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Since the May 2018 visit to Australia by French President Emmanuel Macron, Australian commentators have continued to assert that French colonial control in the Pacific is crucial to constraining China’s rising influence in the region. But much of this analysis is based on a misunderstanding of the dynamism of local politics in the French Pacific dependencies.

A series of articles and opinion pieces in The Australian newspaper have championed the increasing strategic relationship between France and Australia in the South Pacific. Many of them quote staff from leading think tanks, including ASPI.

In a front-page story, Simon Benson argues: ‘Australia and the US are urging France to boost its Pacific influence as part of a new strategic and economic alliance that would act as a counterbalance to China’s ambitions and mark a significant shift in attitude towards the French presence in the region.’

Foreign editor Greg Sheridan presents France as a welcome bulwark against the Chinese.

Greg Brown asserts that ‘the French retain control over a group of islands in the region including New Caledonia, French Polynesia, the Society Islands and the Wallis and Futuna islands’ (notwithstanding the fact that the Society Islands are part of French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna is a separate territory).

The reporting continues to perpetuate the myth that independence movements in the region have collapsed. In an opinion piece in The Australian, ASPI’s Anthony Bergin and the ANU’s David Brewster make no mention of the political situation on the ground in New Caledonia or French Polynesia. In The Australian, ASPI’s executive director, Peter Jennings, states: ‘Ten to 15 years ago there was at least some rumblings of independence support in New Caledonia and that has largely and successfully been put to bed by the French.’

Jennings is fundamentally wrong. Over the past 15 years, the Kanak independence coalition Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste (FLNKS) and other pro-independence parties have steadily increased their representation in New Caledonia’s 54-member Congress, from 18 seats in 2004 to 26 seats in 2019. Since 1999, the FLNKS has controlled two of three provincial administrations.

The results of the November 2018 referendum on self-determination and the May 2019 elections for New Caledonia’s three provincial assemblies and Congress clearly show that the independence movement has not been ‘put to bed by the French’.

After elections on 12 May, New Caledonia’s Congress has 25 loyalists, 26 independence supporters, and 3 members of a new party Eveil océanien (‘Pacific awakening’), which draws its support from the large Wallisian and Futunan communities living in New Caledonia. Despite the new party’s stated loyalty to the French Republic, the three Wallisian votes were cast for independence politician Roch Wamytan to take up the post of speaker of the Congress last month. This sends a signal to the anti-independence parties that the Wallisian community will act in its own interests as New Caledonia moves to a new political status under the 1998 Noumea Accord. Wamytan has used his status in the Congress to travel this month to France to attend meetings of the UN Special Committee on Decolonization and the Non-Aligned Movement.

The same dynamism in the independence movement was shown during the referendum campaign last year. On 4 November last year, more than 141,000 voters in New Caledonia went to the polls to determine the political status of the French Pacific dependency: ‘Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?’

In an unprecedented turnout, 56.67% of voters decided to remain within the French Republic, while 43.33% voted ‘Yes’ for independence. These figures, with a majority opposing full sovereignty, suggest a setback for the FLNKS. In reality, the size of the ‘Yes’ vote disappointed partisans of the French Republic and opened the way for a second referendum in 2020. Opinion polling suggested the pro-independence vote would be only around 30%, misreading the FLNKS campaign on the ground.

Just days after the referendum, FLNKS spokesperson Daniel Goa stated:

We lost on the numbers, but for us it’s a victory. For the Kanak people, the first people, this is a great victory, as we have loudly and clearly expressed our perspective without ambiguity and without recourse. Who now will contest the justice of our struggle, who now will challenge our very existence?

If Australia’s strategic think tanks and leading newspapers are so clearly misreading the situation on the ground, it’s a worrying sign that the Australia–France strategic partnership in the Pacific is built on shaky foundations.

As with independent island neighbours, local governments in New Caledonia and French Polynesia are seeking closer trade, tourism and investment links with China. Air Calédonie is running charter flights for Chinese tourists to New Caledonia, Chinese corporations are planning multimillion-dollar tourism and fisheries investments in French Polynesia, and mining companies are exporting increasing amounts of New Caledonian nickel to China, thanks to Clive Palmer and the closure of the Townsville nickel smelter. These developments challenge the Canberra consensus that the French dependencies are bulwarks against Chinese expansionism.

