After two months without this word having been uttered in public by a Renault executive, or put down on paper in an official communication, here it is dropped by Jean-Dominique Senard, during the general meeting of the car manufacturer, from his first minute at the desk, past the usual formalities. On Wednesday May 25, the shareholders, the auditors, the bailiffs, the journalists, the entire Palais des Congrès in Paris as well as those connected to streaming, were able to hear the chairman of the board of directors, in front of the cameras, pronounce the word ” war “. Ordinarily, even if it is less and less the case, general meetings are not the place that bosses go to to share elements of the current context, these meetings are normally dedicated to the assessment of the past year, but frankly unprecedented events are well worth deviations from the protocol.
“Everyone has in mind the painful war in Ukraine that started last February, which was one more ordeal adding to all the centers of crisis in 2021”, declared Jean-Dominique Senard, during this public meeting, during which everything is recorded, data stored, minutes taken. The sale of activities in Russia, announced a few days earlier, on May 16, has freed up speech. Until then, at Renault, it had only been a question of ” conflict “, more neutral, since not necessarily armed, which could very well, like “invasion”, concern only a piece of territory, without the idea of total aggression. Semantics has become a political issue, a camp marker. If “special operation”, used by Vladimir Poutine, is very connoted, “war” is also it since the Russian president banished it from the vocabulary. Anyone who breaks the law against “false information”, who uses this forbidden word, risks fifteen years in prison.
“Time to find a way out”
The Red Cross, whose neutrality is a fundamental principle, uses only ” conflict “, which earned him protests, marks of indignation on Twitter. But nothing to do with the outcry triggered at the beginning of March against the UN by an article in the Irish Timesaccording to which the organization’s Department of Global Communications had sent an email to its employees, with the subject “Communications guidelines on the Ukraine crisis”, asking them not to characterize the events as ” war “recommending instead to use the terms of ” conflict “ or“military offensive”. Faced with the controversy, Melissa Fleming, head of UN communication, first reacted with a kind of denial, a little vague, indicating in a tweet that no recommendation “official” had been made in this sense, before specifying, after having been questioned about any “unofficial” directive, that an email had indeed “been sent by a local office without authorization”, concerning “about 25 people”and that this one “does not represent[ait] not the official position of the organization. »
It was sent by a local office without clearance and does not represent the official position of the organization.
— Melissa Fleming???????? (@MelissaFleming) March 8, 2022
At Renault, we do not hide it, to say “conflict” and not “war” was a deliberate choice, a necessity, admits a manager, “the time for negotiations, to find a way out” in Russia. The number one objective was to ensure a future for the 45,000 employees who worked in the Renault Russia factory, near Moscow, before bankruptcy struck. Because, as the general manager, Luca di Meo, has repeated many times: a factory that does not work, that does not produce anything for lack of parts, the whole supply chain having been broken by the sanctions, only burns cash. It was guaranteed bankruptcy if no agreement was reached quickly. The negotiations were “intense” but conclusive since, according to Renault’s wish to “don’t insult the future”the manufacturer has also been able to create an option to return to Russia.
The war in Ukraine entered its hundredth day at the beginning of June. It surged, crashed, depressed, infused, then routinized. In the early days of the Russian aggression, the word “war” scrolled across the black screens of the financial news bible that is Bloomberg, in more than 1,000 articles every hour of every day, against three times less today. Nevertheless, it is still one of the most used words. So inevitably, by contrast, a company, whatever it is, which, in a systematic way, since the beginning of the large-scale military invasion of Ukraine, uses a term other than “war” strongly clashes.
The “conflict”, the “crisis”, the “situation”
Since February 24, the date of the start of the offensive, corporate regulatory communications have, coincidentally, taken place at breakneck speed. The first half is particularly prosperous in high masses: there are, at the end of February-beginning of March, the last wagons of the publications of the 2021 accounts, just before the first activity scores for the first quarter, intertwining with the period of the assemblies general. 38 Cac 40 companies published their turnover and/or their results at the end of March, and 37 held their general meeting of shareholders. During these meetings, to which are also added “investor days” for several of them in addition to a slew of press releases, there was a lot of talk about inflation, tensions on supply chains, re-containments in China, soaring oil prices and the “conflict” / “crisis” / “situation” in Ukraine, less often “war”, especially once the phrase is excluded from the count “talent war” that technology companies like Thales and Capgemini deplore.
