French Interventions in Africa

Reluctant Multilateralism

Stefano Recchia, Thierry Tardy, Stefano Recchia, Thierry Tardy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000223811
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

This book explores France's African intervention policy and related legitimation strategies through the United Nations, the European Union, and various ad hoc multilateral frameworks. France's enduring ability to project military power on the African continent and influence political events there has been central to its self-perception as a major power. However, since the end of the cold war, France's paternalistic interference has been increasingly questioned, not least by African audiences. This has produced a gradual and somewhat reluctant turn to multilateralism on the part of French leaders. Drawing on in-depth case studies of recent French intervention policy, this edited volume critically assesses France's efforts to reassure critics by securing multilateral endorsements; share burdens and liabilities through collective implementation; and re-affirm its status as a major power by spearheading complex missions.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies.

France’s interventions in Mali and the Sahel: A historical institutionalist perspective

Tony Chafer

, Gordon D. Cumming

and Roel van der Velde

ABSTRACT

France’s interventions in Mali and the wider Sahel appear to mark a new departure in French military policy in terms of the approach to multilateralism adopted, the regionalisation of the response, and the levels of violence deployed. Yet how ‘new’ is this approach, when set against the historical backdrop of French military interventions in Africa? Should it be seen as a modified version – an adaptation – of the new type of multilateral engagement that emerged in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide? Using a historical institutionalist lens, employing the notions of critical junctures, ‘layering’, and ‘drift’, this article briefly sets out the unilateral approach that marked French military policy in Africa prior to 1994 before going on to analyse the multilateral approach and associated path-dependent practices that emerged after the Rwandan genocide. Drawing on elite interviews in Europe, the US and Africa, the article shows that, while France’s engagement in the Sahel is characterised by an ostensibly novel multilateral approach, it does in fact combine new and old norms, ideas and practices.

France’s military interventions in Mali and the western Sahel since 2013 appear on the face of it to mark a new departure in French military policy. In promoting a regional response to African conflict and insecurity in conjunction with African partners and using levels of violence not hitherto deployed by a Western intervenor in sub-Saharan Africa, France appears to be adopting a fresh approach to multilateralism. Yet how ‘new’ is this approach, when set against the historical backdrop of unilateral French military interventions in Africa since 1960 and viewed in the context of the policy of multilateralism that took root in the years following the 1994 Rwandan genocide? This question will be central to this article.

There is a large literature that draws attention to continuity and change in French Africa policy.¹ Much of this scholarship looks for changes to the political, economic and security dimensions of France’s policy south of the Sahara, homing in on recurrent patterns but also adjustments within the so-called Françafrique, that is, the close, often corrupt relationship between France and its former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa that was extended in the 1970s to Belgium’s former colonies.² Yet the question of how far France’s multilateral approach in the western Sahel is genuinely new remains unanswered in the academic literature to date.³ With the exception of Simòn and Powell,⁴ most analyses focus on the Malian case without setting it within wider historic trends in French military intervention. Some commentators point to patterns of continuity and the reactive nature of France’s approach in Mali, with authors portraying these interventions variously as ‘misadventures’, as a product of France’s colonial past and post-colonial presence in the region, and as a pragmatic decision influenced by the perception that regional security was at stake.⁵ Finally, while there have been attempts in the literature to identify drivers behind the mobilisation of French missions – for example Henke emphasises the agency of ‘intervention entrepreneurs’,⁶ while Erforth explores the role of decision-makers’ psychological environment in influencing French intervention practices⁷ – to date there have been no attempts to provide a theoretically underpinned understanding of the patterns of continuity and change underlying the mobilisation, since January 2013, of French-backed military missions in the Sahel, specifically Operation Serval (2013) and Operation Barkhane (2014).

In this article we move away from a dichotomous to a more fluid understanding of continuity and change by examining these phenomena through the prism of historical institutionalism (HI). HI is especially valuable as an analytical lens here, as it is concerned with ‘tracing processes through time, … analysing institutional configurations and contexts’,⁸ and is adept at embedding new or seemingly new policy directions in a longue durée perspective. We therefore propose a novel use of the HI framework to explore French military policy in the Sahel against the backdrop of established and evolving practices in Africa over the long term. We begin by showing how France’s unilateral approach to military intervention after political independence gave way, in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, to more multilateral forms of engagement. We then explore the newness of France’s engagement in the Sahel against the backdrop of these established and evolving practices in French military policy. Drawing on 30 elite interviews in France, Belgium, Germany, Mali and the US, we show how France has not abandoned the unilateral model entirely, resulting in a form of hybrid intervention that represents a contradictory mix of new and old elements. Our HI framework enables us to show how this melding of new and old is possible and how it has generated its own path dependence, thanks to the persistence of certain practices and the presence of latent ideas that have long existed within French military thinking.

