La politique du dehors avec les raisons du - European University ...

2007. It preceded large-scale Muslim migration into the country. It ended
shortly after French Islamophobia began to make a mark in national politics.
There were always limits to France’s support for secular republics in the
Arab world as well as a theocratic one in Iran. Affection for Saddam Hussein’s
secular Iraqi state vanished when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991. President
Mitterand joined the U.S.-led coalition in driving the Iraqi military out of that
Gulf state. In addition, the French preference for laïcité at home was
transplanted to the international arena and led to a repudiation of Iran after its
1979 revolution. Jean-Pierre Chevènement, defense minister in the late 1980s
in a socialist government, had been a leading strategist behind the approach to
back secular governments in Muslim states: “One of Chevènement’s
longstanding central arguments has been for the need for French foreign policy
to combat religious revivalism in the Maghreb and Middle East—not as an end
in itself, but as a bulwark against the influence of Islamist groups within
France’s own population.” 47
This approach was not yet a turning point in policy towards the Middle
East. After 1996 France expressed opposition to continued sanctions against
Saddam’s regime and President Chirac returned to a more traditional Gaullist
foreign policy. He became one of the most outspoken critics of the U.S. invasion
of Iraq in 2003 and was supported by major French enterprises, the upper civil
service, and the vast majority of French citizens. Chirac contributed to the
conceptualization of France as une puissance musulmane, earning him the
nickname Chirac d’Arabie. The Maghreb in particular became the primary
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