Speech by Gordon Cumming, professor of language-based area studies at the School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University, and 2024-2025 research-fellow at the Paris IAS, during the conference "Responding to Challenges in Global Development: Historical Perspective on France’s Contribution" organized by François Pacquement at the Académie des Sciences d'Outre-Mer.

Session open to an audience limited to Academicians, with prior registration.
Accessible by videoconference.

Presentation

The Spanish flu killed 2 percent of Africa's population (2.5 million out of 130 million), while the Covid pandemic ended the lives of only a tiny fraction of the continent’s growing population (258,000 out of 1.5 billion) (CSIS, 2022; Statista, 2022). France played a key role in tackling each of these challenges and in shaping the international response, whether through colonial assistance, (non-) pharmaceutical interventions and/or foreign aid. But how radically has the French approach to pandemics changed over the longue durée? Are there longstanding practices and older ideas from colonial times that have continued to operate or that have resurfaced at the time of Covid?

These questions are central to this paper which will use a historical institutionalist approach to trace the evolution and significance of French health and development policies in this field. Historical institutionalism offers a fine-grained understanding of change over time, homing in on critical junctures, institutions, and the power of latent ideas. The initial focus will be on "old" path dependencies from the Spanish flu to the end of World War II, with a particular emphasis on unilateralism, inequity of treatment and the prioritisation of economic concerns. This paper will then explore the softening of those dependencies over time and particularly the emergence of a critical juncture around the late 1990s and of a "new" or, more accurately a hybrid, set of path dependencies. It will end by highlighting some indelible threads that have run through France’s health-related support to Africa over the last century.

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