted by Sarkozy ruling out any deals with Hollande’s Socialists (or anyone else) to combine their numbers in the second round. To avoid splitting the anti-Front vote, the Socialists have unilaterally “retired” their candidates from the second round in the regions contested by the two Le Pens – a serious sacrifice, since they are giving up the chance of any seats in the two regional assemblies – but in Alsace, their candidate has defied a similar order to quit.

Sarkozy’s party topped the poll in four of the twelve mainland regions, including Île de France (Paris), and has a reasonable chance of overtaking the Front in the second round in two others. The Socialists came top in just two, but their hopes of winning more have been boosted since by a deal with the Greens and smaller left groups to merge their tickets for the second round in seven regions. This offers the smaller groups a consolation prize of seats in the new regional assemblies, and gives the Socialists, a serious chance of winning control in most of the regions.

If the second round result in France is hard to forecast, so is the outcome a week later in Spain. The latest polls, on average, report that the ruling conservative People’s Party has slumped from 44.6 per cent last time to 28 per cent. Its traditional rival, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, is down from 28.8 per cent to 22 per cent. Their lost votes have gone to two new parties: the left-wing Podemos (We Can), which dominated the local elections in May but has since dropped to 16 per cent, and the less threatening Ciudadanos (Citizens), a centre party that has risen sharply lately to average 20 per cent.

Every opinion poll since 2012 has pointed to a hung parliament; that much is certain. But what coalition, if any, can eventually be put together is anyone’s guess. In southern Andalusia, it took three months for Ciudadanos to throw its support behind the Socialists. This time it could be the other way around.

Spain, like most of Europe, is experiencing a gradual economic recovery. Per capita output grew 3.6 per cent in the year to September, four times the pace in Australia. Unemployment is falling, but it’s still at 21.6 per cent (and 48 per cent among the young), so resentment and alienation are likely to be felt at the polling booths.

France is one of the outliers; there’s a stubble of growth, but it’s now one of just three European countries where unemployment is still rising. Among its many strengths, France has a profoundly conservative attachment to its welfare state, rights and regulations, but that also reflects a broader cultural resistance to reform.

The Hollande government, which began by undoing some of the few reforms Sarkozy achieved, is an extreme example. Government spending is the second-highest in the Western world: 57.5 per cent of GDP last year, compared to 37 per cent in Australia. Paying for it is an expensive business that is putting French workplaces out of business.

In these times, being anti-immigration and anti-Muslim are two keys to the National Front’s success. But exploiting high unemployment and a popular resistance to change is another. •

The post France’s unwelcome choices appeared first on Inside Story.

So unequal were the odds on that convivial Friday evening, so “easy” the targets in the restaurants and clubs where young Parisians were gathering, and so infinite the opportunities presented by open societies to those intent on killing without discrimination or restraint: no wonder that the outpouring of grief and solidarity following the events of 13 November has been shadowed by a “fear of the future” of the kind expressed by Baldwin in 1932. By shell-shocked Saturday, when the unleavened horror of the night before was becoming plain, the bleakest thought of all (to adapt Albert Camus) was that those in the grip of a nihilistic ideology will always “get through” to kill and die in a happy city.

In this respect the response in France is already a contrast with that following the murders in January of seventeen people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and at a Jewish kosher supermarket, when hundreds of thousands marched behind an array of world leaders under the rubric “Nous sommes tous Charlie” (“We are all Charlie”). It’s not just that France’s state of emergency prevents any such major show of unity in the historic Place de la République, though a few hundred did gather there for a candlelit vigil on Saturday night, and another gathering took place on Sunday. This time, the mood is more inward. The difference owes something to the amorphous nature of the assaults, the normality of their setting, their vaster scale, and the intimate, “they-are-us” character of the 132 killed and 350 wounded. (The former total rose by three on 15 November as emergency hospital treatment wasn’t enough to save them.)

The events unfolded in a confusing sequence that took hours for authorities and reporters to piece together. Soon after 9 pm local time, five black-clad operatives made near simultaneous raids in Paris’s bustling 10th and 11th arrondissements. Shootings at a bar, Cambodian restaurant, pizzeria and street near the Place de la Republique killed thirty-nine people in all, while an incursion into the Bataclan concert hall in Boulevard Voltaire (where an alternative rock music band was performing) left ninety dead. Near simultaneously, three companions exploded their suicide vests outside the Stade de France in the city’s north, where France and Germany were playing a friendly soccer match. (They may have aimed to enter the stadium and inflict much greater carnage; at least one had a ticket but was stopped from entering by guards employed by Perth-based MCS Security.)

France’s president, François Hollande, had been hurriedly evacuated from the stadium as the explosions sounded. Within two hours he was announcing the emergency, including a closure of national borders, on television. Three days of official mourning have followed. Across the city and Europe entire, front pages were frantically rewritten and news channels went into rolling coverage of still inchoate fragments. Soon, expressions of sympathy from world leaders were pouring in, along with now customary symbolic gestures: Sydney’s Opera House and London’s Tower Bridge lit in the French tricolour, Barack Obama’s reference to “our oldest ally,” spontaneous vigils and renderings of “La Marseillaise” outside diplomatic missions. France’s universalism, as well as being integral to national identity, still carries global appeal.

Yet this time, the aftermath will inevitably demand much more: more thought, leadership, international cooperation and cohesive purpose. In retrospect, the January massacre, and the thwarted attack on an Amsterdam-to-Paris train in August, became too symbolic too quickly. “Black Friday” may prove the real catharsis for France and perhaps beyond, by clarifying the historic scale of the Islamic State, or ISIS, challenge. What, however, might more vigorous “securitisation” do to the very liberty ingrained in the Parisian, and French, soul? Here, many cite Britain’s ubiquitous CCTV as the regrettable price, or a too high one, for notionally greater security. It is not only that there are no easy answers; in diverse Europe there may be no uniform ones either.

In any event, the authorities’ immediate priority is to map the exact details of what happened and its background, in order to assess and counter live risks. Most urgent is to track the links between what the security agencies call the “point of origin” and the “point of connection”: in this case perhaps Raqqa, the ISIS “capital,” and Paris. Evidence that the perpetrators include three French brothers – now respectively dead, detained and on the run – give the investigation momentum, as do the arrests of suspected associates near Brussels. Other reports, of a Syrian and an Egyptian passport belonging to attackers, and of connections (including arms transfers) with the refugee inflow through Greece and the Balkans, have yet to cohere.

The testimony of survivors, often underestimated, is also invaluable at this stage. Amid their trauma, several confirm the unmasked assailants’ clinical approach, youthful appearance, and calm reloading of weaponry. One referred to a “ghostly” enemy who seemed to appear from nowhere to casually mow down people sitting outside at a restaurant table. The prominent French writer Pascal Bruckner echoes the observation: “We are living in a state of war – a special war with invisible enemies striking at us whenever they want.”

The location, timing and horror of the atrocity ensure its worldwide impact. In turn that gives a crucial insight into the minds of those who planned it. In perspective, Paris represents an epicentre of Islamist terror since the mid 1990s (when a wave of bombings struck the city, killing eight people on its rail network). The bloodbath of relaxed youngsters on a night out recalls Bali’s nightclub bombing in October 2002, where ninety-one Australians were among the 202 dead (as does ISIS’s rhetoric in claiming responsibility – Paris as the “capital of prostitution and vice, carrier of the Banner of the Cross of Europe”). Turning victims into hostages, as for several terrible hours at Bataclan before police stormed the venue, has a trace of the Chechen sieges in Moscow and Beslan in the early 2000s.

The intended targeting of the Stade de France echoes the “spectacle” of 9/11 itself. A major strike on a European capital links to the bombings of Madrid’s and London’s transport hubs in 2004–05. Above all, the mobile, marauding assaults that turned the freedom of the city against itself – as an opportunity for large-scale murder – closely resemble the Mumbai operation of November 2008 (directed from Pakistan), where a ten-man cell killed 166 people.

Along with the explosion on a Russian passenger jet over Sinai, and other recent massacres in Tunis, Ankara, Baghdad, and Beirut (to name only those), ISIS has developed the capacity to apply al Qaeda’s hybrid killing strategy in a more professionally militarised way. The French scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu, author of From Deep State to Islamic State, calls the movement “a successful al Qaeda able to coordinate major terrorist attacks worldwide.”

It is the Mumbai precedent that most worries British emergency planners, who rehearsed just such a scenario in June. Raffaello Pantucci, author of We Love Death As You Love Life: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists, says that the “form of horror” displayed in Paris “requires deep indoctrination, preparation and training… Mumbai-style terrorism has reached European shores.”

Many would-be assaults in Britain have already been aborted at the planning stage by good intelligence, or even a later one by luck and heroism. In June 2007, a Bali-type attempt on a nightclub in London’s Leicester Square, followed the next day by a ram-raid bombing of Glasgow airport, both narrowly failed. Everyone in Britain’s “deep state” is inculcated in the chilling reminder from the Irish Republican Army, or IRA, after it killed five people, but just missed Margaret Thatcher, in Brighton in 1984: “We only have to be lucky once.”

Much concern focuses on the approximately 750 young British Muslims who have gone to Syria to join ISIS, of whom around 450 have since returned. Both returnees and stay-at-home sympathisers are subject to what Charles Farr, head of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, calls “ideological grooming” by ISIS’s cyber-caliphate propagandists. Monitoring and deradicalisation programs race to stay ahead. A timely New Statesman analysis by Shiraz Maher of London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation – published on the day of the Paris attacks – notes that the ISIS threat “is diversifying, deepening and becoming ever more sophisticated.”

The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn developed the point in the wake of the massacre. ISIS “is an effective fighting machine because its military skills… are a potent blend of urban terrorism, guerrilla tactics and conventional warfare.” Its ends, moreover, are clear: to entice Western states further into direct combat via “boots on the ground,” and to foment sectarian hatreds in the West that reinforce alienation among local Muslims and thus make them more receptive to the jihadi message.

One lesson of Paris is the need for world leaders – now meeting in the G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey – to have a coherent strategy whose various elements (political, military, intelligence, hard and soft power alike) emerge from a definite analysis and are tied to a desired result. Stopping criminal violence and its triggers is the vital, day-to-day priority, a whack-a-mole task but not in itself a strategy. The latter has to be linked to democratic renewal, social harmony and economic progress in ways that link Europe, the Middle East and other regions. Above all, the strategy needs what is sorely lacking today: confidence in the West’s own best principles.

There is little sign of this emerging. And Europe’s margin of freedom, as Nick Cohen wisely counsels in the Observer, may be shrinking. (After Paris, he writes, “it feels as if our luck has run out.”) But a small consolation is that an economically straitened Europe, now very pressed too by a huge refugee and migrant inflow, for the moment resists the intercommunal strife longed for by jihadi and other extremists. Paris’s response to the trauma of “13/11,” necessarily less demonstrative than after the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, is so far equally noble.

The Sunday Times journalist Patrick Bishop, now resident in the city’s northwest, talks to Ammar, the manager of a shoe shop, who says, “Everyone knew this was coming… It takes a certain type of person to set out to kill people when they are having a good time – eating, drinking, watching a band. It shows how much they hate life and want to destroy it.” But is there a chance they will succeed? “Never! I am an Algerian and a Frenchman and a Muslim and proud to be all three. I live here in friendship with my neighbours, Jew, Catholic, whatever. What has happened is dreadful, but we Parisians will sort ourselves out and get on with life and its pleasures. We’ve got to. Otherwise the terrorists have won.”

It’s a fragment among millions. And there is so much the other way. But each fragment, like each destroyed and wounded life, matters. Paris’s sadness is a measure of the beautiful humanity it and the world has lost. Those lives of hope and promise must somehow hold the key to a future beyond fear. •

The post Paris: assembling the fragments appeared first on Inside Story.

These barbarians of God… want France to be in a state of shock. To stun her, paralyse and divide her. But in the name of the real martyrs of yesterday, innocent victims, and in the name of the Republic, France shall remain united and stand firm.

Le Monde was also stoic:

In the face of panic, dignity. In the face of the sowers of death, resolve. In the face of desperation, lucidity. In the face of terror, sangfroid… And above all, the unity of the nation when put to the test.

These are undoubtedly fine words. But what would the stoicism they suggest really mean?

This question is one focus of attention on the website of Modern Stoicism, a group whose members are primed from their recent exchanges during Stoic Week, which ran on 2–8 November. Stoic Week, an internet forum with a wide following, is concerned with the application of principles from ancient stoicism to modern everyday life. Participants are guided through a succession of exercises and meditations based on the work of the Roman statesman Seneca and the second-century philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Stoicism differs from other philosophical traditions in its determination to focus on the realities of human life, including the political realities. It is not so much a school of thought as a school for the training of thoughts, in order to promote better action and reaction amid the circumstances we face. Extreme situations and experiences of ordeal are the real tests of the doctrine. It places much stress on the control of emotion in order to foster calm and stability.

Le Monde’s commitment to lucidity in the face of desperation and sangfroid in the face of terror is in accord with Aurelius’s identification of the stoic virtues as resilience, balance, dignity and grace. But to keep your cool in the face of terror is a tough challenge. The question of where that kind of psychological strength may come from is complex, and signals a point of departure between the modern rhetoric of stoicism and the mental disciplines practised in the ancient tradition of the stoic school.

“France is strong,” President François Hollande proclaimed, as he called “for unity, for a collective spirit and for cool heads.” The idea that national unity provides a centre of gravity from which all citizens can draw strength in times of war and crisis is deeply embedded in modern democracy. Calm and unity are inextricably related, as they were in Margaret Thatcher’s speech immediately after the bombing at the Brighton hotel where she and her cabinet were meeting in 1984. “The fact that we are gathered here now,” she said, “shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.” 

Thatcher’s idea of unity was strictly nationalistic, and nationalistic leaders tend to divide nations. Her rhetoric leading up to the Brighton conference had been full of venom about “the enemy within.”

Hollande may speak with a more consciousness, especially since he has been answered by a chorus of support from leaders of other nations, but he also speaks for a nation under attack. And a nation on a war footing typically looks to its borders, accentuating the distinctness of its historical identity.

Here is where the philosophical heritage of stoicism carries a more radical challenge. When Marcus Aurelius talked about unity, he was thinking on profoundly different lines. “Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected,” he wrote in his Meditations, “of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another, and in sympathy with one another. This event is a consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.”

This sounds more like a spiritual vision of unity than a political perspective, but Marcus Aurelius was a head of state, and lived in turbulent times. He fought wars, and was witness to the atrocities of the battlefield. Politics was a way of life for him, and day in day out, he dealt with the crises of government. Seeing himself, his life and his sphere of action as part of a planetary cycle of creation and destruction was a technique for maintaining psychological stability amid the turbulence. Yet it was much more than self-therapy.

As a doctrine brought to bear on public life, stoicism aimed to lay the foundations for civil society. “When we talk of fellow citizens,” Aurelius wrote, “our state must be the world. What other entity could all of humanity belong to? And from it – from this state that we share – come thought and reason and law.”

There is much here to bring European and Islamic traditions of reason and law onto common ground. Indeed, stoicism may be said to have as enduring an influence in Islam as in Europe. While it is hard to imagine any contemporary head of state addressing his or her people as “citizens of the world,” the idea can come naturally to the people themselves.

During the night hours following the Paris attacks, when many people were stranded in a city under lockdown, residents welcomed strangers into their houses, sending the message around through the campaign #PorteOuverte. Cab drivers gave free rides to those who wanted to take up the offer. The #I’llRideWithYou campaign following Sydney’s Martin Place siege worked explicitly across a divide that threatened the unity of common citizenship.

When the unwieldiness and chequered history of the United Nations has made us sceptical about the political viability of being citizens of the world, campaigns like these are important acts of faith. It’s a form of collective consciousness that has to be built from the ground up. Social media have a part to play in it, albeit a somewhat volatile and contrary one – though that, after all, simply reflects human nature.

On Facebook on Sunday morning the tricolour wash spread from one post to the next, across profile pictures, shots of the Sydney Opera House as it was illuminated on Saturday night, and romantic images of the Eiffel tower. “We are all Parisians now” was the prevailing message, though it wasn’t long before a new wave of recognition began to break. Why just Paris? Only twenty-four hours before the attacks began there, Beirut had suffered a similar onslaught, leaving forty-one people dead and 300 injured. One man sacrificed his life to intercept a suicide bomber he’d spotted heading for the doors of the mosque.

By the end of the weekend, Beirut and Paris were appearing in parallel images on my newsfeed, and the tricolour wave was receding. You could call this political correctness, but perhaps that’s only a term to hide behind when the challenge of inclusiveness catches you out. There’s one post from the day that has burned itself into my mind. It’s a simple white card bearing a couple of verses by the young Somali poet Warsan Shire:

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere

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Members of the audience might have been excused if this juxtaposition of wartime soul-searching and the 2015 birthrate recalled to mind Marshal Pétain’s announcement of France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany in June 1940. “Too few children, too few arms, too few allies” were to blame for the defeat, according to the leader of Vichy France. Then again, the idea that the French system was born in 1945 (in fact, it largely dates back to 1928–30 legislation) shows how social security slots into a complex of liberation mythology that remains deeply ingrained despite the work of historians like Robert Paxton.

This tension put the invited historians in a delicate position. Jean-Pierre Azéma, who stepped in for an ill Jean-Pierre Roux, spoke of the ruin of France at the end of the war, his sombre tone dispelling the effervescence created by the minister’s address. Some of the audience voted with their feet, hoping perhaps to find another croissant in the foyer of the amphitheatre, while both my neighbours voted with their fingers, squiggling on their smartphones.

Azéma then vacated the podium for Bruno Valat, whose work has challenged much of the mythology surrounding the 1945 reforms. Valat admirably navigated the conflicting obligations of academic integrity and celebratory mood by reasserting the key findings of his research while emphasising what was new and ambitious in the postwar reforms. He referred in particular to the vision of social security as the basis of true social democracy, symbolised by the elections for the boards that governed the system in their early years.

The day was then given over to a series of roundtable discussions. As at other conferences on the topic, it seemed to me that women, while usually outnumbered by men, had a better grasp of both the financial and the practical dimensions of social security. Too often, however, speakers had a firm grip on only one of these aspects, and some had neither financial nor practical insights to share. One speaker, just before the lunch break, lectured those of us still paying attention on the contradiction inherent in a system that compensated medical expenses without requiring citizens to take any responsibility for their own health. Most of the audience reacted to this exhortation by massing outside for a collective smoko.

After the thousand or so of us had been treated to a free lunch, Touraine engaged her ministerial counterparts from Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg and Tunisia in a discussion about the future of social security in Europe. They were joined by Jonathan Gruber, an outspoken advocate of Obamacare and professor of economics at MIT. Both Andrea Nahles, the German labour minister, and the impressive Swedish social security minister, Annika Strandhäll, spoke about the refugee situation, an issue that otherwise failed to rate a mention. Nahles pointed out that the arrival of so many young refugees had turned the demographic challenge of the German social security system on its head. Strandhäll agreed: “We are trying to see this as one of the possibilities to save the retirement system.”

Strandhäll also refreshingly reminded the audience that social security is “something which touches every citizen in my country.” This may have been implied throughout the day, but not one French speaker explicitly said it. Each of us was given a printed textile carry bag, complete with colourful badge, which included a glossy magazine profiling writers and philosophers, film directors and even a rugby player and recounting their thoughts on social security. There was no mention of ordinary people, and there didn’t appear to be many in the audience either. As I wandered among the panels of a poster exhibition during the lunch break, I felt thankful that I’d managed to get my hands on a suit jacket. Apart from my jeans and lack of tie, I looked very much the part.

The ministers then discussed the future of Europe-wide social security. Romain Schneider, Luxembourg’s social security minister, reported on a “willingness for convergence” at two high-level European social policy meetings. But there was a need, he said, “to direct countries in the right direction” (diriger les pays vers des orientations correctes) in order to avoid a rush “to the bottom” – an allusion to a minimum safety net–style scheme. Schneider also characterised the meetings as “small, informal lunches,” underlining the risk that European social reform would remain the province of “an exclusive club” of officials and politicians. This allusion to one of the most persistent criticisms of the eurozone – that it is a monetary union bereft of political or social structures – prompted Nahles and Strandhäll to express deep concern that talk of social reform might involve finance ministers but exclude their counterparts in social portfolios.

Yet the social security and social affairs ministers also professed a sentimental attachment to national systems, which made it difficult to see how greater European convergence might be achieved. Strandhäll, while acknowledging the consensus for the free movement of labour, nonetheless felt it “important for there to be different social models,” and frankly acknowledged that Swedish unions would not be happy with talk of a (substantially reduced) European minimum wage. Touraine, in an attempt to wrap up the discussion on an optimistic note, inadvertently alluded to similar difficulties stemming from national political considerations. “I am very attached to diversity,” she said. “We do not have the same histories; do we need the same retirement system everywhere in Europe?” Nowhere is it written down, she concluded, that all countries should have the same retirement age.

Europe certainly presents a variety of social security systems, all of which could serve as models for a eurozone scheme. But one of the lessons of the Greek “crisis” – which has been overshadowed by the refugee situation – is that issues like disparities in national pension ages do generate strong popular feeling and diminish the will for common solutions. Without genuine convergence of social security systems, the future of Europe-wide social security looks dim.

As the day unfolded I reflected on the representation of social security in France, how their system differs from Australia’s, and the implications of the Australian model of social security for democracy. The French, in my experience, are positively “chauvinistic” in their pride about the sécu, and sometimes I’m asked whether Australia has its own social security system. The fact that Australia adopted age pensions and unemployment benefits decades before France usually comes as a surprise to my questioners, and I have seen French historians struggle to convince incredulous listeners that their country was a relative latecomer to social security.

