How the doctrine of ‘Frenchness’ failed
The day before he declared a state of emergency in a bid to curb the wave of rioting in France, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin stated the obvious:
“ The republic is at a moment of truth. What’s being questioned is the effectiveness of our integration model.”
What, in fact, is being questioned is how France has applied it.
Unlike Canadian multiculturalism that encourages new immigrant groups to retain their cultural heritage — even at the cost of a clear- cut national identity — France has long chosen the route of integration, or assimilation, into the existing identity.
Its republican creed holds that everyone, once they are citizens, all are then identical in their “ Frenchness.”
At least, that was the theory. The Canadian notion that different ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities deserve special recognition has been unthinkable. American affirmative action theory, anathema. “The policy that France has pursued for 100 years is that to be French, you have to adopt the French culture and become ‘ invisible,’ and then everything falls into place,” says Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. And it worked. Assimilation was highly effective in the past for the simple reason that immigrants came from other European countries, were white and culturally similar. No major adjustments were needed on the part of the newcomers — or the French.
After the end of the Algerian war of independence in 1962, however, the pattern of immigration changed. Algerians and other black or Arab, but predominantly Muslim, North Africans started to arrive. Needing a cheap labour pool, the country happily ushered in about 500,000 by the end of the 1960s.
In 1974, however, France was back on its feet economically and ended its labour migration program. But the immigrants didn’t go back. Why should they? They were French citizens, who now had families. Today, their total number has grown to 5 million out of a 60million population. Nobody paid attention to the implications, says Papademetriou, who worked in Paris in the early 1990s. Like many countries with a changing immigrant demographic, France went on “ automatic pilot.”
“Integration has merit,” he says, “ except when you pretend that certain groups are not being marginalized and stigmatized. “Because the French don’t consider themselves racist — ‘ Us, are you kidding?’ — they didn’t pay attention to what was happening, to what was obvious to outsiders. They didn’t test for discrimination.” What he means is that, in refusing to acknowledge ethnic, let alone racial differences, France never collected the census and workforce data that multicultural systems routinely monitor to assess how new groups are faring. The French government said such data was offensive and antiintegration. But critics say it was afraid of what the statistics would reveal: rampant discriminationfuelled unemployment rates and housing segregation. Integration was a fantasy. The current immigrant riots are not the first in France, just the most widespread. A similar “ intifada” broke out in Paris 15 years ago in response to conditions in the rundown suburban social- housing ghettos, the banlieues.
There are more of them today and they’re not just in Paris; 1,100 banlieues across the country. Though it may appear that France has been oblivious to the growing problems, it has been trying, officially, to come to terms with population changes. In 1989, the grandly named High Council for Integration was created, followed by the Directorate for Populations and Migration, then one council, regional commission and “ Plan for Social Cohesion” after another, all charged with making integration work. The frantic round of activity failed to impress one of the men at the top, former prime minister Jean-Marie Raffarin. In 2003, he said: “ Instead of trying to give real meaning to equality and genuine integration, we’ve had slogans and unenforced laws which have long acted as a smokescreen.”
Nothing much changed.
“ Not unlike the U. S., the French have been listening to their own rhetoric about exceptionalism,” says Papademetriou. “ Before the riots, their model may have only needed tweaking. Now they could face a sea change.”
Others wonder. It is not just one- culture integration, rather than laissez- faire multiculturalism, that France believes is superior. It also vehemently defends the principle of official secularism.
In 1905, the doctrine of laiceté was enacted to bar religion from the public arena, particularly the education system, to ensure equality before the law regardless of private beliefs. The doctrine made formal the secularism introduced after the French Revolution and underlined by Napoleon. For a century, it has been seen as a badge of honour in this overwhelmingly, if only nominally, Roman Catholic country. But with the arrival of large numbers of Islamic immigrants, whose religion and cultural identity are deeply intertwined, many French fear that secularism could be chipped away at until it is one day destroyed. It’s why there was so much public support last year for the ban in public schools on ostentatious religious symbols, Muslim headscarves included. It was not anti- Muslim or any other faith: it was anti- religion, period.
In an attempt to bridge the chasm between secularism and Islam, France created the Council of the Muslim Faith in 2003 to act as a liaison between the government and religious leaders — and ultimately, it was speculated, to promote a French form of Islam. But large sections of the French population are still unhappy with what they
see as hugely conflicting value systems.
Bluntly put, the attitude of many has been:
“ You may be citizens,
but you’re not culturally French and as long as you slaughter sheep at the end of Ramadan, segregate the sexes, pressure women to wear head- coverings, you never will be.” Mark LeVine, a specialist in European Islam at the University of California, says Muslim immigrants “threaten the overarching French identity,” but that a resolution to the current crisis isn’t simply a matter of France opting for multiculturalism over integration. Both approaches have problems, he says, but the forces now in play are far larger than either.
“ They start with the French refusal to admit how bad their colonial past was. They have a blind spot when it comes to visible minorities from former colonies and, when they are Muslim, Islam in itself becomes a problem.” The attacks of 9/ 11 didn’t help. The French delegation told the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination earlier this year that “ the increase in racial intolerance in France has been influenced by international events.”
LeVine thinks a stronger factor is the impact of globalization on France’s economy. Like the rest of Europe, it is grappling with how much it will have to dismantle the social safety net.
“ Its government has to make hard choices on where they spend the money — in the banlieues? Or on health care, on the aging, the middle class, the taxpaying petits bourgeois, the ‘ real French’? And it has to protect its right flank.” The pressures on France are a “ microcosm” of what other nations could face, he says bluntly. Demetrios Papademetriou agrees, noting that other European countries are panicking over the riots: “ French integration has been shown to be an emperor with no clothes. But the Dutch, who’ve spent billions on multiculturalism, also have serious problems and they’re having conniptions.
“ The question now is: How do you inoculate other nations from what is happening in France?”