Some countries in Eurasia are re-exporting sanctioned Western goods to Russia. Meanwhile, India and China are importing cheaper Russian oil and through sanctions loopholes re-exporting refined oil to the West.
France’s record has recently been in the spotlight over its colonial history, past domestic battles against separatists and current approaches to two conflict zones in Ukraine and the South Caucasus. Paris is accused of not pursuing a consistent approach to opposing separatism and upholding the sanctity of the territorial integrity of states.
France was one of three co-chairs, alongside the US and Russia, of the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) Minsk Group established in 1992 to resolve the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. The three-decade record of the OSCE Minsk Group is poor; this should not be surprising as the OSCE also failed to resolve Russian manufactured conflicts in Moldova, Georgia and in 2014-2021 in Ukraine.
There are three reasons why France’s chairmanship of the OSCEC Minsk Group was always controversial.
The first is the influential Armenian diaspora in France which is the world’s third largest after Russia (2 million) and the US (1 million).
A second reason is bias towards Christian Armenia over that of Islamic Azerbaijan. Support for Armenia is probably the only policy that has support across the entire French political spectrum. Regis Gente, a French journalist and analyst who covers the Caucasus, said there has been a shift towards Armenia “that has been driven by the increasing prominence of the far right in French politics, which is animated by anti-Muslim sentiment and has taken on the cause of Christian Armenia against Muslim Azerbaijan”. “The [French] political agenda is being set by the far right,” Gente said.
French far right and Islamophobic politicians such as Marine Le Pen and Éric J. L. Zemmour have led the way in supporting Armenia. French newspaper Le Monde said ‘Eric Zemmour instrumentalizes the cause of Christians in the East, which has become a preserve of the extreme right, even though this extreme right sees in these Christians only a means of justifying its Islamophobia.’ During his December 2021 visit to Armenia, Zemmour fanned anti-Turkish and anti-Azerbaijani sentiments in a similar manner to how he had divided immigrants in France into those who were ‘good’ and those who are ‘bad.’
Azerbaijan is the most secular Muslim country in the world. It also has a two-decade strategic alliance with Israel.
Even in French media critical of the far-right there is no deep understanding of the South Caucasus. The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict has never had anything to do with civilisation or religion and everything to do with international law.
After the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, Armenia and Russia were the only two irredentist powers in the former USSR unable to accept the boundaries of their Soviet republics as post-Soviet international borders. Azerbaijan has always argued, and France in principle has accepted, that the boundaries of the Soviet republics were to become their international borders, as agreed in the December 21, 1991Alma Ata Declaration.
Russian nationalists always viewed Eurasia as their exclusive sphere of influence and the former Soviet republics as quasi-independent states. Under President Boris Yeltsyn, Russia manufactured frozen conflicts in Azerbaijan, Moldova and Georgia while under President Vladimir Putin, Russia invaded Georgia and Ukraine.
Armenian nationalists created a Greater Armenia in the 1988-1922 First Karabakh War. Armenia’s occupation of a fifth of Azerbaijan only ended with its defeat in the 2020 Second Karabakh War. As mentioned earlier, the OSCE Minsk Group had failed to negotiate a peace treaty based on the Alma Ata Declaration which would have required an Armenian military withdrawal.
A third factor is French foreign policy has supported Greece over Türkiye and therefore not surprisingly Armenia over Azerbaijan. France has been a long-term opponent of Türkiye joining the European Union. Azerbaijan and Türkiye have developed a strategic partnership since the mid 2010s.
The OSCE Minsk Group failed to achieve any breakthrough in resolving the conflict and became largely moribund during Barack Obama’s presidency. During and since his presidency the US went AWOL.
Meanwhile, Azerbaijan became increasingly frustrated at France’s bias towards Armenia and called for the closing of the OSCE Minsk Group after both houses of the French parliament, the Senate and National Assembly, voted in November 2020 to recognise the independence of the separatist enclave of Artsakh, the Armenian name for the Karabakh region.
