Taras Kuzio on double standards: Paris has always supported Yerevan Opinion Piece for EUReporter

In an opinion piece for EUReporter, Taras Kuzio, professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, examines why much of the Global South has remained neutral or unsupportive of the West’s stance on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Kuzio argues that perceptions of Western double standards—rooted in NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbia, the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, and the West’s long-standing failure to hold Israel accountable for its actions against Palestinians, particularly in the ongoing violence in Gaza—have deeply undermined the West’s credibility in the eyes of these nations. Azerbaijan, too, has long felt the weight of such double standards regarding its sovereign territories, which were occupied by Armenia from 1992 to 2023. Caliber.Az reprints the article. 

Azerbaijan has long felt this double standard towards its sovereign territories that were occupied by Armenia from 1992-2023. Three co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group – Russia, the US, and France – were aligned in different ways with Armenia throughout its three-decade existence from 1992-2022. The Soviet Union and Russia supported for religious and geopolitical reasons Armenia’s military victory in the First Karabakh War from 1988-1992. The US adopted discriminatory legislation in Section 907 of the US Freedom Support Act against only one former Soviet state – Azerbaijan. France, with its large and influential Armenian diaspora, was always going to be pro-Armenia. Sossi Tatikyan, an analyst at the French think tank Institut Montaigne, wrote: “France’s support for Armenia extends far beyond Macron or his political camp-it represents a broad national consensus across the right, left, and centre. Some French politicians have even advocated for stronger support of Armenia and tougher measures against Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan has only a handful of supporters in France..”

Another influential factor in France is growing anti-Muslim sentiments by far-right politicians which has spread across the political spectrum and led to a misplaced view of Armenia and Azerbaijan being enmeshed in a “Christian-Muslim” conflict - which they are not. Azerbaijan is the most secular Islamic country in the world.

With the largest Muslim population in Europe, France has a problem with racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported: “In recent years, there has been a shift in French political rhetoric in favour of Armenia, said Regis Gente, a French journalist and analyst who covers the Caucasus. The shift has been driven by the increasing prominence of the far right in French politics, which is animated by anti-Muslim sentiment and has taken on the cause of Christian Armenia against Muslim Azerbaijan, Gente told RFE/RL.” Gente continued: “The [French] political agenda is being set by the far right.”

There are two components to France’s double standards.

The first is in contradictory foreign policy of supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity against Russian imperialism while supporting Armenian irridentism towards Azerbaijan. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, France should be upholding the international sanctity of the territorial integrity of all states.

President Emmanuel Macron has offered contradictory advice, support and condemnation, saying, for example: "And if my memory is right [...] Azerbaijan did launch a war, and a terrible one, in 2020." In that year, Azerbaijan re-took territories recognised as its sovereign lands by the UN and whose de-occupation the OSCE Minsk Group, of which France was a co-chair, had failed to achieve during its three-decade existence.

Furthermore, France never condemned Armenia’s occupation of a fifth of Azerbaijan, the ethnic cleansing of three quarters of a million Azerbaijanis from these lands and from Armenia itself, or the massive destruction of cultural and religious buildings and monuments. France has only supported the European Parliament and Council of Europe in issuing resolutions condemning Azerbaijan for anti-Armenian actions.

Although France was allegedly an impartial co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, it ignored Armenia’s occupation and became vocal and issued statements only condemning Azerbaijan for re-taking lands that are recognised by the UN as its sovereign territories. France's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna condemned Azerbaijan’s military operation to re-take Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally recognised as its sovereign territory, as “illegal, unjustifiable, unacceptable.”

France has supported Armenia against Azerbaijan at home in both houses of its parliament and at the UN and in European institutions such as the European Parliament and Council of Europe.

In January 2024, the French Senate adopted a resolution by 336 in favour (and only one against!) condemning the “military invasion of Azerbaijan” on the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and called for the “immediate withdrawal of Azerbaijani troops” from Armenian sovereign territory. One could not imagine the French Senate adopting a resolution condemning Ukraine for the “military invasion” of Crimea and the Donbas and calling for the ‘immediate withdrawal’ of Ukrainian troops from Russian sovereign territory.

In October 2024, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on Azerbaijan’s violation of human rights and international law and relations with Armenia and which condemned Azerbaijan’s support for ‘irredentist groups’ and ‘regrets the smear campaign aimed at damaging France’s reputation.’

Azerbaijan reacted with its own statement which condemned the European Parliament for “chauvinistic, racist, and colonial thinking,” and claimed that “by labelling the peoples fighting against colonialism as irredentist groups, European parliamentarians justify France’s colonial policies, framing them as part of European politics.”

The old problem of when groups can be defined as terrorists or freedom fighters has plagued both Azerbaijani-French relations and France and US relations with Türkiye. France has tended to side with Armenia against Türkiye. Meanwhile the US and Turkiye have been at loggerheads over Washington’s military support for the YPG (People’s Defence Units) which is the Syrian arm of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) that Türkiye, the US, EU, and Australia have designated as a terrorist group. France fought a four-decade war against the armed separatist FLNC (Nationalist Liberation Front of Corsica) and has condemned Russian military support to separatists in Ukraine, while at the same time backing armed Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh. Meanwhile, the US has designated the PKK as a terrorist group while providing military support to its allied YPG.

The second double standard is the lecturing of Azerbaijan over its Armenian national minority while continuing to pursue discriminatory and colonialist policies towards its own national minorities in Corsica and Brittany and towards its “overseas territories” of Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Réunion, Mayotte, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Saint Barthélemy, Saint-Martin, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, which together have nearly three million inhabitants. France has a very poor record in discriminating against Bretton, Corsican, Basque and Occidental languages and cultures within France as well as a long history of colonial discrimination in its former empire and existing ‘overseas territories.

In response, Azerbaijan formed the Baku Initiative Group to support the de-colonisation of French “overseas territories” which it describes as colonies.

Azerbaijan has pointed to, for the French, traumatic question of the Algerian war of independence from 1954-1962 which led to the deaths of between 400,000 and 1.5 million. The ICC (International Criminal Court) was founded in 1988 and has no retrospective power for crimes committed by France and Armenia prior to then.

Algeria was viewed by France in a similar manner to how Britain viewed Ireland, not as a colony but as part of the metropolis homeland. Therefore, the independence of Algeria and Ireland were inevitably more traumatic than India and African colonies. Nevertheless, the huge number of hundreds of thousands of fatalities by France when combatting Algeria’s drive to independence is far greater than the 3,500 who died in what were called ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland from 1968-1998 between nationalist Catholics seeking a united Ireland and Unionist Protestants wanting to remain part of the United Kingdom.

In October 2024, an “anti-colonial” conference focused on Africa was held in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, during the same week as the 19th Summit of the Organisation internationale of la Francophonie (OIF). The Parliamentary Assembly of the Francophonie adopted a “Resolution on crisis situations in the Francophone space, overcoming them and strengthening of peace” which condemned Azerbaijan’s policies towards Nagorno-Karabakh and expressed support for Armenia’s independence and sovereignty. Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry promptly denounced the resolution and recommended France instead "focus on the crimes committed by the French government in the Overseas Territories under French domination.”

Russia’s war against Ukraine has brought into the open tensions between the Global South, as represented by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), founded as far back as 1961, and emerging Middle Powers like Azerbaijan, and the West. Like Russia and China, the NAM seeks to replace the US-led unipolar with a multipolar world. But unlike Russia and China, the NAM has a more genuinely anti-colonialist history and seeks to forge a path between the hegemonic great powers.