Conflicts, internet, artificial intelligence: Emmanuel Macron insisted on Friday that the Francophonie was a ‘space of influence’ and pleaded for its members to carry ‘together a diplomacy’ which defends ‘sovereignty and territorial integrity’ everywhere.
‘The Francophonie is a space of diplomatic influence which allows us to embrace the challenges of the century,’ declared the French president at the opening of the 19th Francophonie Summit at the Cité internationale de la langue française in Villers-Cotterêts, 60 kilometers north of Paris.
“It is a place where we can together carry out a diplomacy that defends sovereignty and territorial integrity everywhere across the planet,” he added in front of dozens of heads of state and government from Africa. to the Indo-Pacific region.
‘Which carries the same message alongside Ukraine which is being attacked today, threatened in its borders and in its territorial integrity by the Russian war of aggression’, he insisted, while many countries of the South have refused to condemn the Russian offensive against its neighbor.
“But who defends a vision where there is no room for double standards, where all lives are equal for all conflicts across the world,” he continued, with the South regularly denouncing double standards of the West in the management of international crises. ‘There can be no peace in the Middle East without a two-state solution,’ the president reiterated, also referring to Lebanon ‘today shaken up in its sovereignty and its peace’.
‘No interference’
Alluding, without mentioning them, to China and North Korea, Emmanuel Macron also pleaded for a ‘peaceful’ Indo-Pacific region, ‘where no power can call into question peace through territorial provocations or any resumption of violence. ‘try whatever’.
The International Organization of the Francophonie (OIF) has 88 member states and governments. It meets for the first time in 33 years at a summit in France, the headquarters of the organization. The President of the Confederation, Viola Amherd, was present. Switzerland benefits greatly from this network, she wrote on X.
‘On this language, the sun never sets’, launched the French president, willingly lyrical, mentioning in passing the Senghor University, which trains executives in French in Alexandria in Egypt.
Tunisian Prime Minister Kamel Madouri, whose country hosted the previous OIF summit in 2022, agreed that the French-speaking community must ‘play its role in finding solutions to the crises’. ‘However, we reject any interference in the internal affairs of countries, the principle of mutual respect and the sovereignty of States is sacrosanct in our eyes,’ he said.
Denouncing a ‘genocide’ in Gaza, with the ongoing Israeli offensive in reaction to the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 in Israel, and Israel’s military actions in Lebanon, he especially insisted for his part that the OIF speaks in favor of an ‘immediate ceasefire’ in the Middle East.
The Secretary General of the OIF Louise Mushikiwabo, for her part, called for the return to ‘the French-speaking family’ of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, suspended since the arrival of juntas in power in these three Sahel countries.
‘Not Françafrique’
The OIF has gradually transformed into a political ‘bloc’ with still ‘modest’ but growing influence, she also underlined in an interview with AFP. On the other hand, she refuted any domination of the organization by France. “The Francophonie is not the Françafrique and the Francophonie is not France,” she asserted.
OIF member countries have launched the ‘Villers-Cotterêts Appeal’, inviting major digital players to ‘build a safer and more diverse space’ on the internet and to ‘fight against all hate speech’. The Francophonie must also be at the forefront of artificial intelligence, pointed out Emmanuel Macron.
The French president also announced the launch of a ‘collection of reference literary works of the Francophonie which will be made available in several languages’, in Arabic to begin with, and ‘distributed in two-dollar paper format’.
He invited young entrepreneurs to rely on French as a vector in commercial relations while the number of French speakers – more than 300 million people currently – is expected to double in the coming decades, and mentioned the upcoming launch of a Francophone Alliance of intellectual property.
In 2025, the City of Villers-Cotterêts will become ‘a laboratory of excellence for training teachers of and in French, future French-speaking education executives, translators, interpreters while welcoming researchers and teaching experts in residence’ , he added.
/ATS
