Saving the Hegemony: French Perspective on the Changing World Order

Late in August this year, President Emmanuel Macron delivered his annual address to French ambassadors, thus traditionally opening a new political season for the Fifth Republic’s diplomacy. In terms of content, it generally reaffirmed commitment to the same course that the host of Elysée Palace has pursued in recent years, including a primary focus on strengthening the EU’s strategic autonomy and enhanced creativity in a number of other regional areas. This time, however, a remarkable keynote ran through his speech—recognition of the breakdown of the previous world order and a clearly articulated intention to put this process on hold. Bolstered by several recent initiatives, such reasoning can be interpreted as a signal of Paris’s leadership ambitions in building a dialogue between the global North and South on behalf of the former. Yet, amid another debacle suffered by French diplomacy on the African continent, these sentiments seemed more like an attempt to save the blushes by presenting the erstwhile neocolonialism clothed in a more alluring mantle.

the French leader took the liberty to make some frank remarks, rather rare to hear nowadays from representatives of the Western establishment. Thus, he stated the “objective dissolution” of the West in the international system—in terms of certain parameters such as population, share in the world economy and trade. In the French leader’s opinion, this dissolution is a consequence of various crises that have successively followed one another since 2008, as well as the rise of other players that effectively compete with the U.S. and Europe in a number of areas. According to his logic, there is a “progressive revision of our international order, its principles and various organizational forms,” overlapped with the “resentment politics”, anti-colonialist attitudes and anti-Westernism in the global South. Such sentiments, Macron recognized, are spreading in response to the double standards “that we have sometimes encouraged,” adapting the international law to the narrow interests of the West and forgetting the sovereignty of other peoples on the planet. Numerous platforms of global regulation, designed along Western lines, be it the IMF or the World Bank, are increasingly losing their legitimacy as reflections of a bygone geopolitical reality and, consequently, are no longer able to impose the Western rules. According to the French leader’s observation, there is indeed a demand for an alternative order in the world, the strengthening of the BRICS being one of its symptoms. The world economy is also evolving in an unpredictable direction, with an apparent trend for “new protectionism”, which has taken shape amid the US-China rivalry. In its turn, Europeans have to face a “fait accompli policy”, pursued by more vibrant actors challenging Europe. According to the French president, this is the case, for example, with the Gulf monarchies, which increasingly perceive Europe as an “old continent” that has fallen into decline, but still “pesters” them with its norms and principles. This makes China and India much more convenient partners.

It is not difficult to see that this diagnosis is in sharp contrast to the rosy picture of the world that was once built by the head of European diplomacy Josep Borrell, where the EU still remains a privileged player, a “blooming garden” surrounded by a “jungle”. Nevertheless, the most important thing is the inference immediately drawn by Mr. Macron from his speculations. Building upon the above-mentioned trends, the president was far from being amenable to the final collapse of the obsolete world order or, even less so, from hinting at any hypothetical drift of France toward truly multipolar formats (his idea of visiting the BRICS summit expectedly turned out to be stillborn). On the contrary, from his point of view, Western nations simply need to change their strategy—not to waste their energies trying to rein the unfolding changes, but should only turn the latter in a favorable direction for themselves.

To put it simply, the logic presented by Mr. Macron boils down to a predictable conclusion: the development of any non-Western alternatives indicates an unwanted “fragmentation of the world”, while supposedly only the proactivity and persistence of Western states, primarily France itself, can make the global order more stable.

The ultimate expression of the French view on global regulation was the Summit For a New Global Financial Pact, which had taken place in Paris two months before Mr. Macron delivered his speech before the ambassadors. The given event encapsulated the characteristic features of all previous French initiatives: a multi-stakeholder approach, the adoption of several more thematic “appeals”, participation of the global South representatives (leaders of South Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt, Cuba, etc.) along with the pacesetting Western speakers.

