At the present time, the press is conducting a campaign against the Chinese; it is howling about the savage yellow race and its hostility towards civilisation…. Journalists who crawl on their bellies before the government and the money-bags are straining every nerve to rouse the hatred of the people against China.
Lenin, What is to be Done? (1900)
The President of France, Emanuel Macron, denounced the “new imperialism” of China and the U.S. Empire in an address during the first official visit of a French head of state to Vanuatu on Thursday, July 27. Macron’s comments referred to the emerging cold war between the People’s Republic of China and the United States-led Western world-imperialist axis.
What imperialism could the president of the colonialist Republic of France possibly denounce?
France conquered vast swathes of North America and several Caribbean islands. France’s “first” colonial empire receded after a series of humiliating defeats in 18th-century inter-colonialist wars. Its remaining possessions were rocked by the anti-colonial legislation of the French revolutionary Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and the anti-colonial rebellion of Toussaint L’Ouverture on the island of Saint-Domingue — what is now Haiti —only for the “second” empire to resurge in the 19th century, with the conquest of most of the Maghreb, much of west and north-central Africa, Madagascar, southeast Asia, and — not coincidentally — many Pacific islands.
At its height, France’s empire was the world’s second-largest, trailing Britain.
As France’s empire fell apart in the decades following the Second World War, it shifted from “classic,” direct, colonialism to neocolonialism, recolonizing newly independent countries indirectly through finance. During the Cold War, France orchestrated assassinations and coups to overthrow several anti-colonial leaders whose programs of independent economic development, self-reliance, and political nonalignment threatened French hegemony.
For example, in 1987 the “republican” French government sponsored a coup d’etat of the former French colony of Burkina Faso to overthrow and murder Thomas Sankara, a Marxist and Pan-Africanist who led his country toward self-reliance as its first president.
Today, fourteen African countries use either the West African franc or Central African franc, currencies pegged to the euro — keeping these countries dependent on the European Central Bank and hyper-exploited by the European Union.
France has never paid reparations to its former colonies. On the contrary, it has extracted colonial “debts.” Haiti, for example, was forced to pay France as much as $30 billion in “exchange” for its freedom.
France’s last formal colonies, including several Caribbean and Pacific islands, were folded into so-called “Overseas France,” ruled from Paris with limited autonomy. Today, “Overseas France” has a combined population of nearly three million people.
Vanuatu, formerly known as the “New Hebrides,” won independence from Britain and France in 1980. France doggedly refused to grant independence to the nearby Pacific islands of so-called “New Caledonia,” despite the rise of an enduring popular independence movement; today, New Caledonia remains a French overseas territory. France would repeatedly rebuke Vanuatu for supporting New Caledonia’s independence struggle throughout the 1980’s.
Macron, like all imperialist politicians, is blatantly fork-tongued. He proudly leads one the very “new imperialist” powers he hypocritically denounces.
The French president isn’t serious about countering imperialism; he is its agent. His statements should be taken for what they are: the capering of a U.S. running-dog dancing to the tune of the organ grinder in Washington. What tune? The Biden regime has been fomenting war fever and building support for hawkish anti-Chinese policies since he took office. As the Eurozone finds itself yoked ever more inexorably to the U.S. Empire — one of the results of the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine — its contemptuous little imperialists fall in line behind their leader. Macron isn’t complaining about a “new imperialism,” he’s proposing it.
France will never willingly relinquish its colonies. Like other humiliated junior-partners in U.S.-led Western imperialism, the French capitalists are threatened by China’s meteoric rise and the world’s emerging multipolarity. Two of France’s neocolonies — Burkina Faso and Mali — already seek to extricate themselves from French control, and are bettering their relations with the West’s enemy, Russia.
Despite Macron’s efforts, history will keep marching all the same. Imperialism will continue to suffer interminable crises and decline. South–South cooperation will only strengthen. And in time, through struggle and solidarity, the wretched of the Earth will overcome their oppressors and reclaim their freedom.
