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ABSTRACT
This article analyses French executives' and lawmakers' legitimisations of the intervention in Libya with the aim of understanding the discursive construction of intervention. It investigates the arguments in favour of intervention and the oppositions they were confronted with. To these arguments belong a re-evaluated democratic legacy of France, an identification with the Libyan people, and a debate on Responsibility to Protect and the rule of law in world politics, which have a broader relevance for French actorness abroad. The article applies the Essex School discourse theory and techniques from Interpretive Policy Analysis on executive speeches and parliamentary documents for structuring the debate and for estimating the strength of ideas in their interdiscursive configuration. An ideal-typical explanation of the legitimisation of intervention and of the choice of one policy over another is made. The article argues that going to war in Libya equated to a question of cultural appropriateness.
Notes on contributor
Falk Ostermann is Assistant Professor of International Security Governance at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Faculty of Social Sciences, VU University Amsterdam. He has research interests in security and defence policy with a particular focus on NATO, CSDP, other European cooperations, and in the parliamentary control of military missions. He is specialised in French security and defence policies, and he has written his PhD thesis about the reconstruction of French security and defence identity and policies during the Sarkozy presidency and its consequences for the European security architecture. He is further interested in constructivism, discourse analysis, and interpretive methods.
Notes
1. Italics represent either a form of emphasis, or they are used to indicate wordings and frequent vocabulary present in the original documents.
2. For an overview of Franco-Libyan economics and trade since the 2000s see France Diplomatie (Citation2012) and Notin (Citation2012, p. 49).
3. All translations are of my own.
4. For reasons of consistency between analysis and quotes, I opted for keeping the French spelling of Muammar al-Kadhafi throughout the article.
The public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, who visited Benghazi during the clashes between the opposition and the regime, reportedly had a prominent role in making the argument in favour of intervention (Altwegg Citation2011, Nougayrède Citation2011).
5. For a critical perspective on Sarkozy's African policies see Cumming (Citation2013).
6. Electoral explanations further dismiss that the British Prime Minister David Cameron was very much engaged, too, without having to face an election (Notin Citation2012, p. 53). Ultimately, this article cannot reject that diversionary use of force might have played a role. By its very character, it is an elephant standing in the room which can hardly be traced in policy-making and its public discourse. Schultz (Citation2013, p. 489) also explains that the empirical evidence of the diversionary use of force theory is mixed.
7. Elster (Citation2007, p. 46) reminds us that the social sciences are usually confronted to a condition of multiple causes that are difficult to assess. He interprets this condition as a warning against largely generalising, law-like explanation.
8. The logics are therefore purely constructed mechanisms that connect individual self-interpretations to the intersubjective nature of politics, broadly defined as struggle for meaning. In doing so, the logics approach avoids the individualist ontology of the largest part of the mechanisms literature (Hedström and Swedberg Citation1998, Elster Citation2007) inasmuch as claiming the real existence of explanatory mechanisms in critical realism (Bhaskar Citation2011).
9. The underlying understanding here is that subjects of discourse are not subjects by the quality of their individuality, but by the position they are given in a discourse, e.g. as president or parliamentarian (Laclau and Mouffe Citation1985, p. 115, Mills Citation2004, p. 30).
10. The logics must always be conceived as a dialectical process where one logic implies the other. This is a dynamic process open for contestation and change. Meaning and hegemony can never be completely fixed.
11. Forty-two presidential and 49 parliamentary documents (33 from the Assemblée nationale, thereof 15 debates; 16 from the Senate, thereof 10 debates) were analysed, altogether representing roughly 1100 pages. The documents were downloaded from the official webpages of the Elysée Palace and the chambers of parliament, which were searched for the term libye. (Some documents with only minor references – like enumerations – were excluded.) Declarations, interviews, letters, newspaper articles, online articles, press conferences, and speeches were chosen for the president, whereas the parliamentary apparatus consists exclusively of plenary debate minutes. An inductive coding procedure with the NVivo software has been adopted for the sake of better retrieval of arguments and for enhancing the structured character of the analysis, thus assuring reliability and validity.
12. Adler-Nissen and Pouliot (Citation2014) meticulously analyse Franco-British leadership in various institutions.
13. A good overview on who did what is given by Chivvis (Citation2014, e.g. Appendix A).
14. Besides the maritime forces under NATO command, France has contributed another Maritime Task Force separately.
15. I agree with the fundamental scepticism as to whether coherence can ever be achieved in discourse as a contingent and contested socio-political practice (Hajer Citation1997, p. 44). The purpose of discourse and social action can be considered to be more cohesion and appropriateness, rather than coherence.
16. These statements therefore confirm the proposition that international institutions endow action with legitimacy (see e.g. Finnemore and Sikkink Citation1998).