Post-colonial Governance on a French Island

The study of governance is often divided between formal state institutions and informal types of authority. Some scholars focus on state institutions: engineers, bureaucrats and politicians. Others concentrate on so-called “traditional” authority: landed relations and family networks, usually seen as motors for corrupting state resources. Instead of such divisions, this dissertation examines how different modes of governance interacted, to rethink conventional understandings of how state authority works. The peculiar modern history of Réunion Island – a sugar-growing French colony in the Indian Ocean whose multiracial inhabitants were French citizens from 1870, which became a French Department in 1946, and is now the only European Union region in the Southern Hemisphere – creates an opportune site for considering how different ruling practices interact. From 1946 all French laws were to apply in Réunion Island, where Creole agricultural workers were dominated by white landowning minority who also ran the local government. Through historical archive research and ethnographic fieldwork the dissertation examines how Metropolitan French and Réunionnais politicians, civil servants, property owners, landlords, tenants and families claimed and reconfigured French social rights in rural areas, shantytown and social housing neighborhoods in Réunion’s capital St Denis. The dissertation demonstrates how the underlying logics of Réunionnais governance, based on landlord-tenant obligation, reshaped the French administration in Réunion, which became a participant in landlord-tenant relations rather than assimilating Réunion to French forms of governance. The governance of social legislation in Réunion is an important case study combining histories of socialism, the demise of colonial empires and the rise of state interventions overseas. The dissertation extends conventional interpretations of French colonialism by examining how the project of French social rights for colonial political loyalty endured in Overseas France - beyond the 1962 Algerian defeat when France is considered to have “decolonized.” French welfare eventually transformed class and racial divides in Réunion, enabling Creole descendants of Africans, Malagasy, Indians and Europeans to create meanings about being French in Overseas France and eventually to appropriate the governance of French welfare systems themselves. The dissertation thus provides a new, comparative overseas perspective for understanding racial difference and social equality in contemporary France.

Mauritius is a small island with a multi-ethnic population in the Indian Ocean. Starting with the Europeans who settled first on the uninhabited island, Mauritius and its inhabitants have experienced events similar to societies elsewhere in the (colonial) world. One of the most significant events it witnessed in the last century was independence in 1968, this also marking the end of a regime favourable to the island's white colonial elite, the Franco-Mauritians. Many observers around the time of independence were critical about the prospects for Mauritius, as the island was overpopulated, rife with ethnic tension and relying on one single crop, sugar-cane (see Naipaul 1972; Eriksen 1998). Mauritius, though certainly not without its problem, has fared remarkably well over the more than four decades that followed independence, while the Franco-Mauritians have also relatively successfully maintained their elite position in the postcolonial period. The island is often considered a success story, transforming from an island with little hope to a middle-income country -especially from the 1980s onwards. Deborah Bräutigam (1999) refers to it as the 'Mauritian miracle', with a prosperous economy and a stable political system. Certainly not all Mauritians have benefited and many remain in poverty, but much larger numbers are advantaged by the island's economic wealth, and income inequality has diminished since independence (Sandbrook et al. 2007: 126, 127). 1 Many have tried to explain this success, though in-depth analyses of the role and position of a white elite in a postcolonial setting are largely absent.

The territorial dispute which opposes the Union of Comoros and the Republic of France over the island of Mayotte is a conflict of 42 years, old enough to see some progress to its solution, if not, at least the determination of both States to solve this " fraternal dispute ". Or, except for the " fanfare " played by the French government and their bad faith, there is not a single step promising the end of this Franco-Comorian dispute. Many propositions have been given to the French authorities by the Comorian side, in vain, and the issue of Mayotte still getting worse over the years. In fact, the only progress that one can notice here is the consistency of a " Mayotte française " engaged by France, in defiance of international law and the Comorian sovereignty over this island. Consequently, the State of Comoros does not have much manoeuvres than to abandon its old policy of " deaf dialogue " and seize the UN babies to settle the question of Mayotte. The purpose of this article is to analyse the role of the UN babies to end solve this problem.

Itinerario, 2005

The Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2013

From a French perspective, French Polynesia is often described as an overseas territory that has been virtually decolonized through the granting of statutes of autonomy. In stark contrast, pro-independence local political parties still consider the country a colony and have successfully lobbied for a process of decolonization under United Nations oversight. This article assesses these competing claims through an analysis of the political evolution of the territory since World War II. The analysis shows that French Polynesia has never been genuinely decolonized. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the French government arbitrarily pulled the territory out of all available international or French domestic decolonization processes, subjecting it to an anachronistic restoration of colonial authority that included the arrest and long-term imprisonment of its major political leader and a series of other unusually undemocratic measures. This led to, and culminated in, the construction of a nuclear testing facility, with tremendous environmental, health, and economic consequences during the following three decades. Later, after giving in to local protests demanding autonomy, France misused that concept not only to cover up a de-facto continuity of colonial rule but also to create a corrupt authoritarian local government favorable to French interests. Recent actions taken and attitudes demonstrated by the French government and its representatives, including repeated arbitrary modifications of the rules of local politics and meddling therein in order to secure their favorites in power, have shown that French colonialism in French Polynesia is alive and well. An international campaign for the decolonization of the country is thus clearly warranted. keywords: Tahiti, French Polynesia, colonialism, neocolonialism, autonomy, decolonization, self-determination.

The Contemporary Pacific, 2014

In their recent book The colonial machine, James McClellan III and François Regourd detail how ancien regime France’s government marshalled science in the service of colonial expansion. By focusing on the local and long distance struggles to make the Isle de France (present day Mauritius) a globally significant centre during the long eighteenth century, this essay suggests an alternative to McClellan and Regourd’s geography of metropolitan centre and colonial periphery, as well as their claim that the investigation of nature was tied to colonial expansion by state centralization. Rather than view centralization as a double process whereby a metropolitan state is able to dominate increasingly peripheral territory by concentrating power and the means of its production and management under state authority, this essay argues that centralization occurred in numerous places and involved the organization, pursuit and management of various sorts of accumulation, with geographically extensive consequences. The goal is to present centralization as historically open and multi-centred, inviting examination of both its local dynamics and long-distance entanglements from various perspectives, which in turn reveals the multi-centred dynamics of empire building and governance, including the organization and pursuit of natural inquiry.

H-France Forum, 2017