In the era of all-digital, data science, it is easy, with the right tools, to go through the content of a meeting: what were the most discussed themes, how many times such and such a word was pronounced, look! and if I type “Ukraine”, what noun in front? If Air Liquide, Airbus, Axa, Bouygues, Legrand, Michelin, Publicis, Safran, Saint-Gobain or Schneider Electric speak indiscriminately of “war” or “conflict”, moving from one term to another as we do with synonyms, others only stick to the second. “War” is absent from the communications of Alstom, Worldline and Société Générale. With regard to the latter, which like the other two did not respond to our requests, the term “war” nevertheless appears in the analysis notes of the investment banking division, sent to clients in the world of finance.
At the end of March, the Sino-British bank HSBC, present in Russia, had created controversy by removing references to the “war” in Ukraine from the research publications of its analysts. “HSBC committees that review all externally published research and customer communications have amended many reports to soften the language used on the subject, including replacing the word ‘war’ with ‘conflict’”revealed the FinancialTimesciting two people with direct knowledge of the matter. “These language changes sparked internal debate and complaints from some staff. These changes contrast with explicit references to Russia’s ‘war’ in research by rival banks like UBS, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. »
Undoubtedly, the high clergy of industry and banking know their semantic catechism, they distinguish the palette of nuances, they know that there is a gradation in the meaning of words. At BNP Paribas, during the AGM of May 17, the Chairman of the Board of Directors wanted “to say a few words about the situation in Ukraine, following the events that began on February 24, and the military operations that we know. » Jean Lemierre had a very special thought for the 5,000 Ukrainian employees (the bank has a subsidiary in Ukraine, Ukrsibbank, whose head office is in kyiv, with branches throughout the territory) who “have done a remarkable job as bankers in the field. They kept the agencies open as much as possible to do their job. And doing their job in hard times, in times of war, let’s call it what it is, is to provide banking service to customers, including ensuring that salaries are paid into customer accounts and ensuring that customers can withdraw cash, because in times of conflict this is very important. »
“Acceptable rhetorical compromise”
“A company that does not want to get completely wet can use the term conflictdecrypts Arnaud Mercier, professor of political communication at the University of Paris Panthéon-Assas. She did not utter the word war, but no one will reproach her for pretending that it is a peaceful operation, since she used the word conflict. It is an in-between solution that can be described as wise. You manage to find a way not to offend Ukraine and its allies, and at the same time, if you still have interests linked to Russia, you haven’t uttered the wrong word. This is an acceptable rhetorical compromise. It is necessarily the result of tactical thinking. It is obvious that when you know that the political and state actors are fighting over the fact of naming things that way or not, you cannot not know it and you cannot act as if there was not a reflection to have on the company’s position in this rhetorical conflict. It’s wise to start by saying to yourself: well, there is a semantic dispute, how do we position ourselves on this? »
At TotalEnergies, there was no reflection, “we call a spade a spade”one says ” war “. It is only in the Russian subsidiary where this word, for security reasons, is absent from the vocabulary of some 200 employees. If the oil company is one of the most present French companies in Russia, even today, it is because it is a shareholder of Novatek and that it holds, thanks to its alliance with the number 2 of Russian gas, shares in the Yamal LNG gas field in Western Siberia. The local partner of TotalEnergies is private, as much as a Russian company can be, run by an oligarch, but enough so that the French giant, with its very political activity, did not need to hold its tongue , unlike Renault which, in order to be able to leave Russia in an orderly fashion, had to avoid offending the Kremlin. The automaker has indeed sold its Moscow plant and its stake in Avtovaz to public institutions, not subject to sanctions, and therefore, indirectly, to the same state which has criminalized the word “war”.