The International Organisation of Francophone countries (OIF) recently held a summit in Dakar. While the debate inside the conference centre in the Senegalese capital over who should be the new head of the 57-nation group was intense, TV news crews found few outside who were interested in the meeting. Including observer countries, the OIF represents 900 million people, which sounds impressive, but when an Al Jazeera reporter talked to locals this was the typical response: “Frankly we don’t understand what La Francophonie is. We’re not paying attention. We’ve heard people talking about it, but nobody has explained what it is.”
Such apathy is not surprising given that the OIF, based around a core of French-speaking countries, is essentially an effort by France to continue to project the great power status that it lost in 1940, after the capitulation to the Germans. That was the reality, as the well-known Parisian commentator Andre Geraud acknowledged seven years later. “As a factor in power politics, then,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine, “France counts for very little”.
Read Full Article »