Contenu du sommaire : L'État outre-mer

In this article, the authors seek to address the singular forms of the State in the French overseas territories. It explores the original historical construction and strengthening of both State interventions and bureaucratic domination in these territories. While drawing up an overview of the existing scholarship, the authors seek to look at the colonial legacies while paying attention to both the variety of the decolonization processes and their complex temporalities in the overseas territories. Instead of naturalizing the so-called “specificity” of political interventions and the State in these territories, they look at the various forms of mobilizations that contribute to frame them as “singular” or “exceptional”. The authors also argue that the evolution of such framing is closely related to processes of politicization and depoliticization. Finally, building on the street-level bureaucracy scholarship, they look at the practical dimensions of state action and administrative encounters.

The French Establishments in Oceania are an interesting empirical case to understand the French State's action in its overseas possessions. Under the terms of a very singular legal system which made half of the natives French citizens while the others remained “native subjects”, this remote possession falls outside the traditional divide between citizens and subjects. While the effectivity of political rights has already been partially analyzed, another important vehicle of citizenship has not been studied, namely, education. Whereas the interests of the “civilizing mission”, and in particular the linguistic requirement of francization, ordered the extension of compulsory education in Tahiti, it was not implemented locally before 1897, after two decades of debates that shed a new light on a fundamental imperial tension between the need to consider as “equal” those who were, and should to a certain extent remain, “different”. This article aims to review this tension in the light of the resistance to the Metropolitan law, both on the part of the colonizers and of the colonized, by showing on the one hand how the racialist logic, officially ineffective in this case, kept resurfacing in public and official writings, and on the other hand, how the Polynesians' hidden transcript, challenged, in practice, the enforcement of the law.

As a result of the departmentalization of the French old colonies in 1946, the prefect became the head of the State services of these territories. In French Guiana, although the population initially welcomed this unprecedented administrative encounter, the latter was in a very short time disrupted. From the mid-1950s onwards, political life was articulated between a local Creole and autonomist left-wing party and a departmental right-wing party affiliated to the Mainland and taxed to be under the prefect's control. Teachers engaged in movements of this local left-wing party were the main actors in this unprecedented bipolarization of political life which resulted in violent conflicts. After assessing the phenomenon on the basis of reports from the prefect, the Government promulgated a Law order on October 15, 1960 – following the recommendation of the same prefect. This Law order established the automatic recall to the Mainland of civil servants perceived as virulent propagandists of subversive ideas. Most of them were autonomist teachers. This article shows how, in less than twenty years, the opposition between the prefect and the autonomist teachers shed light on a new political space in France. This new political space was characterized by an intense political change during which French Guianese Creole teachers became a leading elite of their department, both opposed and allied to the prefect of the overseas department who had excessive powers in virtue of the perceived threat of separatism.

The BUMIDOM is a French state agency created by the government in 1963 in order to control and organize migrations from the overseas departments (Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Reunion) and thus neutralize the latent social crisis. The mere existence of such an agency as well as the policy it implemented reveal the continued existence of specific treatments of the overseas departments and their population, even after the colonial period. Such persistence constitutes a starting point to study and analyze a French colorline that may be less rigid and apprehendable than those that exist in states with institutionalized segregation. Although it does not rely on a biological type of racism, it is still based upon practices justified by the geographic and cultural backgrounds of the migrants. Migrants coming from overseas departments are viewed as citizens by the BUMIDOM. They are still subjected to a specific public and associational supervision. The study also shows that some of the practices by BUMIDOM agents and the general prejudice against people from the overseas departments contributed to forms of racialization that are more culturalist than colorist (but it's worth noting these two forms are not mutually exclusive). The organized migrations implemented by the BUMIDOM reveal deeply unequal relations between the mainland and the overseas departments. That is why despite the non-coercive nature of its action, the BUMIDOM is remembered as a weak institution and generally despised by the population. The agents of the BUMIDOM probably considered the migrants from the overseas territories as full citizens; however, not only were their actions constrained by the domination to which their “clients” were subjected, but the policy they implemented contributed, to a certain extent, to the persistence of their domination.

In April 2011, Mayotte became the 101st French department. On this French island in the Comoros archipelago two civil statuses coexist: one is local under Islamic law and Malagasy and African customs; the other is the common law according to the French Civil Code. The process of departmentalization led to a redefinition of the legal framework to include Mayotte citizens within the French nationality. To that end, reforms of the civil status and local law were launched in 2000. This article looks at their implementation and the debates that accompanied them from a historical point of view. More specifically, based on the ethnographic study conducted by the author, it has become apparent that Mayotte citizens have struggled to adapt to these changes that had not been extensively discussed outside the circle of local elites and national elected officials. This lack of consultation has fueled a worried relation to French nationality for a number of people in Mayotte that has sometimes been expressed through resentment towards the Comorians, whether they are French nationals or foreigners.

The “specificity” of the French overseas territories is both a common wisdom and a shared belief among the various actors involved in politics and the public policies displayed in these regions. However, the term “overseas” does not designate an objective category. It is the result of a historical and social construction stemming from a variety of social and political mobilizations. In the article, the authors aim to show the institutional construction of a public policy category and its relations to an elite social space they label “the State overseas”. They argue that such a category has grown more autonomous in recent years and that its capacity to defend and represent the interests of the French overseas territories has subsequently strengthened. Furthermore, while there is a general agreement regarding their specificity and exceptionality, the authors argue that both the frontiers and the content of public policies in these regions are still the results of classification and definition struggles.

While the governmentality of the French State relies on categorizing its inhabitants, they are not passive towards the institutions. This paper presents an ethnographic account of Maroon women's encounters with the bureaucracy of the French state in Saint Laurent du Maroni, French Guiana. My fieldwork was not conducted alongside officers, but with women looking for social housing in Saint-Laurent, ethnically defined as bushinenge. They see the French State as invested with a postcolonial whiteness called “bakaa”, even if its agents are from diverse origins. The institutional socialization of these women articulates claims to the right to public housing with the idea that the State “gives” these houses. In return, they have to “walk”, i.e. physically go for active and repeated administrative procedures. “Walking” for a house questions stereotypes about Maroon women's passivity based on race, class and gender domination. During their personal interactions with officers, these women both follow bakaa bureaucratic injunctions, and subvert some of the institutional codes. They negotiate bureaucratic arrangements, far removed from the bureaucratic ideals.

From an analysis of the American health care policies, this article proposes a renewal of our understanding of the “neo-liberal turning point” of the 1970s. It highlights a dimension that is usually ignored in the classical studies of this period: the transformations that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s in the social spaces where ideas and knowledge are produced (mainly the academic space and the space of expertise). Thus it invites us to relativize the impact of the economic and budgetary context of the 1970s, which is generally considered as the trigger of the paradigmatic change. On the other hand, it underlines the interest of introducing some elements of the sociology of knowledge into the analysis of policy change.