There was a time when France had the second largest diplomatic network in the world, behind the United States.
That time is over.
In the latest ranking of world diplomacy published on Sunday by the Australian think tank The Lowy Institute, France fell to fifth position in 2023, losing two places in one year.
For a long time appearing just behind the United States, Paris had already moved to third in 2019 when Beijing took first place.
Turkey and Japan now occupy third and fourth places in this ranking, which is based on the number of embassies and consulates across five continents.
According to calculations by the Lowy Institute, which analyzed the diplomatic networks of 66 countries and territories in Asia, the G20 and the OECD, France has closed 18 missions since 2016 - for a total of 249 current consulates and embassies.
Christian Lequesne, author of
Ethnographie du Quai d'Orsay
(CNRS Éditions, 2017), however, qualifies this decline, which he does not see as a sign of a decline on the international scene.
Rather than embassies, Paris, he explains, closed a certain number of consular posts, mainly for budgetary reasons.
“French diplomacy is based on the principle of what we call the universality of the network: we want to maintain a presence everywhere, including through small posts, called PPD (diplomatic presence posts),” explains
the professor at Sciences Po. In Botswana, Fiji, Moldova and even South Sudan, France relies on small representations with a minimum of staff, an ambassador, a political advisor and a cultural advisor.
China remains in the lead
During the same period 2016-2024, Ankara opened almost 30 new missions, reaching 252 representations in total.
“This supports their economic dynamics.
Turkey was already very present in the Middle East, and is now widely deployed in Africa
,” notes Christian Lequesne.
“In the construction sector in particular, the Turks compete with the Chinese in African countries and seek to deepen cultural ties, via student scholarships that they send to Turkey”
.
In this data collected by the Australian think tank, China remains in the lead, with 274 diplomatic representations in the world.
It is closely followed by the United States, which has 271. Beijing has occupied this first place since 2019, a sign of the ambitions of the People's Republic which, already second on the economic power scene, is aiming for the position of new world leader for its centenary in 2049.
The strategy of these Chinese ambassadors, who have used increasingly aggressive communication since the Covid-19 period, is nicknamed by the media the
“diplomacy of fighting wolves”
, in reference to the film Wolf Warrior 2, the biggest Chinese box office success released in 2017. Through this powerful diplomatic network, the Chinese objective is also to isolate Taiwan.
Through financing and cooperation agreements, Beijing is tearing away its allies from Taipei one by one.
The latest is Nauru, a small island state in the Pacific, which decided in January to break its ties with Taiwan to resume formal relations with China.
Since then, only 12 countries in the world still remain loyal to Taipei to the detriment of relations with its Chinese neighbor.