It’s hard to picture an Australian government of any persuasion throwing a gala event to celebrate social security – Gough Whitlam’s state funeral is probably about as close as we’ll ever get – and I doubt even a new constitution or preamble for an Australian republic would mention social security as the French constitution does. Yet the basic features of the Australian model – universal, flat-rate and income-tested benefits financed from consolidated taxation revenue – means that reforms have the potential to affect all of us, making the entire electorate a pervasive interest group, an effect reinforced by compulsory voting. In an era of small government, social security has come to the fore as one of the key areas of political responsibility. This may in some cases limit the scope for reform, as Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey found out, but governments willing to introduce evidence-based reform may well find themselves rewarded by voters.

In France, by contrast, the social security system presents a far more complex picture. Payments are often set as a percentage of past income, and eligibility for pensions is linked to years of workforce participation. The state is not directly responsible for running the system, which is administered through separate bodies – think of the Australian superannuation system. As social security’s share of the national budget has increased, its financing has become subject to creative accounting, which has only served to make the system more opaque.

While everybody furiously agrees on the importance of social security reform, that reform has proved incredibly difficult over the years, a situation not helped by the division of power. France abandoned elections for social security boards in the 1960s and only reintroduced them on one occasion in the early 1980s, but responsibility for social security is still shared between an executive, which doesn’t sit in parliament, and the different levels of government. This makes reform difficult – a point underlined by the fact that French social security reform has often proceeded by presidential decree rather than parliamentary process. The 1945 legislation, enacted before the first parliament of the postwar republic met, is a case in point. Yet still French politicians emphasise a democratic dimension of the system.

The day was brought to a close by president François Hollande, who delivered a highly polished but on the whole uninspiring speech. The silhouettes of people hoping to jump the cloakroom cue became more numerous as his peroration turned into an awkward meditation on progress. Then there was applause and the rest of us filed out of the auditorium and into a street blocked off by the heavy police presence accompanying the president. I weaved my way through the barricades and away from the building before too many people had the time to light up. •

The post “Something which touches every citizen in my country” appeared first on Inside Story.

Commentators were quick to denounce this branding exercise. But any attempt to purify the Gallipoli centenary can also distort the way we remember the events of 1915 by downplaying the multinational history of the conflict.

Among the forces serving in the Gallipoli campaign were thousands of British and French colonial troops – soldiers who fought and died on the peninsula but have largely been written out of the centenary history. Alongside Anglo-Celtic Anzac soldiers were Indigenous Australians, Maoris, Senegalese, Zouaves, Sikhs, Gurkhas and Newfoundlanders, as well as a contingent of Zionists from Palestine who formed the Zion Mule Corps.

Bruce Scates, who chaired the Military and Cultural History Group of the Anzac Centenary Program, has argued that the Gallipoli commemorations often ignore the role of other nations. “We are in danger of returning to a narrow, nationalistic and self-congratulatory account of that costly and ill-conceived campaign,” he writes. “In our rush to remember, we run the danger of forgetting.”

After the conflict on the Western Front became bogged down in trench warfare in early 1915, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, began planning a second front. But his early vision of a naval campaign to capture the Dardanelles Straits was abandoned when the French battleship Bouvet sank on 18 March, with the loss of 600 men. Instead, the fateful land invasion was launched on 25 April.

Although the campaign was led by British commanders, an estimated 80,000 French nationals served in Gallipoli, and nearly 15,000 of them died there. As Britain’s Imperial War Museum points out, “vivid testament” to their presence can still be found on the peninsula, “where, in the French Cemetery above S Beach, there are over 2000 individual grave markers as well as five huge white ossuaries each containing the remains of up to 3000 men.”

The French Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient, initially a single infantry division, grew to two divisions for the Gallipoli campaign. The 1st division had originally been recruited in North Africa from French settlers, and Arab and African soldiers. By 1915, the Corps included an African Regiment of Zouave and Foreign Legion troops. (The Zouaves, originally recruited from the Berber population of Algeria, were augmented by troops from across North Africa and even prisoners of war and deserters from Alsace and Lorraine.) There were also two colonial regiments, each comprising a European battalion and two battalions of West African Senegalese Tirailleurs. From March to December 1915, Senegalese made up more than half the French expeditionary force.

On 25 April, to provide a diversion for the Gallipoli landings, the French 6th Colonial Regiment led an assault near Kum Kale on the Asian side of the Straits. The seizure of Kum Kale was the only success that day, but the French troops were soon withdrawn, with 300 killed and nearly 500 wounded. “Till the first rays of dawn the next day, we are leaning over wounded in an atmosphere of blood, of groans, and of indescribable horrors,” reported medical officer Joseph Vassal of the 6th Colonial Regiment. “There is a Senegalese with his head torn, a foot missing, and three fingers on the hand gone. Another Black, waiting his turn on a chair, is asked, ‘Beaucoup malade?’ [Are you very ill?] The doctor looks. Both legs have been torn off by a shell.”

The next day, the French troops joined British forces on Cape Helles, in the south of the Gallipoli Peninsula. They held the eastern part of the Allied line on Cape Helles and took part in the First Battle of Krithia on 28 April. The French troops were hammered by the Turkish forces, who halted their advance and caused massive casualties among the Senegalese and Zouave units. With many of them dressed in red trousers and white cork hats, the soldiers were an easy target for the Turkish machine gunners.

In early May, successive French attacks at Krithia were beaten off by the Turks. Snipers killed the French officers and Senegalese troops retreated in confusion. General Sir Ian Hamilton, British commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, dismissed the colonial troops as “niggy wigs” and “golly wogs.” Over the next few weeks, the French advance on the right of the peninsula was blocked by Turkish deployments on Kereves Dere, a deep gully running inland from the Dardanelles coast.

By June, the stalemate had led to a collapse in morale among French troops. With limited medical evacuation, only a litre of water a day and trenches filled with rats and lice, they suffered alongside other nationalities. In September, much of the Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient was redeployed to Salonika under French command – troops from Senegal, Martinique and other French colonies formed the bulk of the remaining troops. By year’s end, when the remaining 21,000 French troops were withdrawn, only one man in three from the corps was unscathed by injury or disease.

Overall, the French had sustained 14,340 dead or missing and an estimated 40,000 wounded, including 20,000 medical evacuations. (Among the Australians, 8709 were killed in action or died of wounds or disease, and another 19,441 were wounded.)

The overwhelming silence in Australian commentary about the role of colonial troops at Gallipoli is mirrored in France, where the major focus of commemoration is the slaughter on the Western front. As British historian Matthew Hughes writes, “in France there is only one monument to the men who died at Gallipoli, on the Corniche in Marseilles, the harbour from which most of the troops left.”

More than 1.3 million South Asians served in the British Imperial Army during the first world war, and more than 140,000 of them died. Some 15,000 Indian troops were deployed at Gallipoli, with Indian mountain gun batteries operating in the Anzac area from the landing on 25 April until the August 1915 offensive. The Punjabi Muslim gunners among the 7th Indian Mountain Artillery Brigade were the only allied Muslim troops in action against the Turks on the peninsula.

“The Indian story, and it was a substantial one, must therefore be unravelled from amongst the larger official accounts of the war,” writes Indian historian Rana Tej Pratap Singh Chhina. “There are almost no records that preserve the subaltern voice of the Indian rank and file, apart from the fortuitous collection of letters passed down by the Indian censors in France.”

During the August offensive, the 6th Gurkhas participated in the climactic battle of Sari Bair alongside a Maori contingent from New Zealand. Around one-in-five of the 500 New Zealanders were killed or wounded. The surviving Nepalese soldiers seized the heights of Hill Q on Sari Bair ridge, the furthest Allied advance during the August offensive of the Gallipoli campaign, but were forced to retreat when they were mistakenly shelled by the Royal Navy.

The francophone West Africans serving at Gallipoli were not the only French colonial troops deployed during the war. After the massacre of French soldiers in Europe during the summer of 1914–15, the French high command agreed to expand recruitment to France’s overseas colonies.

In France’s Pacific dependencies – New Caledonia and the Etablissements Français d’Océanie – young men from both settler and Islander communities joined colonial regiments. A quarter of the male population of New Caledonia enlisted or were conscripted, including 1087 French settlers and 1010 Kanaks. Across the Pacific as a whole, 1817 volunteers and 2213 conscripts signed up for the French Pacific battalion. After two warships from the German Far East Flotilla attacked Tahiti in September 1914, 1115 men were recruited to fight in Europe between 1915 and June 1917.

In June 1916, the Bataillon de Tirailleurs du Pacifique, comprising companies of Kanak and Tahitian soldiers, deployed for France. New Caledonians serving with the 5th Regiment of colonial infantry fought on the Somme, at Verdun and in other slaughterhouses. Some 575 New Caledonians, including 382 Kanaks, died for “the motherland.”

Maori and islanders from New Zealand’s Pacific colonies also joined the war effort. On the tiny island of Niue, 150 men joined the 1st Niue Regiment, sailing to Egypt and France in February 1916 as part of New Zealand’s 3rd Maori contingent. Margaret Pointer’s poignant history of the Niuean contingent, Tagi Tote e Loto Haaku: Niue Island Involvement in the Great War, documents how most of the islanders were struck down by influenza, pneumonia or dysentery and were repatriated without firing a shot.

Not everyone rushed to support the Empire. In New Zealand’s Taranaki and Waikato districts, where hundreds of thousands of acres of land had been confiscated after the Maori wars, the indigenous tangata whenua refused to join the colours. In New Caledonia, the 1917 revolt led by Chief Noel highlighted Kanak opposition to French colonial rule, with French soldiers declaring a new military front to crush the rebellion.

On their return to New Caledonia, Kanak soldiers who had survived the slaughter on the Western front were once again placed under the Indigénat, a native affairs administration that denied them the right to vote and restricted them to tribal reserves. Along with indentured labourers and French women, Kanaks only obtained the vote following the second world war, after communist activists had started agitating in the tribal reserves and indigenous soldiers returning from European battlefields had begun petitioning for civil rights.

In Australia, the fate of the “Black diggers” and other returning soldiers – including Alexander McKinnon, an Aboriginal station hand from the Northern Territory who fought and died at Passchendaele in 1917 – has been captured by the moving memorial “One Hundred Stories.”

From Australia to New Zealand, from Niue to New Caledonia, the war is commemorated by memorials to the fallen. But, as Elizabeth Rechniewski writes, these statues can create new conflicts: “The landscapes of Australia and New Caledonia are crowded with monuments that we unproblematically refer to as ‘war memorials’ and yet nothing is less evident than what constitutes a ‘war,’ or what distinguishes a soldier from a fighter. Nothing is more controversial than whose wars we should commemorate and why.”

Following the signing of New Caledonia’s Noumea Accord in 1998, Kanak independence activists began agitating for a proper accounting of the islanders who died for France. On the main Monument aux Morts in Noumea, each European soldier from New Caledonia who died during the first world war is listed by name. On the reverse side, however, the Kanak dead were nameless – the memorial simply listed each village or island, with the number of casualties inscribed in the stone.

In the northern town of Koné, a memorial with a statue of a first world war French soldier was damaged in 2010. The local Kanak mayor replaced it temporarily with a wooden statue of a Kanak warrior who had died defending his own land. Within days, the new statue had been daubed with red, white and blue paint. Then independence activists covered the colours of the French tricolour with the multicoloured flag of Kanaky. To end this outbreak of the history wars, the statue was removed, and the plinth remains empty today.

This year, the Anzac centenary once again highlights the contested nature of military history and the silence of colonial narratives in Australia and across the region. As Bruce Scates suggests, “It is time to look beyond that narrow beachhead at Anzac Cove, acknowledge the futility of war and mourn the suffering of nations other than our own.” •

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This desperate act of Polish resistance to Nazi occupation began on 1 August 1944, as the Red army advanced on the city. The Soviet troops could have come to the aid of the Polish fighters; instead, Stalin ordered his men to put up camp on the outskirts of Warsaw, and they looked on from across the river as the Germans crushed the revolt, systematically destroying large swathes of the city in the process.

I arrived in Warsaw as tension over Ukraine continued to mount. Russia had responded to Western sanctions by banning agricultural imports from the European Union. The measure promised considerable hardship for Polish farmers, for whom Russia represents an important market. Yet the ban was met initially with good humour. The media appealed for people to go out and buy up fruit and vegetables. The humble apple became a symbol of defiance, and newspapers ran recipes using apples in every dish of a three-course meal. My hosts admitted that on hearing the announcement, they themselves had gone out and bought up a couple of sacks, and on the train back to Berlin I found a bag of apples they had slipped in with my packed lunch.

Anti-Russian sentiment can run high in Poland, my hosts explained to me. On the wall of their living room hang two portraits of one of the family grandfathers. The first shows him at the time of the first world war in the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial army. In the second portrait he wears the uniform of a captain of the Polish army. This photograph was taken shortly before the Soviet army took him out the back of a town called Katýn and shot him, along with some 20,000 Polish army and police officials and intellectuals. The Communists blamed the Nazis for this 1940 massacre, and that remained the official version of the event until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

As the repression of the Warsaw Uprising showed, the Germans were no less ruthless in their treatment of the Poles. Hitler saw their country as an obstacle to the Lebensraum that he sought for the German race. Himmler reflected this mindset in a speech to a group of military commanders in September 1944, as the Warsaw Uprising raged. He confided to his audience how he had described the unexpected surge of Polish resistance to the Führer as a “blessing.”

“We will overcome them in the next five to six weeks,” he said. “Then Warsaw, capital, head, nerve centre of this once sixteen- to seventeen-million-strong Polish people will be obliterated – this people who for 700 years, have blocked our way to the East and who, since the First Battle of Tannenberg, have always stood in the way. The Polish problem will no longer be a very great problem for us, or for our children and the generations to come.”

Himmler went on to boast that he had ordered “the total destruction of the city.” By the time the Nazis abandoned Warsaw, more than four-fifths of its buildings stood in ruins. Today the Uprising has come to signify something like a baptism of fire.

Much of this I learnt not in Warsaw but in Berlin, another city where the centenary of the first world war was no cause for celebration. In recognition of that fact, the Topography of Terror, a museum–monument built on the ruins of the Nazi state security complex, hosted an exhibition assembled by the Uprising Museum in Warsaw. On the day I visited, the site was teeming with people, young and old, locals and tourists, many of them visibly distressed by an exhibition that made no attempt to smooth over this chapter of German history.

The German Historical Museum, another popular tourist destination, also hosted an exhibition on the first world war, which was remarkable in its scope. By the time I came to the Gallipoli section, I had learnt how the Germans swiftly defeated the Russian army on the Eastern Front, and how the Germans violated Belgian neutrality and responded to popular resistance with a harshness that sickened the very officers who ordered the reprisals. I had also learnt how many Poles saw the war as an opportunity to regain their independence, and formed two battalions within the Russian army. There was no mention of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, however. The exhibition seemed so intent on painting the Germans as the aggressors that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was barely mentioned.

I happened to be standing in the Gallipoli section when a guide shepherded in a group of high school students. He began by explaining how Britain invaded Turkey in an attempt to break the stalemate on the Western Front, and then – having given the answer away – asked the group if any of them knew which side Turkey fought on. One of the students answered that the Turks fought with the Germans, and I snuck a glance over my shoulder to observe a note of surprise register on the faces of some of her classmates. I imagine that the students rarely hear the Turks spoken about as allies.

“Gallipoli was an embarrassing defeat for the British,” the guide continued, and he explained the malicious irony behind a medal, coined by the Germans in 1915, celebrating the British “victory” at Gallipoli. “But the most scandalous thing about the battle was that so many of the soldiers weren’t British but from Australia and New Zealand! They’d travelled by boat for six weeks to get there. See that hat over there, that sort of cowboy hat?” He pointed to a slouch hat hanging from the Gallipoli sign. “That’s an Australian soldier’s hat. Can any of you guess why there were Australian soldiers at Gallipoli?” The students murmured something about the British Empire. “Richtig!” he agreed enthusiastically. On further questioning another student volunteered that Turkey was called the Ottoman Empire back then, and the guide, evidently satisfied at having brought the discussion back to the imperial theme of the exhibition, moved on to discuss the Armenian genocide.

Not until I reached Paris did I find centenary commemorations akin to what I would have expected in Australia. I arrived in the city at the Gare de l’Est, the terminus of the French eastern railway network and an important site of the war. Photographs taken at the Gare on 2 August 1914 record the jubilation on the faces of the tens of thousands who gathered there in response to the call to arms. As well as the usual plaques and paintings memorialising the war, the grand halls of the station hosted a photographic exhibition portraying “Faces and Vestiges of the Great War.” Pictured alongside ghastly images of grenades and gasmasks were former combatants, flanked by wives and families, and images depicting them in service uniform. The centrepiece of the larger-than-life images showed an aged Moroccan man, a former soldier, proudly seated amidst the smiles of several younger generations of his family.

A gallery of one hundred photographic portraits on the footpath of the Champs Elysées also sought to bring the history of the war back to life. The exhibition, “Merci, for we could not let them die a second time,” reminded passers-by of the hundreds of thousands of men who came from all over the world to the battle- and homefront of France. There was one photo of ANZAC troops. The caption read: “More than 200,000 Australians and New Zealanders travelled 15,000 km by boat to fight in Europe. 55,000 of them would never return. For these two countries belonging to the Commonwealth, this sacrifice marked the founding act of their nations.” This text contains at least one historical error, for the British Commonwealth came into existence only in 1949.

The gallery portrayed a wealth of cultures. There were several photos of Algerian soldiers (“who earned an excellent reputation for courage, often refusing to be evacuated when they were injured”), Moroccans and Senegalese; a soldier from Guadeloupe, a French colony in the Caribbean, stood erect like the rifle in his hand. There were photos of Chinese and Indochinese soldiers, and Japanese nurses. A group of Scottish soldiers, dressed in kilts, performed a traditional dance in the grounds of a hospital. Russian soldiers disembarked in Marseille. Only one photo portrayed Germans, in a column of prisoners of war.

The message of cultural diversity may be an important one in France, where – if support for the Le Pen National Front party is any measure – intolerance is on the rise. But by presenting the war as a mosaic of individual stories, the Paris exhibitions risked effacing broader social aspects of the times, like the militarism and nationalism that fuelled and sustained the conflict. Likewise, the special place attributed to soldiers from former colonies seemed to me to smooth over much of the coarseness of colonial relationships. There was a stark reminder of this in the Berlin exhibition, which described skirmishes in German East Africa, from where a colonist sent a postcard home describing how “the Brits will soon unleash the Blacks onto us, but at least war gives you the chance to see whether you are still a man.”

When I visited the exhibition on the Champs Elysées, the tourists strolling in the glorious September weather rarely stopped to look back on the war. I thought of the exhibitions in Berlin, which even in late October were still crowded with visitors, among them student groups. When I was in Year 12 I studied the first world war, and I wonder how my appreciation of the history might have been enriched had I seen these exhibitions while preparing for my final exams. We subsidise student visits to the war memorial in Canberra; how impressive would it be if Australian students were able to carry out virtual tours of exhibitions in the different capitals of world?

The saying goes that history is written by the victors. But as the Berlin exhibitions showed – indeed, as the entire city of Berlin shows – sometimes the most thought-provoking history emerges from the bare bones of defeat. If Gallipoli too was an “embarrassing” defeat, what do Australians lose when they glorify the ANZAC legend? •

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I can’t see it myself. In the past year, I’ve travelled both to Scotland and to New Caledonia. For the life of me, I couldn’t detect much resemblance between the Scottish glens and the mountain valleys of Grande Terre, the main island of New Caledonia that so bewitched Cook.

In spite of this, there’s one contemporary connection between old Caledonia and New Caledonia. In Edinburgh and Noumea, people are debating independence.

Over four million residents of Scotland, aged 16 and over, will go to the polls on 18 September to decide whether to stay with the United Kingdom or become an independent country. New Caledonia, one of Australia’s closest neighbours, is also scheduled to hold an independence referendum – in its case, sometime before 2018. Today, the French tricolour and the flag of Kanaky fly outside town halls, schools and other public buildings; within a few years, just one of them may be flying.

Many commentators regard debates about flags, sovereignty and statehood as a nineteenth-century anachronism. In the 1990s, as the Soviet Union imploded and Yugoslavia exploded, the “national question” was resolved in conflict and corruption, with an atavistic return to blood-and-soil nationalism. Decades later, there are new debates about borders and imagined communities, about cultural identity in a globalised world. The creative tension between nationalism and globalisation is being played out today in Scotland, Belgium, Spain, France and across the islands of Melanesia.

In his wonderful polemic, Arguing for Independence, the late Stephen Maxwell described globalisation as “the growth of multi-level interdependence between societies around the world, which limits the freedom of all states, while bearing down with particular weight on small states.” Maxwell, the leading intellectual of modern Scottish nationalism, welcomed interdependence. He believed that Scotland’s independence would improve relations with Europe and the rest of the United Kingdom, rather than create a permanent breach between neighbours.

His arguments echo the vision of the Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou, who campaigned for New Caledonia’s independence until his assassination in 1989. Tjibaou argued that independence from France would allow better relations both with Paris and with countries in our region: “It is sovereignty that gives us both the right and the power to negotiate our interdependences. For a small country like our own, independence allows us to determine our interdependences.”

As a modern capitalist economy, Scotland is fundamentally different from New Caledonia, a developing country struggling with the legacies of French colonialism. But the quest for independence unites the two nations.

With just over a week to the vote in Scotland, pollsters report a late surge in support for the Yes campaign led by the Scottish National Party, or SNP.

There’s a panicked tone to the interventions of Better Together, the unionist campaign led by former Labour chancellor Alistair Dowling. Their “Let’s stay together” initiative has wheeled out a range of politicians, celebrities, musicians and business leaders to highlight the damage that would be caused by a vote for independence.

The No campaign is mobilising supporters from across the spectrum. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Stones fan or a Beatlemaniac – both Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney have declared their opposition to independence. The Pope and atheist superstar Richard Dawkins agree that the break-up of the United Kingdom is a danger to global stability. Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton and the boss of BHP Billiton have all called for a No vote. J.K. Rowling is one of the many English-born residents of Scotland who will vote against independence.

