The French Foreign Minister’s visit to Australia in December last year marked a new phase in the relations between Australia and France. Two years after the breakdown in bilateral relations caused by the cancelled submarine contract, Catherine Colonna’s presence on Australian soil was evidence of France’s willingness to move on from past controversies and set the relationship on a new, upward, if more modest, trajectory.
According to the terms of the joint communique, it signalled a ‘commitment to a dynamic bilateral relationship founded on trust, shared values and shared interests, globally and in the Indo-Pacific’.Footnote1 In her speech at the National Press Club, the French Foreign Minister reiterated the terms, insisting moreover on the convergence of the two countries strategic vision for the Indo-Pacific, her words echoing the National Press Club Address of her Australian counterpart in the same venue a few months earlier.Footnote2 Catherine Colonna did moreover underline the attachment of the two countries to multilateralism and their commitment to protect the international rules based order, in an approach ‘based on inclusiveness and solidarity’.Footnote3
Interestingly, most of the Australian media chose to focus on the real but limited component of Defence industry cooperation, and interoperability between the armed forces of the two countries, insisting on the pre-existing reciprocal Pacific military base access suspended after AUKUS, to describe the visit as a reset of the bilateral military cooperation.Footnote4 It mostly read the visit of the French Foreign Minister as a return to pre-AUKUS relations.
Strategic considerations are indeed underlying the resumption of the relations, initiated in July 2022 by the visit of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to Paris. Australia and France need to coordinate action in the South Pacific and beyond. Both fear the growing and potentially hostile presence of China in the South Pacific, with potentially harmful consequences for their respective economic, security and political interests as well as for the regional order.
Beyond immediate security concerns for its populations and territories in the region, France is ultimately anxious about the potential loss of its status as an Indo-Pacific power, as well as its vast Exclusive Economic Zones, which it owes to its possessions in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Australia shares similar concerns for itself but knows that its main leverage and status in the western alliance lies in its stability to prevent any hostile power establishing a foothold in the region. Both would have a lot to lose in a change in the status quo.
Yet, the focus of the dialogue has changed. With the strategic competition stronger than ever, security concerns are still a primary driver of the bilateral relation. But cooperation is no longer about the co-development of big military assets but about the joint management of a space where sub-strategic issues have potentially major strategic impacts.
Australia and France understand that the tussle for influence with Beijing is not just about military power but about the capacity to assuage the anxieties of the Pacific states regarding their own survival and future. There is indeed a fundamental gap between the threat perception of France and Australia on the one side, whose concerns are primarily strategic and related to China, and those of smaller and more vulnerable states such as most South Pacific islands on the other. For the latter, climate change, not China, constitutes an existential threat.
Both also understand that the strategic competition between the US and China confers the smaller South Pacific island states considerable agency, giving them a political space and bargaining power which considerably diminish the latter’s willingness to be considered part of anybody’s sphere of influence.
As fellow status quo powers, Australia and France agree in principle on the nature of the answer to South Pacific island states. But Canberra and Paris also grasp the difficulty of a situation in which the main difficulty for them will be to maintain and develop political and operational unity. As status quo powers, the two countries need one another—as well as New Zealand. But the cooperation between the two countries is to be developed in a context loaded with contradictions and potential obstacles.
Their fundamental unity of perception in the strategic field is partly counter-balanced by mutual apprehensions regarding, for example, the way each of them intends to address its political relations in the region. Australia in particular is concerned by Paris’ handling of pro-independence movements in New Caledonia and French Polynesia. Although it does support France’s presence in the region, Australia watches carefully how Paris handles its New Caledonia predicament as a return to violence could, once again, alienate the Pacific islands states and push them in Beijing’s welcoming arms. It questions France’s staying power in the region. Australia itself faces the risk of being perceived as too heavy handed in the management of its relationship with the South Pacific island states.
Canberra and Paris diverge on some of the specifics. Differences on issues such as climate change, and more broadly environmental risks, change the terms of coalition building across the entire Indo-Pacific. They also create significant tactical discrepancies in their approach to the region. It is relatively easy for France to advocate decarbonisation, but, even if Australia has made significant progress on the matter,Footnote5 its path to carbon neutrality is infinitely more complex—as the third biggest fossil fuel exporter in the world—than for France. Similarly, Paris advocacy for nuclear energy as an alternative falls in deaf ears in Canberra.
France also has expectations of its own vis-à-vis Australia, in particular in the Indian Ocean where it aspires to see Canberra play a larger role. The problems there are of a similar nature than those faced in the Pacific. In the Indian Ocean too, the disconnect is growing between the concerns of the smaller states, for which issues such as climate change or IUU fishing are existential threats and those of the regional powers, increasingly disturbed by Chinese encroachments in the Indian Ocean.
