Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Some three years after inviting Colonel Muammar Ghadafi to Paris on a state visit, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was at the forefront of the 2011 NATO-led campaign against the Libyan leader's regime. This dramatic change of posture was ultimately the result of quite a specific set of circumstances: the urgent humanitarian situation in Benghazi, Sarkozy's willingness to bypass his own Foreign Ministry and France's need to regain the initiative in North Africa after being caught off guard by the speed of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Yet while Libya was in many ways a unique case, it did reflect two distinct trends: a new-found readiness to overhaul France's existing practices in North Africa and a much greater reluctance to effect meaningful changes to French policy south of the Sahara.
The question of rupture (a clean break) with Françafrique (France's neocolonial and clientelistic relations with black Africa) has long been fundamental to the literature on France's Africa policy. Recent studies have asked whether Sarkozy, elected in May 2007 on a broad platform of change, lived up to his election promise 'to once and for all turn the page on the complacency, secrets and ambiguities' marking Franco-African relations (Sarkozy, 2006).1 According to Gounin (2012), Africa 'policy was reformed' under Sarkozy, as 'the old guard lost ground to the modernisers'. However, most commentators emphasise continuity. Thus, Yates (2012, p. 321) labels Sarkozy's promise of rupture 'a pious vow', while Mengali (2010, p. 53) laments France's return to the '"Franco-African habits" of the past'. Thiam (2008) criticises the haste with which campaign pledges were broken, while Machet (2012, p. 1) denounces the Sarkozy era as 'years of regression, marked by a utilitarian and venal vision of Franco-African relations'. Other analysts reach similar conclusions but attribute the lack of reform to different factors, including 'the weight of history' (Gnanguenon, 2011), 'developments in individual Francophone-African countries' (Moncrieff, 2012, p. 3) and 'the rise of emerging countries in Africa' (Darracq, 2011).
The above analyses shed valuable light on Sarkozy's legacy, even if most do not cover his entire quinquennat (2007-2012) and some assume that his Africa policy was 'entrapped ... within a dual approach based on rupture or continuity' (Gnanguenon, 2011). Others recognise that under Sarkozy there...