SUMMARY
After being left weakened by the end of the Second World War, France has made its way back to the arena of international politics. One of the more successful courses of action in achieving this was by being one of the founding members of the United Nations in 1945 and by taking a permanent seat in the Security Council. France was also one of the founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as well as to the predecessor of the European Union, the European Coal and Steel Community, which were founded in the late 1940s and the early 1950s respectively.
The second course of action that France took in order to strengthen its position after the Second World War, and arguably the less successful one, was its attempts to suppress the pro-independence movements that emerged all over the French colonial empire. Thus, France engaged in a number of conflicts in Asia, such as the conflict over Laos (1946-1953), Vietnam (1946-1954) and Cambodia (1946-1953), as well as in Africa, in countries such as Tunisia (1953-1956), Algeria (1954-1962) and Cameroon (1957-1959). However, France was not able to reconsolidate its power and finally granted independence to its colonies.
The historical legacy of France’s colonial empire has continued to have implications until today. France has continued to be involved in several intrastate conflicts in its former colonies but has also contributed with peacekeeping troops to these countries especially. France has deployed national forces in support of several UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, such as the Sangaris force that provided support to MINUSCA in the Central African Republic between 2013 and 2016, or the Licorne force in Ivory Coast that supported ONUCI from 2002 until 2015, which was followed by the French forces of Côte d’Ivoire until the end of the UN mission in 2017.
France had troops in the Sahel region through its Barkhane force that, starting in 2014, was deployed in Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali and Mauritania. The aim of the Barkhane force was to prevent jihadist groups to rebuild and strengthen in the area, and help enforce security in the Sahel region and ultimately in Europe as well. In Mali the French troops has supported the UN-led MINUSCA peacekeeping operation, as well as providing the Government of Mali with secondary warring support in their conflicts against IS and AQIM.
Moreover, as part of international coalitions France has been a secondary warring party in the conflicts in Yugoslavia, where France as part of the NATO coalition supported UCK, Kosovo Liberation Army, against the government led by Milosevic, in 1999. In the 2000s France was a secondary warring party to the Government of Afghanistan against the Taleban, and took part in the US-led coalition that fought IS in both Iraq and Syria.
Although France mostly has been spared from organized violence within the country’s borders since the end of the Second World War, radical Islamists have carried out a number of attacks against civilians in the 2010s. In January 2015, 12 people was killed, when the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was attacked by gunmen associated with AQAP. In November that same year, a coordinated attack took place in the capital of Paris, carried out by an IS-cell, which took the lives of 130 people. In addition, in July 2016 more than 80 people was killed when a truck ran into a large crowd of people in Nice, an attack that IS claimed responsibility for.
