At its most extreme, this focus descends into a postmodern oblivion: a world where everything is narrative and there is no difference between Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Yet this does not mean that narrative analysis is useless. Quite the opposite, in fact.

For more than a decade, our ability to form a coherent narrative about ourselves has been degrading. By “our”, I mean the West, which emerged in its current form in 1945 after three decades of war, desolation, and economic upheaval. The narrative that it told itself was crystalised during the Cold War: that the West would stand for liberty and freedom against the very live totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.

But this framework crumbled together with the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism. Overnight, a new narrative was needed, and it didn’t take long for one to emerge. The post-Cold War narrative formed in response to the Gulf War in 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq aggressively attacked Kuwait, principally with an eye to seizing its oil reserves. The United States and a 42-country coalition intervened, the Iraqis were soon pushed back, and Kuwait was allowed to govern itself. Here was the seed of the new narrative: the West, having won the Cold War, would keep the peace in the new status quo.

This updated founding myth required a domestic component — something tangible at home — and it found it in the ideology of the New Economy, which emphasised the transition of Western developed nations from highly industrialised economies to more technologically driven ones. This idea grew organically with the computer revolution, a loosening of financial and trade regulations, and the feelgood vibes of the Nineties’ economic boom. This was a world where Bill Clinton played the saxophone as the stock market rocketed.

By the early 2000s, however, this post-Cold War narrative started to fracture. The first blow was the collapse of the New Economy ideology as a massive bubble in the stock market unwound at the turn of the millennium. And then, three years later, came the invasion of Iraq. This intervention was very unlike the first Gulf War in which Hussein had clearly acted as the aggressor. This time, the conflict was instigated by Britain and the United States, opposed by many European countries, and was justified based on false, made-to-order intelligence — the now infamous “dodgy dossier”.

Still, even with these tremors, our narrative broadly held together: economic growth continued apace, and the war gave rise to an anti-war movement that would eventually produce future President Barack Obama. But then came the next hit — a real hammer blow. In 2008, as housing markets collapsed across the world, much of the growth of the 2000s turned out to be fake, fuelled as it was by housing debt. More debilitatingly, the impressive financial architecture that had sprung up as the sector was liberalised turned out to be rotten.

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But all was not yet lost, as two movements emerged out of the ashes of the 2008 collapse: the Right-wing populist movement and the Left-wing populist movement. The former, associated mostly with the Tea Party movement in the United States, saw the government and corporations as corrupt interlopers. Its Left-wing cousin, associated with the rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, saw things the same way. The two movements only differed on preferred solutions, with the Left wanting a more interventionist approach and the Right wanting to cut down on the state and promote market competition.

In the subsequent years, its Left-wing incarnation has mostly disappeared. In the US, it was absorbed back into the mainstream of the Democratic Party, won over with promises of radical social and cultural agendas that did not interfere with the economic bottom line. In the UK, the Corbyn movement collapsed in a wave of scandal, and a slightly confused group of Blairites seized the reins.

Meanwhile, the Right-populist movement mutated. Driven largely by the Brexit movement and the rise of Donald Trump, it dropped many of its more libertarian-leaning firebrands and became more pragmatic. It no longer wanted, say, tax cuts for the sake of tax cuts. Rather, it wanted cultural and economic rejuvenation. Taking place against a backdrop of severe and ever-increasing social and economic problems, this evolution was far from a surprise.

Today, however, there is reason to believe that the Right-populist movement has also failed. Donald Trump won the presidency, but he did not produce much in the way of constructive change. What happened instead is that the American political system became highly unstable, and many of the previously existing norms that held it together started to dissolve. This reached its crescendo in recent weeks with the arrest and indictment of Trump, an anarchic blip from which the country is unlikely to ever recover.

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In Britain, the Brexit movement got its way and, after years of bickering, the Conservative Party eventually managed to pull the country out of the European Union. Once again, though, nothing changed. The economy did not take off like a rocket. Mass immigration increased rather than decreased. Right-populist cultural and institutional concerns remain as they had before Brexit. At the same time, nothing catastrophic happened either. The Remainers who promised economic collapse and a sharp fall in trade with Europe were wrong. None of this happened. Indeed, nothing happened.

In both the UK and US, then, there is reason to think that we have no real coherent narrative. No one is sure where to go next or what to believe. And as three recent events have demonstrated, this noxious position is already causing serious dysfunction in our political culture.

The first was the Covid-19 outbreak and the responses in the form of the lockdowns and the vaccines. Compare this traumatic incident with, say, the Iraq War. Today, most people in the West agree that the Iraq War was a mistake; it was tragic and produced a terrible aftermath, and we have managed to come to terms with it. If you were to sit down at a dinner table full of strangers, you would all broadly know what the narrative is on the Iraq War — and so you can discuss it. Yet this is not the case with Covid-19 and the government’s response to it. There is no accepted narrative. Did we beat the virus with our prudent and rational response? Or did we overreact and create havoc? There is no settled answer, so it festers.

