France and the new imperialism. Security policy in sub-Saharan Africa

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France and the new imperialism. Security policy in sub-Saharan Africa, by Bruno Charbonneau, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008, 189 pp., £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780754672852

The civilizing mission might have changed its name and its image, but to this day it remains implicit if not explicit in France's Africa policy. (p. 1)

At a time when a number of French publications are asking whether France has ‘lost’ Africa, Bruno Charbonneau's France and the new imperialism is a useful reminder that we should not forget the strong ties that are being kept alive between sub-Saharan Africa and the former colonial power. His book offers a re-examination of the discourses and policies that have kept this hegemonic relationship going since the nineteenth century. Following a more or less chronological pattern, Charbonneau provides an extensive study of French security policy towards sub-Saharan Africa up to and including the violent uprisings which occurred in Côte d'Ivoire in late 2004 and that were directed against the presence of French armed forces in the country. This focus on Franco-African security and military relations makes Charbonneau's contribution one that has enormous value to the field of international relations in general and to anyone with an interest in security studies and post-colonial politics.

Charbonneau's reference to hard, empirical evidence sits well with a theoretical approach that draws from Gramscian notions of hegemony as well as Foucauldian interpretations of power. This balance is one of the desired aims of the book. It attempts to take critical theory to a position where it can elicit social change by engaging head-on with empirical research in order to point to ‘where resistance and opposition can be effective: that is, by raising consciousness’ (p. 6). Charbonneau begins with an all-out attack on the concept of a pre-formed unitary state, the symbolic state. He refers to this ‘ahistorical’ conception of the state as a ‘strategy of power [which] produces, transforms, and reproduces [the] political order’ (p. 12). It is the most powerful symbol on which Franco-African security and defence policies are based.

The author gives a concrete account of the consequences of security policy in Africa once it has been decoupled from the discourse on the symbolic state. Via two case studies which are discussed in separate chapters, we are shown how both militarisation and impunity were the main outcomes of these policies. First, he deals at length with France's involvement in the events that led to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. He then provides an examination of France's ‘military cooperation’ in Côte d'Ivoire. These examples serve to underline the ways in which Charbonneau understands France to be exercising a form of imperialism: with its roots in economic domination, the control of Africa is performed via security policy.

Charbonneau's stated aim is to contribute to the literature on networks and parallel hierarchies, on the criminal activity that he believes to have been discarded by international relations as a discipline – in particular by French scholarship. He is most successful in highlighting the linguistic reconfigurations that France has had to adapt to in order to give legitimacy to its presence, its interventions and continued meddling in African affairs. The reader is thus implicitly told the story of how France went from being a ‘coloniser’ and ‘civiliser’ to a ‘developer’ in humanitarian clothing, operating in a world where globalisation has ‘provided France with a valuable new method to maintain and restructure its influence and power’ (p. 77). Along with a number of highly revealing interviews with senior serving officials from the UN and from French military high command, a large number of previously unpublished records are particularly illuminating. Among other things, these demonstrate that African states have not been entirely passive when it came to defining cooperation agreements with France.

Although Charbonneau has a majestic way of positioning his work theoretically, the reader will most likely be disappointed that his analysis of France's increasingly complicated relationship with Rwanda and other African states has not been further developed. It is always easy to point to gaps in works which deal with relatively recent events. However, it seems that relations are changing rapidly and one is left wanting for an account of how these would fit into Charbonneau's analysis. Notwithstanding, it seems likely that further research would only support the thesis of France and the new imperialism.

At a time when most of the attention is drifting towards the relations that China is developing with large parts of Africa, France and the new imperialism highlights the pervasiveness of imperial relations that are so hard to break away from entirely. The book is a must-read for all those with a keen interest in Africa and its future. I know of none other which analyses the ongoing relations of ‘new imperialism’ that are the foundation of modern-day Franco-African relations with such surgical accuracy.