Australian support for ongoing French colonialism in the South Pacific may also generate long-term tensions with our nearest neighbours. Members of the Melanesian Spearhead Group continue to support decolonisation in New Caledonia. Smaller island states like Nauru, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu successfully moved a 2013 motion through the UN General Assembly to reinscribe French Polynesia on the UN list of non-self-governing territories.

Australian commentators can try to pretend that decolonisation is off the agenda in the Pacific. All they have to do is persuade the peoples of New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Bougainville, Guam and West Papua.

The support from Italy’s populist leaders for the ‘Yellow Vest’ protests in France is a sad first in the history of the European Union. Never before has one of the six founding countries of the European project intervened so resolutely in the domestic affairs of another. To add insult to injury, Italy is supporting a movement that contains elements who clearly reject fundamental European values of tolerance and respect for democratic institutions.

Italy has gone astray, and France needs to understand why, so that it can fight to ensure that populism doesn’t gain further ground domestically. In doing so, France must distinguish the Italian people from some of their far less admirable political leaders.

Rising tensions between the French and Italian governments are partly the result of competition between the two populist parties in Italy’s ruling coalition, which took office in June 2018. This was recently reflected in strong anti-French rhetoric from the leader of the Five Star Movement, Luigi Di Maio, who until now has been largely eclipsed by the League party leader, Matteo Salvini. But anti-French sentiment in Italy has deeper roots, and exists among both the elites and parts of the wider population.

Franco-Italian relations have always been complex. As the heir to the Roman Empire, Renaissance and Baroque Italy felt culturally superior to France and more refined. For Italians, the demonstrative way in which France exhibited its greatness and glory from the time of the Sun King (Louis XIV) to Napoleon made it appear ‘nouveau riche’. Even French support for Italian unification in the second half of the 19th century contributed to further misunderstanding, because France ‘received’ Savoy and Nice in exchange for its precious help.

In more recent times, there had at least been some signs of mutual admiration. Italians looked enviously at France’s well-functioning state, while the French nodded approvingly at northern Italy’s dynamic network of small and medium-sized companies. Today, however, this kind of reciprocal praise seems like the stuff of nostalgia.

The view from Rome these days is that France gives lectures on budgetary rigor but no longer practises it, as when French President Emmanuel Macron cancelled his planned fuel-tax increase in the face of the Yellow Vest protests. But Italy’s current negative perception of France is above all emotional. From the crisis in Libya (a country Italy knows well) to the migrant crisis (which has hit Italy disproportionally hard), Italians feel deliberately ignored, if not abandoned, by the French—who, to make matters worse, also give the impression of looking down on their neighbours.

It is tempting to compare Italy’s criticism of France to the Yellow Vests’ hostility towards French elites. Both sentiments, after all, draw their strength from a feeling of humiliation in the face of perceived arrogance and privilege. The big question now is whether Italy’s populist present will be France’s future.

Clearly, this scenario is no longer inconceivable. Defenders of liberal democracy in France and elsewhere must, therefore, adopt and adapt the Yellow Vest motto and refuse to give in.

In a short 2008 essay entitled ‘The spirit of the Enlightenment’, the late French essayist of Bulgarian descent, Tzvetan Todorov, reminded us that ‘there would not have been a Europe without the Enlightenment and no Enlightenment without Europe’. And in the immediate aftermath of World War II, statesmen such as Robert Schuman in France and Alcide de Gasperi in Italy not only were devout Christians, but also believed in the ideas of Montesquieu and Voltaire.

This is clearly not the case with Salvini or Marine Le Pen in France. Rather than being united and moved by hope and trust, they are exploiting a culture of fear and humiliation and a common desire to destroy the existing system.

There is little to be gained simply by contrasting the spirit of the Enlightenment with the populist spirit of the Yellow Vests, or Macron’s deep and sincere desire for reforms with Salvini’s shrewd and brutal vulgarity. But there are lessons to be learned from the rise of the Italian populists and the French Yellow Vests.

For starters, one cannot ignore the emotions of others. Equality of respect is as important as equality of means. Humiliation is a powerful motor that can drive people to sheer hatred, as Macron is currently experiencing. Furthermore, representative democracy is fragile and precious. It must be defended at all costs from its authoritarian external enemies, as well as from domestic opponents intent on seeing only its shortcomings.

France, meanwhile, should maintain its moderate, reasonable, yet firm stance and not engage in a war of words with Italy. Instead, it should try to understand how—and, even more so, why—it became the principal target of its transalpine neighbour. Critical reflection here could help France to overcome its own internal divisions and prevent Italian-style populism from taking power in Paris.

