Colour-blind policy has fed Muslim radicalism

The Times November 07, 2005

Colour-blind policy has fed Muslim radicalism
From Charles Bremner in Paris

THE biggest explosion of street violence in France since the late
1960s has jolted the country into confronting its failure to include
its seven million residents of Arab and African origin in the
national mainstream.

President Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, his Prime Minister, seem
at a loss, however, to propose anything beyond the “republican”
strategy that successive governments of Left and Right have followed
since the first riots erupted on the immigrant estates 15 years ago.

M de Villepin has promised a “major plan” to ease the plight of the
immigrant communities — the latest of many over the past two decades
— but, meeting community leaders on Saturday, he made clear that this
would be more of the same: a mix of tax incentives for business in
“difficult districts” plus more money for schools, police, other
public services and better counselling for jobseekers.

Under the ethnically colour-blind “French model”, the immigrant
workers who came in the 1950s and 1960s from the former colonies in
North and black Africa were to be regarded as equal citizens. They
and their descendants would take advantage of the education system
and generous welfare state to assimilate with “white” France. To
promote the idea of assimilation, neither the State nor any other
body publishes statistics on ethnic or national origin.

In practice, France turned its back on the minorities, shunting them
into suburban cités denying access to the so-called ascenseur social
(social elevator) that was supposed to lift immigrants into the
mainstream. Unemployment on the estates is up to three times the 10
per cent national average. Laws supposed to promote integration and
oppose multiculturalism, such as the ban on Muslim headwear in
schools, have often heightened resentment and the feeling of
exclusion. This has in turn fed the rise of Muslim radicalism, which
has now become the dominant creed of the young in the French ghettos.

France has always deemed its model superior to the Anglo-Saxon
approach of diversity, which has enabled ethnic minorities to retain
strong bonds in cultural and religious communities. France calls this
“comunitarism” and says that it promotes ghettos, exclusion, poverty,
race riots and religious extremism that can ultimately lead to
actions such as the London bombings.

Three decades on from the big inflow of immigrants, everyone now
agrees that the French model has not worked, although almost no one
says that the American and British approach has produced better
results. Some, such as Nicolas Sarkozy, the iconoclastic Interior
Minister who is at the centre of the present crisis, have provoked
outrage by saying that France should copy aspects of the Anglo-
American model, starting with policies to favour the entry of ethnic
minorities into education and jobs. M de Villepin slapped down M
Sarkozy last week for promoting dangerous “un-French” ideas that
could encourage the Muslim extremism that has recently infected Britain.

Mainstream Muslim leaders who have been consulted by the Government
have all hammered home the message. “The young have the feeling that
they have been abandoned, left at the roadside,” Larbi Kechat, rector
of the rue de Tanger mosque in Paris, said.

Some change in the French approach has been appearing over the past
couple of years. Proposals are afoot to take a firmer hand with the
racial discrimination that is still widely applied with impunity to
jobseekers.

Paradoxically, the figure most associated with a radical new approach
is M Sarkozy. His proposals for a break with the French model have
received little welcome. Both Left and Right see them as a breach of
France’s republican tradition and believe that affirmative action
would play into the hands of the anti-immigrant Far Right, led by
Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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