We were preparing this dossier on federalism and Africa when, in March, the historian Vincent Duclert and his commission issued a report finally confirming that French officials knew about the genocide being prepared in Rwanda in 1994. The state and the leaders of the time thus bear "heavy and overwhelming responsibility" for the deaths of 800,000 people within four months. The report shows decision-makers caught up in an ethnicist reading and were more concerned with Raison d’État (France’s supposed eternal greatness and the future of the francophonian world) than with the fate of the local populations. This is a way of putting into perspective this dossier, which looks at history, pan-Africanism and African federalism on the one hand, and the links between the European Union and Africa from a globalist perspective on the other.
Pour le fédéralisme - Fédéchoses keeps on denouncing attacks against democracy, here or elsewhere and in particular in Belarus, Turkey or within the EU (recently in Lyon where terrorists, members of a Turkish paramilitary organisation related to Ankara’s government, attacked the premises of a Kurdish association). Europe can always become the place where hatred or tensions from other regions of the world are expressed.
An economic giant, intergovernmental Europe remains a political dwarf. As if this were not dramatic enough for its own security and the global balance, the EU is making a fool of itself in foreign policy. Those days, the President of the Commission, Ursula van der Leyen, has been victim in Ankara of a mysogynistic and macho manoeuvre by Erdogan’s regime coupled with the culpable passivity of the ’first of the old white males’ of the European Council (of heads of State and government !), its president Charles Michel. Beyond the scandal in terms of equality between women and men, which the EU was supposed to defend, this incident demonstrates the emergency of clarifying responsibilities between the Commission (Presidency and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security) and the Council, which have been fighting like crazy to represent the Union externally ever since the Lisbon Treaty. This cacophony makes the EU look ridiculous abroad and in the eyes of its citizens, and is a boon to its opponents and those who oppose its values, both within and beyond its borders. They would be wrong to be embarrassed when the EU has "its ass between two chairs" and Mr Michel seems to be looking for a “casting couch” !
At a time when Presse fédéraliste signed a partnership with Professor Robert Belot’s Jean Monnet Chair and is publishing a first volume on Henri Frenay, we draw attention to his important text "Daniel Cordier et Henri Frenay : bataille mémorielle et enjeu historique".