Until the terrorist attack at a market in southern France on 23 March, French President Emmanuel Macron had been planning to launch a new European-level political campaign. Though the official rollout has now been postponed, Macron’s latest project remains central to his presidency and to his conception of power.

Macron’s ‘La grande marche pour l’Europe’ will mimic the program that toppled France’s dominant political parties and transformed his La République En Marche ! movement into a political force in 2017. Over the course of six weeks, he will dispatch 10 ministers and 200 parliamentarians to survey the French people’s views on Europe and European issues. The results will then be considered in developing a platform that can beat populist and Euroskeptic parties in the 2019 European Parliament election.

Macron has persuaded all other EU member states (with the exception of Hungary and the United Kingdom) to conduct similar public consultations, which he hopes will lay the groundwork for the EU‑level reforms he proposed in major speeches in Athens and at the Sorbonne last year.

To understand the full scope of Macron’s ambitions, we should consider the principles that underpin his worldview and guide his approach to politics. Few are better acquainted with Macron’s thinking than French historian and philosopher François Dosse. Dosse not only taught Macron at Sciences Po in the late 1990s, but also introduced him to his intellectual mentor, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, for whom Macron worked as a research assistant for two years.

Dosse recently published a book about Macron and Ricoeur titled Le philosophe et le president. A few weeks ago, I met with him in his Paris apartment to discuss his latest work, and he explained Macron’s approach to European reform as a combination of two fundamental Ricoeurian concepts.

The first is ‘consensus dissensuel’. This may sound like a highfalutin version of ‘having one’s cake and eating it’. But, according to Dosse, it is really about drawing strength from the opposition between two conflicting viewpoints, unlike a Hegelian approach, which seeks synthesis between two poles. Macron’s embrace of the Ricoeurian model is evident in his frequent use of the phrase ‘en même temps’ (‘at the same time’) when describing parallel domestic-reform proposals.

Similarly, Macron’s vision for Europe seems to reconcile the irreconcilable: his plan is both to preserve member states’ sovereignty and deepen EU integration. Institutionally, this means supporting supranational bodies while also allowing for more flexibility in areas where national governments, rather than Brussels, are better positioned to solve problems.

On defence policy, Macron wants to work within existing EU treaties, and he supports proposals for a Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) agreement and a European Defence Fund. But he also hopes to move beyond the current EU and even NATO frameworks to establish a European intervention initiative that would operate alongside British, US and other allied expeditionary forces.

On migration, Macron wants both to secure Europe’s external borders and ensure that the burden of taking in refugees is shared across the EU. In the short term, he is pushing for an agreement among member states on refugee quotas. But, in the long run, he supports greater harmonisation of asylum systems, or even the creation of a central EU asylum agency.

Macron also hopes to reconcile opposite ideas with respect to the euro. While pushing for reforms within France that will reduce the risks of financial contagion, he is also calling for a common eurozone budget and finance ministry to make the monetary union more resilient to future shocks.

Beyond these areas, Macron wants to boost innovation in the digital sphere, by establishing a European version of the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. At the same time, he wants to protect national sovereignty in the digital age through regulations and a common fiscal approach.

The second Ricoeurian concept underpinning Macron’s worldview is the idea of a European ‘refoundation’. Whereas the first wave of European integration was largely limited to economics, Macron now wants to focus on politics and culture, starting with the European Parliament election next year.

When Macron looks at the EU political stage, he sees stale cartel parties that are just as ripe for disruption as France’s mainstream parties were in 2017. For example, he has mocked the centre-right European People’s Party, asking how any parliamentary group can call itself Christian Democratic when it includes the parties of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Macron also recognises that the decline of the centre left in Europe—along with the impending post-Brexit exodus of UK Labour Party MPs—has left a large void that needs to be filled. To that end, he has considered creating a Europe-wide ‘En Marche !’ movement that could nominate its own Spitzenkandidat to the European Commission presidency. In fact, there has already been some talk of positioning European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager for that role.

Initially, the Macronistes had planned to recruit defectors from other party groups, and then ally with the left-leaning Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. But the creation of a European En Marche ! could mean that they will try to edge out the ALDE, too. At any rate, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will insist on a conservative candidate for the Commission presidency, so Macron might try to use that as a bargaining chip for concessions on other issues.

