Everything was going well until then. Jean-Luc Mélenchon was visiting Senegal in mid-May and gave a speech to students on the 16th. He stood in the prestigious company of Ousmane Sonko, the new Prime Minister of the country and was welcomed as a friend, he who unconditionally supported the party of opponents of Macky Sall, the former president. The Elysée, on the contrary, is considered guilty of having practiced burying its head in the sand in the face of political repression. In short, the Insoumis is on conquered ground to freely make its critical speech towards Emmanuel Macron heard.
However, he will be heavily booed by the large crowd who came to listen to the two men at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. What happened ? After Sonko declared that “external attempts to impose on us the importation of lifestyles and ways of thinking contrary to our values risk constituting a new casus belli” – he was thinking of homosexual rights and the “priority concern within Western opinions” for the LGBT community – Jean-Luc Mélenchon, once the floor came to him, retorted that he had been the first to have filed a text of law on the possibility of homosexual marriage and that there was therefore a serious disagreement there. It should be remembered that in Senegal, homosexual relations are usually considered a deviance and that they can be punished by five years’ imprisonment.
We must first salute the courage of Jean-Luc Mélenchon who made this precision to the defiance of the crowd. It is then useful to point out that he wanted to assure his audience that he would not seek to impose his opinions on the subject – one wonders how, moreover. Finally, we can add that the Senegalese Prime Minister documented his exasperation by mentioning the fact that financial partnerships with international institutions were now conditioned – according to him – by these societal issues.
Intellectual neocolonialism
This is only an anecdotal incident in the context of the visit of the leader of the Rebels to Africa but it seems to me terribly revealing of the cognitive dissonances which trap the path of a certain “progressivism”. Leon Festinger, the famous social psychologist, inventor of this notion, used it to designate the discomfort that everyone feels when several elements of their beliefs and values come into contradiction with each other.
Here, Mélenchon defends his position but wants to make it clear that he will not impose it because he knows well that this would be interpreted as the manifestation of a sort of intellectual neocolonialism. This fact indicates the open wound in the ideology of a certain left which, for this reason, will never be able to achieve coherent intellectual positions. The very idea of progressivism, however we define it, indicates a certain representation of History. There would be an arrow of progress which can be thwarted but which should lead to new rights and a state judged objectively superior from a moral point of view to the previous situation. This is the case with the rights of women and homosexuals, for example. But, at the same time, this progressivism is haunted by the risk of ethnocentrism which consists of imposing the values of ours on other cultures. This risk is widely illustrated in the history of colonialism which, precisely, he abhors.
So how do we resolve this dissonance? No doubt, apparently, as Mélenchon does: by mulling over his opinions and waiting for the light to descend on these peoples. We would have to wait somehow. However, if we think that these liberal values will naturally impose themselves on the scale of History, it is because they have a universal charge. If this is the case, it is because they are morally superior to those of other civilizations and here we are back where we started. This progressivism (because there is another which more clearly assumes its universalism) may well lick its open wounds, they will not heal.
Gérald Bronner is a sociologist and professor at Sorbonne University
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