In January 2023, during the Second France-Australia Foreign and Defence Ministerial Consultations,Footnote6 Australia and France had pledged, once again, to work together in the Indian Ocean, in association with the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA). Yet the operational translation of these intentions is still pending. Understandably, Australia’s presence in the Indian Ocean remains limited to the northeast with primary focus on the stability of Southeast Asia and access denial to Australia and it is unclear whether Canberra is really willing to deploy resources to expand its presence and activities in the area.
None of the two sides ignores those difficulties. None is too sure of how to overcome them. The roadmap, a programmatic document listing the priority areas for cooperation, made public by the two countries reflects these uncertainties. It appears much as a list of potential outcomes of a clearly defined strategy than a process through which they will try to jointly define politically and strategically relevant, technically and operationally feasible, as well as financially viable solutions to very real issues.
From this perspective, the emphasis put on research through the creation of an ‘Australia-France Centre of Excellence for the Indo-Pacific’, is symptomatic. It demonstrates a political will to transcend current divergences but also an absence of ready-made solutions. In more than one way it is a diplomatic way of avoiding direct antagonism on issue on issues. The Australia-France Energy Transition Program, for example, fits the characterisation. Promoting research on hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuels, makes tremendous scientific and economic sense. However, it is also a projection into the future that delays painful decisions and avoid confrontation.
More than anything else, the roadmap signed in December 2023 is a confidence building mechanism between two countries, both distant and proximate, geographically as well as politically. It allows both states to project goodwill while respecting each other interests and convictions. Yet the way forward will be treacherous and uneasy. In each domain of cooperation, strategic convergences are likely to be contradicted by tactical considerations and structural constraints.
This should surprise no one. Relations between Australia and France have never been smooth sailing, and the current as well as future difficulties need not be exaggerated. The post AUKUS bilateral crisis pales in comparison to the situation which prevailed in the late 1980s and 1990s when France managed to federate the entire South Pacific (including Australia) against itself thanks to its initial handling of the New Caledonia predicament as well as the nuclear tests. France has since changed its ways and embraced in the South Pacific regionalism while Canberra has overcome its initial difficulties in accepting Paris as a resident power of the Indo-Pacific.
The strategic landscape has changed though. In the 1980s and 1990s the consequences of disputes between Australia and France remained bilateral even when related to third parties, mitigated moreover by their common participation to US alliances. China’s assertiveness makes it imperative today for the two countries to coordinate action in the Indo-Pacific and has de facto turned them into fellow status quo powers.
In 2017, in an attempt to temper the enthusiasm which followed the conclusion of the contract for the French submarines, Australian journalist Graeme Dobell wrote: ‘in the decades ahead, partnership in the South Pacific will be the natural and easiest part of the Australia-France relationship’.Footnote7 Natural, the partnership in the South Pacific is indeed, by the sheer virtue of history and geography. But even in the larger Indo-Pacific, it is unlikely to be easy at any point. Yet, their respective futures there partly depend on their capacity to sustainably mobilise the required political will to overcome the bilateral difficulties that will inevitably arise.
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Frederic Grare
Frédéric Grare is Senior Research Fellow at the National Security College in Canberra, Associate Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where is has also been director of the South Asia program. He also worked as a policy officer at the Centre for Analysis, Planning and Strategy of the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, Head of the Asia Bureau of the Directorate for Strategic Affairs of the French Ministry of Defense, His last book, The Indian Ocean as a New Political and Security Region, co-written with Jean-Loup Samaan, was published in 2022.
Notes
1 France-Australia Joint Statement – On the Official Visit to Australia by French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Catherine Colonna – Australian Parliament House, Canberra (4 December 2023).
2 Penny Wong, National Press Club Address, Australian Interests in a Regional Balance of Power, 17 April 2023.
3 Indo-Pacific Speech, French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, 4$ December 2023, National Press Club.
4 Robert Thomas, ‘Australia and France Agree on Reciprocal Pacific Military Base Access’, Geo Indo-Pacific, 8 December 2023.
5 Adam Morton, ‘Australia Passes Most Significant Climate Law in a Decade Amid Concerns over Fossil Fuel Exports’, The Guardian, 30 March 2023.
6 Second France-Australia Foreign and Defence Ministerial Consultation, 30 January 2023.
7 Graeme Dobell, ‘Australia’s Long Dread of France in the South Pacific.’ In More than Submarines: New Dimensions in the Australia-France Strategic Partnership, edited by Jacintha Carroll and Theodore Ell, ASPI, December 2017.