Late in August this year, President Emmanuel Macron delivered his annual address to French ambassadors, thus traditionally opening a new political season for the Fifth Republic’s diplomacy. In terms of content, it generally reaffirmed commitment to the same course that the host of Elysée Palace has pursued in recent years, including a primary focus on strengthening the EU’s strategic autonomy and enhanced creativity in a number of other regional areas. This time, however, a remarkable keynote ran through his speech—recognition of the breakdown of the previous world order and a clearly articulated intention to put this process on hold. Bolstered by several recent initiatives, such reasoning can be interpreted as a signal of Paris’s leadership ambitions in building a dialogue between the global North and South on behalf of the former. Yet, amid another debacle suffered by French diplomacy on the African continent, these sentiments seemed more like an attempt to save the blushes by presenting the erstwhile neocolonialism clothed in a more alluring mantle.

Useful recalcitrance

Alexei Chikhchev:
France and Africa: Another Fresh Start?

Setting the French leader’s speech in a broader context, it is appropriate to recall that reflecting on the desired structure of the international system is not something new either to the foreign policy of the Fifth Republic or to Mr. Macron himself. On the contrary, this can be traced back as one of the main themes in French diplomacy during all of the recent decades, giving it a certain scope and elan that was largely lost in other European capitals after World War II. Thus, even during the years of bipolar confrontation, France, although still politically part of the Western camp, used to embrace the “overcoming Yalta [1]” slogan, perceiving the system based on the unambiguous leadership of the U.S. and the USSR as unfavorable for preserving its own great-power status and, accordingly, advocating the ideas of détente and multipolarity. Already in those days, the Elysée Palace raised the issue of organizing a multilateral North-South dialogue, supporting the signing of some cooperation agreements between the European Communities and ACP countries, as well as pushing the Bretton Woods financial system towards a crisis. Subsequently, in the 1990s-2000s, Paris, unlike many of its partners, found itself among the critics of the “American-style world”, this opposition seemingly peaking in 2003, when Jacques Chirac and Gerhardt Schroeder condemned the invasion of Iraq. It was the French president who was one of the first Western leaders to draw attention to the imbalances of globalization [2], neglect of socio-economic inequality and climate protection. Moreover, even during the mandates of Nicola Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, when the French policy demonstrated a distinctly “Atlanticist” bias (a return to NATO military structures, the operation in Libya, etc.), there were also attempts to formulate a special position when discussing the global agenda. Obvious examples are the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015: by organizing its execution the French side hoped to put environmental issues at the center of the entire international agenda, or take the calls to rethink the IMF’s functionality in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. While remaining a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the Fifth Republic did not ignore the issue of reforming it, having proposed in 2013, among other things, a voluntary non-use of the veto in case of large-scale war crimes.

Characteristically enough, in all of the cases described above, both idealistic and realistic considerations were intertwined in Paris’s desire to influence, one way or another, the evolution of the world order and its institutions. On the one hand, a kind of republican messianism, dating back to the ideals of the Revolution of 1789, made itself felt. Proud of being the birthplace of human rights and values of humanism, France continued to spread them in the outside world in the hope to make the global order more democratic and just (according to its own understanding of those categories [3]). The aspiration for national greatness, expressed in the 1960s by de Gaulle and consisting in the idea that France can be a significant power only if it is “standing on top everything” and participates, at least declaratively, in solving key world problems, was also related to this ambition. On the other hand, the pragmatic calculus was far from splitting the West from within but making it only stronger instead through flexibility and diversity of approaches. As a result of all the adjustments proposed by France, the “Western family” and the Fifth Republic itself would still have to retain the most comfortable place in the international system, the right to define the rules of the game for all, retaining the appearance of solidarity with the global South. In this regard, multipolarity, as French analysts explain, is usually understood by Paris not as the existence of several roughly equal centers of power, but as a joint solution to global problems with the unconditional priority of Western interests.

