What happened in France

French Lessons

By Jim Hoagland
Wednesday, November 9, 2005

"We are victims of our architecture," says Guillaume Parmentier, the
head of a French institute, as he struggles to explain two weeks of
rioting in the sterile high-rise ghettos populated by France's Muslim
immigrants. True. But architecture is not the whole story.

The social explosions that have hit France are being watched
nervously by the rest of Europe for signs that this could become
something that so far it is not: a religiously motivated uprising by
Muslim youths against their Christian and Jewish neighbors. But jihad
-- or the assumed lack of it -- is not the whole story either.

The French -- and the angry, nihilistic Arab and African youths in
their midst -- are also "victims" of that country's immigration and
assimilation policies and, indirectly, its paternalistic social
welfare system. Mark them as casualties of a particular brand of
politically correct arrogance that French politicians have practiced
for 30 years, and you begin to get something like a whole story.

France's upheaval is too important to be explained away by any single
factor. And it is too important to be treated as a matter of
satisfaction by Americans irritated by the French, on foreign policy
or other grounds. France and its beautiful, troubled capital are
proxies for all affluent nations that have elevated into an art form
the habit of ignoring the world's poor, desperate and criminally
inclined.

Our collective neglect lumps them all together, and it helps make the
disadvantaged become prey or accomplice for criminals and Islamist
fanatics. In that sense, we are all French right now. It is not just
Paris that is burning. It is Africa, and the Middle East, and parts
of Asia and Latin America, that are burning and showering flames on
the Paris ghettos. And on London, Madrid, New York, Bali and Casablanca.

Hurricane Katrina helped Americans understand in sickening detail the
failures of local and federal emergency-response bureaucracies.
France's riots should illustrate to the French the dead-end nature of
the physical and social architecture of building a tall fence around
the country's 5 million to 10 million Muslim immigrants and their
offspring, and then pretending they are essentially not there.

The French equivalents of New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward lie in 300
or more " zones de non-droit " (lawless areas), which sparked the
national rioting. These are areas in the immigrant suburbs of Paris
and other large cities where the police do not go as a matter of
policy. They have instead for years established checkpoints on the
perimeter of these islands of soulless high-rises and then let the
inhabitants fend for themselves.

So now we know: Lawless areas can exist inside strong national
boundaries as well as in the failed states of Africa and Asia.
Governments can stumble into disaster by hoping for the best while
letting serious problems fester in Clichy-sous-Bois as well as in New
Orleans.

Television interviewers have descended on Clichy-sous-Bois and the
other locales of arson and pillage to transmit the voice of the riot.
Almost in unison and by rote, the perpetually unemployed children,
and grandchildren, of North African immigrant workers who settled in
France in economic boom times complain that they are marginalized and
discriminated against -- even though they are as "French" as anyone
in the country.

True. But the prejudice of others is not the whole story either.

The unemployment benefits that France's generous social welfare
system provides to these youths may have bought the stylish clothes
and grooming many of them display in the television interviews. But
it has not bought their satisfaction or acquiescence in the system
that feeds them and isolates them. Those payments may have enabled
these youths to be as disdainful of the kind of work their parents
eagerly came here to find as are the other "French."

The riots are in some ways a protest against what their parents have
created (no surprise there) and against the enormous pressures that
life in a Western society brings to bear on antiquated Muslim family
structures. These youths lash out with molotov cocktails against the
cultural crossfire that envelops them. And they become easy prey for
the criminals and militants dumped into the failed townships of a
proud and rich nation.

So there is no single explanation and no single answer. The United
States has responded to the collapsing social and family structures
of the Muslim Middle East and Central Asia with the fire and
brimstone of war. The French respond to a related challenge within
their borders with political insincerity and economic handouts. The
failures of both countries have more in common than either is
prepared to acknowledge today.

jimhoagland@washpost.com

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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