Trump and Macron bilateral at the Elysee Palace, November 10, 2018, during Centennial of the end of World War I commemorations. Shealah Craighead/ Press Association. All rights reserved.

In 2017, Labour pledged to create a unified
National Education Service for England “to move towards cradle-to-grave
learning that is free at the point of use”, including the abolition of tuition
fees. Just across the channel, in France, free education for life already
exists — albeit in a state of underfunded disrepair.

For us, one French and one British, this system
has been vital: an opening into new worlds, a chance to reorient our lives, and
a way of reviving the avid curiosity that marks the end of childhood. But the
universal basis of this model is under threat.

On 19 November, French prime minister Édouard
Philippe announced government plans for an astronomical rise in university fees
for non-EU students. Currently, where you come from does not affect how much
you pay to study in France: it costs €170 a year for an undergraduate degree, a €243 a year for a
masters, and €380 a year for a PhD. For students from outside Europe the
government plans to increase the cost to €2770 a year for undergraduates and €3770 a year
for masters and PhD students.

In an ironic twist reminiscent of Trumpian
policy flourishes, these fee hikes are part of a package of measures entitled
#BienvenueEnFrance (Welcome to France). The government’s stated objective is to
increase the number of foreign students from 324,000 to 500,000 by 2027 — by
making them pay at least ten times more.

Anglo-American
model

From the standpoint of the elitist, fee-paying,
border-policing model of UK higher education, one could be forgiven for being
more shocked by the relative openness of the existing French system than by the
proposed changes. And indeed, a comparison of the two models is prescient
precisely because it seems increasingly clear that Macron’s government is
intent on importing the Anglo-American model of higher education to France.

Earlier this year, the government introduced
stricter selection criteria for school-leavers hoping to go to university.
This was widely seen as a move away from the essentially non-selective,
comprehensive-school-style idea behind the bulk of French public universities.
This principle of non-selection — epitomised by the university Paris 8, which
was set up in the wake of the movements of 1968 as an experiment in open
popular education — has always been undermined by the existence of the grandes
écoles (a small set of highly selective elite institutions such as the École
Normale Supérieure) as well as being continually eroded by underfunding.

And yet this principle continues to heavily
influence debates over the future of higher education in France. The government’s
first two measures regarding universities — increasing their selectivity and
drawing financial borders around them — signal a worrying change in direction
of travel.

Existential
threat

Writing in Le
Monde, sociologist Éric Fassin puts the aim
of this latest measure in the clearest possible terms: “the government wants to
attract the richest, and push away the poorest”. While the number of
scholarships for overseas students will increase from 13,000 to 21,000, this
will constitute but a drop in the ocean: the current number of foreign students
stands at 324,000.

And even if the number of scholarships did make
up for the increase in fees, the introduction of means-testing always poses an
existential threat to the principle of universal public services: once you
start asking who should pay and who should not, it is a slippery slope towards
privatisation.

In conjunction with the insufficient increase in
scholarships, Édouard Philippe stated the government’s intention to attract
more students from “emerging countries (China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia) and
non-francophone countries in Sub-Saharan Africa”. This is in sharp distinction
to the current make-up of the foreign student population.

Of the 10 countries that send the most students
to France, 6 are francophone African, with African students in general making
up a total of 45%. These are the students that the government is hoping to
dissuade from studying in France: the young people of its former colonies.

Republican
tradition

This flies directly in the face of what some
consider a longstanding republican tradition: that if you can speak French and
you have the qualifications, you can study in France for next to nothing. This
tradition — which acted as both a colonial tool to train the governing elites
of the French colonies and later, arguably, as a measly form of postcolonial reparations —
contributed to the development of some of the most important thinkers and
writers of recent decades:
Achille Mbembe, Albert Memmi, and René Depestre to name
but a small few.***

To compensate, the government is proposing to
contribute towards the expansion of French higher education institutions based
outside of Europe. While this may be welcomed by those who would prefer to
study in their home countries, this measure comes with its problems. Not only
is it a way of reinforcing the global influence of la francophonie
(playing catch-up with the US and UK spread of branded universities across the
world, such as UCL Qatar or Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi), it is also a way of
limiting the dynamics of decolonisation at work in the former metropoles
themselves. As Stuart Hall famously put it: “we are here, because you were
there”.

The same was repeatedly voiced by students of
formerly colonised countries studying in France present at a meeting called
shortly after the government’s announcement. The attempt to price out students
from former colonies is a forceable off-shoring of the ongoing dynamics of
decolonisation — a process at play not only in former colonies but also in the
former centres of colonial power.

Patriotism
as openness?

The sheer hypocrisy of such a move is all the
more striking given Macron’s internationalist posturing on the world stage. Only last month,
during Trump's visit to Paris on Remembrance Day, the French president was at
pains to denounce economic nationalism in favour of a vague notion of
patriotism as openness.

That this squares with a rise in university fees
for non-European students tells us all we need to know about the exclusionary
contours of neoliberal internationalism.

***Here, we are not including figures such as
Frantz Fanon and others because Martinique remains, administratively, part of
France.