Restaurantes

There is a degree of common ground between the NPED and the views of policy makers in Paris. The key point of agreement, which became increasingly apparent in the 1980s and early 1990s, is that for African states a balanced budget was an essential precondition to a renewal of the development agenda. Many in Paris also agreed that market signals were not properly functioning in the heavily bureaucratic economies of Africa. It followed that at least some conditionality needed to be imposed on aid, especially if the function of that aid was to stabilise the recipient country’s budget. The more technocratic-minded policy makers in Paris (principally the Finance Ministry) came round to this position in the early 1980s.187

Many in Paris were naturally favourable to this position, and had indeed long been worried by the lack of “rigueur” (spending discipline) in the public administration of African states. To some degree they welcomed the financially rigorous position of the IFIs as a support for their own position in arguments in Paris. For others, the necessity to align French practice with NPED was a reaction to the scale of the financial problems facing francophone African states and the need to ensure that the IFIs shared the burden of budgetary support (burden sharing).188 An increasing proportion of French aid was taken up by budgetary support from the mid-1980s. With the deepening of the debt crisis, large amounts of this aid were used to enable francophone African governments to pay debts previously contracted to the French or the IFIs. The French therefore became aware that they were pouring money in, with little prospect of repayment (table 7 in Annex 1 shows the increasing proportion of French aid used for budget aid).189

As was shown in Chapter 1, the crisis of the CFA Franc and its eventual devaluation crystallised at the same time the resistance of the French to the NPED and the impossibility for France to continue to go it alone. The overvaluation of the CFA

187 _{Wilson, E. J., ‘French Support for Structural Adjustment Programmes in Africa’, World Development,}

21 (3) 1993 and personal interviews.

188 _{In a very typical statement of this latter French attitude to structural adjustment lending (burden}

sharing), French Finance Minister Alphandery stated in 1993: “Ces efforts [de l’ajustement] il faut que les Africains les poursuivent pour retrouver une crédibilité internationale et pouvoir bénéficier de l’aide financière à l’ajustement structurel de la part des organismes internationaux” (Le Monde, 22 septembre 1993).

Franc from the mid-1980s ran counter to measures recommended by the IFIs, which were targeted at increasing the franc zone’s export base. The CFA Franc’s overvaluation led to over consumption of imports, with inflationary pressure absorbed by the French Finance Ministry. The devaluation was therefore a sign of a shift of power away from importers into francophone Africa (many of whom had powerful influence in Paris) and public sector employees in Africa, towards the IFI backed technocrats and exporters. This shift of power was symbolised by the appointment, under pressure from the IMF, of Allasane Ouattara, as the prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire in 1990. He had previously been deputy director at the IMF and was considered a technocratic outsider by the majority of the elites in Abidjan and Paris. It should also be noted that the devaluation and the Abidjan doctrine that accompanied it (the statement that France would not give budget/programme aid to countries unless they had an agreement with the IFIs, pronounced by Prime Minister Balladur in September 1993) had important political implications. Specifically, the Abidjan doctrine was designed to stop African heads of state using their links to the French president to get round the reluctance of French officials to bail them out when they did not have enough money to pay the public sector salaries (“boucler les fins des mois”). This can be seen as an important and successful attempt to impose technocratic (as opposed to political) criteria on the allocation and use of French aid.

Despite this apparent alignment, French development aid policy and doctrine continue to show strong differences from the NPED. At the technical level, the majority of French policy makers (from all parts of the administration) believe that the use of market forces in developing societies must be limited and regulated, and are suspicious of the ideological fervour with which the IFIs pursue the liberalisation and privatisation agenda. French officials also argue that their long-term presence in francophone Africa has given them greater knowledge of the subtleties of the problems facing Africa, as opposed to the office-bound bureaucrats of the IFIs. More specifically, French officials argue that the conditions attached to adjustment loans are too detailed for the recipient country to own fully, and that they led inevitably to a takeover of the state administration by donors.190

Further differences stem from the fact that the starting point for the French differs from that of other donors. The NPED, as well as the generalised liberalisation of trade and finance since the 1980s, is fundamentally incompatible with the coopération system, which was the raison d’être of French development aid policy. As discussed,

this system worked through negotiation between well-placed elites in Paris and across francophone African and constituted a protected environment for African leaders and French officials and businesses. The NPED challenges the position of leaders in francophone Africa and the closeness of their relations with the French. The French have been reluctant to select aid recipients on any basis other than political support. As the analyst Béatrice Hibou stated in a report for the Foreign Ministry on the franc zone in 1995: “[les] pratiques mercantilistes et protectionnistes, [les] reflexes de chasse gardée … sont incompatible avec les réformes libérales en cours et avec l’integration de l’Afrique dans l’économie mondiale”.191 _{Moreover, in their relations with recipient}

governments the French look to use insider influence and diplomatic persuasion in order to see reforms implemented, as opposed to the policy buying model of the IFIs.192

The French attitude to the NPED agenda was therefore ambivalent. The same can be said of the attitude of French officials to the new ideas that emerged in the 1990s. Many French officials welcomed the turn back to the state (the acknowledgement that a functioning state was an important part of development and that in some cases structural adjustment had undermined it). French attitudes to other emerging issues have been varied. Selectivity is difficult to enact because the criteria for the selection of French aid recipients are ultimately political (the French point out that given the ultimately subjective nature of judgements concerning “governance”, all aid selection decisions are in fact political).193 However, one may argue that the French do pursue a policy of selection according to state capacity as the main coastal states of Africa have always received greater amounts of aid per capita than the Sahelian countries. Finally, as far as SWAPs are concerned, French aid practices have in fact proven largely compatible with this idea, as the French have been involved in restructuring whole sectors of African economies and public administration since the mid-1980s, effectively doing sector wide aid without calling it such.

Chapter 5 will consider some of these issues concerning the state and development policy in greater depth and relate them to the reforms of 1998–2002. It is important to note here, however, that while French state traditions fitted well with the state centred development paradigm of the 1960s, the good governance concept is treated cautiously in French administration and, where it is used, it has a different content relative to its use by other donors. The model of society it presents appears to present a juridical and minimal state that functions solely to regulate competing private

191 _{Cited in Libération, 13 novembre 1995.}

interests, which is seen as incompatible with the French social model. French traditions, the milieu in which French officials collectively forge their values, place greater emphasis on the state as the site of the expression of the collective will of the nation and see society as more than the aggregation of individual activities. In this conception the state should be “volontarist” (take initiatives) in order to achieve social progress.

In the place of good governance, the French prefer to use terms that refer to the strengthening of state institutions. Terms such as “Renforcement [or développement] institutionnel” or “Etat de Droit” are frequently used. Dating from the period of the construction of the French state before the French Revolution, this latter term refers to the legitimate and impartial nature of state authority over citizens.194 _{This conception of}

the construction of political entities is not incompatible with private interest and initiative, but posits the state at the centre of social life.

In summary, French development aid policy in the 1980s and early 1990s aligned to some degree with the precepts of the NPED. This occurred both at the macro- economic level and at the micro level of aid practice. Equally, the French welcomed many of the precepts of the good governance agenda, particularly as it related to institutional strengthening. However, differences of interpretation between the French and other major donors indicate that there are limits to the convergence of both policy and doctrine. Subsequent chapters of this study will look at the evolution of these differences in the 1998–2002 period.