Enamoured by Yerevan, Paris is on the back foot in the wider South Caucasus Case of moral turpitude and self-affliction

The French Senate's 15 November resolution, couched in the language of pro-Armenian sentiments and anti-Azerbaijani exhortations, defends the indefensible and asserts the implausible. It is grandiose, sententious, blatantly myopic and vain. Although the resolution is only recommendatory and its ridiculous demands are ostensibly undeliverable, it is still fraught with complications for French foreign policy in the South Caucasus, with the potential of dragging it to ruination in the long run.

 On the worth of the worthless

The document that we are contemplating is a collection of impracticable vows primarily, but not exclusively, designed to circle like vultures, fruitlessly generating the mirage of "tangible help" for Armenia. It is also retrograde, regressive and reactionary, even in comparison with Yerevan's own current official line. At a time when Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has publicly acknowledged the futility of envisioning any future for Karabakh, other than as part of Azerbaijan, the resolution demands the recognition of the illegal and universally unrecognised entity as the basis for future talks between Baku and Yerevan, encouraging the ghastly temptations of Armenian revanchists.

Imbued with a grotesquely inflated sense of its own worth, the Senate demands, with an arbitrary whim one would associate with a ramshackle student union of a lefty university, the withdrawal of Azerbaijani Armed Forces from the positions held after the 13-14 September interstate border escalation. It calls for the establishment of a humanitarian office in what is now temporarily controlled by the Russian "peacekeepers", without any hint at the importance of furnishing and upholding Baku's agreement.

The resolution is also blatantly presumptuous, for it demands the imposition of diplomatic and economic measures, sanctions on the export of Azerbaijani hydrocarbons and seizure of the property of Azerbaijani authorities, assuming that the whole of Europe should accept its partisan and myopic view. It is also factually ill-informed on the grounds of failing to take into account the importance of Azerbaijani oil and gas for South-East Europe in the light of the Russia-Ukrainian crisis. Naturally, nuclear-powered France is not a market for Baku's gas exports.

The dread this ill-conceived resolution inspires is preying more heavily on the minds of French policymakers than the officials in Baku. Azerbaijan has long been convinced of the sheer unreliability of the goodwill and neutrality of Paris, which has done nothing to prove the reverse, with the Senate's recent document rendering a huge disservice to Macron's personal efforts to soft-soap, which set the tone during his private meetings with President Aliyev. 

Dreary constitutional points and political concomitants

Let us look into the dreary part of the story. Why does the Senate resolution matter? Is it, after all, not recommendatory? It matters. Indeed, a great deal. The Senate is not a body tasked with overseeing the nation's foreign policy; it can only advise or urge the government to act in a particular way, and the latter cannot stop the Upper House of the legislature from advising or issuing any resolution on any subject. This is a constitutional point of view and it is true.

But. There is one "BUT" of gargantuan import with two limbs, for the entire issue should also be viewed (a) in the context of how the resolution impacts the overall perception of the French attitude vis-à-vis Baku-Yerevan dynamics, and (b) from the lens of the possible complicity of President Emmanuel Macron, as the main person chiefly responsible for foreign affairs.

The first limb could appear to be a lesser issue, but still. The Senate is not a freestanding entity existing outside the carcass of the State. In terms of shaping an extended French perspective on any foreign policy matter, it has an integral role to play, not of a direct constitutional nature, but indicating a particular preference that is predominant in the Upper Chamber of the parliament. The 15 November resolution is reflective of a perspective that is essential in shaping perceptions of the French standpoint.

The second limb is of greater practical significance, as it looks into the indirect links between what the Senate says and President Macron's considered opinion on what Paris should do in a given situation. In a 12 October interview with the TV channel France 2, the French President accused Baku of “unleashing a terrible war against Armenia in 2020”, blamed it squarely for the recent 13-14 September border escalation, cast aspersions on Azerbaijani territorial integrity, and sanctimoniously claimed that his country would not sell its moral values for the gas coming from the recipient of his remonstrances. The resolution adopted on 15 November, in many ways, resoundingly re-echoes Macron's sly barbed darts, inflating them to the scale of the grandiose hysteria that its responsibility-absolved nature affords.