France’s double standards became apparent. While combating Corsican separatism at home over four decades, and denouncing Russian-backed separatism in Ukraine, France was at the same time supporting separatism in Azerbaijan.
French foreign policy proved to be multi-faceted. France, while condemning Russia over its support for separatism in 2014-201 and full-scale war from 2022, was siding with Armenia and de facto Russia over how to define ‘self-determination.’
France was a leading advocate of Kosovo’s independence which set a precedent for an autonomous region of a republic to be recognised. Hitherto, only republics in the USSR and Yugoslavia had the right to self-determination.
Russia misconstrued the West’s recognition of Kosovo’s independence to support the ‘independence’ of Georgia’s South Ossetian and Abkhazian regions in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. Armenia agreed, believing Nagorno-Karabakh had the same right to ‘self-determination’ as Crimea and voted with Russia against resolutions at the UN which denounced Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The French parliament’s support for the independence of ‘Artsakh’ sides confusingly agrees with Russia and Armenia.
France’s support for Armenian separatism put it at odds with its own foreign policy towards the Russian-Ukrainian war. Together with Germany and Russia, France was a chairman of the Normandy Format established in 2014 to resolve the war. The Normandy Format did not support separatism in Ukraine’s Donbas region, it backed Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
A fifth of Azerbaijani territory from 1992 and 7% of Ukrainian territory from 2014 was occupied by Russia. Under the UN Charter and international law, both Azerbaijan and Ukraine had a right to liberate their occupied territories through diplomatic or military means.
France provides military aid to Ukraine’s to pursue its right of self-defence and liberation of its territories but condemns Azerbaijan for undertaking these very same policies towards its occupied lands. France, and its Western allies, have provided Ukraine with a large volume of military assistance since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. President Emmanuel Macron described the 2020 Azerbaijan military campaign to re-take back its lands as a ‘terrible war’ while supporting Ukraine’s right to militarily do the same.
It is therefore not surprising that Azerbaijan has condemned France’s double standards and that their relations have deteriorated. Azerbaijan has condemned France’s bias towards Armenia as ‘Islamophobic’ and even ‘racist.’ France has accused Azerbaijan of ethnic cleansing Armenians and demanded respect for Armenian cultural and religious monuments and buildings in Karabakh. Azerbaijan retorts that France ignored the far larger ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis in the early 1990s and since then the destruction of a huge array of cultural and religious monuments in the territory it occupied for nearly three decades. Azerbaijan – like Ukraine – must clear tens of thousands of anti-personnel mines left behind by Armenian and Russian occupations. In the interest of balance, France should have condemned both sides.
The spat descended further when Azerbaijan launched the Baku Initiative Group in July 2023 to support the cultural rights and the right to self-determination of Corsica, remaining French colonies (‘Overseas Territories’ of New Caledonia, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Martinique, Guadeloupe) and condemning current French ‘neo-colonialism’ in its former colonies in Africa. France has condemned the imprisonment of Armenian separatists after Azerbaijan re-took control of Karabakh in September 2023 at that same time that France was imprisoning 22 Corsican separatists.
Azerbaijan has also raised the very sensitive issue of France’s violent campaign against Algerian nationalists fighting for independence from 1954-1962. An estimated 400,000 to one and half million died and there were several failed assassinations against French President Charles de Gaulle and a coup d’état in 1958 that led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic.
The French spat with Azerbaijan is one aspect of a larger conflict between the West Global South that rests on bot justice and double standards. The West will not receive support from the Global South against Russian aggression and war crimes in Ukraine while it ignores, or supports through arms deliveries, the same two policies committed by Israel in Gaza and Armenia in Azerbaijan.
There can be no double standards, as seen in the case of France, towards separatism, the sanctity of the territorial integrity of states and past and existing colonialism. France, and its Western allies, should end their pursuit of two contradictory goals of supporting the restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity while opposing that of other countries.
Taras Kuzio is a professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy.
