Climate Consultant
"There is tremendous anger and frustration, but the protests tell a misleading story"
International negotiations aren’t what they used to be. When Metternich convened the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the crowned heads of state (including the Czar, British King and various obscure dukes) spent six months wining and dining each other and did deals over late-night cards in the ballroom. Relieved at having got rid of Napoleon, the Austrian government picked up the tab.
130 years later, when Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met at Yalta, only a few select diplomats accompanied them. The world’s media were entirely absent: the Royal Air Force did not deem it necessary to shuttle them to the Crimea via Liberia and Egypt (Roosevelt’s approach route) or by flying boat through Gibraltar and the Dardanelles (as Churchill arrived). There was no civil society present when Churchill drew the post-war balance of power in Europe on a paper napkin and Stalin nodded his assent.
By contrast, Copenhagen 2009 has been, until the last 48 hours, an open, democratic process. The Bella Centre, a vast hangar on the outskirts of the Danish capital, has room for 15,000 people. Over 45,000 people applied for passes, most of them associated with non-governmental organisations. Even the official parties to the negotiation, who had preferential access to the centre, included many participants who were neither diplomats nor government figures. The delegation I went to see got me a ‘party’ badge. (I never found out if there was an ‘after-party’ badge).
The conference may be doomed to failure, but in part this reflects impossibly high expectations. A multilateral negotiation process, involving over 200 countries and many other non-state entities, cannot possibly lead to a mutually satisfactory ‘global deal’. Global deals, by their nature, involve small numbers of powerful people talking to each other in closed rooms. To be successful, they require a sense of urgency (even fear), extraordinary levels of gumption, a willingness to take risks even though the numbers and implications are unclear. We’ll know in the next 48 hours if those conditions were present.
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Philip Clothier
The Martiniquan newspaper shows Nicolas Sarkozy stooping for a photo call. He is squashed against a small, middle-aged woman’s face, the pressure accentuating his worry lines, while releasing a look of joy on her own. On television news bulletins on the Caribbean island, Sarkozy looked just as ill at ease wandering around a pain-au-chocolat factory in Fort de France, Martinique’s capital, during his visit at the end of June.
Sarkozy’s visit was an attempt to meet the political discord currently dogging these parts. A general strike and weeks of rioting in Guadeloupe in January spread to Martinique and La Reunion in the Indian Ocean, reigniting debate about the future of the French neo-empire, or the départements et territoires d’outre-mer—also known as the DOM-TOMs.
I was in Martinique filming a documentary on life in France’s overseas departments when Sarkozy delivered his landmark speech here in June. The French president offered the colonial malcontents the chance to disengage from France, although not to break away: “autonomy” is the buzzword, rather than independence. A referendum has now been set for 17th January.
Scattered rather haphazardly around the globe, the DOM-TOMs represent the colonial leftovers—what remained after France ditched its interests in French Africa and French Indo-China in the 1950s and early 1960s. Though they straddle the globe, giving France a sense of strategic importance in far-off parts, few are of major economic or political importance.
Sarkozy has been known to compare this haphazard collection of territories to spoilt children, with their hands constantly held out for treats. The sweeties come in the shape of enormous cash subsidies from France which fund public sector employment and huge infrastructure projects, and finance chronic trade deficits, caused in no small part by a fixation with importing stuff thousands of miles from mainland France. Thus, when you enter a DOM-TOM boulangerie you are immediately transported to a Parisian arrondissement with rows of perfect croissants and fluffy baguettes. And on nearly every corner shines a bright green cross indicating the presence of yet another French style phamarcie.
Yet if all that France is getting is a misplaced pride, in knowing that the croissants are never far away, then the modern day DOM-TOMs begin to resemble one of history’s most expensive vanity projects.
The political doyen of Martinique is Dr Pierre Alika. He recently celebrated his 102nd birthday by getting married to a much younger woman of 80. He fully appreciates what the French connection has done for his homeland since it became an official departement after the second world war. “In the 1940s Fort de France was full of typhoid. I saw two funeral corteges a day going past my house. That has become history with modern water supply. And proper education for all our children is also guaranteed now.”
