26 December 2020, NIICE Commentary 6623
Jay Maniyar
France, a European Union power and one of the world’s foremost influencers in terms of security policy and an endeavour to strive for liberal norms and pacifist objectives, is well poised to emerge as a country of vitality to Asia’s two pivotal regions – the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and the Indo-Pacific region. France is the world’s top six economies and its security forages have not been stymied or deterred by the novel Coronavirus. It is also being deemed by most scholars as an “Indian Ocean Rim country”. France continues to sufficiently fund its armed forces, and is a committed defence partner of India, with the landmark 2016 deal of thirty-six Dassault Rafale fourth-generation fighter aircraft having just witnessed its initial deliveries.
France has the world’s largest exclusive economic zone (EEZ), amounting to approximately 11 million square kilometres, with 9 million (over 80 percent) concentrated in the Indo-Pacific region. This is largely because of its overseas island territories in the IOR, which essentially serve as French military and security outposts towards achieving the European giant’s priority objectives pertaining to the maritime domain of the IOR. These objectives even include territorial and maritime boundary disputes in the western IOR with east African countries such as Mozambique and Madagascar. France is also attempting to utilise its island territories to give its security overtures a fillip in the Indo-Pacific region, as mentioned in the 2019 strategy document.
As per the prevalent and developing situations, France has all but stationed itself strategically in the IOR, with able assistance from its island territories officially called French Overseas Territories. Its territories exist in the form of tiny islands such as Mayotte, Réunion, and Scattered Islands, as well as sub-Antarctic and Antarctic territories. The French presence is complemented by India’s military-minded stationing in western IOR islands such as Agalega and Assumption Island (Seychelles), and Madagascar.
France and its Hunt for Friendships in the IOR
As far as maritime security – the region’s overarching subject of debate – is concerned, France has inked several agreements and understandings with IOR countries such as India, Djibouti, the United Arab Emirates, Mauritius, Kenya, etc., and countries of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) group such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore (which lie on the eastern periphery of the Indian Ocean). The ASEAN has also committed itself for a role meant to affirm ‘ASEAN Centrality’ in the Indo-Pacific, an outcome of its June 2019 Indo-Pacific ‘Outlook’ document.
From the purview of multilateralism, France has boosted the workings of the IOR’s fundamental maritime security-concerned organisation in the Indian Ocean Rim Association, by becoming its 23rd member. Upon ascending to the IORA, France released a statement declaring its intentions to help form a holistic maritime ecosystem such as the blue economy, maritime security, and disaster management. France will also be chairing the workings of the Indian Ocean Commission – an organisation which it founded in 1982 and one that is focussed on several cooperative dimensions vis-à-vis Indian Ocean island countries such as political and economic cooperation – in the upcoming year. France is also chairing the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (2020-22), another pivotal maritime security organisation centred in the Indian Ocean’s affairs and pioneered by India since 2008.
France’s elevation of the region’s Track-I linkages is even more crucial given that the Indo-Pacific is facing a dearth of major powers that may help assuage increasingly troublesome Chinese applications. India is, inarguably, a developing country and a maritime fledgling in comparison to the holistic sea-based supremacy espoused by the United States or the commendable blue-water deployments of Japan. The United States and Japan, while involved in the IOR and the Indo-Pacific to a certain extent, are yet to entirely encompass the region from the point-of-view of their immediate goals and objectives, and long-term political, economic, security, and ecological ambitions. Australia has expressed reluctance in the past as far as the issue of not disrupting Chinese feathers is concerned, and this may yet resurface in the coming years.
This is best ascertained by its withdrawal from the QUAD 1.0 in the late 2000s. The US remains the sole major power capable of exerting its dominance in Indo-Pacific region, while ensuring that the parameters of freedom, inclusiveness, democratic norms, ideals and values, and openness are upheld. In this respect, the inclinations of France and other EU powers such as Germany and the Netherlands can only be welcomed in no uncertain terms. Together, the EU powers are inclined to embolden a presence of well-meaning democracies in the Indo-Pacific region.
France has been attempting to cater to a diverse array of interests not just limited to the domain of security with countries of the IOR, hence enforcing the guidelines of its strategy for the Indo-Pacific. For instance, in April 2015, France and India worked together to establish a Marine Biology Institute in India. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between the two friends to undertake research on marine biology and biotechnology under the auspices of an institute unique to and for India, possibly leading to inventions and innovations borne of meticulous joint research between Indian and French experts in the domain. This helps foster cooperation in developing areas of the maritime domain of the IOR and the Indo-Pacific, which are also essentially primed as being maritime regions above anything else. The Indian Ocean Commission was also founded by France to address issues such as cooperation in sustainable development pertaining to the maritime domain.
Inferring French Security Motives in the Indo-Pacific
It can be safely assumed that France aims to not just emerge as a major maritime power with considerable green-water prowess in the neighbouring waters of its mainland, which has a relatively long coastline of slightly under 5,000 km, with a focus on security imperatives in the Atlantic and Arctic regions. Instead, France aims to emerge as a net security provider (a role considered to bear distinction and an admiration that invokes a deeper sense of security, majorly maritime, in nations that are ‘host’ to the benefactor country) in the Indo-Pacific region through maritime patrols, warship deployments, and emergency disaster response mechanisms. Given the testing array of disputes, distress, dismays, and apprehensions posed by the Indo-Pacific – the world’s foremost region of strategic uncertainty, France is best suited, given its capacities and capabilities in comparison to other Indo-Pacific-inclined powers, to emerge as a credible balancer in constructively shaping the security developments of the IOR assiduously.
Further ahead, France may yet employ its territories for more directed military purposes and transform them into multi-purpose maritime military bases in order to balance rising Chinese gambits in the Indian Ocean. China’s concept of territorial and regional hegemony, as evinced from the hollow depths of its condemnable conduct in the South China Sea on a routine basis, vindicate China’s historical and increasingly boisterous claims of the Indian Ocean ‘not belonging’ to India. France’s active lobbying for the European Union to devise a security strategy for the Indo-Pacific, given French influence in its continent’s affairs, has further weakened Chinese prerogatives and boosted the profile of like-minded democracies in fostering together a peaceful, prosperous, and prime Eurasia.
The geographical locations, significance, and centrality of French territories in the western IOR affords France an accessibility like none other, strengthens its approach, facilitates its deployments, helps protect the international shipping lanes from maritime security spoilers, and helps it forge a formidable character to eventually parachute the country into the Indo-Pacific’s twenty-first century ‘Great Game’ relatively easily, given its productive perception of the region’s affairs which would be well harnessed over time. France could well upscale its presence in its overseas island territories aimed at upsetting the status-quo i.e. the impact of Chinese naval forays on the regions’ security balances, and offer an alternative to or alongside the United States in establishing regional sea supremacy for the purposes of the IOR and the Indo-Pacific.
An increasing focus is being expended to maritime affability with the region’s nations through undertakings such as joint naval exercises, maritime patrols and surveillance programs, maritime military assistance provisions, intelligence gathering missions, and assistance to relief in the domain of nature-instigated destruction such as cyclones and tsunamis. In this regard, France, which always was an IOR country, can slowly and surely evolve into becoming an ‘Indo-Pacific country’, and given its affiliation to external regions, a leading one.
