France is clinging to an ideal that's been pickled into dogma

France is clinging to an ideal that's been pickled into dogma

Britain is in no position to lecture, but the French model of colour-
blind integration gives racism a free hand

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday November 9, 2005
The Guardian

Paris is in flames and it's more than a city which is burning. The
presidency of Jacques Chirac, already battered, is being consumed
before our eyes. The French political class, shaken by the No vote in
May's referendum on the European constitution and the rejection of
the Paris bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, is feeling the ground
tremble. Not since 1968 has there been such a widespread and
sustained challenge to the French state.

But the greatest threat of all is to an idea, one that has held firm
since the first days of the Republic. If that idea is now shrivelling
in the flames of Lille and Toulouse, the heat will be felt far beyond
France: it will reach even here.

The riots themselves are not hard to fathom; several French
commentators have said the only mystery is why they didn't break out
15 years earlier. If you corral hundreds of thousands of the poor and
disadvantaged into sink estates and suburbs in a misery doughnut
around the city, expose them to unemployment rates of up to 40%, and
then subject them to daily racial discrimination at the hands of
employers and the police, you can hardly expect peace and
tranquillity. Cut public spending on social programmes by 20% and you
will guarantee an explosion. All you have to do is light the fuse.

And this fire has been building for decades. It was after the second
world war that - just as health minister Enoch Powell went recruiting
for NHS staff in the Caribbean - France went shopping among its
foreign colonies for labourers and factory workers. It brought these
mainly Arab migrants in, then dumped them on the outskirts of the big
cities. It did the same to the Harkis - Algerians who had
collaborated with the French colonial authorities - and the next
waves of North African immigrants, warehousing them like an unwanted
commodity in high-rise ghettoes on the périphérique, out of sight of
the white folks of the city. And there they have stayed for a half
century.

Their anger could not stay pent-up forever. And the official reaction
to the first outbreak of violence clearly inflamed it. Interior
minister Nicolas Sarkozy promised to "Karcherise" the "scum" who were
burning cars and torching buildings: Karcher is the brand name for a
kind of sand-blaster, the sort of machine one might use to remove
bird droppings from a wall. According to former Libération columnist
Doug Ireland, to speak of Karcherising the North African youth on the
streets was "as close as one can get to hollering ethnic cleansing
without actually saying so".

The motives of the man they call Sarko are not hard to divine: he
wants to run for president in 2007 and has clearly decided his
constituency is the white right nurtured by Jean-Marie Le Pen. His
hardman language during these last 10 days has been a nakedly
Powellite bid for those National Front votes.

Now his rival, prime minister Dominique de Villepin, has taken the
initiative, reviving a 1955 curfew law which allows local authorities
to impose a state of emergency. He may succeed where Sarkozy failed,
restoring a semblance of calm. But the move itself has caused
disquiet. For the 1955 law was passed to quell Algerian unrest at the
height of the independence struggle. That the same legislation should
now be used to put down the children and grandchildren of the
Algerian rebels has prompted some glum reflection in France - as if
that bitter war never really ended.

It's this sentiment which gets close to what is really at stake. Yes,
these riots are rooted in economic deprivation and urban decay. But
they also have an ethnic, racial dimension. And France's key problem
is that it cannot face that fact.

That is a less polemical statement than it sounds. For it is a matter
of bald fact that France does not officially recognise the concept of
ethnic difference at all. It is literally illegal for anyone
compiling an official census even to ask about someone's ethnic
origins. There are no figures showing the rate of French-Algerian
unemployment or school enrolment or hospital treatment. French
official texts speak of integration as resting on the "refusal to
distinguish citizens according to their origins and their
particularities". In other words, there can be no Algerian French or
French-Moroccans or any other such combination. There are only the
French.

This is a defining republican value. Tim King, who writes the
excellent France Profonde column for Prospect magazine, says the idea
is rigidly enforced. "When an immigrant comes to France, he must drop
everything he has ever learned of his previous culture; he has to
leave it in his baggage."

The doctrine was doubtless perfectly well-intentioned. There shall be
no categories of citizen in France, it declared. The law shall view
everyone equally.

The trouble is, it is not the law that decides every aspect of daily
life: people do. And they do not always have the pure, colour-blind
outlook presumed by the French notion of integration. On the
contrary, racism of the overt, gross variety persists in France. One
study last year found, for example, that a man with a classic French
name applying for 100 jobs will get 75 interviews. A man with the
same qualifications, but with an Algerian name, will get just 14. The
trouble is, according to the law, that is a mere coincidence. After
all, both Francois and Abdul are French citizens.

France's refusal to see the ethnicity of some of its people as
relevant translates into de facto racism. If human beings were free
of prejudice, the French republican ideal would work beautifully.
Because we are not, it allows racism a free hand.

It is a classic example of what happens when an idea designed for one
era remains unchanged for a later one. As Neil Kinnock might have put
it, a once decent value becomes pickled into a dogma - enforcing the
very opposite outcome of the one it intended.

The French do not face this problem alone. The US has a model of
integration which is the reverse of France's: it positively
encourages new migrants to hold on to their first culture, happy to
let them hyphenate as Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans.

But that model is not perfect either. As we saw after Katrina, there
are still plenty of Americans who feel excluded by their race. That's
partly because the US model applies to immigrants, those who chose to
make their life anew in America. It does not apply either to those
who were already there or those who were dragged to the country in
chains, in the holds of cargo ships. Which is why Native Americans
and African-Americans both argue, with justification, that they are
shut out of the American dream.

Britain has an emerging model too, one we call multiculturalism. It
did not arrive from nowhere, but partly came out of our own
experience of race riots in the 1980s. Unlike France's, it recognises
difference and has passed legislation to protect it. But it also
yearns for some affirmation of common identity. It knows there are
differences between us - but it wants there to be ties that bind.
What those ties should be, what notion of Britishness might hold us
all together, nobody seems quite sure.

Indeed, the problem of racial cohesion in Britain is far from solved,
as we saw last month in Lozells. But multiculturalism is still the
best model we have. And, after the last 10 days, it may be the only
one left.

freedland@guardian.co.uk

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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