Victoria Panova:
Impulse of Multipolarity: Outcomes of South Africa’s BRICS Summit

To paraphrase what was said above, it is acceptable to note that where, for example, the U.S. embarked on a hardcore unilateral approach, France has been accustomed to offering soft leadership of the collective West, which differed in form, but not in its ultimate goal. This pattern largely explains Macron’s foreign policy activity during his first years in power, which coincided with the presidency of Donald Trump overseas, because just in 2017-2020, the French leader formulated a whole series of initiatives addressing the issues of global governance. In particular, since 2018, the Paris Peace Forum has been held on an annual basis—a platform for discussing all pressing issues of global affairs with an emphasis on project interaction between actors of different types (governments, businesses, NGOs). Due to the universal thematic orientation of this forum, experts rightly pointed out that it was actually an attempt to duplicate the UN in a simplified form, without an extensive network of institutions, rules and procedures. The same logic underpinned the 2019 launch of The Alliance for Multilateralism—an informal coalition of countries led by France and Germany, ready to promote the concepts of “effective multilateralism” and “rules-based order” in various international institutions. The Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace (2018), the Christchurch Call to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online (2019), One Planet Summit for addressing environmental issues (since 2017), the Joint Finance development bank meetings (since 2020), and many others continued this thrust. In a similar way, the French side tried to mediate in settling the conflict in the Sahel, where, starting in 2020, the plan called for all steps to be integrated into an umbrella structure, namely the Sahel Coalition. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recapped, the essence of all such formats was reduced to “agreeing in a narrow friendly circle on recipes to be subsequently imposed on everyone else” and bypassing the existing negotiating platforms, where there is a chance of encountering alternative points of view. A common feature in those initiatives was the use of a multi-stakeholder approach combined with a selective choice of participating countries that usually included roughly the same representatives of the West, in addition to a group of friendly states in Latin America and/or Africa.

It is noteworthy that with the arrival of the Biden administration, Paris initially slowed down a bit, preferring, more often than not, to join the new steps of its American colleagues (Summit for Democracy) and switching from the global to the regional level (the European Political Community project which unites all the countries of continental Europe except Russia and Belarus). Nevertheless, during 2023, a number of factors made the French president return to the topic of the changing world order, as this subject was the cornerstone of his speech to the ambassadors. First, there was the ongoing confrontation with Russia: the “geopolitical defeat” of Moscow, so much desired by the French leader, never came to pass, while any attempt to change Russia’s posture through sanctions, respective appeals to China or by using other methods eventually failed. Secondly, alternative to Western formats of international cooperation, BRICS in the first place, aimed at accelerating the de-dollarization of the global financial architecture, have been gaining pace—starting in 2024, this group will have expanded to include six new nations. Thirdly, the demand of African states for independent development and diversification of partnerships without neo-colonial oppression from former metropoles is getting louder,—particularly, at the second Russia-Africa Forum. Assessing these trends, the French leader did not fail to sound an alarmist tone, having admitted that the current international context increases the risk of “weakening the West, and especially our Europe.”

Take the lead once you can’t withstand

Ivan Timofeev:
Russia-West: Rising Stakes

Elaborating on the latter tenet, the French leader took the liberty to make some frank remarks, rather rare to hear nowadays from representatives of the Western establishment. Thus, he stated the “objective dissolution” of the West in the international system—in terms of certain parameters such as population, share in the world economy and trade. In the French leader’s opinion, this dissolution is a consequence of various crises that have successively followed one another since 2008, as well as the rise of other players that effectively compete with the U.S. and Europe in a number of areas. According to his logic, there is a “progressive revision of our international order, its principles and various organizational forms,” overlapped with the “resentment politics”, anti-colonialist attitudes and anti-Westernism in the global South. Such sentiments, Macron recognized, are spreading in response to the double standards “that we have sometimes encouraged,” adapting the international law to the narrow interests of the West and forgetting the sovereignty of other peoples on the planet. Numerous platforms of global regulation, designed along Western lines, be it the IMF or the World Bank, are increasingly losing their legitimacy as reflections of a bygone geopolitical reality and, consequently, are no longer able to impose the Western rules. According to the French leader’s observation, there is indeed a demand for an alternative order in the world, the strengthening of the BRICS being one of its symptoms. The world economy is also evolving in an unpredictable direction, with an apparent trend for “new protectionism”, which has taken shape amid the US-China rivalry. In its turn, Europeans have to face a “fait accompli policy”, pursued by more vibrant actors challenging Europe. According to the French president, this is the case, for example, with the Gulf monarchies, which increasingly perceive Europe as an “old continent” that has fallen into decline, but still “pesters” them with its norms and principles. This makes China and India much more convenient partners.