Facing this parade of millionaires, the SNP has been joined in the Yes campaign by a range of left-of-centre groups that have traditionally been hostile to Scottish nationalism and the SNP’s pragmatic conservatism.

Polling shows that working-class voters are more likely to vote Yes than the rich, in the hope of protecting the social democratic advances that Scotland maintains over the rest of the United Kingdom (no tuition fees at university, free medical prescriptions for the elderly, booming investment in wind and hydro power, and policies to promote investment in the National Health Service).

During a visit to Scotland last year, I was struck by the diversity of grassroots organising, as the members of a broad coalition try to mobilise their neighbours and workmates in a debate about creating a different sort of society. One night, we travelled halfway across Edinburgh in the pouring rain to attend a community debate in Leith, but were turned away at the door. So many people had turned out that the organisers decided to give priority to the undecided, and were refusing entry to those who’d made up their mind or outsiders who couldn’t vote.

Another day, on a bus to Balmaclellan, we spotted a woman with a bag emblazoned with the simple slogan “Yes.” Later, over a cuppa in her home, she explained that she was an SNP member and responsible for doorknocking in Balmaclellan and nearby farms. “There’s another young lass from the next village who is involved in Radical Independence,” she explained. “She has green hair, but we get along pretty well – we’re both working for the same thing.”

From staid SNP supporters to the youthful troops of Radical Independence, from the artists of the National Collective to the activists of the Scottish Socialist Party, the act of voting Yes is part of a broader debate about the future. Should the Queen stay as head of state, or do we want a modern democratic republic? Should we stay in NATO and the European Union? The pound or the euro? How can we overcome Britain’s democratic deficit (no constitution, first-past-the-post voting and a House of Lords packed with Church of England bishops and the enemies of social democracy)?

The Yes campaign has remobilised a generation of Scots who have fought against a range of Westminster policies, from Maggie Thatcher’s poll tax to David Cameron’s bedroom tax, from Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq to Britain’s bipartisan support for the £80 billion renewal of Trident nuclear submarines. In spite of the integration of Scottish elites in the British Empire, there hasn’t been a Tory majority in Scotland since 1955.

Our own English-born, Rhodes Scholar–educated Tory prime minister weighed in on the other side of the debate during a recent visit to London. “As a friend of Britain, as an observer from afar, it’s hard to see how the world would be helped by an independent Scotland,” Tony Abbott said in August. “I think that the people who would like to see the break-up of the United Kingdom are not the friends of justice, the friends of freedom, and the countries that would cheer at the prospect… are not the countries whose company one would like to keep.”

Abbott’s intervention in the independence debate was widely reported as a gaffe: in the past, his ideological enthusiasms have led to the occasional awkward statement, such as telling the US Heritage Foundation that “few Australians would regard America as a foreign country.”

Rather than a blunder, though, I’d suggest that it was a more calculated intervention. Abbott recognises that independence for Scotland would open a wider debate about neoliberalism and nuclear policy, the role of the secret state and the “Five Eyes” UKUSA alliance, the United Kingdom’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council, how Scotland and England will coexist in NATO and the European Union, the role of the banking sector – a complex debate that would upset the relaxed and comfortable.

His intervention also comes at a time when debates about self-determination and independence, about borders and sovereignty, are occurring around the world, from old Caledonia to New Caledonia, from Corsica and Catalonia to Bougainville.

You wouldn’t know it from the Australian media, but the Coalition government will soon be facing strategically significant debates about self-determination in our own region. Over the next five years, there may be major changes in two of Australia’s closest neighbours, as New Caledonia and Bougainville move towards a new political status.

Both islands suffered traumatic periods of armed conflict, in New Caledonia in the 1980s and in Bougainville in the 1990s. In spite of the widespread calls for independence, there were significant divisions within the population and both conflicts ended with innovative political agreements to delay a vote on a final political status.

Since 1998, both have been undertaking lengthy transitions towards a self-determination referendum and the possible creation of two new sovereign and independent nations. Indigenous peoples and migrant communities are debating cultural identity, the future role of mining, and how to develop a viable post-independence economy.

These transitional periods are now coming to a head. Under the 1998 Noumea Accord, New Caledonia is scheduled to hold a referendum before 2018. In a similar period, Bougainville will come to the end of the ten-to-fifteen-year transition initiated by the 2005 election of the Autonomous Bougainville Government. Will these referendums be held as scheduled, or will there be pressure to maintain the status quo in the interest of “stability”?

Tony Abbott has often spoken of the Anglosphere – his vision of a set of civic institutions marked by pluralism, democracy and fairness. But the term has taken on a broader strategic meaning in Canberra’s policy community, best shown in Keep Calm and Carry On: Reflections on the Anglosphere, a 2013 report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Institute director Peter Jennings argues that the Anglosphere has taken on a new meaning in the age of Edward Snowden. “A more modern term is the Five Eyes community,” he writes, “which refers to the post Second World War intelligence collecting and sharing relationship developed between the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.” His view is that “the Anglosphere demonstrates itself time and time again to be the engine of global order and the essential enforcer of international stability, even at a time of sweeping strategic change.”

Reflecting concern over China’s emerging strategic power, many Australian policy wonks argue that the old Anglo alliance must be strengthened in the Asia-Pacific region through closer cooperation with India (uranium sales), Japan (increased interoperability with ANZUS forces) and France (military cooperation in the South Pacific).

In recent years, both major parties in Canberra have welcomed France’s ongoing presence in the Pacific, arguing that the French state is a “positive influence in the region.” Australian think tanks like Jennings’s organisation and the Lowy Institute are holding strategic dialogues with French officials (but not Kanak or Tahitian leaders), promoting closer engagement with the French armed forces in the Pacific. This creates some tension with our closest island neighbours in Melanesia, which are actively supporting independence movements in New Caledonia and French Polynesia.

To the disquiet of leaders in Canberra, Jakarta and Port Moresby, Bougainvilleans and West Papuans are asserting their right to self-determination within postcolonial nations like Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. The issues of self-determination, autonomy and independence are on the agenda of organisations like the Melanesian Spearhead Group – a dilemma indeed, when many of your nearest neighbours are countries that cheer at the prospect of independence.

As Stephen Maxwell has argued, this issue is a very contemporary one. “It is not an accident that the right of the self-determination of peoples is so widely acknowledged,” he wrote. “It reflects a judgement that those best qualified to decide how a community should manage its collective interests are the members of that community. They are in the best position to know their own needs and the best options available to them for meeting those needs. They are more likely than anyone else to be guided by an enlightened self-interest in balancing the claims of individuals and minorities within the community against the claims of the majority and of present generations against those of future generations.” •

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Except the first one – that one I’ll never forget. It was Terrence Des Pres’s The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, a book that did much to send me on my autodidactic search. I don’t know the circumstance of Des Pres’s death, other than that he took his own life eleven years after he saw his classic in print. He was not the first writer whose grappling with such inhumanity led to suicide – Primo Levi preceded him by seven months. A close knowledge – in Levi’s case, too close – of the premeditated, condoned and bureaucratically implemented murder of six million civilians, still within living memory, can be far too heavy a weight to bear.

Based, as the texts mostly are, on the testimonies of survivors and witnesses, The Survivor focuses on the shame the SS and other guards deliberately inculcated in their victims. What Des Pres homed in on was the shit that was everywhere, in the freight cars in which hundreds were crammed without sufficient facilities, then in the camps where the same lack applied, and finally in the Zyklon-B “showers” themselves. It was as if the whole horrific journey was a sewer in which the victims were forced to travel, trudging through the Dantesque hell of their own excrement.

Here was both fact and metaphor, and Des Pres’s empathetic rendering of it did more than just about anything else to establish the means by which the Nazis set out to persecute and then eliminate (yes, the word is carefully chosen) my people. Murder on such a scale is almost impossible to grasp, but human shit – the smell and inescapable pervasiveness of it – certainly is.

Appearing in 1976, The Survivor was an early entry into the mass of Holocaust literature published in English. I had read Anne Frank’s diary soon after the English edition came out in 1952, but this was written while she was in hiding, before her death from typhus in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The English translation of Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (If This Is A Man) appeared in 1959, bearing witness to his year in Auschwitz,T but his was a relatively lone voice then. It took a while for the Holocaust to sink in after the war, largely because of an understandable reluctance on the part of survivors to revisit the horror they often felt guilty about escaping; and the fledgling, macho-Jewish state of Israel actually shrank from the shame of it, Yad Vashem notwithstanding. But then came 1985’s Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half hour documentary recording the testimonies of both victims and perpetrators, most aptly described as an “act of witness.” Shoah changed things. By the time it appeared, Israelis and Diaspora Jews alike were prepared to digest this pogrom of all pogroms in our tragic history.

Alongside these developments, a kind of sub-genre evolved. These were books designed to show that not all German or French or Polish or Dutch were complicit in Hitler’s barbarism, and that many of the “righteous” non-Jews subsequently honoured in Israel were willing to risk their lives and those of their families to harbour Jews and help them escape certain doom. We in Australia know most about this through Thomas Keneally’s Booker Prize–winning Schindler’s Ark and the Spielberg movie made from it, but the first was arguably Anne Frank’s diary itself. For three years before they were betrayed, the Frank family were hidden behind a bookcase in the Amsterdam building where Anne’s father worked.

But those were complicated times. Before 1942, when the “final solution” was adopted and the Franks were forced into hiding, the Nazis themselves facilitated emigration out of Europe for Jews wealthy enough to pay for it, or those helped by Jewish philanthropic organisations, including the ones operating under the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. There were even negotiations between the Nazis and the Jewish Agency for exit visas to Palestine. But after the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 the cooperation ended. The Nazis may have wanted a judenrein Germany, but as the majority of Jews could only get as far as mainland Europe, most of which was then Nazi-occupied, extermination seemed the only expedient. Or so the grisly logic went.

Like the Franks, Gertrude Cohn was a German Jew who ended up in Holland, in her case after the outbreak of the first world war had cut short her stint as a social worker in England. In Amsterdam, Gertrude embraced Zionism, and by 1917 she was running the Jewish National Fund’s Commissariat there. Three years later she married Jacques van Tijn, a Dutch mining engineer and thus acquired her invaluable Dutch citizenship.

With Jacques offering his services as a travelling exploration geologist, the van Tijns spent several years out of the country. When they returned in 1932 they set up house in a wealthy, slightly Bohemian suburb just outside Amsterdam, where Gertrude raised her two children and entertained a wide range of visitors. But five years on, as the Nazi crackdown on German Jews intensified, Gertrude’s husband, always a bit of a womaniser, finally left her. A broken Gertrude threw her considerable energy into helping more of her fellow German Jews across the Dutch border and then sought to find them refuge in England, the United States, Canada, Australia and Palestine, or wherever else she found places that would take them.

Because of her native German and fluency in Dutch and English, van Tijn was able to negotiate with the Nazis while maintaining contact with the Americans and British. One very important interlocutor operated from Geneva; she also had French and Zionist contacts. Secretary to two Dutch Jewish committees, she developed a well-functioning network for dealing with the flood of refugees pouring out of Germany. After the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland, others began arriving from Eastern Europe. Van Tijn was instrumental in setting up a farm, or werkdorp, on the outskirts of Amsterdam where young refugees could be housed and trained in agriculture. Her most urgent task was saving Jewish children through the famous Kindertransport.

But her work became next to impossible after Germany invaded Holland itself. Soon enough, her committees were disbanded and the Germans created a Judenrat, or Jewish Council, in their place. Believing that getting Jews out of the Netherlands was more crucial than ever, she continued to work for the Council, but only as a volunteer. She refused to join the Council, and had a tense relationship with David Cohen and Abraham Asscher, its two leaders. What little income she had came from the United States and some of the international relief agencies. Finally, like Anne Frank, she was sent to Bergen-Belsen, but despite an ongoing heart condition she miraculously survived.

After Germany’s defeat, Cohen and Asscher were formally charged by the Jewish community with collaboration, and though she was never charged herself, the very fact of her having worked for them meant that Gertrude was tainted. Indeed, we might never have known her story, or her intricate footwork of survival during the Dutch occupation, but for the fact that, apart from a voluminous correspondence and her report to the Dutch government on her wartime activities, she wrote a memoir with the aim of setting the record straight.

According to University of Chicago historian Bernard Wasserstein, author of The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews, that memoir is a rare and impressive document, not only because it is one of the few to record Holland’s experience of war and occupation, but also because Gertrude is unusually frank and critical of herself and so – unlike so much autobiographical writing Wasserstein read, and David Cohen’s in particular – it is not at all self-serving.

Having refused refuge herself when it was offered many times, and despite the hardships she endured and the risks she took with her life, van Tijn lived into her eighties. By then she had settled in Portland, Oregon, to be close to her children, from whom the war had separated her for years.

For readers now, especially here in Australia, one of the most significant insights to be gleaned from Wasserstein’s account is how similar the arguments against accepting refugees in van Tijn’s time were to those shaping policy today. Refugees weren’t escaping persecution but merely seeking a better life; transit and receiving nations didn’t have the capacity to absorb them; their arrival in too great numbers would inflame racial prejudice – and, in the case of Palestine, would cause the Arabs to riot. Unscrupulous smugglers operated as well, charging high fees to guide people over borders. Many refugees were deemed to be “illegal,” entering without papers or using papers that were forged. There were several instances, too, of boats being turned back. (It was the turning back of the St Louis, with its Jewish refugee passengers, after it had docked in Havana and its passengers were refused entry to the United States, that eventually led to the adoption in 1951 of the current UN Convention.)

The specific question of forged papers neatly segues into Peter Grose’s A Good Place to Hide. Peter Grose is a former Australian journalist, literary agent and publisher living off the coast of France, where he came upon the story of how the French Protestant community of the Haute-Loire Plateau, a part of France with a history of Huguenot resistance, played a critical role in saving Jews after the June 1940 Nazi invasion. Grose’s previous books, An Awkward Truth and A Very Rude Awakening, cover Australian war subjects – the 1942 bombing of Darwin and the Japanese midget submarine attack on Sydney Harbour – and here too he reveals his journalist’s nose for remarkable events.

Unlike Wasserstein, whose focus in The Ambiguity of Virtue is on a single brave woman, Grose writes about a whole community. Still, it’s inevitable that certain players stand out. Oscar Rosowsky, for instance. Clearly one of Grose’s favourites, Rosowsky arrived on the Plateau as a seventeen-year-old boy with his mother, Mira, in late 1942. His father had already been arrested and the two of them, mother and son, had been separated. After hair-raising escapes from the Vichy authorities, they both ended up on Le Chambon sur Lignon, the principal village in Grose’s story. The boy was already launched on his career as a forger, having produced false identities for himself and for his mother. Not until the war ended did the inhabitants of Le Chambon come to know that the two were even related.

Grose describes Rosowsky as “one of the finest – and most spectacular – forgers in World War II history,” and shows the importance of what he did:

By early 1943, [Rosowsky’s] forgery team had become a key element in the rescue operation. Looking back on it now, it seems incredible that this onerous and crucial burden rested on the skinny shoulders of an eighteen-year-old Latvian Jew with no experience of or contact with the dark underworld of criminal forgery, and whose frustrated ambition was to become a doctor.

Happily, Rosowsky’s ambition was realised, and he eventually became president of the General Medical Council of France.

Not so fortunate was André Trocmé, Le Chambon’s pastor for the war’s duration. In many respects, Trocmé’s story parallels van Tijn’s. Trocmé, too, was an outsider. From northern France, near the Belgian border, and with a German mother, he was fluent in that language. Like van Tijn, he came from a wealthy family, and was the family “firebrand” and not a little stubborn. Two traumatic events transformed him into the unwavering pacifist he became. Like van Tijn, he suffered the untimely death of his mother, and he was forever marked by what he saw at close quarters of the gruesome butchery of war:

The River Somme, scene of the most terrible trench warfare of World War I, flows through the middle of Saint-Quentin, so the worst of the carnage took place nearby… [F]or two and a half years André witnessed at first hand the streams of bodies being brought back through the town from the front line. He could smell the gangrenous flesh, and see for himself the bitter consequences of war.

The Trocmés were forced to billet a young German officer, a man André assumed might one day kill his brother Robert, a French army captain. The German convinced him that, as a Christian, he had arranged with his superiors that he would not carry a gun and would serve as a telegraph operator instead. André took him to a meeting of young French Christians who, after a momentary pause, accepted him as a fellow Christian and pacifist. This is what clinched it for Trocmé, and eventually sustained him throughout the dark days when he led his parish in the dangerous business of harbouring refugees and smuggling them over the border into Switzerland.

But late in the war Trocmé’s pacifism worked against him. The Resistance was gaining strength on the Plateau and the maquisards were in fierce combat with the Germans, holding out until the Allied invasion. Now, they became the heroes of France’s struggle. A pacifist was not only irrelevant; there was also the very real chance that Trocmé might be seen as a collaborator. A big enough cloud of suspicion hung over his head that he was forced to resign as Le Chambon’s pastor.

Trocmé spent most of his remaining life in Geneva working with the international peace movement. He was nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize and was named as one of Israel’s Righteous Among Nations, but he refused that honour unless it was bestowed on all of Le Chambon. He also received the Rosette de la Résistance for “remarkable acts of courage that contributed to the resistance of the French people against the enemy.” As Grose observes with irony, he was “surely the only high-profile pacifist to ever receive it.”

Of the two books, Grose’s flows better – which is quite an achievement considering the number of characters he juggles and the many connections welding together his story. The son of another of Le Chambon’s resisters made a documentary of their exploits, Weapons of the Spirit, the title of which was taken from Trocmé’s joint declaration with another pastor on 23 June 1940 – the sad day when the armistice between France and Germany was signed. The full text of the declaration is included in A Good Place to Hide, along with a précis of Huguenot resistance and other valuable appendices. The one thing missing is an index.

I was most grateful to Wasserstein for providing one. For neither his nor Grose’s book is what you would call an easy read. Nor do I think they should have been. The subjects they tackle are among the most serious of our time. None of us can be certain that we will act with honour if circumstances demand. But for all the ambiguity that’s mixed up in virtue, as it is practised in the all-too-material world, it’s a comfort to know that we humans are capable of lifting ourselves out of unspeakable mire, and risking our imperfect selves for a higher good. •

The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews
By Bernard Wasserstein | Harvard University Press | $45

A Good Place to Hide: How One French Community Saved Thousands of Lives in World War II
By Peter Grose | Allen & Unwin | $32.99

The post Remarkable acts of courage appeared first on Inside Story.

The documentary traces of visits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are so sparse that Fullagar, a historian at Macquarie University, can only outline the visits (some voluntary, others forced) of a Brazilian king (in 1530–31), four Inuit (in 1576–77), and about a dozen indigenous aides to Walter Raleigh (between 1584 and 1618). She categorises the American native visitors of the seventeenth century as “cultural brokers” (assisting colonial entrepreneurs), “royal emissaries” (Pocahontas, the most famous), “performer” (or “wonder”) and “working plebeians” (little known seahands, soldiers and servants). She can tell us some of these people’s names (they are nearly all men), hosts and temporary abodes, but she has found no general model of English perception. Unlike Spain, with its systematic approach to plundering and enslavement, Britain engaged with the New World in the period 1500–1700 in a discontinuous, ad hoc way that neither required nor encouraged a coherent public framework of interpretation of a “savage visit.” France received many more New World visitors than Britain, Fullagar reports, because the French fur trade in North America occasioned more intimate and territorially extensive contact and because French intellectuals (such as Montaigne) were more interested in the relationship of the “savage” to “civilisation.”

As British commercial interest in the New World grew, however, so Britons began to articulate a framework in which the visit of a New World “savage” could be interesting enough to stimulate published commentary and visual representations. What particularly compelled a growing discourse about the “savage,” Fullagar argues, was Britain’s ongoing debate, during the eighteenth century, about its own formation into a commercial, urban, consumer society. To consider the savage was to enable a reflection on the vices and virtues of one’s own civilisation, she argues. As well, Britons debated the costs and benefits of mercantile imperial expansion with its associated political and military rivalry with France. The visiting savage helped bring that projection into focus, just as it was becoming clear that it paid to know your savages when vying with France and Spain for North America. A delegation of four Iroquois “kings” to London in 1710 attracted official interest and much popular attention. So did a Cherokee delegation in 1730, a Creek delegation in 1734 and another Cherokee delegation in 1762. Fullagar treats each visit in detail, with particular attention to engravings, paintings, press articles and popular appropriations.

The historiography of the eighteenth-century Atlantic has become very rich. As more and more historical actors have come into view, the contingencies of European imperial outreach have been more fully appreciated: the Atlantic was a zone of interacting sovereigns of different kinds. Fullagar makes good use of one of this literature’s themes: a British sensibility that was unsettled and conflicted due of the sheer size of the politico/military and economic projects that Britain was then undertaking, both at home and across the oceans. The greatest skill of the historian is to contextualise – to suggest how a global conjuncture may be read in the detail of a Joshua Reynolds painting. When the documentary material is available to her, Fullagar relishes the opportunity – at once descriptive, narrative and analytic – in alert, uncluttered prose.

Evoking British uncertainty (or diversity in certainties), she is able to show that while the category “savage” was constantly available, its eighteenth-century meanings could be complex and unstable. Contemporary visual and anecdotal representations of the four Iroquois kings admired them variously – as warrior allies of mercantile ambition, as loyal monarchists indifferent to crass Whiggery, as embodiments of spirituality and stasis, as visitors appalled (or awestruck) by British sophistication, as objects of shallow, unruly popular spectatorship. The Iroquois and other “savages” were the diverse mirrors of whatever the writer/painter or reader/viewer thought virtuous or wicked in his/her times. The savage could also be an object of fear – warriors to be sure, but on whose side? What was a respectful and prudent way for hosts to behave when such visitors came?

