French-Australian Relations: Une Entente Glaciale Revisited

In light of last year’s deterioration in French-Australian relations, this article will examine the AUKUS exchanges between former Prime Minister Scott Morrison and President Emmanuel Macron, with a particular focus on the underlying French and Australian English cultural values and assumptions which influenced their communications. It will be argued that these different ways of seeing the world were largely responsible for the decline in relations between the two leaders. The article will examine these events in light of the general dominance of English as a global language, and the particular “monolingual mindset” which exist in Australia. Concrete examples will be used to show how learning foreign languages can vastly expand one’s vision of the world personally and professionally, providing access to knowledge and promoting acceptance and understanding of other cultural values and worldviews. It will also be argued that - perhaps even more importantly – multilingualism promotes awareness and understanding of our own worldview and the realisation that ours is not the only way of seeing the world, let alone the right one. Some of this awareness could easily have prevented last year’s entente glaciale.