The French Antilles and the French overseas in general due to a series of social uprisings are active social volcanoes, with successive eruptions threatening France’s strategic planning.
France’s overseas territories are a total of 13 regions located in the Caribbean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and Antarctica. These lands were annexed to France in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, respectively, characterizing those times as slavery and colonialism.
The Overseas France
Today, most of these regions are provinces of the French Republic, legally equal to the corresponding provinces in the French hinterland located in mainland Europe, and some of them enjoy more or less autonomy.
The total population of these overseas areas is 2.8 million, just 4% of the French population with these areas making up 18% of the territory and 97% of the exclusive economic zone of the French state.
Their control provides France with military and naval bases in all the world’s oceans, with the exception of the Arctic, and supports the country’s role as a world power, a permanent member of the Security Council.
Guadeloupe and Martinique
In Guadeloupe, young activists set fire to roadblocks, blocked roads and some of them opened fire on police. Ten members of the class were injured, five of them by bullets. The situation in Martinique is similar, with the general strike reminiscent of that of 2009 which lasted a month and a half. The reason for the new social unrest in overseas territories (after those in French Guiana, Mayotte and Reunion) was the opposition of a portion of the population to the mandatory vaccination of hospitals and firefighters, under the threat of dismissal.
However, the causes of social discontent are deeper. The people of these areas may be legally equal to the citizens of European France, but the reality they experience every day is very different.
In the French Antilles one in five people is unemployed (in youth this percentage is even higher) while one in three lives below the poverty line. Lack of drinking water makes living conditions dramatic for many, while local production is very limited and the overseas areas live mainly on subsidies from the French state that can no longer cover everything.
To these problems was added the great scandal of the chlodercone pesticide used for decades in banana plantations, polluting rivers, seas and water reservoirs for centuries and affecting nine out of ten people in those areas. As a result, the social uprising of recent weeks has taken on an openly anti-French, anti-colonial and anti-systemic character, as the French now recognize.
At a time when public security issues are almost monopolizing public debate ahead of next spring’s presidential election, images of violence and chaos from the former colonies only do not work in favor of the outgoing President.
In addition to ostentatiously paying tribute to police officers, the French Foreign Minister Sebastian Lecorny attempted to break up the anti-government front in the Antilles with two concessions:
On the one hand, he extended until the beginning of 2022 the deadline for the vaccination of sensitive categories, on the other hand, he proposed to Guadeloupe and Martinique the prospect of a certain autonomy, which the local elites had not even demanded. Especially his second proposal met with several reactions in France as at the time it was formulated France was struggling to prevent the secession of another autonomous region of New Caledonia.
The Kanak tribe
In this geostrategically important Southwest Pacific Archipelago, where the slave trade flourished, the indigenous Kanak tribe repeatedly revolted against French colonialism. In 1999, the Noumea agreements paved the way for a political solution to the constitutional problem by envisaging three referendums on the question of independence. In the first of what happened in 2018, “no” prevailed with 56.7%.
Two years later in the second attempt of the supporters of independence, the difference was reduced and the “no” prevailed with 53.3%. The third and final post is scheduled for December 12th. The separatist party had high hopes that it would prevail, but the pandemic turned the tide as it curtailed the election campaign, while medical and vaccination assistance from France was crucial to tackling the crisis.
A possible secession of New Caledonia would mean a chance that the Archipelago would be closely linked to China, on whose economy its survival depends (please read the analysis entitled “Will China acquire the French Archipelago of New Caledonia?“). That would be a major geopolitical defeat for France in the Pacific just months after the announcement of the AUKUS agreement between the United States, Britain and Australia.