Eventually, Fullagar claims, the idea “savage” became useless as a way to think about native visitors from North America: these people were better understood as agents relevant to British projects such as Christian evangelism and political diplomacy. Fullagar refers to this as “the full historicisation of America”; it severed the region “from useful fantasy” in the British imagination, after 1763. That is, the “savage” visitor became less the antonymic projection of qualities Britons saw in their own “civilization” and more a real historical agent, of relevance to particular institutions and policies.

By the end of the eighteenth century, visitors from the Pacific had displaced the North Americans as the feted, fascinating and increasingly eroticised savage visitor. By then, social theory had been born in the form of “universal (or conjectural) history” that understood human diversity as the result of the different speeds at which all peoples were moving from savage to polite society. Enlightened thinkers (Scots and others) were eager to find empirical examples of the slowest/earliest peoples and the Pacific seemed to have them in abundance.

Arriving in London in 1774 as the guest of Sir Joseph Banks, Mai (or Omai) from Tahiti embodied Britain’s late eighteenth century “Oceanic idealization.” He was soon given an audience with King George III and Queen Charlotte and inoculated against smallpox. By that time, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755) had begun to influence British perceptions of the savage. Rousseau’s speculative history of humankind as the steady corruption of natural virtues reinforced the school of thought that criticised contemporary commercial, credit-dependent, urban and governed civilisation from the standpoint of England’s landed tradition. Many – both intellectuals and hacks – were thus well primed to see gracious, primitive Mai in terms of the virtues of “natural man.” The contrary point of view was exemplified by Samuel Johnson, who thought Rousseau “a rascal who ought to be hunted out of society” and ascribed Mai’s grace and good manners not to his Pacific origins but to his rapid habituation to his hosts’ standards.

Unfortunately for those who idealised Pacific peoples such as Mai, the Hawaiians murdered Captain James Cook in 1777. Perhaps “natural man” was a bit of a beast to be tamed after all. Fullagar argues that the heroisation of Cook – exacerbated by his martyrdom – strengthened British sentiment in favour of imperial expansion.

Other Pacific visitors arrived after Mai. One, Lebuu disembarking from Palau in 1784, became interesting by dying of smallpox while in England, an opportunity for “sentimental discourses about the self.” Another, Kualelo from Hawaii in 1789, illustrated the gloomy possibility that savages were ineducable. A third, the Tahitian Maititi, arrived in 1793 so sick from his smallpox vaccination that he lasted only a few months. After Mai, Fullagar says, the British public lost interest in savage visitors: they seemed minor details of a confidently expansionist Empire.

The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World, by ANU’s Shino Konishi, now with the University of Western Australia, is about the visitations that such expansion propelled. More than twenty British, French and Spanish expeditions visited Australia between 1770 and 1803. They wrote about the Aboriginal people they met, and about the Aboriginal men in particular. One important difference between cross-cultural encounters in England and those in Australia was that whereas English conventions demanded that the savage body be dressed, in Australia the savage was likely to be naked. This occasioned a kind of “degree zero” of mutual observation. “The natural body,” writes Konishi, “when considered in its essential state, stripped of its cultural and material embellishments, and reduced to its needs and drives, was all that natives and newcomers held in common.”

Emphasising the centrality of the body is the organisation of Konishi’s book, in which the explorers’ comments about men are organised under a series of headings: the skin, the hair, the face, sexuality, the propensity to fight and methods of fighting, the communicative sounds that they made (however poorly understood), their labour processes and tools, and their physical capabilities. Each heading gets a chapter, and each chapter begins with Konishi’s summary of the ideas about skin, hair, the face and so on with which “the Enlightenment” had equipped (or ill-equipped) these curious and thoughtful explorers and early colonists.

The influence of Rousseau looms large in her account, as in Fullagar’s. From 1770, his description of humanity’s earliest condition could be verified or refuted by observing those who we now call the First Australians. Many occasions of European curiosity, however, seem to have been no more recherché than such simple (and to me, compelling) questions as: In what respects are They like Us? Are all humans warlike, users of language, makers of music?

The detail of these observations, from the scores of interactions recounted by Konishi, is both fascinating to read – she quotes liberally – and impossible to condense into a neat compendium of acquired knowledge. Here are some piquant vignettes. Joseph Banks used his own spittle to rub clean a patch of Aboriginal skin, to ascertain its true colour. The British puzzled much over the scarification of skin. Hairstyles attracted European attention, but “Indigenous pomades and powders were often perceived as mere dirt,” and Baudin’s artists were instructed to standardise the rendering of hair so that variations in the object of greater interest, the skull, could be recorded. To grasp the significance of tooth extraction among the Eora required better understanding of language than the British first possessed, but at least they figured out that it was a ritual practice, just as they noticed that nasal piercing was a mark of distinction.

Were Aborigines musical? La Marseillaise, sung by Baudin’s men in 1803, had “the picanninnies jumping for joy”; but an earlier expedition’s violin performance had met first with indifference and then rejection (the listeners put their fingers in their ears). The explorers were often disappointed by Aborigines’ failure to “admire and covet” their “ostentatiously displayed… weapons, musical instruments, bottles, clothes and trifles…” Aborigines were impressed by mirrors, however, and the Europeans’ weapons and animal skins engaged them even more. Body parts figure prominently when the visitors compiled Aboriginal word lists, but the editor of the second edition of Péron’s journal thought his readers were better off not knowing how the men of Oyster Bay referred to their erections.

A recurring theme of Konishi’s study is that to observe Aboriginal men was to interact with them, usually without the mediation of language, which gave rise to many moments of mutual opacity, curiosity, apprehension, relief and amusement. When Konishi invites us to imagine ourselves in these interactions, we cannot help knowing their sequels: the intervening years of displacement, dispossession and violence. Posterior awareness endows with innocence these scenes of inarticulate reciprocal wonder and blunder.

Nonetheless, our knowledge of the catastrophe to come cannot be denied, and it shadows Konishi’s treatment of some European perceptions. Accounts of “Aboriginal warriors and warfare” were “the predominant focus of European depictions of the Aboriginal male body,” and she suggests that explorers’ depictions of “the aboriginal martial body and indigenous warfare… were biased by their failure to comprehend indigenous hostility as a form of organized resistance.” Observations made through the voyages of Cook, La Perouse, d’Entrecasteaux, Baudin and Flinders, do not, it seems to me, give us grounds for chiding these explorers for not discerning “organised resistance” or law-governed process in Aborigines’ occasionally violent behaviour. Indeed, as Konishi points out, D’Entrecasteaux 1793 and Péron in 1803 didn’t see any warrior contests among Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land, and so they found a real life example of humans in Rousseau’s peaceful state of nature.

The observations occasioned by establishing a penal settlement, from 1788, at Port Jackson were a different matter. These British observers were occupiers, not visitors, and it should have occurred to them that this fact was increasingly evident to the Eora and was becoming the basis of their behaviour towards them. Konishi quotes Captain John Hunter’s dismay at Eora “treachery”; she writes that the First Fleet, unlike preceding “explorers,” found occasion to resort to terror and collective punishment. When the visitors and occupiers observed vengeful clashes among Aborigines, they saw confirmation of the “Hobbesian thesis” that humans were naturally in a state of war. Konishi suggests that they might have discerned such tit for tat as legal process, and they might also have construed Aboriginal attacks on British “as a martial response to the loss of their sovereignty.” That they did not is what she means by “biased.”

Konishi’s knowledge that these early relatively symmetrical encounters were soon to be succeeded by structural domination encourages her not only to report but also to assess the truth of what the explorers wrote. Were they, in their “bias,” laying the ideological ground – however unintentionally – for the grossly unequal relationship of coloniser to colonised? Noting the prevailing opinion that “Aboriginal men were lazy and exploitative of their women,” her critical response is to quote passages in which explorers described Aboriginal men’s activity. While this textual evidence undermines the stereotype, it doesn’t address the question of whether the Aboriginal male exploited the hardworking womenfolk.

We may have to accommodate, within our post-colonial sensibility, the thought that Aboriginal society really was unequal in ways described in the late eighteenth century. Could that gender inequality have been evident in Aboriginal sexuality itself? The chapter “Carnal Bodies” considers whether Aboriginal men enforced females’ sexual submission – whether they practised “courtship with a club,” as attested by Watkin Tench, David Collins and Francois Péron. To cast doubt, Konishi cites Tench’s description of a dance performed by Boorong and Nanbaree, glossing it as “a ritual of desire and love.” Tench interpreted as “courtship” other Eora dances that he recorded. Her conclusion is that male courtship included “a range of techniques, motives and expectations in courting women” – some brutish, by our standards, others not.

BENNELONG was the eighteenth century’s most prolifically described Aborigine, and he mercurially graces both Fullagar’s and Konishi’s books. Though initially Captain Arthur Phillip’s captive, he appears to have been as curious about Europeans as any European could be about him, and his resulting susceptibility continues to puzzle us. Is such openness best understood as pliancy? When clothes are “civilisation,” what do we make of a man who dons as easily as he divests? His mode of inquiry into eighteenth century Britain was immersive, experimental, equivocal, both linguistically penetrating and delighted by society’s surface. Few agents are more suited than Bennelong to a historiography that renders agency as “performativity” – and (without dulling the theoretical point) he seems to have been something of a show-off. (In 2014, Jack Charles – actor, reformed thief and elder – is his nearest avatar.) He challenges our essentialisms as much as he did those of the late eighteenth century. Adroit mobility across the civilised/savage boundary eludes characterisation – and discourages trust? When the British apprehended the possibility of starvation, Fullagar tells us, they fed Bennelong well lest he tumble to their predicament and report it widely.

Konishi tells the story of how Bennelong pleased Arthur Phillip by promising not to beat a young woman (Boorong) whom he had said he would beat and whom Arthur had sought to protect. Later, she quotes characterisations of him as “pliant” and “good-natured.” In her puzzling over this, the words “seemed” and “appeared” are prominent; then she refers to “his metaphorical submission to the British” and goes on to characterise him as a strategist, a man who “took advantage of his unique position in the colony.” This leaves us with the question of what he wanted, what he would use “advantage” to get. Food was one thing, but perhaps we can infer that, as keenly as any navigator or naturalist, he desired knowledge itself. To be confronted with strangers was to become possessed by a question about how different or similar human beings might be. Why else would Bennelong, in December 1792, board a ship to England?

Only one newspaper (the Dublin Chronicle) reported his twenty-one-month visit, and Fullagar concludes that, by 1793, Britons had lost interest in visiting savages (and were more excited about the kangaroos that arrived with Bennelong.) But a bill of Bennelong’s expenses, kept by his host Arthur Phillip, gives some clues to what Bennelong experienced. Having kept from Bennelong the knowledge that the British might starve to death at Port Jackson, Phillip could now, in his London itinerary, solicit Bennelong’s awe and improve his English. After a year (and the death of his companion Yemmerawanne), Bennelong wanted to go home; he had to wait months till a berth was available. Subsequent British press accounts of Bennelong – the Times in 1805, Sydney Gazette in 1813 – deployed the cliché appropriate to a time of colonial hostilities: immoveable Bennelong, a parable of savage indifference to civilisation’s generous opportunity.

Like Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific, each of these books reminds us that the European Enlightenment rested partly on a global traffic of persons between widely separated spaces. The transactions between visitors and hosts rendered by Fullagar and Konishi are surely among the most appealing moments in the history of the Enlightenment. Taken in their own terms, they portend not conquest but the adventure of getting beyond puzzlement, the savoured prospect of knowing humans very like and very unlike oneself. Thus Fullagar and Konishi make London and Sydney Cove into scenes crucial to a global history of knowledge. The intellectual and geopolitical structures of late eighteenth century are vividly present in these stories of folk finding one another compellingly queer. •

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IN A SENSE, Oscar Manutahi Temaru lost the battle but won the war. Not long before he ended his term as president of French Polynesia this month, he achieved his long-held goal of increasing support for the Maohi people’s right to self-determination. Temaru has been campaigning for independence from France since the 1970s.

In a historic decision, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on 17 May to reinscribe French Polynesia on the UN list of non-self-governing territories. The resolution, sponsored by Solomon Islands, Nauru and Tuvalu with support from Vanuatu, Samoa and Timor-Leste, was adopted by the 193-member UN General Assembly without a vote. It ends a sixty-five-year period during which French Polynesia has been absent from the list of countries recognised as colonial possessions.

The resolution asks the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation to debate the issue of French Polynesia at its next session and report back to the General Assembly. It also calls on the French government “as the Administering Power concerned, to intensify its dialogue with French Polynesia in order to facilitate rapid progress towards a fair and effective self-determination process, under which the terms and timelines for an act of self-determination will be agreed.”

The right to self-determination does not necessarily equate to political independence. Under UN decolonisation principles, a referendum of the “concerned population” can consider a range of options, including integration with the colonial power, greater autonomy, free association, or full independence and sovereignty.

There’s a long way to go before the people of French Polynesia decide on a new political status. Temaru’s opposite number, the incoming president Gaston Flosse, denounced the “tyranny” of the UN decision. A long-time opponent of independence, Flosse claims a popular mandate for his loyalty to France.

But even as a symbolic measure, the UN resolution sparked fireworks and fury in Paris. After writing to all member states in an unsuccessful bid to delay or scuttle the resolution, France’s UN ambassador boycotted the General Assembly session. “This resolution is a flagrant interference,” said the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “with a complete absence of respect for the democratic choice of French Polynesians and a hijacking of the decolonisation principles established by the United Nations.” The French nationalist party, the National Front, denounced the United Nations, “recalling with great force that the future of the French territories can only be seen within the bosom of the French Republic.”

Since the end of nuclear testing in 1996, France has sought to improve relations with members of the Pacific Islands Forum. But the fierce reaction to the UN resolution suggests that Paris is not planning to relinquish its role as a colonial power in the region any time soon. And the fact that the UN resolution was sponsored by French Polynesia’s island neighbours shows that the debate about colonialism in the region isn’t going to go away.

FRANCE first colonised part of Polynesia as the Etablissements Français de l’Océanie in the mid nineteenth century. By the end of that century, the five eastern-Pacific archipelagos we now call French Polynesia had fallen under French control. Since then, their status has evolved from protectorate to colony, then from “overseas territory” to “overseas country” to today’s “overseas collectivity” of France, each shift in terminology reflecting changes in colonial policy in Paris.

For fifty years after the founding of the United Nations, Paris refused to accept monitoring of decolonisation in the Pacific, arguing that the Pacific territories enjoyed self-government within the French Republic. The newly created United Nations established a list of non-self-governing territories in 1946, calling on administering powers to promote economic, social and ultimately political development in their colonies. But from 1947, France refused to transmit information on its overseas territories to the General Assembly, as required under Article 73 of the UN Charter. A revised UN list of territories in 1963 ignored France’s Pacific dependencies, apart from the joint Anglo-French condominium of the New Hebrides.

After the end of nuclear testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in 1996, France began to change its policy in the Pacific region. The signing of the 1998 Noumea Accord – an agreement between the French state and supporters and opponents of independence in New Caledonia – acknowledged the need for decolonisation and improved regional relations. President Jacques Chirac began the devolution of more powers to France’s overseas territories in 2003. New Caledonia and French Polynesia both gained observer status at the Pacific Islands Forum (which links Australia, New Zealand and fourteen independent island nations), and upgraded to associate membership in 2006.

These changes were too little, too late, for the FLNKS independence coalition in New Caledonia and the pro-independence party Tavini Huiraatira in French Polynesia. These nationalist movements have long sought support in their quest for a new political status, and the United Nations is seen as a crucial forum.

The latest UN resolution means that French Polynesia joins sixteen other territories on the UN list of non-self-governing territories, including five in the Pacific region: New Caledonia (under French administration); Tokelau (New Zealand); Pitcairn (United Kingdom); Guam and American Samoa (both United States).

New Caledonia was only reinscribed on the UN list through a UN General Assembly resolution in December 1986, after campaigning by members of the Pacific Islands Forum. The resolution came at the height of armed conflict during 1984–88 between the French armed forces and supporters and opponents of independence. Australia and New Zealand joined their island neighbours to support New Caledonia’s reinscription, fearful of the radicalisation of the Kanak independence movement and perceived Soviet advances in the region.

In French Polynesia, the independence movement has sought the same sort of recognition for decades. As leader of the Polynesian Liberation Front, Temaru first lobbied at the United Nations in 1978. He patiently sought support from Pacific governments throughout the 1980s and 1990s, gaining solidarity from the Pacific Conference of Churches and the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement, but little action came from neighbouring Polynesian nations.

In contrast, the independence movement in New Caledonia gained extensive support from the Melanesian Spearhead Group, which links the FLNKS and the governments of Vanuatu, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.

Since reinscription in 1986, New Caledonia has been scrutinised by the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation every year. The governments of France and New Caledonia even invited the UN committee to hold its regional seminar in Noumea in 2010. Maohi nationalists are angry that the rights extended to New Caledonia under the 1998 Noumea Accord do not extend to other French dependencies in the region. Symbolically, Oscar Temaru was refused entry to the UN’s 2010 decolonisation seminar in New Caledonia’s capital.

GASTON FLOSSE first served as president of French Polynesia in 1984–87 and was re-elected in 1991. The long rule of this fierce opponent of independence came to an end in 2004 after Temaru’s Tavini Huiraatira party united with other groups in the Union for Democracy coalition, or UPLD, and defeated him in closely fought elections for the French Polynesian Assembly. For the first time, French Polynesia had a president who supported independence from France.

Since then, local opinion has shifted slowly but significantly, even as control of the government has swung back and forth between supporters and opponents of independence. (Unstable political coalitions and Paris’s unceasing opposition to Temaru’s agenda have combined to bring about eleven changes of leadership since 2004.)

In 2011, the French Polynesian Assembly in the capital, Papeete, narrowly voted for the first time to support Temaru’s call for UN reinscription. A legal challenge to the Assembly vote failed at the Administrative Tribunal of Papeete in early 2012.

The UPLD also looked to Paris as France moved towards presidential elections in May 2012. After years of conservative rule under presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, the Tavini Huiraatira party had aligned itself with the French Socialist Party. Before his 2012 election as president, François Hollande signed a cooperation agreement with Tavini in his role as Secretary General of the Socialist Party, formally recognising the right to self-determination for the Maohi people.

The UPLD coalition decided to soft-pedal their reinscription push at the United Nations during 2012 in order to avoid embarrassing Hollande in the midst of the presidential elections. Once elected, however, Hollande began to back away from the principles set out in the inter-party accord.

With Australia and France signing a Joint Statement of Strategic Partnership in January 2012, Canberra too has been less than enthusiastic about Temaru’s reinscription initiative. When I interviewed him last year, Australia’s then parliamentary secretary for Pacific Island affairs, Richard Marles, described France as a long-term stable democratic partner in the Pacific and reaffirmed Australian opposition to re-inscription. “We absolutely take our lead from France on this,” he said.

Meeting in Rarotonga in August 2012, Pacific Islands Forum leaders reiterated their support for the principle of self-determination but didn’t endorse the call for re-inscription. Instead, the Forum communique welcomed “the election of a new French government that opened fresh opportunities for a positive dialogue between French Polynesia and France on how best to realise French Polynesia’s right to self-determination.”

A month after the Forum, without the restraining influence of Canberra and Wellington, the leaders of Samoa, Solomon Islands, Fiji and Vanuatu lined up at the UN General Assembly, explicitly calling for action on decolonisation. Vanuatu’s then prime minister, Sato Kilman, called on “the independent and free nations of the world to complete the story of decolonisation and close this chapter.” He urged the United Nations “not to reject the demands for French Polynesia's right to self-determination and progress.”

In the year Samoa celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of independence from New Zealand, prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi told the General Assembly, “In the case of French Polynesia, we encourage the metropolitan power and the territory’s leadership together with the support of the United Nations to find an amicable way to exercise the right of the people of the territory to determine their future.”

The same month, with Fiji’s foreign minister Ratu Inoke Kubuabola in attendance, the Sixteenth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, in Tehran, issued a new policy on decolonisation. According to its communique, “The Heads of State or Government affirmed the inalienable right of the people of French Polynesia–Maohi Nui to self-determination in accordance with Chapter XI of the Charter of the United Nations and the UN General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV).”

Opinion was also shifting at home. In August 2012, the Eglise Protestante Maohi, the Protestant church that is the largest denomination in French Polynesia, voted for the first time to support Temaru’s call for re-inscription. “The reinscription of Maohi Nui on this list constitutes one way to protect the people from decisions and initiatives of the French State that are contrary to their interests,” said the church executive. “This reinscription would serve, through the recognition of the rights of the Maohi people, as an efficient means of protecting their heritage and allowing them to remind France that she must clean our country of all the nuclear waste that has been left here.”

The following month, the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches added its voice, calling on “France, the United Nations, and the community to support the reinscription of French Polynesia on the UN list of countries to be decolonised, in accordance with the example of New Caledonia.”

WITH increasing regional support, the formal bid for reinscription was relaunched in early 2013, with extensive lobbying in New York by Oscar Temaru and France’s senator for French Polynesia, Richard Ariihau Tuheiava.

In January, Temaru addressed a meeting of the Co-ordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement in New York, seeking their support. “This is yet another case of David against Goliath, and the reason why we want our country back on the UN’s list of non-self-governing territories,” he said. “Without the UN as a referee between France and us, this is once again an unfair and uphill battle. Don’t get mistaken – this is not a request from us to get independence without our people’s vote. What we seek is a fair evolution of our relations with France, with the oversight of the UN.”

In February, the UN ambassadors for Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Nauru formally lodged a draft resolution at the General Assembly. But in spite of pre-election pledges by President Hollande, French diplomats launched a sharp attack on the initiative. The assault was led by France’s UN ambassador Gérard Araud, a graduate of the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration who had represented France as a diplomat in Washington, NATO and Tel Aviv. Araud lobbied hard to have the resolution delayed in the hope that it would lapse after the May 2013 elections in Papeete.

