Part V - International Relations and Diplomacy
Relations with international organizations
Immediate exits
The ECHR and the Council of Europe are exited simultaneously with the EU, or even beforehand if possible. Remaining in these structures after having left the EU would leave open entry points for external legal constraints. The ECHR will renegotiate nothing: its case law is what it is, built over decades. Any attempt at renegotiation would be a waste of time in service of a null result. The logic of the transition demands closing all external pressure levers before they are used to slow down or destabilize the process.
The UN and the Security Council
France's permanent seat on the Security Council with veto right is the most precious diplomatic asset France possesses. This seat is not negotiated, not shared and not Europeanized. France uses it actively and sovereignly: including to vote with countries that the West considers adversaries when its interests demand it.
Official development assistance
No official development assistance can be decided, maintained or suspended without an explicit popular mandate. It is the French people who work, who contribute, and from whose labor a fraction is levied to be paid abroad: it is for them to decide. Each significant bilateral assistance is therefore submitted to a national referendum, preceded by a public debate including the real cost per taxpayer and a documented assessment of previous assistance. The mandate thus granted is limited in time - ten or twenty years - then automatically put to a vote again. One generation does not decide for the next. This mechanism implies no global logic: the people may decide to maintain assistance to one country and suspend it to its neighbor, or to eliminate everything, or to maintain everything. It is their choice, assistance by assistance. Contributions to multilateral organizations from which France withdraws disappear mechanically: they are not subject to any referendum since the structures that received them no longer exist within the French perimeter.
The WHO
France maintains its participation in the WHO for legitimate functions: epidemiological surveillance, coordination of pandemic responses, sharing of scientific data. It categorically refuses any treaty or amendment that would give the WHO binding power over national health decisions.
The IMF and the World Bank
France advocates for a profound reform of these institutions: governance reform, redefinition of loan conditions, reorientation toward genuine development. If these reforms remain blocked, it supports the development of alternative institutions.
The WTO
France maintains its participation in the WTO for the predictability of the international commercial framework. It refuses any decision of the dispute settlement mechanism that would constrain its sovereign trade policies. It is prepared to pay the tariff compensations provided for rather than modify policies that fall within its sovereignty.
The BRICS
The BRICS today represent more than 40% of global GDP in purchasing power parity and carry an explicit political project: to build an international order alternative to Western hegemony and reduce dependence on the dollar. France shares several of their fundamental critiques: refusal of American unilateralism, demand for reform of the Bretton Woods institutions, principle of non-interference.
But France cannot join the BRICS without compromising the active non-alignment that is the founding principle of its recovered independent diplomacy. It therefore requests an observer status: present at summits and working groups, participating in discussions without voting rights, following in real time developments on de-dollarization and the new financial architecture, simultaneously maintaining dialogue with the G7 and with the BRICS. This dual channel is the concrete translation of active non-alignment. A France as observer at the BRICS complicates the purely anti-Western narrative and forces nuances that its presence alone makes necessary.