The second of these events was the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline last year. Once again, we have no official or widely accepted narrative of what happened. Most people appreciate that it was an enormous development that will have tremendous economic and geopolitical ramifications in the coming years. Yet we do not have a coherent narrative of why the pipeline was destroyed, who destroyed it, and what this means. Instead, conspiratorial thinking permeates and, as with Covid-19, it festers.

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Then, at the start of summer, there was the march of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner private military company, on Moscow. As it happened, the media went into overdrive. We were told that a world-changing coup was unfolding; a major historic event, possibly of the magnitude of the collapse of the Soviet Union, was taking place before our eyes. But then, once again, nothing happened. Prigozhin stopped, apologised, and went to Belarus with some of his troops. The conclusion was inconclusive; there is no coherent narrative about what happened. We cannot digest it, and so it festers.

In turn, each of these world-changing moments confirmed that narrative breaks are becoming more frequent as time marches forward. The recent coup in Niger demonstrates this once again, exposing uncomfortable truths about French-African relations that we would prefer to ignore. And yet, as we try to ignore it, our global influence ebbs. Increasingly, major events — or pseudo-events — are taking place in the world and provoking impassioned reactions, but then seem to lead into a ditch of unmeaning.

And then what happens? After the initial passion or even hysteria, people are forced to move on without processing what has just happened. In other words, we, as a society, advance without forming a coherent, broadly accepted narrative. We drift on, allowing doubt to fester, paralysed by a sneaking suspicion that the West is losing the plot.

In each of these coups, the military officers involved cited the same reasons for seizing power: mounting concerns about a surge in terrorism and chronic social and economic underdevelopment. Despite being one of the world’s richest regions in terms of natural resources, including oil, gold and uranium, the Sahel is also one of the poorest financially. Niger is a striking example: it is one of the world’s leading exporters of uranium, yet consistently ranks towards the bottom of the Human Development Index.

In the eyes of these countries’ new leaders and their supporters, much of the responsibility for this lies with one villain in particular: France. They are, after all, all former French colonies, part of what used to be known as Françafrique. And more than any other imperial power, France has continued to exercise a huge influence over its former outposts, replacing outright colonial rule with more subtle forms of neocolonial control — first and foremost with currency.

Before Africa’s decolonisation in the Fifties and Sixties, it was common among Western powers to impose forms of monetary subservience on their respective colonies. The latter were generally forced to use currencies issued and controlled by the imperial centres, to ensure the European countries’ economic control and financial benefit. France was no exception; rather, what set France apart from other imperial powers was the fact that its monetary empire survived decolonisation. While most African colonies, upon becoming independent, adopted national currencies, France managed to cajole most of its former outposts in Central and Western Africa into maintaining the colonial currency: the CFA franc.

In the decades that followed, various countries tried to abandon the CFA system, but very few succeeded. As the Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla and the French journalist Fanny Pigeaud write in their book Africa’s Last Colonial Currency (which I translated), France did everything it could to discourage countries from leaving the CFA: “Intimidations, destabilisation campaigns and even assassinations and coups d’état marked this period, testifying to the permanent and unequal power relations on which the relationship between France and its ‘partners’ in Africa was based — and is still based today.”

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The CFA franc, as a result, continues to be used by 14 countries, mostly former French colonies, throughout Central and Western Africa — including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Together, they form the so-called “franc zone”, with France still playing a central role. Despite the formal “Africanisation” of this group, which involved transferring the headquarters of the CFA franc’s two central banks to the African continent, France continues to enjoy far-reaching control over the system — and the countries that employ it.

“More than simply a currency,” Sylla and Pigeaud write, “the CFA franc allows France to manage its economic, monetary, financial and political relations with some of its former colonies according to a logic functional to its interests.” They contend that the CFA franc represents a form of “monetary imperialism”, which hinders the development of African economies and keeps them subservient to France.

Consider Niger: the country is France’s biggest source of uranium (providing around 20% of its supply), which is needed to fuel the nuclear plants which provide roughly 70% of the country’s electricity. Yet, only one in seven Nigeriens (and just 4% of rural residents) have access to modern electricity services, while more than 40% of the population live in extreme poverty. Just as strikingly, 85% of the company that operates Niger’s uranium industry is owned by France’s Atomic Energy Commission and two French companies; only 15% is owned by Niger’s government.

The CFA system, and the lack of monetary and economic sovereignty it entails, is central to this systematic plundering of resources — in Niger and elsewhere in the Sahel. Of the 10 countries with the world’s lowest Human Development Index, five are part of the franc zone, including the three that have experienced recent coups.