In the interests of compromise, the sponsoring states issued a revised version of the resolution on 1 March, but France sought for weeks to keep the resolution out of the General Assembly. Although colonial powers including the United States and Britain agreed to back France, other UN member states were astounded by the vigour with which France pressed its case. Denouncing the “violence and condescension” of Araud’s interventions, Temaru wrote to the French president on 27 March, calling on him to bring the ambassador to heel.

“Without wanting to embarrass you with the procedural details or the reasons invoked to refuse us a date,” Temaru wrote, “I would draw to your attention the growing frustration and incomprehension over France’s position, which we have been informed of by several UN member states. For the majority of these states, the right to self-determination is a sacred principle, inscribed in the UN Charter… The French pressure towards the President of the General Assembly is similarly perceived as the denial of the democracy that is at the heart of the General Assembly… If some of your confreres in the P5 [permanent members of the Security Council] seem to be accepting the French action on our dossier, others have shared their astonishment with us.”

French Polynesia’s local elections on 5 May saw the defeat of President Temaru’s UPLD coalition, with voters angry over the government’s management of French Polynesia’s post-GFC fiscal crisis, declining tourism and growing unemployment. The return of Gaston Flosse, an ageing politician currently appealing a series of convictions for corruption and abuse of office, highlights the political stasis in Papeete, and the lack of vision for new post-nuclear economic options.

After his election, Flosse immediately wrote to the president of the General Assembly, Vuk Jeremic of Serbia, in an unsuccessful attempt to delay action on the resolution. France’s ambassador boycotted the session on 17 May and Britain, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands all disassociated themselves from the consensus vote. Fearful of a growing regional debate about West Papua, Indonesia’s representative stressed that the “adoption was solely based on a specific historical context and should not be misinterpreted as precedence by other territories whose cases were pending with the Decolonisation Committee.”

IN THE aftermath of the UN resolution, Gaston Flosse is now seeking to pre-empt a debate about options and timetables for self-determination by calling for an immediate referendum on independence. Buoyed by his success in the Assembly elections, Flosse is hoping that a quick vote would overwhelm the UPLD, which must rally a population fearful that France would abandon them, politically and financially, after independence.

For Temaru and the UPLD, any referendum must be based on UN practice and principles, and the thorny question of voting rights must be resolved. Flosse has argued that all French nationals resident in the territory have the right to vote in a self-determination referendum. Temaru, echoing the process established by the Noumea Accord in New Caledonia, has argued for a restricted electorate limited to indigenous Maohi and long-term residents. Any vote should be preceded, he says, by a lengthy transition, with information in local languages about all options and a timetable for the transfer of authority.

In spite of French anger over the UN resolution, the decolonisation agenda has some way to go. New Caledonia has been on the UN list since 1986 and increased UN scrutiny does little to change the reality on the ground. (Under the Noumea Accord, after elections in 2014 New Caledonia will move towards a decision on its political status, with a possible referendum before 2019.) With limited staff and finances, the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation lacks the capacity to fully support the remaining territories.

Even so, self-determination will remain on the region’s agenda over the coming decade. The Melanesian Spearhead Group meets in June in New Caledonia, with FLNKS leader Victor Tutugoro taking over as chair of the sub-regional body at a crucial time. The UN resolution has buoyed the Kanak independence movement, with the FLNKS Political Bureau warmly welcoming the decision. As Maohi nationalists celebrate their victory, the future of France in the South Pacific is yet to be decided. •

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AS François Hollande hits the hundred-day mark, what is the verdict on the man at the top of French politics? In terms of style, his trademarks emerged quickly enough. He has renewed the Gaullist interpretation of the presidency: in accordance with the letter of the constitution, he sees his role as an above-the-party arbiter who lets the prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, govern. Unlike Nicolas Sarkozy, Hollande neither polarises public opinion nor arouses strong feelings. He is generally described as “decent” and “modest,” adjectives that were never associated with Sarkozy.

Three months on, however, the novelty of this change is beginning to wear off. Over the course of the past week, commentators in the media have called on Hollande to start being more specific about his policies and priorities. Some journalists have even begun to mock his quiet tone: the expression présidence pépère (“cushy presidency”) has been used in several broadsheets.

So where is France really headed? In line with Hollande’s Agenda for Change, released on 4 April, the new Socialist majority in parliament passed a rash of bills before the recess on 2 August. Most were intended to generate an extra €7.2 billion to meet the 2012 deficit targets. The highest-profile reversal of previous government policy was the decision to resume taxing overtime pay and put an end to state subsidies to fund that exemption. “Work more to earn more” was the flagship measure of Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign. It aimed to boost the economy by deregulating the labour market. In fact, this reform did nothing to stimulate employee income but cost the state more than €25 billion in tax relief.

Another law reinstated salary-based charges paid by employers – the previous government had shifted those costs to the general public in the form of a tax increase. The infamous Tepa law, passed in August 2007 – which lowered taxes on assets of wealthier people – was also revised. Jérôme Cahuzac, the Socialist minister for the budget, declared that this “exceptional contribution is a big effort being demanded of those who can afford to make it.” It sounded like an uneasy plea to the rich, rather than a confident decision. This half-hearted approach augurs badly for the intentions of the government when it comes to addressing the widening gap between the rich and the rest of the population.

Furthermore, a 75 per cent tax rate on those earning more than €1 million and a new 45 per cent rate on those earning over €150,000 have been delayed until the autumn. At the same time, the minimum wage was increased by a token 2 per cent. This felt like a slap in the face for the trade unions and low-income voters.

But what about the much-heralded Tobin tax, introduced on 1 August? It’s worth clarifying that this is a tax on only 0.2 per cent of the value of financial transactions. Another tax aimed at high-frequency trading was also implemented. The so-called frequency tax is 0.01 per cent on the amount of stock orders modified or cancelled that exceeds 80 per cent of all orders transmitted in a month. In short, it’s more of a “non-transaction” tax.

These “achievements” promised to shed a new light on Hollande’s much trumpeted intentions of “further regulating the markets.” The government has used taxation to try to dissuade bankers from deliberately placing false orders in an attempt to manipulate the market. Take note: Hollande did not try to ban certain practices or introduce new rules. He is simply trying to benefit modestly from the system as it stands.

In the run-up to the election, Hollande had promised to renegotiate the EU fiscal compact. This endeavour was supported by a large majority of voters. On 29 June, after one of those dramatically choreographed EU summits, a glowing Hollande appeared before cameras and declared: “Europe has changed in the right direction.”

Yet the French president spectacularly failed to keep his word. Angela Merkel and Sarkozy’s treaty has prevailed unchanged. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Left Front presidential candidate, denounced it as a “knockabout farce.” All Hollande could claim was a derisory “growth pact” worth 1 per cent of the European Union’s GDP (€130 billion). More embarrassing was the revelation that the growth package entailed deploying up to €55 billion in unspent EU structural funds.

The Socialist president has not opposed the EU-inspired austerity programs that are strangling the economies of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Worse, he has implicitly endorsed them by sending an unprecedented, thinly veiled warning to Greek voters days before the dramatic rerun of the general elections. He hinted that if Greeks insisted on casting their votes in favour of Syriza, a left-wing “anti-austerity” coalition, it could cost them Greece’s participation in the eurozone.

On 9 August, France’s constitutional council ruled that the adoption of the EU fiscal compact did not require a change to the constitution. This would have necessitated the support of three-fifths of MPs, an unachievable majority. Instead, the treaty will enter into force if the government passes an “organic law” by a simple majority. Hollande said there would be no referendum on the new treaty – he is afraid of losing it.

This denial of democracy has infuriated the left. Many argue that the pact allows Brussels to dictate national policy by allowing it to impose sanctions on countries that fail to respect a structural deficit ceiling of 0.5 per cent of GDP. The diktat will restrict all governments’ room for manoeuvre in the foreseeable future. What is more, it dramatically undermines parliament’s powers to pass laws as it sees fit for the country. When the French return from their summer holidays, they can only hope for further spending cuts (€33 billion in 2012–14) and tax rises to meet Hollande’s 3 per cent deficit targets by the end of 2013.

Hollande has chosen to stay the course of the punitive austerity policies that are ruining European countries. Mr Normal has quietly taken to the neoliberal sea – and he makes no waves. •

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But when is a rose not quite a rose? Biographers of Stein have had to contort themselves to gloss over the curious fact of her survival in relative comfort during the second world war. For here is the question. How did two Jews living in France – Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas – manage to avoid deportation and the confiscation of their property, the fate of most Jews under the Nazi occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime? All told, some 77,000 Jews – men, women and children – a third of them French citizens, the others refugees or immigrants, were rounded up in Drancy and other concentration camps, to be sent to their deaths. Irène Némirovsky, one of France’s most popular writers, was among those captured in the Gestapo’s dragnet. But Stein and Toklas remained untouched, as did Stein’s priceless art collection.

Barbara Will, a Dartmouth College English professor, was one of those biographers. A specialist in modernism and American literature, she published Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius”, a book mainly concerned with Stein’s aesthetics, in 2002. As more and more material was uncovered, however – not the least of which were Stein’s letters to Thornton Wilder and the handwritten manuscripts of her translations of Vichy president Marshal Pétain’s speeches – Will felt compelled to grapple with the problem of Stein’s wartime collaboration. As she puts it in her new book, Unlikely Collaboration, “Given the generally positive reputation Stein currently enjoys, it was simply hard to believe the accusations… We want our good writers to have good politics.”

Yet evidence to the contrary has long been with us, as even a short list of fascist or Nazi sympathisers shows. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun, literary stars of their day, were all attracted to what they believed to be the stability offered by right-wing authoritarianism. It can be argued that their support for fascism or Nazism had less to do with anti-Semitism than with a longing for the perceived tranquillity of authoritarian regimes in the past, but the argument is not always convincing.

The period between the two world wars was one of rampant social and economic dislocation in Europe, the memory of wholesale slaughter still fresh. France, a nation divided since the convulsions of its 1789 revolution, was the major battlefield. Tradition-bound Catholic monarchists, still smarting from wounds delivered back in the eighteenth century and unreconciled to the Third Republic and democracy in general, were horrified by the looming spectre of communism. The left’s Popular Front encapsulated their deepest fears. Society had grown decadent. The odd thing is that Gertrude Stein – who, with her brother Leo, did more than just about anyone to promote “decadence” in the arts – believed this too.

By the end of the 1920s, the character of Stein’s famous salon had changed. Hemingway and Fitzgerald had gone, and so had Picasso. Unlike those macho characters of the early days, their replacements tended to be happily homosexual or bisexual and to share Stein’s openly authoritarian beliefs. The key figure in the new constellation was Bernard Faÿ, a French professor nearly twenty years Stein’s junior, who had a Harvard degree and had taught in various American universities. His specialty, indeed his passion, was America, but an America of a very distinctive kind. In contrast to the democratic decadence of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, Stein and Faÿ favoured the eighteenth-century federalism created by America’s founding fathers – a theme elaborated by Stein in The Making of Americans and miscellaneous pieces and by Faÿ in countless lectures and monographs.

As a one-time student of American history myself (admittedly at the undergraduate level) I’m obliged to say that I find their ideas about the United States quite wacky. But their import here lies less in their validity than in their relevance to European politics of the time. Foreshadowing a quite different European Union by decades, Faÿ argued for a pan-European federation that would entrench Europe’s traditional Christian values. So long as his federation brought peace to the continent, he was more than willing to countenance German dominance. Peace was essential to Stein as well, for it was only under peaceful and stable conditions, she believed, that art and artists could flourish. This was her special take on the policy of appeasement.

Will presents what is essentially a double narrative of the lives of Stein and Faÿ, the latter of whom she has rescued from oblivion in order to explain his role in Stein’s and Toklas’s survival. She examines the Stein–Faÿ friendship and explores their diverging yet mutually beneficial paths under Vichy. Finally, in an epilogue, she tracks their markedly different postwar trajectories.

WHAT brought Stein and Faÿ together in the first place was their fascination with America. Despite his nostalgia for its ultimately pragmatic federalism (designed as it was to control the rabble), Faÿ was infatuated with the country’s wealth and vitality, the bustling capitalism that came to France’s rescue in the first war. Stein was, well, missing her home. True to America’s “melting pot” tradition, she regarded herself more American than Jew, and felt the American experiment had a great deal to offer Europe. The American Experiment, in fact, was what Faÿ called his first published book. A young man on the make (Will describes both Stein’s and Faÿ’s personalities as manipulative), he insinuated himself into Stein’s rarefied circle and was happy to be her acolyte, at least to begin with. Their friendship deepened through the exchange of manuscripts and a convergence of political opinion.

The 1930s was a turning point for both, catapulting each out of a kind of precious obscurity. After The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published in 1933, Stein, aged sixty, became a celebrity. Her photograph, in the likeness of a bust of a Roman emperor, graced the cover of Time – even today, for some, America’s highest accolade. A high-powered lecture tour with Toklas of the two women’s native country followed. The astounding success of The Autobiography led Stein to hope that her more experimental prose and poetry would have a similar reception. That never really happened – few read it then and few read it now, outside academia; fewer still claim to understand it – but her reputation as a “genius” was secured.

Faÿ’s star, too, continued to rise in the thirties. He was accepted in government circles as an expert on America and helped shape French policy. An assiduous writer and public intellectual, he was elected to the prestigious Collège de France and eventually appointed director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, all the while evincing increasingly right-wing opinions and more than flirting with fascism. Though not particularly anti-Semitic himself, he was a regular contributor to anti-Semitic journals such as Je Suis Partout and La Gerbe, mixed in anti-Semitic circles and sprinkled the anti-Semites’ favoured hyphenates – including “Judeo-Communist” and “Judeo-Masonry” – through his writings.

Stein likewise used her newly acquired prominence to air her reactionary views, famously going as far as admiring Hitler for bringing order to Germany. By contrast, she loathed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, arguing that with his Dutch background he didn’t scrub up as truly American. (And this from the daughter of immigrant Jews!) The New Deal, which was slowly winching the country out of the Great Depression, was anathema to her, creating a nation of “idlers.” The mass industrial society the United States had become was the antithesis of her beloved Jeffersonian America (a delusory historical distortion we hear bandied about to this day).

Before the second war began, Stein and Toklas had settled in a chateau in the village of Bilignin in the Bugey region of southeastern France. There was some skulduggery involved in their renting the property, which belonged to a lieutenant who was due to retire and planned to take up residence there. It was through the Faÿ connection that Stein was able to arrange a promotion, and thus an extension of duty, for the hapless officer, who was sent off to another post. The move helped ensure their survival: when the Germans seized Paris in June 1940, Stein and Toklas were not among the tragic cavalcade of refugees that Irène Némirovsky wrote so movingly about in Suite Française. They were already safe, smack in the middle of Vichy.

At Bilignin they enjoyed the kind of bucolic idyll that Stein had promoted in her writings: gardening, growing their own produce and bartering with their neighbours. The neighbours were overwhelmingly Catholic and deeply conservative. When they were forced to move again (the lieutenant, then captain, had indeed retired) it was to Uriage, the centre, as it were, of the most reactionary elements of French society. Will writes of the cabal of royalists and Nazi sympathisers that operated there, and Stein’s rubbing shoulders with them.

Both Stein and Faÿ had long been admirers of Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun and the leader of France’s wartime collaborationist government, whom they compared with George Washington. They subscribed to his revanchist National Revolution well before he made his peace with the Nazis and set up the Vichy state. Opposed to the 1789 revolution’s ideals of liberté, egalité, fraternité, were Pétain’s travail, famille, patrie, the “core values” of his program of “static agrarianism.” Among the manuscript pages of Stein’s translation of his speeches is a prologue in which her support for both Pétain and his puppet state are made abundantly clear.

It has been argued that Stein’s translating the speeches was quid pro quo for the fact that she and Toklas were spared from extermination and her Paris art collection protected from appropriation by the Nazis. But Will makes a case for Stein’s genuine enthusiasm for the task. Will’s painstaking examination of the manuscripts reveals how closely Stein followed Pétain’s style. This has led Will to speculate that this was another instance of Stein’s contradictory and reactionary submissiveness to authoritarian father figures. (In the iconoclastic writings for which she is better known, Stein had claimed to disown the “fathers,” but these just happened to be Jewish.)

To be scrupulously fair, I’m not so sure that Will’s take on this is the only one to be had. It’s possible that Stein, a fluent French speaker and excellent translator, felt obliged to stick as close as she could to Pétain’s words because it would be dangerous to do otherwise. This is the “grey zone” that most who lived through those years had to negotiate, one way or another. But history, as we know, is the darling of the victor. As Will reminds us, in June 1940, when the Nazis closed in, the overwhelming majority of French people preferred the occupation to what they had experienced in the previous war. The Resistance we honour today was, in the main, a tiny group of leftists and Jewish partisans.

As the war continued and life under the Nazis proved increasingly harsh there is evidence enough that opposition to them grew. Certainly after November 1942, when they replaced Pétain with the more compliant Pierre Laval and Vichy was dissolved, it is fair to say that the French had had enough. But as Sylvia Lawson has noted in Demanding the Impossible, her recently published collection of essays about resistance, even so ardent an opponent to the Nazi regime as Simone de Beauvoir was forced at times to make her accommodation.

By 1943 Bernard Faÿ’s fortunes had dramatically turned. Too much a French patriot to wholly embrace Nazism, he had focused his energies on ridding France of Freemasonry, an obsession bordering on paranoia that saw him, as Bibliothèque Nationale director, draw up the infamous list of 500 card-carrying Freemasons that resulted in most of them being deported. Unwilling to cooperate with the Germans after Pétain’s fall, he was soon removed from this post and his lectureships. But this didn’t spare him from being convicted as a collaborator after the war. He spent six years in prison, but escaped with the help of Toklas after Stein had died.

Unlikely Collaboration is a challenging book. Stein’s reputation as feminist gay icon will probably not survive it. As for her literary reputation, that had already been interrogated if not completely undermined by the time Will embarked on her investigation. But Stein’s case poses yet again those perennial questions about politics and art. Can artists remain aloof from politics? Should artists collaborate for the sake of their art? And finally, do reactionary politics make for bad art? I would say not necessarily, and Will, I’m sure, would agree. But I still maintain that great art springs from large, if fallible, hearts; and that technical brilliance or even iconoclasm is not enough. I never was much for Gertrude Stein, and after reading this book I like her even less. But I can feel for her predicament, if not for the way she resolved it.

SEEING Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, on show recently at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery, might well be called a biography of Stein’s life, manifest in five stages and in a wealth of artworks attesting to her influence in the development of modern art. The exhibition was first mounted last year at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum, together with a larger exhibit of the Stein family art collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. More recently, The Steins Collect, with her brother Leo’s collections alongside hers, finished up at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Predictably, all the shows have attracted crowds.

Is it not a little ironic that a lesbian couple were kicked out of San Francisco’s exhibition for holding hands in public? And more – that this single incident sparked a huge protest? Politics today are not what they were when Stein was alive; and I’m grateful at least for that. •

Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma
By Barbara Will | Columbia University Press | $49.95

The post Good writers, bad politics appeared first on Inside Story.

Not everything about Facebook or its pervasive rise is unique to the twenty-first century. More than a decade before Alan Turing’s influential 1936 paper setting out the blueprint for the modern computer, the first “facebooks” appeared. They were created by students not at Harvard but at elite French universities and, like their present-day counterpart, they were the product of the irresistible rise of another technology: photography.

The story can be sifted from massive collections of secret files on individuals held by the French National Archives. Earlier this year a thought-provoking exhibition at the archive, Fichés?, made use of the sensitive material to trace how attempts to identify individuals evolved with technology. It asked the simple question: how did the photographic portrait come to be the most ubiquitous key to personal identity?

The earliest photographs date back to the 1820s. As techniques were refined, the potential to produce exact reproductions of the visual world piqued the interest of more than just a handful of artists. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Parisian police force had seen their potential, and began to use photographic portraits to register criminals. Physiognomy – a technique based on the belief that a person’s character was reflected in their appearance, and particularly their face – was still influential. One police officer, Alphonse Bertillon, developed an elaborate anthropometric system so that photographic portraits assembled by the force could be standardised.

It was the repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 that gave impetus to the rise of the mug shot. Police sent photographers into the prisons to photograph those arrested, and then they composed the first criminal record cards to include a photographic portrait. At about the same time, improvements in technology made it possible for police agents to take their own shots. A single bureau was established to oversee a central “database” of record cards. Photos of wanted criminals were distributed in a bulletin and also published in the press.

By the end of the Great War it had become commonplace for French people to have their photograph taken for administrative purposes. The portraits were required for a whole range of new identity documents. Entitlement cards for war veterans and driver licences were introduced at this time, as were identity cards for foreigners on French soil. (Passports as we know them did not yet exist.) Before long people attached photographs to the most innocuous official documents.

It was at this point that the first “facebooks” appeared. Students at elite French universities produced yearbooks made up of a photo of each member. The practice soon spread to government departments and large companies as those students stepped into influential positions. Some eighty years later Facebook initially followed a similar trajectory. After a successful launch in Harvard, it was introduced first into other Ivy League universities and then into major corporations before being made available to the general public.

The exhibition also examined a darker side of the growing use of photographic portraits. Archival records show that when French police began to build collections of individual record cards, not all parts of the population were catalogued with the same fervour. Roma and other nomadic peoples served as “models” for what was ostensibly the refinement of the anthropometric standards developed by Bertillon.

As state-sanctioned racism built to the crescendo of the second world war, the photograph became a tool of control and repression. In 1935 the French government set up a sophisticated central record agency to “administer” the increasing number of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. The first French national identity cards were issued by the Vichy regime in 1940, and they included racial descriptions as well as information, where relevant, on how and when the bearer had attained French citizenship. The cards facilitated the work of the Nazis.

The worst abuses of the Vichy regime seem an age away, but vestiges of that early craze for attaching photographic portraits to anything and everything remain. In France it is still common for job applicants to send off their curriculum vitae with a photo attached. Despite claims that the practice has made it possible for employers to discriminate, subconsciously or not, against candidates of foreign and particularly Arabic appearance, most French people continue to put a face to their name. Those who choose not to run the risk of a potential employer suspecting that they have something to hide.

