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Editorial: France and the Commonwealth

The papers of the conference on which this issue of Round Table is based constitute the culmination of a long-held ambition of mine, to get the English speaking Commonwealth and La Francophonie, its French–speaking equivalent, to engage in a dialogue within the journal. It has also enabled me to do the previously unthinkable, publish a couple of papers in French. But most of all it has enabled me to work in the company of French and Anglophone friends and scholars in a mutual process of better understanding that I hope will be the first in a new impetus, not only for cross– Channel dialogue but for a much wider global intellectual cooperation between our two major linguistic areas. The conference where all of these papers were first aired was held on 11 April 2008 at the University of Paris 7, also known as ‘Paris Diderot’ in the Marais area of Paris. It was organized principally by Dr Mélanie Torrent and Dr Claire Sanderson with help from myself. Mélanie and Claire were the real prime movers behind the idea of a meeting to examine what the French academic community thinks of the Commonwealth and I owe them a huge debt for seeing the project to fruition. Some of these papers were contributed in French and then translated into English (by the author) but all the discussion was bi-lingual. The questions on which this meeting concentrated show how much real convergence there is between Anglophone and Francophone policy makers and academics, in spite of our much-vaunted differences. Firstly, both communities are concerned about democracy – what can promote it and indeed what can generate it in order to create a stable peace? Secondly, what ‘tools’ can be deployed to help fulfil this ambition? Both communities are far less sanguine about the possibilities of answering either question in a hopeful way than they were ten years ago. The lessons of Iraq and the Middle East in general, not to mention those of Africa, have left us all with a heavy hangover from our earlier euphoria about the ‘democratic peace’. But we all agreed at this conference that the ‘quiet diplomacy’ of leaders of the Commonwealth and La Francophonie, and the work of the secretariats, especially the Commonwealth Ministers Action Group (CMAG) model had proved superior to the use of tanks and aircraft in the promotion of good governance. Both the introductory papers by Amitav Banerji of the Commonwealth Secretariat and that of Marion Julia about La Francophonie stress the common interest of both bodies in democratically organized peaceful change for the better in a way that listens to local populations but does not preach to them. However, we also all agreed that the incentivisation of such good governance is a difficult issue. It can be damaged by the economic system, capitalism, that inevitably goes along with attempts to change political systems and behaviour and it often overlooks those who are thereby excluded, like the Dalit population of India discussed in Michel Nauman’s contribution to this volume. His paper, as well as The Round Table Vol. 97, No. 399, 809–811, December 2008