ABSTRACT

In February 2010, a few months after the global festivities commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, Benin discreetly celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the National Conference of Dynamic Forces that led the country on to the path of a peaceful transition toward pluralism. In 2010, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of the French-speaking countries of Africa, Benin, the old ‘Latin Quarter’ of French West Africa, seems to represent one of the exceptions that proves the rule that West Africa is an area disinclined to democratic change and undermined by political crises. For most observers of the African continent, the matter has long been settled. The transplantation of ‘democratic modernity’ has generally been a failure, expressed, at best, by a reproduction of the ‘bad governance’ of the corrupt postcolonial states and, at worst, in an increase in tensions, disintegrating the social fabric and leading to violence, if not to real war. Côte d’Ivoire is said to be the classic case of a crisis of citizenship generated by opening the Pandora’s Box of pluralism. 1 The majority of funders, weary of seeing the democratic conditions on which they insist hijacked by regimes creating an illusory democratic ‘front’, seem to have found refuge in a minimal appeal to ‘good governance’ and ‘participatory strategies’ to combat poverty.