It takes an exhibition like this to remind us that the photograph played a role in building professional and social “networks” well before the word was applied to groups of people, let alone a group of computers. And in a world where photo ID has become so common, it is worth reflecting on the remarkable fact that only a century ago many people considered having their photo taken to be an invasive and even dehumanising experience. The expression “to shoot a photo” dates back to the nineteenth century. Were those people right to be concerned, given what we now know about the eerie negatives of the pre-digital age photograph?

Because French archival law protects documents relating to individuals for fifty years, the exhibition could not make use of any records from the 1960s onwards. But the truncation of the story only makes the contrast with the present-day abundance of photographs all the more stark. On sites like Facebook, portraits – when people choose to post one at all – are just a pixel in a kaleidoscopic representation of life. It would seem that we are in the process of polishing a new facet in the history of visual identity. •

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This contrast, between a static, routinised home-life and the dangerous unpredictability of events, is a defining characteristic of the Simenon universe. In the Maigret novels, the two are nicely balanced; domestic life (or rather the kind of domestic life as lived by the Maigrets), serves as a welcome refuge from the constant reminders of the cruel and unpleasant things that people can do to one another. In the romans durs, however, domestic routine cannot be relied on to offer any such refuge.

In Simenon’s The Train, now reissued by Melville House in the 1964 translation by Robert Baldick, we follow an unassuming tradesman, Marcel Féron – he repairs radios for a living – as he flees south with his family ahead of the German invasion of 1940. Their day-to-day life, in which “all the familiar objects were in their places,” is no longer safe. The novel was first published in 1961, the same year, as it happens, as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and despite the huge differences between the two – short, spare and laconic as against long, exuberant and writ extra large – they can both be seen now as part of a rising mood of revisionism, by which the still recent war was cast not as a grand cause but as a confusing collection of apparently random events, to which the only sensible response was the pursuit of self-interest. The Train, like Catch-22, is notable for the way in which it makes cowardice seem not only the most rational approach to the unfathomable absurdity of war, but also, in an odd way, to constitute a kind of nobility.

When Marcel, who tells his own story, first introduces himself, his business is doing well, his house is his own, his wife Jeanne is pregnant again and due to give birth in a month or two. “I had become a happy man,” he says, not altogether convincingly, “I want to make that perfectly clear.” Simenon is adept at conveying the ways in which a life can be both reassuring and suffocating. Jeanne is of an anxious disposition, little Sophie has a “nervous temperament” and refuses to sleep apart from her parents even though they have “furnished the prettiest room in the house for her.” The source of the girl’s anxieties is never quite made clear. Do they come from inside? Are they inherited, or are they perhaps attributable to her delivery by forceps, as her mother claims? Or do they come from outside the home, from the voices on the radio, the snatches of French and German and Dutch and English that create a “sort of dramatic throbbing in the air”?

The news of the German advance throws everything into chaos. The life that Marcel and Jeanne have carefully built up, with its “standards” and its “landmarks,” seems suddenly to be slipping away. They decide to join the Belgians who are already heading south, though “decide” is perhaps too strong a word. As Simenon describes it, the small family’s departure simply happens; they go with the flow. It seems the natural thing to do. “Everything was natural now,” says Marcel, who sees the prospect of joining the other refugees as an opportunity to escape from his carefully constructed version of himself and to follow his true destiny, whatever that may be. One of Simenon’s great strengths, equally apparent in the Maigret novels, is his ability to show how changes in circumstances can change everything, and how people who seem destined for a particular path in life and a particular destiny can suddenly be led in a quite different direction, becoming someone different in the process.

The war is ever present in The Train, but always at a certain distance, in the form of those voices on the radio or the second- and third-hand reports of eyewitnesses. Nobody really knows what is going on. The fleeing villagers jostle for seats on the train going south. An official makes room in first-class for the pregnant Jeanne and for Sophie, but Marcel must remain behind to follow in a freight train. Marcel feels keenly the separation from his wife and child, and vows to find them again, but at the same time he takes pleasure in his new freedom and his new unencumbered self. In an implicit criticism of the vagaries of nationalism and of group loyalties, Simenon shows how Marcel and the other occupants of the freight car that they find themselves in begin to redefine themselves in the context of their new, travelling home. Even the “French people in the other two freight cars… were foreign to us.”

Soon Marcel’s world becomes even smaller as he falls in with Anna, a woman of not quite definable accent and nationality, who may or may not have sought him out for her own protection. “Falling in” becomes falling in love, as together they form a mutually supportive band of two. The depth and intensity of this spontaneous affair contrasts starkly with the dutifulness of Marcel’s marriage, but – in a characteristically Simenon touch – that does not diminish his parallel determination to find his family again and to resume his old life. Is it preferable to live, with Jeanne, in predictable harmony, as a “caricature of the married couple,” or to continue to invest in a relationship that belongs only to the “fragile present,” that “didn’t have any future”? Marcel’s resolution of this question is conveyed in a few almost throwaway lines towards the end. It is a mark of Simenon’s cool humanity that we are left to see his decision as a fact of life, the kind of thing that any of us might face should circumstances conspire against us. •

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This line of thought was encouraged by the film itself, in which the boundaries between art and life were constantly crossed and re-crossed and the identity of a character in the film often merged with the identity of the actor who was playing the role. The famous mime is played by a famous mime; the impoverished heroine with a working-class childhood is played by a working-class actress whose father worked with the tramways and whose mother was a washerwoman. The democratic emphasis is a key to the film.

Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) was made during the Occupation years, in Nice, in Vichy France. Set in the Parisian theatrical world of the 1840s, it is about, roughly, the necessity of art, the struggle for self-realisation, the quest for love, and what the English literary critic John Bayley, thinking of Keats, called the erotic fantasies of the lower middle classes. At its centre is Le Théâtre des Funambules (“The Theatre of the Tightrope Walkers” – everyone in the film is, in some sense, a tightrope walker), a mime house that stages low-grade, circus-like, dumb-show entertainments for a demanding and noisy audience. (It is easy to sympathise with the man who tries to maintain order by calling out, “Shut up! I can’t hear the mime!”) A proper theatre, with a royal patent permitting the actors to speak, is further down the road, but strict prohibitions prevent any performer in the Funambules from uttering a word, so there is comedy and drama as well as a fine when the rule is broken.

The film follows the careers of two men, both historical figures, the actor Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), and the mime Baptiste Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault), and their fascination with the demimondaine they both love, Garance (Léonie Bathiat, who was known as “Arletty”). The large supporting cast ranges from a supposedly blind beggar, Fil de Soie (Gaston Modot), who is in fact an amateur of Baptiste’s mimes, through the sinister criminal-artist, Pierre-François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), to the higher reaches of the aristocracy in the Compte de Montray (Louis Salou). The film is notable for an engrossing and complicated plot that twists the lives of these characters around that of Garance.

It was once very well regarded. A group of French critics voted it The Best Film Ever in 1995, and it has often appeared in those lists of top ten films, although not, to my knowledge, recently. Many artists, including Bob Dylan, Theodore Roszak and Terry Gilliam, have testified to its importance for them, but perhaps the dismal failure of a 1996 London stage version, directed by Simon Callow, marked the beginning of its current decline.

I haven’t seen any advertisements for a screening of the film for a long time, although the new digitally enhanced print might herald a return to favour, and its reception in London was by all accounts enthusiastic.

Frédérick and Baptiste are that double act so profitably exploited by the French, the binary. Frédérick is shallow, one of life’s amiable opportunists, the man without a plan, who takes life easily, optimistically, generously, riskily and courageously. Baptiste is a deep, but obsessive, perfectionist, an idealist who fails his most important life challenge, and then, six years later, thinks he can go back and start all over again. Frédérick, a creature of the street, is a man of words; Baptiste, a creature of the moon – from where he dropped into a bucket, so his father tells us – is a man of gesture. Mime, we reflect, is an art form appropriate to a lunar landscape both airless and soundless, where gravity exerts but a fractional influence. The film asks: “What are you, a Frédérick or a Baptiste? Which would you rather be? Whose, now you see the evidence, is the better approach to life?”

For my money, and simplifying grotesquely, it is Frédérick’s. Brasseur’s performance gets Frédérick’s vitality, confidence and inventiveness exactly, most typically in the wonderful scene where he is accosted by Lacenaire, who has come to demand money from him. It is, Lacenaire explains, “a matter of life or death.” Flushed with his success as an actor, Frédérick, who has never seen Lacenaire before, unselfishly divides his lottery winnings with him, invites him to dinner, reminisces and chats. Only at the end, as an afterthought, does he ask whether it really was a matter of life or death for anyone. “Certainly,” says Lacenaire, pulling back his coat and showing his dagger. “Yours.” One could hardly think of a better example of the need to go with the flow.

This is all as may be, for it has always seemed to me that rather than any character it is the crowd, with its insatiable desire for imaginative transformation, that is the affirmative engine of the film. To give the crowd this role was a defiant gesture in the years 1943–45. The story of the film’s making shows what a conflicted place France was at that time: on the one hand writer Jacques Prévert and Carné were left-wing French patriots who employed as key crew members Jews who had to work clandestinely and uncredited; on the other hand one cast member, Robert le Vigan, fled early in the shooting after the Resistance sentenced him to death for collaboration, and the beautiful heroine, Arletty, had a lover in the German military in Paris (her famous justification was “si mon cœur est français, mon cul, lui, est international” – “lui” is especially droll). The thousands of extras that make up the crowd include both collaborators and members of the Resistance.

The crowd makes the careers of Frédérick and Baptiste possible. The corrupt, aristocratic and quasi-aristocratic individualists – the Compte and Lacenaire – fail utterly, partly because they have no relation to the crowd. Frédérick and Baptiste, the actor and mime who succeed, do, and come across less as individuals than as projections of the crowd’s need for art. In an early scene, after they have risen to the challenge to perform in a crude pantomime at a moment’s notice, Frédérick and Baptiste share a drink at an all-night canteen. Frédérick hoists a sample member of the crowd up by his collar, shakes him, and reminds him that the actor’s duty is to “revive the giants of the earth.” Baptiste, less egotistical, more sentimental, thinks of the man’s poverty and adds, “Their lives may be small but their dreams are vast.” Performers like Frédérick and Baptiste are indeed “the children of paradise,” or “the children of the gods,” for paradis (French) is the gods (English), the cheap seats at the top of the playhouse, where the crowd, whose thirty centimes are the economic basis of the show, can enjoy the spectacle.

How just, then, that the film should return to the crowd time and time again in one unforgettable image after another – the crowd, idly seeking distraction from tawdry sideshows on the street, the crowd jigging drunkenly in the sinister Redbreast Inn, the crowd jeering, shouting, applauding, hanging over the galleries at the Funambules. The same crowd swallows up the principal characters at the end of the film. This crowd, a creature partly of the February Days of 1848 and partly of the postwar euphoria of 1945, the first child of the revolutionary mob, the harbinger of the (imperfect) Fourth Republic, is fundamental to the film. It is, at a dangerous historical moment, the film’s assertion of fraternal, egalitarian and libertarian – if not yet decolonising – values. Those were the days.

As to the Valhalla, it is long gone, replaced by a row of shops and a tower with a clock that never works. Gone too is the crowd that once spilled out over Victoria Street at half-past midnight on a cold Sunday morning. •

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WHY is one French noun masculine and another feminine? This question has puzzled generations of students who have studied French. The sun and moon rise and set in similar ways, yet one is masculine and the other feminine. The words “hand” and “fist” essentially refer to the same body part, yet one is masculine and the other feminine. But which is which? And why? Lacking any obvious explanation of this seemingly arbitrary phenomenon, we sometimes resort to poking fun at it: “Is ‘computer’ masculine or feminine?” The answer, of course, is either – with perfectly plausible reasons for both.

For readers without any experience of gender in French or any other European language (and gender is also present in various African and Australian Aboriginal languages), the phenomenon can best be described as a systematic way of organising nouns into a limited number of subsets. It might surprise you to know that Old English was also a gender language, and has left us with such remnants as singular/plural contrasts (house is/houses are, this/these/those) and a complex pronoun system (I/my/mine, his/her/its/their) that involves cumbersome “agreements” requiring certain changes particularly to verbs. As native speakers, though, we don’t find any of this difficult.

People who aren’t fluent in French are largely unaware that in some cases – après-midi (afternoon) and couple (couple), for example – speakers are free to choose which gender they use. Nor do they realise that French dictionaries don’t always agree on gender: pamplemousse (pomelo, grapefruit), for instance, is feminine in some sources (Académie française dictionaries, writers), and masculine in others (Larousse dictionaries, botanists), while Dictionnaires Le Robert offer alternative genders in their Petit Robert but masculine only in Le Robert pour Tous. Some nouns – orgue (organ), for example – change gender from singular to plural. And not even native speakers agree on the gender of some nouns, as an informative post from the HeiDeas blog reveals:

Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed [on] only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns.

It’s not that native speakers don’t know the gender of nouns, says HeiDeas. It’s just that they don’t agree. And then there is the challenge of synonyms with different genders – river can be rivière (feminine) or fleuve (masculine) – for which French is infamous. As for words borrowed from other languages, let us not venture far into that quagmire. Most are masculine – but not all.

Unfortunately, agreement principles in French are even more complicated – and none more so than those relating to gender. English speakers often recite the French nonsense expression la plume de ma tante (the pen/quill of my aunt) to indicate some familiarity with French gender and its principles of agreement. We readily recognise the relationship between ma, a feminine agreement form, and tante, a female person (just as we would recognise mon oncle as “my uncle,” a male person). But the precise relationship between la (a feminine agreement form similar to ma) and plume is not clear. What it does indicate is that, while “gender” and “sex” may be used interchangeably in English, in French “feminine” is not equivalent to “female,” and “masculine” is not the same as “male.”

My book Gender Assignment and Word-Final Pronunciation in French: Two Classification Systems sets out a radical explanation of how gender works in French. The answer, I argue, lies in contrasts in meaning, or binary opposites, where one part is associated with masculine and the other with feminine. We are used to these either/or opposites because we use them all the time in everyday life: dead or alive, dark or light, open or closed, full or empty, odd or even. My explanation fits an extensive vocabulary of French nouns that deal with the natural world and beyond. It produces only one single exception – to which we’ll return – for which gender is determined not by meaning, but by the presence of adjectives.

Dead:alive opposites form important semantic distinctions associated with contrasting genders. Things that are “dead” – cadavers, corpses, wood – are masculine, as are things that never existed or no longer exist, including mirages, shipwrecks, dinosaurs and recently extinct species such as aurochs (ancestor of our domestic cattle, extinct in 1627) and tarpan (a wild Eurasian horse, extinct for around a century) plus several extinct birds, including the great auk, the moa and the dodo. This correlation between “extinct” and masculine gender is supported by the fate of the North American passenger pigeon, whose name changed from the feminine tourtre to the masculine pigeon migrateur following its extinction in 1914.

“Alive” is associated with feminine gender, although in quite surprising ways. (It would not be a particularly useful distinction if all living things were feminine.) It becomes significant in contrast to “dead” for words such as “recruit” (a living body that makes up numbers lost through death or injury), and “victim” (originally a living body offered for sacrifice). “Alive” is also crucial where appearances suggest otherwise. For example, fish typically turn on their sides when they are dead; but rays, skates and “flatfish,” feminine in French, swim in this side-on position and are very much alive.

In one area only, gender distributions have always been plausible, regular and uncomplicated – sex. “Male” and “female,” that is, because nouns that indicate the “male” of a species are masculine (for example, “buck,” “bull,” “drake”) and nouns that indicate “female” are feminine (for example, “doe,” “cow” and “duck”). Learners can use these principles to generate the correct gender – for animal and bird species, at least. (For humans they are less consistent.) The basis on which we come to apply these “male” and “female” terms for each species is another matter, particularly for birds; as we shall see for pairs of bird species, we rely on different aspects of appearance and certain qualities associated with one sex over the other.

But what happens when we want neither “male” nor “female” but simply the name of the species? Only one of each pair can serve (cow rather than bull, for instance, in English), but which will it be? In this move from sex to species, we discover something remarkable about French gender, and begin to unlock the secrets hidden in this code.

Ducks and drakes

Both English and French have different male and female terms for certain species of birds, though not always for the same species. English makes a distinction between “swan” and “cob” that French does not, while French makes distinctions that English does not, as we can see in this complete list of French terms:

French terms for male and female birds

faisan “male pheasant” | faisane “female pheasant”

paon “peacock” | paonne “peahen”

coq “rooster” | poule “hen”

dindon “male turkey” | dinde “female turkey”

canard “drake” | cane “duck”

merle “male blackbird” | merlette “female blackbird”

jars “gander” | oie “goose”

pigeon “male pigeon” | pigeonne “female pigeon”

sacret “male saker” | sacre “female saker”

Most of these birds we know well. The first four pairs are terrestrial ground-feeders we call “fowls.” We can apply these pairs of terms accurately because of their association with certain differences – size, hairiness/feathering, crests/coxcombs, plumage colouration, even parenting duties. We are less aware of the consequences of these differences. Against the brilliant, colourful, even lustrous plumage of male fowl, the brownish or speckled colouration of females may seem drab, but in their terrestrial habitats it camouflages and protects females and leaves males exposed to greater danger. High visibility is dangerous for daytime ground-dwellers. These differences are not difficult to find, given a polygamous lifestyle in which a single male lives alongside his female harem. The dominant male maintains his position by fighting off other males of his kind; the females lead a more collaborative existence.

Even when birds are out of sight, differences in voice (pitch, amount, purpose) convey male:female distinctions for each species. When they call, males have a loud, raucous voice, for early-morning crowing or gobbling that establishes their territory, for warding off other males or alerting the female harem to potential danger; but they are generally silent. In contrast, the quieter but more constant calls of females maintain a social pecking order, and keep their broods in touch as they engage in the constant search for food. Together, these elements provide a composite that offers constant distinction between male and female. (We use a similar composite to distinguish between “male” and “female” humans – body shape, height, hairiness/beards, hairstyle, dress, voice, gait, and so on.)

Male:female distinctions are more difficult to establish for ducks. Mature males have plumage nuptial (breeding plumage), but only at breeding time, and only for certain species; after moulting, the new growth is much the same colour as for females and immature males. Like terrestrial fowls, female ducks brood their eggs and nurture their young, while male ducks disappear to moult with other males and typically play no part in parenting. But again, such distinctions are only available at a certain time of the year. Duck species are largely silent. Some dabbling duck species quack, but not particularly loudly, and then it is only the females (dommage for Walt Disney’s Donald Duck and his three “nephews”). Other duck species have a wide variety of calls, whistles, coos, grunts and so on, but these are also infrequent.

The more aerial blackbirds are also common ground-foragers. In this species, male and female are dimorphic; that is, they have entirely different plumage colours and were once considered to be different species. Today we recognise the black as male and brown as female (suggesting that the “four-and-twenty blackbirds” in the nursery rhyme pie were an all-male affair). Male blackbirds sing loudly and joyfully, but not constantly, and only for certain months of the year.

For the last three pairs – geese, pigeons, sakers – male and female of each species are so similar that, for the most part, we cannot tell them apart. Mature male geese are larger than females, while female sakers are larger than males, but distance makes this difficult to judge. There is one characteristic that distinguishes females from males of each species: laying eggs, a process in which males have some involvement, but only indirectly. These male and female distinctions for geese, pigeons and sakers remain significant only for breeders. Others, including native French speakers, would simply use the general or “unmarked” term for the species.

From sex to species

The question is, which term for each pair comes to serve as the general term for the species? In English, we typically use the female – with one exception, “peacock” rather than “peahen.” In French it is the male – with two exceptions, oie, the female goose, and sacre, the female saker. Sacre is highly unusual. As its meaning changes from “female saker” to the species “saker,” its gender changes to masculine. This change does not occur for oie.

How can we account for these irregular outcomes? What motivates the extraordinary change in gender for sacre? Since the “generic” sense for each species must now encompass both male and female, we would expect the gender to reflect some characteristic shared by all members of the species, something that humans can easily identify. One characteristic stands out – response to threat or intrusion, a characteristic that humans would immediately notice and exploit for food or sport, or both.

Despite their heavy-bodied frames, fowl are excellent flyers, yet they prefer to run across the ground in response to threat rather than take to the air – putting them at risk from faster (or better armed) predators. Ducks are not wary of humans, and nor are pigeons or blackbirds, whose initial response is to hop or run a short distance, only to take to the air at the last moment, and even then not flying far. Single male blackbirds rely on intimidation to send off other males.

A striking contrast

In contrast, geese collaborate to attack intruders. To guard over the flock, they set sentries whose cry of alarm at the slightest hint of danger alerts the flock. The other geese respond in unison, and the resulting cacophony is sufficient to repel most predators, particularly those depending on surprise. Their loud, repetitive honking helps the flock keep in touch when members spread out to feed, or during long migratory flights.

These adaptations offer a “protective” environment for individuals and the flock. This relationship between “protective” and feminine gender is consistent with female fowls being protected by their colourations. On the other hand, responses to threat for the previous terrestrial and aquatic fowls increase the likely harm for individuals and possibly others in the flock. Again, the relationship between “harmful” and masculine is consistent with the greater danger of bright colourations for male fowls.

For the sacre, the change in gender is tied to a change in meaning. When the noun is feminine, it means “female saker”; but when it becomes masculine, its meaning becomes generic: “saker,” a kind of falcon, one among many diurnal birds of prey that feed in daylight hours rather than nocturnally. Diurnal birds of prey are typically masculine: vulture, condor, various falcon species (merlin, lanner, hobby and peregrine), harrier, hawk, goshawk, sparrow hawk, kite, lammergeier, secretary bird, bald eagle – although four, including osprey, are feminine. The nocturnal set, which we call owls, are mostly feminine; the exceptions are the “horned owls,” whose ear tufts look much like horns. This attribute is strongly associated with male/masculine in the animal world (but not for ruminants that are typically “horned”).