It is not difficult to see that this diagnosis is in sharp contrast to the rosy picture of the world that was once built by the head of European diplomacy Josep Borrell, where the EU still remains a privileged player, a “blooming garden” surrounded by a “jungle”. Nevertheless, the most important thing is the inference immediately drawn by Mr. Macron from his speculations. Building upon the above-mentioned trends, the president was far from being amenable to the final collapse of the obsolete world order or, even less so, from hinting at any hypothetical drift of France toward truly multipolar formats (his idea of visiting the BRICS summit expectedly turned out to be stillborn). On the contrary, from his point of view, Western nations simply need to change their strategy—not to waste their energies trying to rein the unfolding changes, but should only turn the latter in a favorable direction for themselves. Among many areas, this view should be applied to the reform of international institutions: to prevent the “marginalization of our own system” of global governance, several developing countries should be involved in decision-making on the governing boards of the IMF and the World Bank, without questioning the very role of these structures in the overall global architecture. Macron identified India, Brazil and South Africa as the most interesting partners in this regard, with the ultimate objective of causing a split in the BRICS by drawing some of its members closer to the West easily discernible behind these moves. In addition to Brazil, the prospect of building relations with other Latin American countries is emphasized: Paris expects to get closer to them by leveraging the climate agenda—the protection of the Amazon rainforest—inasmuch as the Fifth Republic is geographically present in this region through Guiana, claiming accession to the Amazon Pact of 1978. Incidentally, according to French logic, climate should become the hottest topic for Western diplomacy in principle, for this is where the West could be proactive, gathering new coalitions under its banners and claiming the ability to define common standards for all. The consistent work with the powers of the Indo-Pacific region—Indonesia, Vietnam and others, to whom France offers a kind of third way between Washington and Beijing, which, in fact, runs closer to the U.S. anyway (under the “neither submission nor equidistance” slogan)—ought to be subordinated to the common plan of preserving the Western leadership. Finally, we are talking about creating a broad diplomatic front in support of Ukraine: replicating across the world the proposition that it is Russia’s actions, not the West’s, that create a negative effect on a global scale; struggling to reduce the number of votes favoring Moscow in the UN General Assembly, etc.

To put it simply, the logic presented by Mr. Macron boils down to a predictable conclusion: the development of any non-Western alternatives indicates an unwanted “fragmentation of the world”, while supposedly only the proactivity and persistence of Western states, primarily France itself, can make the global order more stable. It is worth saying that in addition to the above-mentioned directions, this view is rather conspicuous in Paris’s current African policy as well. Speaking about the spread of anti-colonialism, the French leader emphasized that he considers this phenomenon largely “contrived” and does not understand how modern Pan-Africanists enter into a “bizarre alliance” with “neo-imperialist” forces replacing the old metropolises on the African continent. The Fifth Republic, according to the Elysée Palace’s host, has played a positive role in the war on terrorism in the Sahel (without it, the states there would simply “not exist”), and is now optimizing its military presence “in accordance with the demands” of the Africans themselves. Commenting on the military coup d’état in Niger, Macron emphasized that France would support Mohamed Bazoum, the “democratically elected” president—not directly, though, but through the ECOWAS. This said, it is proposed to shift the main focus of the continental strategy from toxic security issues to a win-win agenda of international development—support for African youth, entrepreneurship and civil society, educational and cultural-humanitarian cooperation in the support of Francophonie. For all that, the question of abandoning the residual attributes of France’s own neo-colonial influence, be it the complete closure of all military bases, the abolition of the CFA franc or the voluntary renunciation of preferential access to African resources, is not even raised. The way of restructuring the media presence in Africa, proposed by Macron, is quite symptomatic—bringing in a private component only because the state ownership of some French media outlets serves as a convenient pretext for criticism from competition.