Much remains to be seen, but it is already clear that Macron has brought a new kind of thinking to European politics. In his view, sovereignty in Europe can really be exercised only at the level of the EU. He is taking France from the Fifth Republic to a Sixth Republic that is no longer strictly franco-francaise, but truly European.

Deep divisions within Europe are increasingly threatening the values upon which the European project of ‘ever closer union’ is based. In 2015, during the refugee crisis, many commentators saw a divide between German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Willkommenskultur (welcoming culture) and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán’s vision of ethnic purity: a Western Europe of bridges versus an Eastern Europe of walls.

But another threat to European unity comes from within individual countries. In Germany, talks to form a center-left, center-right coalition have broken down. In the Netherlands, it took Prime Minister Mark Rutte 208 days to form a new government after elections in March. In the United Kingdom, the political establishment is in disarray over Brexit. And in Poland, white nationalists and neo-Nazis recently staged a massive march through the streets of Warsaw.

Which gulfs are wider—those between member states or those within them? The answer to that question matters a great deal. If Europe’s biggest problem is that it is divided along national borders, then liberal-leaning countries like France and Germany could try to change the balance of power within increasingly illiberal countries.

Every EU country agreed to a set of liberal-democratic standards (part of the so-called Copenhagen Criteria) when it joined the club. But, over time, the governments of Hungary and Poland have decided that they no longer want to abide by the rules. One solution could be to create a smaller club with better benefits. Countries that wish to join this privileged inner circle would have to agree to a new—or rather, the original—set of rules; and countries that break the rules would be left out. There would finally be a cost to breaching EU standards.

But this solution could work only if the biggest problem is the divide between member states. As for the divisions within member states, consider Germany. After the federal election in September, Merkel embarked on a fascinating experiment, in which she tried to unite her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its more nativist sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), and the left-wing Greens.

Merkel is a talented negotiator, and far better suited to write about ‘the art of the deal’ than others we won’t bother mentioning. But it remains to be seen if she can heal the divisions in her own country.

While the Greens would like to uphold the Willkommenskultur, the CSU’s position on migration is closer to that of the Visegrád Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). In fact, at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015, the CSU hosted Orbán at one of its party conferences.

Moreover, while the Greens are European federalists who support greater economic solidarity with Greece and Italy, the FDP channels the fiscal discipline of the Finns, the Dutch, and German Swabians. They are staunchly opposed to deeper European economic integration.

Many hoped that Merkel would succeed in forging a ‘Jamaica’ coalition (named after the colours of that country’s flag). But, in the end, the experiment failed. The FDP abandoned the talks out of frustration that, as its leader Christian Lindner put it, ‘The four discussion partners have no common vision for modernization of the country or common basis of trust.’

Even without a Jamaica coalition, Germany still has a stable liberal majority in the Bundestag. The same cannot be said for the rest of the EU, where almost every other member state is now a ‘50–50 society’: half cosmopolitan, half communitarian. In these countries, the government at any given time represents whichever side won the latest round in an ongoing culture war.

In the UK, for example, 52% of voters opted to leave the EU. The country is now hurtling towards an isolated state of provincialism and xenophobia, but its leaders keep telling the public that Britain will be better off on its own. For those who believe it, the fact that the UK will lose a say in EU decisions affecting its economic environment doesn’t seem to matter.

France, on the other hand, has an energetic new pro-European president, Emmanuel Macron, who is committed to preparing his country for the years ahead. And yet France is not much more cosmopolitan than Britain. In the first round of the presidential election this spring, the nativist campaigns of Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan collectively won 46% of the vote—almost as much as the UK’s ‘Leave’ campaign.

Clearly, the EU is a society both of states and of citizens. That means intra-national divides are as important as the diplomatic spats between countries.

Earlier this year, a Brookings Institution report tried to determine if Europe is an ‘optimal political area’, a concept borrowed from economist Robert Mundell’s theory of ‘optimal currency areas’. The report concluded that cultural and institutional differences between EU countries have not changed much over the past three decades of European integration. But it also found that the divisions between countries are far smaller than the differences within countries. Or in other words, on the issue of freedom of movement, there is greater polarisation between London and the British Midlands than between the UK and Poland.

Creating a flexible or multi-tiered Europe could solve some short-term problems, by bringing together coalitions of the willing to address specific issues. But it could also introduce new dangers. After all, most European countries, regardless of what tier they are on, will still be 50–50 societies that could opt in or out of deeper integration with a single election or referendum. In the future, one cannot rule out the possibility that Le Pen will be elected president of France, or that the anti-EU Five Star Movement will come to power in Italy. By the same token, the more moderate Civic Platform might return to power in Poland.