But why would diurnal hunters be masculine and nocturnal hunters feminine? Owls have the same excellent eyesight as diurnal birds of prey, but they have other adaptations: excellent hearing (through feathered facial discs/ear tufts that amplify and locate sound waves), and flight feathers rigged for “silent running” that muffle the clap of beating wings, giving prey no advance warning to take cover. Where diurnal birds of prey are restricted to daylight hunting, owls can extend their hunting time when needs must. The form and habit of these “feminine” birds are flexible and adaptable, qualities that are not present for the inflexible, less adaptable, “masculine” set.

In French culture (and our own), these different male:female terms are restricted to bird species we have kept captive as farmyard birds in keeps or cages, for food, sport, communication and/or profit. For non-domesticated birds, we only need a generic term. (This pattern is also found for other animal species more generally.)

It is not by chance that male:female terms deal largely with species that we have domesticated and have a vested interest in breeding. For all other animals, in French as in English, we simply add mâle/male or femelle/female to the generic term to indicate a specific sex. In French, the gender of these nouns is determined by the species, not by the sex, as we can see for the following two species, one masculine (M), the other feminine (F):

éléphant (M) elephant

a male elephant: un éléphant mâle (M)
a female elephant: un éléphant femelle (M)

girafe (F) giraffe

a male giraffe: une girafe mâle (F)
a female giraffe: une girafe femelle (F)

For any domesticated “farmyard” bird, French has a single generic term, the masculine volatile. Also masculine are domesticated homing and carrier pigeons – but not white doves, bred in captivity to be set free as symbols of peace (or freedom from war). Other domesticated animals are also masculine, including cat, dog, horse, sheep, cattle, donkey, pig, guinea pig and ferret (although wild creatures are not all feminine).

If we take just one of the more abstract pairs of semantic opposites, such as “protective” and “harmful,” we find an extensive set of nouns among living things whose genders correlate in the same way as in previous examples. “Protective” covers any response that protects life against the environment and competition for food, light and warmth. “Harmful” applies to the opposite, particularly responses that harm or endanger life. The various protective:harmful attributes are as varied as they are astonishing.

Some entities produce a thick, hard, protective outer shell (crab, clam, oyster, mussel, scallop, turtle/tortoise, hazelnut, walnut), while other shells are brittle (egg, snail, peanut) or protect only part (acorn, cashew); those in the first set are feminine, while those in the latter set are masculine. Some creatures are wary and immediately flee when they sense danger (viper, trout, bleak, cockroach), while others are unwary (kookaburra, sea lion, grebe, booby); the former are feminine and the latter masculine. Some can change direction unexpectedly, swerving (mouse, ant, gazelle), leaping (flea, frog, trout) or taking to the air (insects such as ladybird beetle, fly, wasp, honey bee, cicada, locust), and are feminine. Others hang or move around upside down (sloth, certain wrasse), dive headfirst into a different medium (diving ducks, various diving birds, sand eels), or rely on speed (hare, fox), each habit bringing its own risk of injury and death, and are masculine.

Seeking safety or shelter underground (rabbits, wombats) is inherently dangerous: whole colonies risk being buried alive when terrains suddenly flood, or weaken and collapse (miners and cavers well understand these risks); their entrances can admit other less welcome visitors, particularly predators from whom there is little chance of escape, particularly for their young. “Underground safety” is almost an oxymoron. The diurnal but feminine osprey has waterproofed feathers and can haul itself out of the water or swim to safety after a dunking where the masculine fish eagles do not; they easily become waterlogged and drown.

These protective/feminine and harmful/masculine correlations are consistent, regular, even predictable. Other variations include:

Protective: Includes a collaborative response to threat (crane, guinea fowl, moorhen); thorns protecting new growth (hawthorn, honey locust tree, bramble, barberry, bougainvillea); an additional prehensile grip via tail (op/possum), mouth part (lamprey, tick, some caterpillars) or fins (topknots); or the ability to spin a safety net (spider, certain caterpillars), to spread despite changes in environment (carp) or inhospitable landscapes (goat, Canadian white spruce, lavender), to use a repellent odour to ward off predators (weasel, skunk, marmot, mole, cantharis (Spanish fly), grass snake), or to use synchronous surfacing (scoter, a type of seaduck). Fieldfare, large European migratory thrushes, collaborate to ram predatory birds or “escort” them away from the colony. All these creatures have feminine names.

Harmful: Includes an inflexible set of growing conditions (most plants); the need for ready access to water (hippopotamus, elephant) in environments that make this uncertain; a fixed diet (grazing herbivores such as deer, bison, cattle) which cannot alter even in long droughts and brings the possibility of death; a fixed terrain/specific patch (chamois, other mountain goats); tails not prehensile (squirrel, monkey); arboreal creatures whose lives are always at risk as they move through trees at considerable speed; night singing without protection of group (rail, crake, nightingale, cricket); and restricted spread where disease may wipe out an entire species (feral pigeon, rock dove).

The quintessential thorned rosebush (rosier) is masculine; its thorns cannot protect new growth from sap-sucking insects, or old growth from fungal infections that kill. Many of the cuckoo family, including “brood-parasitic” Old World cuckoos, indigo birds, African whydahs and honeyguides, are “harmful” and therefore masculine because they lay their eggs in others’ nests and attempt to foist their care on non-parents at the expense of their own clutch. Some cuckoos endanger their own lives by preferring to leap, walk or run rather than fly from harm (roadrunners, whydahs, anis). A cuckoo may find itself in another’s nest but it remains true to its heritage.

Snakes typically lie in wait for prey to pass by, and are masculine, but our Australian death adder is feminine. Herons also typically stand and wait for prey to pass by and are masculine (héron and other masculine terms); but some herons are more flexible and adaptable, using “toes” to dig up food or lure prey towards them; they are called aigrette, a feminine term. (English terms “heron” and “egret” do not fit French usage, although they may once have done so.) When food becomes scarce, those able to obtain a more constant food supply have a level of protection that can help them survive until more promising times return; others are left to starve and possibly die. Where attributes enhance safety and promote life, we find feminine gender. Where attributes are harmful, endangering the lives of individuals themselves, or their family or their species, we find masculine gender.

It may be that certain entities have one characteristic that is “harmful” and another that is “protective.” Although the “tricoloured heron” can change its foraging and feeding strategies, it builds its nests on mud flats, leaving its young with little protection from cold and predation or from drowning when water levels change abruptly. Speakers may use the feminine form in the context of feeding but use the masculine form during the breeding season and changes in weather.

We may not know these things about each entity, or be able to predict their gender. But knowing the gender can now tell us something about their characteristics; and “exceptions” will prompt us to look for some other crucial attribute associated with the contrasting gender.

More opposites

What other opposites are there? How do we know which ones to look for, and what their associated genders will be? The answer lies partly in an entity itself, and partly in the meaning contributed by the lexical component(s); together they give rise to, yet limit, the range of potential opposites. For example, fruits have only a limited number of potential semantic opposites – odourless:fragrant, hard:soft, sweet:not sweet, filled:hollow, thick:thin-skinned, and so on. Using our intuitions and stereotypical associations, it is not difficult to distribute the opposites for each pair between the two genders. For hard:soft, we are more likely to associate “hard” with masculine and “soft” with feminine than vice versa – and so we find masculine for fruits that remain hard even when ripe, such as passionfruit, watermelon and quinces (where softness indicates rotting), and feminine for raspberries, red/white currants, figs and dates, where soft indicates ripe. These hard:soft semantic contrasts can also apply elsewhere – for example, hard bone (masculine), soft flesh (feminine). Hard:soft can also vary slightly, providing other sets of semantic opposites such as rigid:flexible or fixed:changeable.

Restricted:free can vary into closed:open contrasts to create distinctions between fist (masculine) and hand (feminine) although they indicate the same body part; a masculine bud opens out into feminine leaf or flower. Closed geometric figures (circle, square, rectangle and triangle) are masculine; open forms (line, parabola, curve and spiral) are feminine. The principles associated with these items become easy to understand; we can know and recall their gender assignments with ease, without even knowing the French terms. For the very first time, these semantic principles offer a systematic means of understanding French gender assignments, even synonyms with different genders, while exceptions prompt us to consider another potentially crucial attribute. An item can display multiple attributes – the salient attribute depends on other entities in its environment.

The universality of this radical account has yet to be tested, particularly for other previously unexplained gender and noun class languages. We cannot know if these patterns are those that native speakers are attuned to at a subconscious level. If various semantic features identified for French seem astonishing for a European gender language, the notion “harmful” was first identified nearly forty years ago in an Australian Aboriginal language (although not in precisely the same way) and has since been identified in several others, as have other features identified in French, including “animate,” “edible,” and semantic opposites shiny:dull.

These findings are exciting. For the very first time, this single step from sex to species offers principles we can understand, recall with ease and apply without effort once we know. It’s also exciting because it offers learners an explanation that they can use. There’s no need for memorisation; the gender becomes a given, something learners know, just like native speakers. For native speakers it offers an explanation that they find fascinating. All speakers enjoy learning something astonishing about their own language.

And the single exception? The gender of the word gens, or “peoples,” is determined by adjectives. It is a result of the artificial re-engineering of this noun from feminine to masculine by authorities in the middle ages, in the period before the Académie française was established, and resistance by native speakers to the change. It has its own remarkable story. •

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Set against a backdrop of featureless fluorescent-lit offices and reception areas and an endless succession of beige job expos, Florence Aubenas’s The Night Cleaner chronicles the search for a job at the height of the slump that began in 2008. The respected French journalist had been writing and talking constantly of “the recession,” and yet she felt disconnected from what the word really meant. “It seemed to me, all of a sudden, as devalued as the shares in the stock market.” Her solution was to jump the divide and plough head first into an unemployment queue.

In the tradition of Fran Abrams’s Below the Breadline, Elisabeth Wynhausen’s Dirt Cheap and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Aubenas went undercover, assuming the identity of a middle-aged woman with no employment history and no job prospects — in the language of the system, a “statistical high risk.” But she pledges to continue her search until she attains a full-time job, and in the process becomes another problem for employment agency workers at Pole Emploi as they drown under the weight of statistics and targets. Reduced to an object of management speak, she is advised to turn to a “particular speciality — cleaner.”

As Europe continues to rupture under the weight of the Greek debt crisis, Italy teeters, and talk circles around the possibility of the break-up of the euro, Aubenas’s account, although based on events two years ago, is still very relevant. In 2009, she writes, the recession was already something that “happened a very long time ago, ages and ages ago, last year…” It is a one-off event, and it comes without warning — the jobs simply fall through the floor.

“Suddenly, during winter 2008, we were officially declared to be in recession,” she writes. “The radio talked about it morning, noon and night. Every day, 3000 more unemployed signed on with the agencies, and in a few weeks the administration found itself struggling under the weight of 70,000 unexamined files. Such a thing had never been seen before.”

Alone and anonymous, she takes residence in the city of Caen, as featureless as the offices she cleans, and literally neither here nor there, “neither too far north nor too far south, neither too big nor too small.” She limps along the highways of Caen in her bomb of a car following up job interviews, only to be told when she arrives that the position has been filled.

In the town’s prime, more than 20,000 people worked in the eight big factories that circled Caen, “all pointed to as an example of how France was able to combine its fields of potatoes with its coke furnaces, and how the country had picked itself up after the war and was decentralising its industries and marshland, ducks, and bombed-out buildings.” Now, the buildings rot around her, and she could be anywhere, in any city across Europe or America, in cities and towns hollowed out, directionless, without community, without a centre.

Like those of her fellow job-seekers, Aubenas’s needs are simple. She wants something that pays at least the minimum wage, boasts a back-to-back shift, doesn’t require a three-hour drive across town eating up half her pay packet in petrol, and won’t break her back. And yet, as a client of Pole Emploi, she must endure master classes in massaging her CV and day-long clinics on “The Cleaning Professions.” Her “main specialties” on her freshly reworked CV are listed as “the routine cleaning of premises and work services, picking up waste paper, cleaning furniture and accessories (ash trays, waste paper baskets, etc), management and follow up of jobs at various sites.”

Trudging into the darkness of the day to begin work, huddling in idling cars waiting for offices to open — biding time is the hallmark of this book. Aubenas’s life of queuing, endless interviews and filling time between shifts is punctuated by short bursts of equally monotonous but nail-bleeding work.

Her description of one of the eight Pole Emploi sites around town captures her state of being — always restless, always on call, never at ease, at home nowhere:

Everything seems designed to create a sense of almost blank discomfort, where nothing invites you to settle down, or even to linger any longer than the time absolutely necessary for the formalities. The room is a big lobby which acts simultaneously as a reception desk, a waiting room, and a telephone cabin for people to pursue their quest. You can also consult the job offers on computers. These functions are not separated by any partitions, and everyone is standing, behind counters as tall as a man, so that the people, the agency’s advisors included, seem to be floating around the draughty space, between the drab coloured walls.

The people Aubenas encounters during her search for work — the cleaners, queue members, agency workers — also seem to float. They are featureless, in limbo, and yet there are moments when their frustration suddenly punctuates the text: when an angry outburst interrupts the fluorescent hum of the job agency waiting room as a desperate job seeker shouts that they “just need to work,” or in the story of the “Moulinex girls,” fiercely proud women who mourn the loss of their beloved workplace, one of the first factories where women could work in the sixties, and the “last big one to close down, in 2001, after negotiations in Paris, marches, and coverage in all the French media.”

There’s Victoria, the seventy-something-ish woman who’s been a cleaner, and union member, all her life; Phillipe, who simply longs to get back behind the wheel of a car he can’t afford, to assume the stature of someone with a set of wheels; and the elderly couple marching in a union rally gently berating their children for their grudging attendance.

Although it is enormous, this rally that features halfway through the book, it doesn’t compare to the violent union protests of the seventies, Aubenas notes; it’s a demonstration that has no anger in it, “no real slogans, as if its only claim is in its sheer mass.” She observes that this giant march of people “no longer seems to be borne along by certainties or grievances, but merely crisscrossed by questions which fly from one group to the next: ‘How many of us are there? What are we going to do? How long is it going to last? Where are we going?’” Their questions anticipate those of the students at the Spanish education protests, the angry Greek rioters, the Italians who camped out baying for Berlusconi’s blood, and the 99 per cent of the Occupy movement.

Aubenas ultimately washes into the beige walls and attains the anonymity of a cleaner: slipping around the halls of a ferry at night staying out of sight of the passengers; knocking over a pail of dirty water across a freshly waxed floor and cleaning it on hands and knees as the arriving office workers step around her; and tending to the coffee stains and mess in yet another office. Her identity is erased entirely in one confronting moment when she realises that two office workers who’ve stayed back late have begun to have sex in front of her as she vacuums in the corner. Aware of her presence under the fluorescent lights, they remain completely oblivious to her shock and discomfort as the vacuum hums over their grunts.

This is an uncompromisingly bleak account of the search for humanity in the dehumanising search for work. Aubenas’s methodical account might be grinding and unsentimental at times, yet she gives voice to the anger and helplessness of the case workers and the clients united in a common goal: to shift their vast numbers off the employment agency’s books.

Now more than ever it is a stark reminder of the gap between the headlines of the European meltdown and the reality of the lives of people who have fallen, and will continue to fall, through the cracks. •

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EACH time I return to Paris, a city I lived in for three years, I’m struck by what seems like a pervasive lethargy. Catching up with friends usually does nothing to mitigate the feeling. Anecdotes about frustrations at university or in the workforce remind me of why I was able to pack my bags and turn my back on an ambition that had been the focus of my entire adult life. Paris can be a daunting place for a young person seeking a foothold, and many of my friends are looking beyond the ville lumière in search of a less sombre existence.

Nicolas Sarkozy was supposed to drag France’s economy, at least, out of its sluggishness. It seemed to me that he was elected not so much because the left–right pendulum happened to move in his favour, but because he had a reputation for being able to get things done. He certainly made things happen in his personal life. In his first months in office, he left the wife who had campaigned by his side for the model and singer Carla Bruni and was photographed aboard a super-yacht belonging to a French billionaire. The public was not amused. His popularity slumped and has remained chronically low.

A few commentators have seen the Libyan intervention, in which Sarkozy has played a key role, as a desperate attempt by the French president to reverse his political fortunes. Edwy Plenel, former chief editor of Le Monde and now head of Mediapart, wrote a scathing article accusing Sarkozy of “Napoleonic atavism” in having, “from his first day in office,” sought a war “to silence internal opposition.” Opinion polls suggest that the majority of the French do indeed support the action against Gaddafi, and it’s this mood that I was keen to understand during this visit to Paris. What I didn’t expect was that even some of my most left-wing (and usually articulate) friends would struggle to express a firm opinion on the intervention. The French media has also generally fallen into line with the president.

There seems little doubt that Sarkozy sees the Libyan crisis as an opportunity to win back support among France’s voters. Action is central to his political identity: “four years of action” sits at the top of the list of policy portfolios on his official website, ahead of the usual categories like education and justice. Yet he has flexed France’s military muscle – first in Afghanistan, then in Georgia – without any significant boost to his popularity.

Observers may be right to say that the Libyan intervention is to Sarkozy what the Falklands war was to Margaret Thatcher. But the lack of any real debate on the military deployment in Libya suggests that something else is at work. Some of the most prominent political acts of Sarkozy’s career relate either to North Africa or to the tension with France’s large Muslim population. Both are tied up with France’s difficult, ambiguous relationship with its colonial history. This ambiguity gives him free reign in territory where he can appeal to the far right while confounding the left, whose relationship with this past and present is, if anything, the most fraught of any section of French society.

ONE of the defining moments of Sarkozy’s rise to the presidency were the riots that spread across Paris’s northern suburbs, the banlieues, in late 2005. The youths involved were mainly immigrants, or the children of immigrants, from France’s former African colonies. Sarkozy, who was interior minister at the time, took the gloves off. He made news by threatening to clean out the suburbs with a Kärcher – one of those yellow, high-pressure hose units – and calling the rioters that most taboo of words, racaille, which can loosely be translated as scum.

The controversy generated by his inflammatory approach allowed him to forge a reputation as a man who got things done, and it was clear that the far right was listening. In the presidential elections in 2007, Sarkozy attracted the votes of both the centre and the far right. Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far right Front National, ended up with just over 10 per cent of the first-round vote. For Le Pen, this was a significant drop from the previous presidential election in 2002, where he won almost 18 per cent of the final vote and finished ahead of the socialist candidate and incumbent prime minister, Lionel Jospin. Sarkozy’s election victory indicated that many who had voted for the Front National in 2002 felt satisfied with his performance, particularly when it came to sensitive social issues.

Another example of Sarkozy’s decision to operate in the North Africa policy frontier was his proposal to found what was then called the Mediterranean Union. The idea was to create a new geopolitical fulcrum centred on the nation states bordering the Mediterranean Sea. In its original form, controversially, it would have excluded Germany, France’s major counter-balance in the European Union. Sarkozy presented his vision for the Mediterranean Union during a visit to Dakar in his first year in office. His speech was an astounding throwback to the colonial era. Addressing himself to the African youth, he explained that Africa’s problems were all because it had never taken part in “History.” According to the president, its peoples were too busy looking back, nostalgically, at a lost past. He urged African youths to heed his words, take pride in their culture and step up to play a role in the History that had always passed their continent by.

The Dakar speech has been extensively criticised, but perhaps the most effective antidote to its paternalistic and patronising tone is to read it as a statement about Sarkozy’s conception of post-colonial France rather than its ostensible subject, Africa. Reading the speech in light of Sarkozy’s first term in office, it is difficult not to feel that he was in fact lamenting a France no longer capable itself of creating “History.” France is no longer the major world power that it once was, and the French language is no longer a lingua franca. In this sense, Edwy Plenel’s reference to Napoleon was on the mark. Viewed as the latest in a sequence of political gestures relating to North Africa, the Libyan intervention seems to be about more than just using a war to keep the voters on side.

THE revolutionary waves that spread from Tunisia throughout the Arab world have proved without a doubt that the youth of Africa are capable of making even Sarkozy’s sort of History. Sarkozy seemed to be taken by surprise. The French government’s scandalous dealings with Ben Ali, the deposed Tunisian leader, demonstrated that its sympathies were not with the popular movements. The French government was not, of course, alone in being caught off guard. But Sarkozy was shown up perhaps more than any other head of state when Gaddafi, reacting to the UN Security Council resolution to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, came out and said that his “friend” – yes, he meant the French president – had “gone mad.”

Given the apparent contradiction in the president’s stance, it is striking that neither the French left nor the French media have challenged Sarkozy over the Libyan intervention. Regardless of whether military action was right or wrong, why was the deployment not debated in a country that wholeheartedly supported Chirac when he opposed George Bush’s plans to invade Iraq? Granted, Obama is no Bush; but were the crimes that Saddam Hussein perpetrated against his own people any less grave than Gaddafi’s? There may be something of a generational shift at work in French politics. After all, Chirac – like Mitterrand before him – was involved in the Algerian war, and this experience may have informed his opposition to the Iraq campaign. Sarkozy has had no such experience of combat.

This cannot explain, however, why the French left has failed to challenge Sarkozy on this issue. The left’s failure to come up with a coherent, independent position seems symptomatic, at least to some extent, of the general malaise concerning France’s colonial history and its present-day consequences. France’s history of immigration has been and still is neglected in the school curriculum and in public discourse. Instead, strong republican values, including the ideal of assimilation, tend to set the parameters of debates about issues such as the wearing of burkas. These values are an integral part of France’s identity and the French are right to uphold and defend them. But history also shows the danger of seeking to apply these values universally. It is well known that the French left was, on the whole, no more supportive of Algeria’s war for independence than the right, because Algeria was, quite simply, part of the French Republic. That was only fifty years ago. Nobody on the left would pronounce such a sentiment today.

