August 7, 2020 - 3:00pm
No more dramatic a vision of our returning age of empires can be imagined than the spectacle, yesterday, of President Macron’s triumphal tour of a devastated Beirut. As desperate Lebanese pressed around him, calling for the overthrow of their own rulers, and even pleading for the return of the French mandate, Europe’s most important statesman seized the moment, hugging crying women — in a city where Lebanon’s leaders would be lynched, if they attempted the same itinerary — and assuring the crowd that he would propose a new constitutional settlement for the country, brought to the brink of collapse by corruption.
Whether or not it is in the capacity of any European power to fix the country’s many problems remains to be seen. Since independence from France in 1943, Lebanon’s combustible mix of religious groups jostled together within the same borders has hampered any prospect of stable governance. The power-sharing arrangement imposed at the end of the country’s 15-year long civil war has had the unintended consequence of enabling kleptocratic mismanagement by ethnic and sectarian warlords.
But then, perhaps France and Europe have no other choice than to engage with the country’s problems before Lebanon slides into civil war once again. Europe left the problem of Syria to the regional powers of Iran and Russia, the Gulf kingdoms and Turkey, with the tragic and destabilising consequences we see now. Hundreds of French civilians have been slaughtered over the past 5 years by fellow citizens with no prior connection to Syria but who were nevertheless inspired by the jihadist groups feeding parasitically on the country’s chaos. The refugee waves that followed both Syria’s collapse and that of Libya have also upended European politics, with Macron representing the bulwark of the continent’s centre-right against populist challengers. With his new Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin darkly warning recently of the risk of civil conflict at home in France, the necessity of forestalling yet another civil war in France’s near abroad seems clear.
It’s ironic that Macron can walk more freely in Beirut than he can in his own capital. The Gilets Jaunes revolt which threatened to unseat his rule may have dampened, for now, but as the most significant and sustained bout of violent protest in Western Europe for many decades, it highlights that his reign is not fully secure. Nevertheless, on the back of his stunningly successful EU recovery deal and of France’s growing role as a major strategic power in the Eastern Mediterranean for the first time since the Second World War, ‘Jupiter’ is clearly in the ascendant.
His performance in Beirut’s devastated streets yesterday was a powerful statement of the return of the grand, symbolic factor in European politics after decades of, essentially, rule by uninspired, ageing HR managers. It’s worth revisiting Macron’s 2017 interview with Der Speigel, where he set out his philosophy of governance:
What happens over the next few months and years, in Lebanon now as well as France, will reveal the viability or not of Macron’s historic vision.
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SubscribeThe thing that strikes me is that accusations of Empire are useful when it suits but the fact is that some places appear to be better off under colonial rule by a civilised western power than they are by tribal warlords and crazed religious zealots. All cultures are not equal. If they were traffic between them would not be as one way. What’s the difference between French colonisation of yesteryear and the colonisation of Christian Lebanon by Muslim radicals leading to civil war??
Perhaps they could do a job swap. Macron runs Lebanon for a while and variety of Lebanese crooks run France.
It wouldn’t make much difference either way.
Actually it would.
That is why France is France!
Really? Could you expand slightly on that?
A striking deployment of straightforward, factual information, in a way that neatly bypasses questions about European involvement in former colonies ” and indeed, about empire itself. It renders such whataboutery as impotent as it is irrelevant to Lebanon’s present, terrible situation.
I had always thought that, if one was forced to choose between two models for empire, the British one was inherently superior to the French, largely because of the latter’s paternalistic mission civilisatrice and its centralising inclinations. But events of recent decades have given me cause for thought about my suppositions.
Granted that the British have had notable successes in helping out when a former colony was in trouble ” notably in Sierra Leone in the 1990s ” but it seems to me that France has been quicker to jump up. Look at several interventions in former African colonies over the last 30 years.
OK. Those interventions have been fuelled partly by the way that France, after independence, kept many of those countries tied in one way or another to their former masters. But this article shows another side to that attachment. Jupiter has indeed landed.
It reminds me of an incident I experienced over twenty years ago, at a meal where a conversation broke out about what was happening in Pakistan. That was during the mid- or late-1990s. I was sitting next to an elderly engineer of Pakistani origin who, I guess, would have been in his early 20s when the state of Pakistan was established in 1947.
As the quite animated conversation went on around us, he turned to me and said “It was better when the British were there.” He spoke very quietly, with a twinkle in the eye. But he spoke in utter seriousness. If Mr Roussinos’s account is to be believed ” and I don’t see why it should not be believed, some Lebanese are now feeling the same as my distinguished Pakistani friend.
Maybe Jordan, the Dominican Republic, Singapore, or Botswana could get involved helping other nations. Harder to call it “European colonialism” when [well-governed] non-European states are doing the heavy work!
A perfect opportunity for the whites to refuse to use their ‘privilege’ to be ‘saviours’ of the rest, and then to demonstrate what happens when they don’t.
I was amused by your remark “since Independence from France in 1943″. That ‘Independence’ was achieved thanks to the British Army giving the French a ” damned good thrashing ” on two occasions, in 1941 to the Vichy French, and then again in 1945 to the Free French.
Both campaigns incited WinstonChurchill KG, to make some fairly vitriolic remarks about De Gaulle, which were never to be forgiven or forgotten, whilst President Truman stated, rather more succinctly, “Those French ought to be castrated”. A contemporary French politician described the situation as the worst crisis since Fashoda.
French mandate rule, from 1920 both in the Lebanon, and neighbouring Syria, had been at unmitigated disaster from the very beginning when the first French viceroy, arriving at the tomb of Saladin in Damascus ejaculated “Saladin, nous sommes ici”, whilst simultaneously kicking the tomb.Not a good start.
Given such a background it is surely ironic that Macron now seeks to curry favour with the unfortunate Lebanese.
I was amused by your remark “since Independence from France in 1943″. That ‘Independence’ was achieved thanks to the British Army giving the French a ” damned good thrashing ” on two occasions, in 1941 to the Vichy French, and then again in 1945 to the Free French.
Both campaigns incited WinstonChurchill KG, to make some fairly vitriolic remarks about De Gaulle, which were never to be forgiven or forgotten, whilst President Truman stated, rather more succinctly, “Those French ought to be emasculated “.A contemporary French politician described the situation as the worst crisis since Fashoda.
French mandate rule, from 1920 both in the Lebanon, and neighbouring Syria, had been at unmitigated disaster from the very beginning when the first French viceroy, arriving at the tomb of Saladin in Damascus yelled, “Saladin, nous sommes ici”, whilst simultaneously kicking the tomb.Not a good start.
Given such a background it is surely ironic that Macron now seeks to curry favour with the unfortunate Lebanese.