The French Caribbean Between Egalitarian Aspirations and Identity Assertions: Towards a Shift in the Relationship to the State?

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current transformation of the relationship between the French Caribbean and the French State. It aims at exploring the discursive categories through which the overseas realities are now named, apprehended and reconstructed. It also emphasizes the mechanisms by which the framework of public action in these overseas territories tends to be recomposed at all levels, be they local, central or European. How is regulated the major tension between the egalitarian aspirations historically rooted in the local populations and the permanent statement of “differences” or “specificities”? To what extent and how this tension, which is consubstantial with the relationship between the Caribbean overseas territories and the French State, infuses public action in these territories and permeates their internal political spaces? Clearly, the shift in the framework of public action results from compromises which are negotiated, sometimes bitterly, at the European, central and local levels, while it reveals the tensions inherent in societies characterized by a sense of multiple belongings and identity assertions. It also draws on discursive strategies now giving priority to new arrangements for political representation, based on the valorization of “proximity”, even the quest for a conformity of those in charge of public action with the overseas societies.