Ségolène Royal, who lost to Sarkozy in the presidential election, went to Dakar in 2009, two years after the president had made his infamous speech, and took the opportunity to apologise for his words. But it is perhaps telling that her own attempt to engage with the issues Sarkozy had been so upfront about was clumsy, wavering between the abstractly intellectual and the overly emotive. Royal was born in Dakar, and made a great deal of her African childhood. Despite this, her speech lacked a palpable sense of connection to the place and the issues she was purporting to address, while her emphasis on her childhood memories seemed empty given that her parents moved back to France when she was only two years old.

Sarkozy no doubt came to his position on the Libyan crisis with domestic political considerations in mind. But what distinguishes the Libyan intervention from his other military exploits is its relationship to the ambiguity that is North Africa, where Sarkozy, action man, can do as he pleases. The left simply has no coherent intellectual platform from which to engage with him. It’s yet another reminder, as though one were necessary, of the political potency of history. •

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Marion Fourcade’s comparative study of American, British and French economists and societies is a boldly original sociological discussion of the differences between economics in the three countries and an attempt to explain the ubiquity of the global method of economic analysis and explanation. Her discussion of the different political logics of American, British and French economics and economists is compelling and original. It is enlivened by some engagingly frank extracts from interviews with leading American, British and French economists. To sum up her complex argument, American economics can be explained in terms of federal constitutionalism, British economics reflects public-minded elitism, and French economics reflects Gallic statism.

Fourcade’s discussion of the global dominance of market theories is less penetrating. She sees it essentially as a reflection of US dominance of international economic scholarship and institutions since the second world war “and their commensurate power over the rules of the game.” That may well be true, but Fourcade does not seriously question the international model. Does it describe an idealised reality of how individual economies or the global economy work? Does it enable economists to predict, and to causally explain, economic events? How sound are the assumptions about economic actors?

The recent global financial crisis has revived these questions, but Fourcade largely seems content to accept the model as the ruling paradigm within which economists seek to practice the normal science of solving economic problems that emerge from national and global experience. Whether it is, in Kuhnian terms, a paradigm in crisis, does not appear to concern Fourcade greatly.

She does, however, note that economists “have abstracted economic processes into ever more sophisticated mathematical models” and have laboured “to bring economies into line with their economic models.” In other words, Fourcade seems to suggest that economists are more concerned to make the world conform to their theories of how they think it should be rather than to make their theories reflect the world as it is.

And she asks a key question: “might not the reverse be true as well? After all, aren’t economic discourses and practices just as much made by society as they make it?” With this question Fourcade does approach the heart of the economic theory dilemma, but she says her aim is to offer a more complex and sociological critique of economics rather than “the oft-heard complaint about the lack of fit between economic theory and reality.”

The great strength of her book is her analysis of the cultural differences between American, British and French economics. As she writes, “One of the most important aims of this book is to specify how not just the institutional but also the intellectual framework of economics varies across nations.” Given her account, the global dominance of American economics is hardly surprising. “[T]he centrality of market institutions to US political culture and institutional make-up…” she writes, “has given the practice of economics in this country its particular character.”

According to this account, American economics has always been the handmaiden of American business and characterised by what she calls scientific professionalism, shaped by the abilities of economists and the expectations of the private and public institutions that hire them. Fourcade points to “the relative intellectual homogeneity of American economics,” to the role of universities and graduate schools in producing PhDs, and to the technical sophistication of mathematical theory and statistical and econometric work. She notes that more than 80 per cent of Nobel Prize winners in economics since 1969 have been Americans.

Curiously, she ignores those American economists who are critical of the dominant model based on general equilibrium theory and marginal utility. Thorstein Veblen and Lester Thurow, for example, are not mentioned despite their critical writing at the start and towards the end of the twentieth century. Instead she focuses on Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman and other disciples of what Thurow called “price-auction” economics.

British economics, she argues, has been shaped by high-minded educated elites who saw themselves as having “the right and duty to uphold true British culture.” Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Maynard Keynes and others established this tradition mainly under the influence of Benthamite utilitarianism, which stressed the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

As Fourcade notes, utilitarianism could support revolutionary ends, notably redistribution, but was challenged by the liberal belief that only laissez-faire guaranteed the maximum utility for all. And she recognises the intellectual power of the great Cambridge economist, Joan Robinson, quoting her devastating remark: “Marshall certainly was a great moraliser but somehow the moral always came out that whatever is, is very nearly best.” Keynes, of course, was similarly devastating on the crude conception of laissez-faire.

Unlike the Americans, Fourcade writes, “many British economists… continued to struggle to reconcile economic performance and efficiency with redistributive social goals.” She concludes that public-minded elitism reached its zenith in the interwar and early postwar years, was rejected by Margaret Thatcher and rehabilitated under the Blair government.

In France, economics has had a more chequered history, reflecting the sometimes dramatic political history of the country. Despite a general and continuing preference for laissez-faire liberalism, French economists “hold more favourable attitudes towards state intervention than practitioners in other advanced countries.” France also has a tradition of economic critique that argues economics is bourgeois, presenting itself as pure science and ignoring moral and ideological underpinnings that serve the interests only of wealthy countries and individuals.

Importantly, the organisation of French economic knowledge exhibits a strong statist pattern, with much economic expertise located in state institutions and departments. Fourcade notes that “the French business world has historically shown little interest in making use of organised economic expertise.”

Fourcade says her purpose in Economists and Societies is to “lay bare certain commonalities and differences in the way the field of economics is institutionally, intellectually and jurisdictionally structured across countries.” She concludes that the social structures within which economists live are largely national, but that the social structures of economics are also international, and that economists must inhabit both structures.

Her book succeeds admirably. It is an original and important contribution to the history and sociology of economic thought. It deserves to sit alongside Joan Robinson’s little classic Economic Philosophy (Pelican, 1964). •

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AMIR took a box of matches from his pocket and placed it on the table in front of him. He lit a match and held it to one of his fingers. Then he lit the next match, and burnt the next finger. He did not talk, but grimaced as he applied the flame to each finger. In the dim light inside the squat, I could see he was in pain; he stopped to take a break before forcing himself to start again. It was a surreal scene: the makeshift fire in the corner of the squat, the unrelenting wind coming through the exposed walls, the sleeping bags laid out among the debris – this was not something I expected to see, not in France. When I asked one of the other volunteers what Amir was doing, they told me that he was destroying his fingerprints to try to escape detection.

We were in the Palestinian Camp in Calais, where I have been working as a volunteer cooking food for “irregular” – or undocumented – migrants trying to cross from France into the United Kingdom. Although it was called the Palestinian Camp, it was made up of Egyptians, Iraqis and other Arab speakers. All of them were living in an abandoned lace factory exposed to the elements, with half of the outside walls missing. Debris lay scattered over the factory floor.

Calais is a port town in the department of Pas-de-Calais overlooking the Strait of Dover. It is at the narrowest point – thirty-four kilometres wide – of the English Channel. The town relies on lace-making, chemicals and paper manufacturing industries, and on the port. It is also known for its gigantic shopping complex, Cité Europe.

But irregular migrants in Calais don’t work in the lace factories, and they don’t shop at Cité Europe. They prefer not to be seen and would, in fact, rather not be in Calais at all; it is merely a necessary stopover on the way to Britain.

Irregular migrants have made up part of the population of Calais since the mid 1980s. Many of them give economic or family reasons for wanting to get to Britain, and sometimes it’s an amalgam of both, with the migrant’s family members or contacts across the Channel owning businesses that can offer them work. Shahram Khosravi, an Iranian researcher who was once himself an irregular migrant, explains that having such a network is crucial because it provides a certain amount of security and self-confidence in what is a very precarious situation. “Beside economic support, the network meant access to information and to having a clear and defined prospect of the journey,” he wrote in an article published in 2008. “The choice of country of destination was primarily determined by such networks.” Some have also mentioned language as a reason for choosing Britain as their destination –they speak English but not French – while other migrants have been told by contacts in Britain that it is easier to claim asylum and find a job there.

The number of irregular migrants in and around the town increased dramatically in 1999 with the arrival of hundreds of Kosovan refugees. In a warehouse formerly used for tunnel construction and with funding from the French government, the Red Cross opened the Sangatte refugee camp, officially a “centre for humanitarian emergency accommodation and reception.” The centre was to be a temporary shelter for refugees until they were dealt with by the administration, usually either via an application for asylum in France or a voluntary return to their homeland. But those at Sangatte did not want to stay in France or return home. Instead, they tried to cross the Channel as stowaways in trucks or on trains.

The growing population of Sangatte centre was controversial, with Britain and France blaming each other for not doing enough to enforce the border and for lax asylum rules that allowed undocumented migrants to enter. For Britain, the existence of the centre demonstrated that France was a “soft touch” for irregular migrants. In 2002, after pressure from his British counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, who was interior minister at the time, closed the centre, claiming it had become a magnet for undocumented migrants. Since the closure, large numbers of refugees arrive from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Africa, with local charities estimating a total number in the thousands.

During my time in Calais I was a volunteer with one of those charities, Salam, which distributes cooked food each day and visits migrants in their camps. The other volunteers at Salam were mostly the concerned locals who had founded the charity to fill the gap in services after Sangatte was closed.

Irregular migrants now stay in a number of squats in and around Calais, including the Palestinian Camp, the Sudanese Jungle, Africa House, the Pashtun Jungle, and the Hazara Jungle. As the names suggest, migrants have grouped themselves along language and cultural lines. A squat is called a jungle if it is completely uncovered, a camp if it’s semi-covered (in a derelict building, for example) – or a house if it’s in an intact structure.

On my first night in Calais, the other volunteers and I visited the Sudanese Jungle. We drove to a nearby sportsfield, parked our cars, crossed the road and walked along the canal. We kept walking in the dark until we reached a group of people sitting around a campfire, their figures dimly lit. Despite the conditions they were living in, these migrants were the friendliest I’d meet, joking with us and offering endless cups of tea.

IN 2002, responding to the increased numbers of irregular migrants, the European Union set up the Eurodac database to store the fingerprints of all asylum seekers and irregular migrants found in the European Union, and details of their location when first detected. All member countries can access the database. Since 2003, under the European Union’s Dublin Regulation, irregular migrants have been required to lodge their asylum claim in the first EU country they reach. If their asylum claim is rejected in that country then they must return to their country of origin. This naturally has implications for many migrants in Calais, who want to get to Britain rather than seek asylum in the first EU country they had entered – which was why Amir in the Palestinian camp was trying to destroy his fingerprints. Many other migrants would have entered Europe through Malta, Italy or Greece, all countries where it is notoriously difficult to gain asylum.

Even if migrants want to stay in France rather than go to Britain they have little chance of being successful in their claim if their fingerprints are already registered on the Eurodac database in another EU country. The Dublin Regulation does contain a clause that allows EU members to consider an asylum claim where a migrant has already passed through another EU country, but according to Marie Martin, who recently completed a thesis at the University of Sussex on the situation in Calais, there is “a clear reluctance to use this clause.”

Another man I met at the food distribution, Ali from Afghanistan, was one of many affected by the Dublin Regulation. His fingerprints were taken three years ago when he arrived in Italy from Afghanistan. Because it was his country of entry, he had to apply for asylum in Italy, and he has lived there now for three years. But he is dissatisfied with his life. What he earns in Italy is barely enough to live on, he said, and he was hoping to go to work in Britain for a few years – illegally, because he was not eligible for a British work permit. One of his sisters already lives in England.

The European Union is currently re-examining the Dublin Regulation. Critics claim that it has not succeeded in preventing irregular migrants from moving once inside Europe, and is also costly and inhumane. The Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, Thomas Hammarberg, said last month that a revamp of the Dublin Regulation is needed because countries such as Greece and Malta are unable to provide adequate protection because of the sheer numbers of asylum seekers arriving at their borders. As a leading scholar on Europe, Eiko Thielemann, has pointed out, migrants’ historical and cultural ties to their chosen destination will override any attempts to prevent secondary movement. The situation in Calais illustrates this very clearly.

The Dublin Regulation is part of the European Union’s efforts to control spontaneous movement into its territories as well as to prevent secondary movement once irregular migrants are inside. The European Union has been working to create a Common European Asylum System, a coordinated approach to managing the flow of people, but the process has been stalled for more than a decade and 2012 is the new target date for its implementation. Carl Levy, a political scientist at London’s Goldsmiths College, points to an ambivalence not only in the method but also in the common goals of EU asylum policy: “The internal asylum and refugee regime of the EU is still a process marked by conflicting restrictionist and liberal tendencies and is left in a limbo of intentional ambiguity.”

According to Levy, this “intentional ambiguity” results in a mixed bag of policies and practices, which migrants must navigate in their attempt to reach their destination. Levy notes a contradictory “division of labour, ”with supranational institutions such as the European Commission advancing a human rights approach while individual member state governments push for greater migration control through such mechanisms as integrated border management and rapid border intervention teams and through the work of the EU border protection coordinating agency, Frontex.

All the migrants I talked to shared the same desire for a better life, which they mostly saw as synonymous with being able to earn more money in Britain. Some migrants I met would be deemed “economic migrants” – they wanted to go to Britain for work and either came from a country in which no conflict was occurring or had already been granted asylum in another European country. But, as Levy notes, the distinction between economic migrants and refugees is sometimes not so clear; although they may initially leave their home country because of fear of persecution, many migrants undertake journeys that can take years to complete, thereby becoming economic migrants over time.

IN CALAIS, the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, or CRS, are charged with policing migrants. The CRS are the general reserve forces of the French National Police, and perform riot control duties. They are well known for being used in demonstrations as crowd control and for their excessive use of force.

In my time in Calais, I saw the CRS continually harassing migrants by raiding their squats, sometimes up to four times a day. Towards the end of my stay, the CRS were raiding the Sudanese jungle many times a day. In theory, these raids catch undocumented migrants, who are then served papers saying they must leave France within twenty-four hours. In reality, the migrants simply return to Calais and wait for another opportunity to cross. The CRS’s strategy is one of continual harassment so that migrants will finally leave Calais of their own accord, and at their own expense.

The CRS’s main weapon is unpredictability. The migrants can never be sure if or when they would be raided, and once captured, what will happen to them. The consequences vary: being detained for twenty minutes before being let go, being arrested and detained in the local police station overnight, or being taken to the detention centre in Coquelles, one of the centres de rétention administrative where irregular migrants are held. If they were detained in Coquelles, they have a two-hour walk back to Calais after they’re released. Migrants whose only crime is irregularity cannot be detained for more than forty-eight hours and so the cycle of arrest and release continues.

The CRS’s actions during a raid are also unpredictable: sometimes they used tear gas or put pepper spray in the water or took away the blankets and food. Once, they appeared to have given the dogs laxatives so they would defecate all over the squat. This tactic of extreme, calculated harassment is essentially designed as psychological warfare to break down migrants. While I was in Calais the psychological warfare took a cruel turn – it was Ramadan and many migrants were fasting. The CRS started raiding squats in the evening, just before migrants would break their fast for the day. Those caught by the CRS would usually be taken to the police station overnight, thereby having to miss out on food that day.

Some of the unpredictability might have resulted from the fact that CRS personnel were changed every three weeks. Apparently, it is part of the “tour of duty” for all new CRS recruits to spend three weeks in Calais. This means that Calais receives a constant turnover of CRS recruits who are usually keen to prove themselves and their force. At the same time, the turnover prevents the CRS personnel from forming any kind of permanent relationship with the migrants, and might also account for the uneven treatment of migrants by the CRS. While there were numerous accounts of physical force and abuse by the CRS in Calais, I was also witness to a “good cop” answering questions politely. And at the end of Ramadan, in response to the migrants’ request on the Muslim holy day, the CRS released those they had arrested so they could pray at a mosque just outside Calais.

The unpredictability and harassment had a real effect on some of the migrants I met, with many becoming depressed and despairing about their situation as the intensity of the raids increased. The cycle of raids, arrests, detention and checking of papers seemed to be working to get migrants moving out of Calais. Volunteers told me that a couple of years ago there were nearly a thousand migrants coming to the food distribution point every night; now there were only about a hundred and fifty. It is hard to determine the reason for this. Do fewer people want to go to England, or have people have become more successful in their crossing, or is the CRS harassment having an effect? It is also hard to determine where migrants have gone –if they have travelled to the nearby city of Dunkerque or elsewhere close by, or if they have really returned to their country of origin.

ON MY last night in Calais, I visited the Palestinian camp once more. There was a fire burning in a corner of the squat, where a man sat alone. He told me his name was Ahmed and he asked me where I was from. Australia, I told him. Ahmed laughed and said that’s where he was from as well. I thought he was joking until he pulled out his passport and by the light of the fire I could see the emu and kangaroo on the cover. I was dumbfounded. I asked him what he was doing here, and told me his story.

Ahmed had lived in Adelaide with his wife, after migrating there from Morocco. He became an Australian citizen, but had then separated from his wife. His only other relatives were his three brothers and their families, all of whom lived in England. “I was lonely, I didn’t want to be in Australia anymore,” he said. One of his brothers owned a business in England and he guaranteed a job would be waiting, so Ahmed decided to go to England to try out life in a new country and be closer to his family.

At Heathrow airport, with his Australian passport, he was stopped and questioned about the intentions for his stay in Britain. He told the immigration officials that he had come to visit his brothers for a holiday. They didn’t believe him and brought his brother, who was waiting for him at the airport, in for questioning. Unfortunately his brother mentioned that Ahmed wanted to see how life was in England, and that he might stay if he liked it here. The immigration officials took this as evidence that Ahmed was lying, and refused him entry into Britain – despite the fact that he was entitled as an Australian passport holder to enter Britain without a visa and stay for up to three months as a “tourist.” This is how most Australians enter Britain, but not for Ahmed, who looked different and whose name was different from a typical white Australian’s. As he said, “I can never escape my background.”

This refusal repeated itself when Ahmed tried to enter Britain again via Ireland, France and then Germany. Each time his legal entry was refused on the basis that it had been refused the first time. His passport details and the entry refusal were registered on a database, which came up every time officials scanned his passport. He applied for a new passport in the hope that the previous refusals would not show up, but border agents were suspicious of his having obtained a new passport before the old one had expired, and he was refused entry on that basis. Having spent much money (thousands of dollars flying to and from Europe) and time (nearly two years), he decided his only way to get to Britain was illegally via Calais.

When I met him, he had already tried to cross the Channel via a truck and had been caught, held overnight by the police and released. This time, he told me, he had decided to go via another route just outside Calais. It was more dangerous and in a more desolate area, and fewer people tried to cross this way – thereby increasing the possibility of success, since it was under less surveillance. I met him the night before his attempt to cross. I asked him if he was afraid. “Yes,” he replied, “but I would rather die than not make it.”

I wonder if Ahmed made it. I hope that he is now with his brothers in England and not back in the former lace factory that is the Palestinian camp in Calais. •

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IT ISN’T EASY being Nicolas Sarkozy (or any other democratic leader) in these days of economic and social uncertainties, aggressive political oppositions and volatile electorates. But the French president, unpopular at home and not greatly admired abroad, is working furiously to achieve what could be a transforming personal and national policy success.

With France due to take over the G20 presidency on 14 November Sarkozy has launched diplomatic initiatives aimed at embedding Russia more deeply in global monetary and security systems and persuading China to allow its currency to rise more quickly. It remains to be seen how successful the erratic Sarkozy will be in this plan to reform and rebalance the monetary system. But it is a risk he can afford to take: he has little to lose if he fails, and much to gain if he achieves meaningful progress.

If Sarkozy can succeed where the United States has failed in persuading China to revalue its currency upwards to ease monetary imbalances, and in bringing Russia closer to western monetary and security arrangements, he will boost his reputation and his prospects for re-election in 2012. If he fails, it won’t be too surprising given his ambitious goals and the gap between Chinese rhetoric and action on currency issues.

Already French government officials abroad are at pains to explain Sarkozy’s plans, contain over-blown expectations and deny that France has any fixed policy agenda. Instead they speak of wanting to “build consensus” about the monetary system, do something about the volatility of the prices of raw materials and agricultural products, and deal with trade imbalances.

The officials say they wish to create a momentum for rethinking the monetary system. They stress the importance of not overlooking the rising military and economic strength of Russia as well as China and the need to discuss making greater use of IMF special drawing rights as a stabilising global currency. They are promoting what they call workshops on currency issues in China, North America and Europe, alongside ministerial meetings, to discuss the political realities of currency reform. At the same time France is pursuing the issues in upcoming meetings with Chinese, American, Russian and other European players.

Somewhat disingenuously, the officials deny that Sarkozy is trying to boost his domestic political prospects, insisting that France always takes seriously its leadership roles in organisations. Perhaps. But one consequence of any success would be to lift Sarkozy’s domestic popularity and enhance his reputation. That would certainly boost the morale of a great nation facing difficult economic, political and social challenges.

Sarkozy is not, of course, the only western leader facing such difficulties. Barack Obama faces losses in mid-term elections as the United States continues to struggle economically. Support is fading for West Germany’s Angela Merkel; Britain and Australia have unstable minority governments. Belgium is a political mess. And the misery list grows longer as voters tire of economic and social uncertainty.

But Sarkozy faces a pernicious mix of problems. He is beset with personal and political scandals. Opinion polls report that the French overwhelmingly don’t trust him to solve the country’s problems. French unemployment is a troubling 10 per cent, economic growth has stalled and there is anger over Sarkozy’s moves to ban Islamic women from wearing the burka in public places, to expel Roma and to raise the retirement age to sixty-two by 2018.

So the French president has seized the opportunity to try to tackle monetary problems within the G20 framework. His political motives probably matter less than his policy proposals for stabilising currencies and commodity prices. He can’t afford to propose reforms blatantly designed to promote European interests at the expense of the United States and others.

It is unlikely that President Obama would look positively on French plans to draw Russia closer to Europe, but he would favour any initiative to persuade China to revalue its currency to ease the US trade deficit with China. Realistically, China seems unlikely to be any more responsive to France than it has been to US pressure on its currency. But Sarkozy has taken a bold step. Now he has to maintain the momentum. •

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