A historical institutionalist framework

Before proceeding, it is worth clarifying our aims, terminology and conceptual framework. First, we define path dependence as the tendency for policies and practices to develop their own self-reinforcing logic, due to the costs of changing direction or reverting to previous practices. Another key term is multilateralism. Sarah Kreps has suggested that, for an intervention to be multilateral, it must fulfil both procedural and operational criteria. In terms of procedure, authorisation should be given by the UN or another international organisation prior to the intervention and subject to that organisation having a formal voting mechanism. Operational multilateralism relates to the number of states participating and the power distribution between them; for example, if an individual actor is able disproportionately to influence or drive decision-making, then this may affect how far it can be considered genuinely multilateral.⁹

Concerning our conceptual framework, we are not arguing that HI can explain military interventions, rather that it can, through its simultaneous focus on old and new ideas and practices, shed light on frequently overlooked aspects of policy change in the military sphere that underlie the military mobilisation process. In examining this process, HI may adopt a rationalist approach (focusing on choices that actors make) or a sociological approach (focusing on actors’ values) to understanding path dependence. In this article we do not side with either rational (positivist) or sociological (constructivist) approaches to HI but draw on both to show how the choices that actors make and the values that underpin those choices generate path-dependent policies and practices. In this context it is worth noting that institutions can be formal (structures) or informal (rules, norms, established practices) and that both play a key role in shaping the new path dependence.

As regards HI itself, this was initially used to analyse continuity and change in domestic politics,¹⁰ but its explanatory value in the international arena is now increasingly acknowledged.¹¹ A distinction can be drawn between HI scholars studying major institutional change as a result of exogenous shocks and those studying ongoing, endogenously driven, incremental change.¹² The first strand includes scholars who attach particular importance to ‘critical junctures’, key moments driven by external events that provide an opening for significant change and generate a new institutional configuration.¹³ Institutional structures are then said to adapt, creating a new institutional configuration which, once the initial changes take effect, follow a path-dependent, self-reinforcing logic where there are increasing returns associated with continuing down this path and significant costs (which may be material or reputational) associated with going into reverse.¹⁴ We argue that the mid-1990s represent just such a ‘critical juncture’ in French Africa policy that has had a profound and lasting impact on French military interventionism on the continent.

As to the second strand in HI scholarship, this focuses on explaining gradual, endogenously driven processes of institutional change. As Mahoney and Thelen state: ‘Much of the empirical work on path dependence … has been organised around explaining the persistence of particular institutional patterns or outcomes’.¹⁵ In seeking to account for path dependencies that emerge following exogenously induced major changes, historical institutionalists focus on the ‘stickiness’, or self-reinforcing, nature of institutions, linked in particular to the cost implications of, and risk of reputational damage from, shifting away from the new path.¹⁶ Yet, as Mahoney and Thelen point out: ‘Once created, institutions often change in subtle and gradual ways over time. Although less dramatic than abrupt and wholesale transformations, these slow and piecemeal changes can be equally consequential … for shaping substantive political outcomes’.¹⁷

Recent studies have thus turned to endogenous mechanisms to help us understand incremental changes in institutional development, since it is increasingly acknowledged that, within any path dependence, gradual change does nonetheless take place.¹⁸ They focus on the ‘small trial-and-error steps instead of big institutional choices’ that lead to gradual changes, as actors engage in ongoing efforts to adapt to a multiplicity of often unintended effects and unanticipated events.¹⁹ Moreover, rules, norms and practices are rarely devoid of ambiguities, are subject to internal challenge and may be enforced to a greater or lesser extent. This provides opportunities to undermine or ‘bend’ existing norms and practices. As Streeck and Thelen put it: ‘Rather than big changes in responses to big shocks, we will be looking for incremental change with transformative results’.²⁰

A further point that Mahoney and Thelen make is that modes of institutional change do not necessarily entail simply the removal of pre-existing rules, norms and practices and their replacement by new ones.²¹ Thus ‘layering’ may occur, meaning that ‘new’ ways of doing and thinking are introduced alongside or on top of existing ones. A second possibility is the occurrence of ‘drift’, which results from changes in the aim or underpinning logic of the policies themselves, meaning that the rule or norm no longer has the same impact.²² What each of these modes of institutional change has in common is that they build on existing rules, norms and practices, which are not radically altered but either complemented (layered) or reinterpreted (drift). One consequence of this and of the persistence of mindsets and latent ideas is that the new institutional configuration may draw upon the ideas and practices associated with the previous institutional configuration, prior to the ‘critical juncture’.

These two approaches to HI are not necessarily opposed to each other.²³ Thus, our focus will be both on exogenously driven critical junctures and on incremental change within the new path-dependent course associated with multilateralism, with particular attention given to mechanisms of layering and drift.²⁴

While historical institutionalists would not claim that these mechanisms explain institutional change, they would argue that they enable us to understand better how they nudge forward endogenous processes of incremental change over time, following exogenously driven radical change.²⁵ By studying the contexts in which they operate, as new challenges and opportunities emerge, HI can also make a significant contribution to understanding the more fine-grained forms of change in international relations.²⁶ Thus, we argue that HI can help us understand how, in response to the new, post-Rwanda context, the adoption of a multilateral approach, which has been at the forefron...