Nor is France’s control over the franc zone limited to economic tools. Niger is also France’s main Sahelian military base, hosting around 1,500 French soldiers. To further complicate matters, the country is also home to around 1,000 US soldiers, one of the largest contingents of American troops on the African continent, operating under the umbrella of the United States Africa Command (Africom). Since 2013, the US has also been carrying out drone missions from several bases in Niger — including a recently constructed $110-million installation. For both France and the US, the purported objective is to fight Islamic terrorism; the reality, however, is that despite this massive foreign military presence, security in Niger and other countries has deteriorated over the years — as have their economic prospects.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that Africa’s newest military juntas have singled out France as the main target of their ire. In Mali, the current military leader Assimi Goïta expelled the French army, cut diplomatic ties and even banned French as an official language. In Burkina Faso, the young revolutionary leader Ibrahim Traoré also expelled French troops and banned several exports.

For Sylla, this amounts to nothing less than “a second national liberation movement, which aims to bring to completion the decolonisation process which began in the Fifties and Sixties in Francophone Africa”. While the first stage of this process was about obtaining political independence from the West, this latest stage is about obtaining economic sovereignty and independence. This is why, as a recent United Nations report noted, popular support for these new military governments can be understood as being “symptomatic of a new wave of democratic aspiration that is expanding across the continent”. As Sylla told me: “In many of these countries, the militaries are seen as leaders upholding their nations’ sovereignty and independence, as opposed to elected governments, which tend to be puppets of the West and have done nothing to challenge the neocolonial order throughout the years.”

But what does this mean for Niger? For now, the country appears to be moving in the same direction as Mali and Burkina Faso. While the new government has stopped short (for now) of telling foreign troops to leave the country, it has revoked a raft of military cooperation agreements with France, closed the country’s airspace — effectively bringing to a halt US drone operations — and announced it is suspending the export of uranium to France. In response, thousands of people have taken to the streets to show their support, burning French flags and even attacking the French embassy. “Since childhood, I’ve been opposed to France,” a local businessman told the BBC. “They’ve exploited all the riches of my country such as uranium, petrol and gold. The poorest Nigeriens are unable to eat three times a day because of France.”

As if to prove his point, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) — a political and economic union of 15 countries located in West Africa which has the support of the West — immediately placed sanctions on Niger, suspending all commercial and financial transactions between Niger and Ecowas countries and, even more ominously, freezing Niger’s assets deposited in the central and commercial banks of Ecowas. The reason they can do this is precisely because Ecowas contains the West African Economic and Monetary Union, which issues the currency used by Niger, and is largely under France’s control. This allows France to weaponise the CFA franc against any government that poses a problem for it within the franc zone. The EU has also reacted punitively, suspending aid and cooperation with Niger despite it being one of the poorest countries in the world.

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More worryingly, the West African bloc said it would “take all measures necessary”, including the use of force, if the elected government was not reinstated within a week. That deadline expired on Sunday and no action was taken, but the threat has not been retracted. They are due to meet on Thursday to decide what happens next. Meanwhile, France, the EU and the US have all offered “unflagging” support to the ousted leader, and have backed Ecowas’s stance. This follows a decade of France using military force to defend its interests in Francophone Africa, intervening in the Ivory Coast, Mali and Chad.

But this is more than just a story about France’s waning hegemony and US military presence in the region. The Nigerien coup also threatens a $13-billion dollar project to build a gas pipeline connecting gas fields in Nigeria to Europe, which would pass straight through Niger. Following the EU’s decision to wean itself off Russian gas last year, this venture is arguably more urgent than ever.

The Nigerien military regime, for its part, has warned that any foreign military intervention in the country would result in a “massacre”, while Mali and Burkina Faso have both come out in support of the new government. Any military intervention, they warned in a joint statement, “would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali”, and “could destabilise the entire region”. Moreover, given Russia’s strong ties with the putschist governments, a Western-backed attack on Niger could easily mutate into what Colin P. Clarke has described as “a regional proxy war”, with Russia and the Wagner Group supporting Niger (and Burkina Faso and Mali), and Western countries supporting Ecowas.

All of which feeds into fears that we are on the verge of a new scramble for Africa, with Russia, China and the West vying for influence over this immensely resource-rich, young continent predicted to be the next frontier of growth. If this logic prevails, however, it will be a disaster for Africa. For as hard as it may be to fathom, Western countries — and France in particular — should accept that this anti-Western trend has much less to do with recent foreign influence than with historical grievances against long-running neocolonial practices. Any attempt to counter it with the same old recipe — financial blackmail and military force — will only strengthen the rebels’ resolve.