Confronting the intra-societal challenge to the European project will not be easy. It is a deep, generational problem that goes to the heart of national identity, history and geography. No quick institutional fix can solve a problem like that.

As military cooperation between France and Australia increases, the French Navy is stepping up its presence in the Asia–Pacific region to protect its trade routes and demonstrate the importance it places on international maritime law.

The chief of the French Navy, Admiral Christophe Prazuck, tells The Strategist that the government-to-government agreement for the French company Naval Group to design 12 submarines for the Royal Australian Navy signals much closer cooperation for decades to come.

‘A key reason for our involvement in the region is our new strategic relationship with Australia. We are profoundly linked to the Australian Navy. This contract will link our two countries for decades. For 30, 40, 50 years our links will be tight.’

Prazuck, who served in submarines, on surface warships, as a special forces officer and as an oceanographer, says defence cooperation between France and Australia will be enhanced by the submarine project but it won’t be limited to submarine operations. ‘Our road map is not limited to submarines. It includes environmental surveys, oceanography, hydrography.’

There’s already increasingly close cooperation on anti-submarine warfare, submarine strategy and amphibious operations and more visits to Australian ports by French warships, Prazuck says. ‘We’re sending to Australia our newest class of ships. In the past such visits have been made by patrol boats arriving from France’s island territories. Now we are sending here our most sophisticated pieces of equipment to work with our Australian friends.’

France has always had a strong interest in the Asia–Pacific, Prazuck says. ‘The centre of gravity of the world is moving towards your region. Much of our trade is now with Asia and the Indo-Pacific. We’re not so far from home because we have 1.6 million French people living in the Pacific, in New Caledonia, Polynesia and expats in the area. So we are a country of the Pacific region. We live in the region’, he says.

‘Your region of the world is pretty dynamic’, Prazuck says. ‘Each country in the region is getting the tools it needs to protect its security and prosperity.’ He says France is closely following the tensions in the South China Sea. France is concerned that the international court ruling on the disputed territories has been ignored. ‘This is of great concern to us. We are following it with great attention.’

France is translating those concerns into actions by increasing its naval presence in the area, Prazuck says.

‘What’s happening in the region with the weakening of the law of the sea is important to us. We have been sailing in the area and particularly in the disputed areas to make our point as a maritime country.’

The most recent French defence white paper raises two key security concerns, Prazuck says. The first is the opportunities provided to terrorists when governance collapses and nations become failed states. The other is the extent to which global and regional powers are increasing their arsenals, especially at sea.

‘The strategic landscape is moving rapidly’, Prazuck says. ‘China, for example, built in the last four years the equivalent of the entire French Navy. It’s not a threat, but the landscape has changed and it’s changing very fast. It’s changing faster at sea than on land. With freedom of navigation you can move your assets more easily. You can show your power more easily and you can put pressure on the sea lines of communication and have a strong influence without moving out of your country.’

A more recently emerged threat is North Korea.

Admiral Prazuck now has an Australian officer, a captain, on his staff in Paris to help build the relationship. ‘Having an Australian officer 20 metres from my office will help me to have better interaction with the Australian Navy’, he says. ‘I have a British officer, an American officer, a German officer and an Australian officer. Our four main partners.’

The French military has regularly worked closely with Australian and New Zealand forces to deal with natural disasters in the region.

Prazuck says France needs a strong naval capability because it’s the world’s number two maritime nation with the second largest exclusive economic zone (EEZ). ‘Australia is the third. If you add all the EEZs around our islands, we have 11 million square kilometres—the equivalent of the US and Mexico. It’s a huge piece of water.’

He says that, as a former submariner, he’s sure the conventionally powered Shortfin Barracuda being designed for the RAN will be a very effective submarine that will meet Australia’s needs. ‘I have no doubt about that.’

The question of whether Australia should have nuclear submarines is a political and strategic issue rather than a technical issue, he says.

He says France has been building submarines at the rate of one per year, on average, since 1899. Last year France’s six nuclear-powered attack submarines spent a total of 1,000 days at sea, the highest availability rate since they were launched 30 years ago.

‘We have great confidence in Naval Group’s ability to build the submarines we need and to maintain them’, Prazuck says.