David Djaïz, author of New French model (Allary editions, 240 pages, 19.90 euros) and teacher at Sciences Po Paris, discusses the reasons for the push for sovereignty in French political discourse, six months before the presidential election. At the heart of a “Uncertain globalization” and in the face of sovereignty “Identity”, he advocates the strengthening of the sovereignty of nations and their cooperation to better understand the “Global problems”.
The breath of sovereignty invites itself everywhere at the start of the campaign. How to explain this strong comeback of sovereignty, in different shades, in the French political debate?
If the discourse on sovereignty is coming back in France and elsewhere in the West, when it had very bad press twenty years ago, it is because our societies have since experienced three major crises of generalized interconnection. The first was the security crisis caused by the attacks of September 11, 2001, a blow to the unification of the world under the American umbrella. The second is the 2008 crisis, a global crisis linked to financial and economic interconnections. The third is of course the Covid-19 crisis, a mega crisis of planetary interconnection, from which we are barely emerging.
Faced with these three crises, there is the renewed feeling, sometimes of fear, of being caught up in global phenomena that we do not control. The return of speeches on sovereignty is therefore a way to restore national collective deliberation to majesty. In this situation, there are two possible reflexes: to build a planetary policy – but this is impossible in the absence of a world state – or to build reasoned and cooperative national protections.
You plead for the rehabilitation of nations. What difference is there between your definition of the concept of sovereignty with the sovereignism brandished in the presidential debate?
There is a populist sovereignty that has been on the rise for several years on the right. It is integral sovereignty, the one promoted by Steve Bannon [l’ancien conseiller stratégique de Donald Trump] in the United States and a translation of which can be found in [le premier ministre] Viktor Orban in Hungary. There, it is not a question of putting the collective deliberation in majesty. It is rather a question of making prevail the law of the strongest, by rejecting a part of the citizens and all that does not fit into a certain vision of the nation: the European Commission, the LGBT community, the Muslims, the migrants… In reality, this sovereignism is a catch-all emanating from an old identity supremacism.
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