Some Diplomats Are American, Canadian, French in Other Countries But White in Haiti
you had never met, outside of Haiti, a former diplomat accredited there, it would be difficult to measure the gap between two modes of conduct. Elsewhere, he conforms to the ordinary rules of his function, with restraint, lexical prudence, and explicit recognition of the host state's sovereignty.
By La Rédaction · Port-au-Prince · · 3 min read · Updated 24 April 2026
Translated from French — AI-assisted and reviewed by the editorial team. The French version is authoritative. Read the original · About our translation policy
By Jean Venel Casséus
If you had never met, outside of Haiti, a former diplomat accredited there, it would be difficult to measure the gap between two modes of conduct. Elsewhere, he conforms to the ordinary rules of his function, with restraint, lexical prudence, and explicit recognition of the host state's sovereignty. In Port-au-Prince, these safeguards disappear. He is White. The Black Code is his only Convention. Consequently, his words take on a directive tone, his attitude slides towards prescription, his interventions become commonplace. This difference in posture reveals a persistent representation of Haiti as a space of historical exception, a territory where the suspension of norms continues to be permitted more than two centuries after 1804.
Foreign interference in Haiti does not stem from an isolated incident or a temporary contingency. It is part of stabilized, recurring practices integrated into the daily functioning of international relations concerning the country. Embassies assume a role that largely exceeds observation or mediation, publicly qualifying political actors, implicitly arbitrating internal conflicts, guiding economic choices, validating or disqualifying institutional trajectories. This continuous displacement of authority causes a lasting weakening of the state's capacity to produce its own decisions and establishes a political dependence that fuels structural fragility instead of containing it.
This mechanism is articulated with a racial dynamic that is rarely formulated but always operating. In Haiti, many diplomats cease to be mere state representatives to embody a position of dominance, of a colonizer. They assume a supposedly superior legitimacy, allowing themselves to explain, correct, and call to order. All these attitudes reveal a hierarchical vision of the world, in which a Black country, born from a slave insurrection, continues to be perceived as an incomplete political body.
The consequences for stability are immediate. By shifting the effective locus of decision-making outside national institutions, these practices encourage local actors to bypass the Haitian public sphere to seek decisive approval elsewhere. Politics then ceases to be a structured relationship between governors and governed, transforming into peripheral negotiation conducted in diplomatic salons. This configuration leads to a fragmentation of responsibility, a weakening of public authority, and fertile ground for the proliferation of violence in the vacuum left by a recognized decision-making framework.
Development suffers from a similar constraint. No coherent economic project can be sustainably rooted in an environment where public priorities remain constantly revisable under external pressure. International aid, often presented as a moral justification for these interventions, primarily functions as a political conditionality mechanism, linking collective choices to agendas developed outside the country.