Egregious fallacy and its perils

There is a logic, however short-sighted, perverse and ill-conceived, to the official French design in the South Caucasus. In a bid to re-assert itself in the region, Paris has embarked on the path of reinforcing Yerevan's negotiating stance vis-à-vis Baku, at a time when Prime Minister Pashinyan is increasingly disillusioned with Moscow’s lack of on-ground backing, with France eyeing the long-term prospects of gradually extricating Armenia from the Kremlinosphere. France also remains wary of the increase of Turkish influence which, in conjunction with Azerbaijan's post-2020 coercive assertiveness, could jeopardise Yerevan’s unenviable isolated predicament. 

The question is how the externally visible parts of the current South Caucasian design of Paris correlate with its self-perception as an aspirational unbiased global player. France has long been in the process of squandering its global stature and, by some self-deprecating accounts perpetuated by the nation's own intelligentsia, who habitually enjoy self-imposed existentialist angst, it is caught in a seemingly irreversible spiral of decline. 

Such a grim outlook suggests some contrived form of doom and gloom, which should not be taken on face value, as it is not unheard of in many post-imperial Western nations to bemoan the former grandiose days of subjugation and lament presently plummeting fortunes and sheer apathy in proportions outweighing the reasonable.

There is, of course, the elephantine question of the large Franco-Armenian diaspora that should also be placated. The wider gist of the matter is not merely about pleasing the electorate for vote-grabbing purposes, but also the general foreign policy imperative of re-entrenching French influence in those parts of the world with fertile Francophile underpinnings. Armenia fills the bill on this account.

In this vein, France genuinely yearns for a greater and awe-inspiring lofty civilisational role, not just in its former colonies, but also in the South Caucasus wherein, by increasing its diplomatic soft footprint in Armenia, it aims to project an allegedly enlightening influence, accompanied by a political-economic penetration.

When I confronted eminent Irish historian Dr Patrick Walsh on the place of Armenia within the global French design, his answer seemed to provide a perspective akin to what I perceived as a catharsis, absolving me of the task of coalescing the fluttering probabilities in my mind into a more definable geopolitical context.

Dr Walsh’s perspective has its premise founded on a wider competition within the EU: “With the departure of the UK, France sees itself as militarily as the strongest state in the EU. The EU is not a state and hasn't got an army, so France finds itself as its military muscle. Of course, what goes in the West is what Washington does, rather than Paris. However, Libya, where France took a lead, demonstrated that France has not relinquished its old ambitions in the world and is prepared to assert itself. Armenia is a place, like Lebanon, that France feels very much under its sphere of influence, at least in a soft power fashion”.

If we return to the point of the long-term judiciousness of such a foreign policy, let us throw a semi-piercing glance and reflect. The problem with this design is two-fold, to say the least. Firstly, it is true that Pashinyan, suffused with euphoria, is in the state of tripping over himself in gratitude, as are many in Armenia who are recumbent in the rêverie of learning that anti-Azerbaijani imperatives are swaying in the wind due to a discernibly augmented gale emanating from Paris.

Nevertheless, there are definable limits as to the assertiveness and desired proactiveness of what Paris can offer to augment Yerevan. On 10 November 2020, Macron's pro-Armenian interjections ground to a juddering halt when Pashinyan was compelled to sign the trilateral declaration which, in real terms, was an act of capitulation for his nation, and France was left with no choice but to come to terms with what President Aliyev achieved. In this wake, Macron’s words of support, as are the case today, promised infinitely more than they can deliver, effectively constituting premonitions for even more debilitating Armenian frustrations in the future.

Secondly, by preferring to ingratiate himself with those on whose electoral preferences he counts and prioritising the objective of luring Yerevan into the wider French realm of gravitational pull, Macron gravely risks, indeed irreparably, losing its clout vis-vis Azerbaijan, and by virtue of this, any possible pervasive influence over the whole Caucasus, which does not appear to be a sensible calculation once looked at beneath the microscope.