Alla Levchenko:
Rules-Based International Order: Dos and Don’ts of “Liberal” Manners

The ultimate expression of the French view on global regulation was the Summit For a New Global Financial Pact, which had taken place in Paris two months before Mr. Macron delivered his speech before the ambassadors. The given event encapsulated the characteristic features of all previous French initiatives: a multi-stakeholder approach, the adoption of several more thematic “appeals”, participation of the global South representatives (leaders of South Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt, Cuba, etc.) along with the pacesetting Western speakers. Accordingly, as Mr. Macron later explained, the goal of the meeting was also formulated: laying the foundations for a “new consensus” [4] regarding the global financial architecture and sustainable development, trying to formulate a set of “universal” rules, motivated by looking for a balance between the North and the South. And even though these rules, as the Elysée Palace assured, “will not be dictated either in Brussels or Washington,” it is the West, represented by France, that arrogates to itself the right to lead the way in further discussions, eventually minding its own interests. Among the principles agreed upon at the summit were: linking economic growth to compliance with environmental standards; prioritizing national sustainable development strategies with the indispensable involvement of international bodies; and regular packages of monetary aid to underperforming countries through development banks and private sources.

* * *

As has been noted by the Russian researcher Timofey Bordachev, in the lack of new ideas and limited material capabilities, France is faced with the fact that its own and collective Western problems do not come down to “the decline of the international or regional order per se, but to the diminishing power of those who until recently could have had a decisive influence upon it.” Having probably arrived at the similar conclusion, Macron is doing his best to delay this process, or to reverse it as his ultimate goal. It is obvious that by inviting its closest allies to take up a speedy repair of the Western-centered world order to preclude its total collapse, Paris hopes to get extra benefits for itself to a certain extent, primarily of a political nature (for example, the status of an informal leader in promoting the climate and digital agenda). Nevertheless, on many points, one can clearly see how France seeks to indulge in wishful thinking. It’s plain to see in the case of Africa, where Macron’s arguments about Paris’s “favorable” role and a new partnership with the global South do not sound very convincing against the backdrop of a series of military coups (from Mali to Gabon), widespread anti-French sentiment, and the protracted persistence of certain vestiges of neocolonial policies. Many nations that should be integrated into the Western-centered world order at the suggestion of Macron—India, Brazil, and others—are unlikely to abandon the policy of building a multipolar world, where relations with Western countries and institutions serve as only one option in achieving their national objectives. In the days of old, the approach promoted by the Fifth Republic could at least be partially interesting for discussing some common topics within the framework of Franco-Russian relations: issues such as strategic stability, regional conflict resolution, and cyber security. However, at the current stage, French attempts to preserve the generally pro-Western world order, even if with some adjustments, come into fundamental collision with Russia’s commitment to building a real multipolar world.

1. Hoffmann S. La France dans le nouvel ordre européen // Politique étrangère. 1990. Vol. 55, no. 3. p. 503.

2. The very term “globalization” in the French political vocabulary is close in meaning to “unification” aka Americanization, while “mundialization” is used as a neutral description of the interconnected world.

3. Obichkina E.O. The Foreign Policy of Emmanuel Macron: Looking for Geopolitical Strategy in Deranged World Hierarchy // Relevant Problems. 2021. No. 3. p. 238

4. Even during his first term in power, Macron unashamedly proposed to refer to this consensus as the Paris Consensus by analogy with the Washington Consensus. For more detail see: Chikhachev A.Yu. The Concept of Paris Consensus in the Rhetoric of French President Emmanuel Macron in The World after the Pandemic: Global Challenges and Development Prospects. World Development. Issue 23 edited by A.A. Davydov, Z.A. Mamedyarov, M.V. Khorolsky, et al. M.: IMEMO RAS, 2022 p. 93-101.