Martinique certainly has many other trappings of a wealthy European country: a great health service, fabulous roads, very little crime and conspicuously well-used public beaches. It also enjoys hideous traffic jams and, until Sarkozy opened his chequebook this year, sky high petrol prices. In a bid to quell the discontent on the island and in Guadeloupe, the prices of hundreds of key products were reduced overnight by 20, and even 30 per cent, costing Paris a reputed €580m.
But the French link comes at a cost: big public sector projects have to go through layers of French decision making. I’m told it took a quarter of a century to get the main sports stadium—named after Dr Alika—built. Although still pointing his country towards Paris and criticising Sarkozy for being too keen to please people, even Dr Alika concedes that all good things eventually have to come to an end. “Autonomy is the way for the future Martinique—but we don’t want to leave the grand ensemble of France completely, you see.”
There is, however, some support for full-blown independence. For Garcin Malsa, a socialist mayor who’d be quite at home having tea with the ex-mayor of London Ken Livingstone, true political sovereignty might help Martiniquans shake off the poisonous legacy of the slave trade. “President Sarkozy is like Napoleon, a dictator who still wants an empire. The only thing that matters now is paying back the people who have been enslaved all these years, deprived of their rights and never been compensated for the terrible things that happened here,” he told me.
Malsa is particularly energised about the white minority known colloquially as the Beke, the direct descendants of the slave owners. Critics say that the Beke still hog the commanding heights of Martinique’s economy and, amid disquieting talk of maintaining racial purity, struggle to integrate with the local people. “The Beke are like the South African whites during apartheid,” Malsa says. “And Sarkozy is like a fascist, as he does not intend to break them up.”
Unsurprisingly, representatives of the Beke label such talk as communist and say that the real debate should be about improving Martiniquans’ work ethic: how to make them better capitalists and how to open the country up to the world.
It’s too early to call which way the vote, earmarked for the end of the year, will go, but even if Martinique chooses autonomy, President Sarkozy will still be left writing large cheques. As long as France still provides lots of meaty public jobs and the annual €2bn or so trade deficit, it’s hard to see Martiniquans—or any of the other DOM-TOMs—giving away the free baguette.
Anthony King
Trident submarines: how useful are they?
In his recent piece for Prospect, Anatol Lieven rightly raises the issue of current British defence policy, questioning current procurement programmes and the strategic concept of global intervention primarily with the US and/or Nato which underpins their development. Eurofighter, designed to interdict hostile jets, seems almost laughably superfluous, while the Royal Navy’s carriers–and especially Trident submarines–are of questionable strategic utility.
In order to escape from the current defence predicament, Professor Lieven logically proposes that Britain return to Europe to develop a more regionally focused defence policy. He articulates a vision of defence which inspired the St Malo agreement in 1998 and which many Europeans today would support.
Yet, the logical proposal of reinvigorated European defence co-operation runs in the face of current developments. The St Malo agreement and the European Security and Defence Policy which developed from it have been extremely disappointing. Europeans have been able to conduct few significant interventions even on their own borders. While neutral countries like Ireland and Sweden have been willing to contribute to these ventures, most of the other European nations have been reluctant to contribute. Germany has been very reticent here while France has typically used European missions to assert itself against the US and to further its own interests in Africa. There is very little appetite in Europe for the kind of European initiative which Lieven proposes.
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Mary Fitzgerald
Sarko: a 21st-century Napoleon
Why is Nicolas Sarkozy so mysteriously appealing? asks Lucy Wadham, author of the forthcoming The Secret Life of France (Faber), in her article for this month’s Prospect. It’s because the French secretly want to be dominated by a strong, libidinous male, she says—and this desire has taken the political left by surprise, leaving it in disarray. Sideshows like Sarkozy’s lightning conquest of Carla Bruni (known as “the predator” for her voracious sexual appetite) have only boosted his magnetism, something Wadham can testify to first-hand after seeing him in the flesh. “Sitting in Sarkozy’s line of vision for two hours was among the most erotically charged experiences I have had,” she confesses.
Wadham says she is not alone in this sentiment: despite its many powerful women, France really wants to be controlled by a man. Is this really so? Weigh in here.
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