ABSTRACT
December 2015 was a landmark in the political history of French Guiana with the election of the new single territorial community – the collectivité unique - which enshrined the official demise of the Région and, more pertinently, the Département that had previously embodied the principle of assimilation of this South American French territory to France. Broadly-speaking, the traditional two-tier system – which exists all over metropolitan France, although, in contrast to those overseas, mainland Regions comprise multiple Departments – has been slimmed down and streamlined into a single political body combining the powers of the former two. Martinique undertook the same reforms, albeit with different sociopolitical overtones, while Guadeloupe, which had turned down the offer of institutional change that was put to the Caribbean Overseas Departments in a 2010 referendum, maintained the departmental institution inherited from the 1946 law that had aligned the former colonies to the metropolitan institutional model. Guadeloupe also kept the Région which was established by François Mitterrand in 1982 and extended to the ‘four old colonies’ (Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique and Réunion). With the two former municipalities of Saint Martin and Saint Barthelemy, which acceded to the slightly different status of Overseas Territories when they split from ‘continental’ Guadeloupe, France now has five dependencies in the Caribbean region.
