The problem with France
Modern, multiethnic France
Paris 'riots': My aunt's building burned yesterday night
by Jerome a Paris from the European Tribune
One of my aunts lives in one of the cités in the suburbs where the "new Intifada" is taking place - supposedly the new "Baghdad on the Seine". Her building suffered a fire yesterday night, started by the usual suspects in the neighborhood (they blew up two motorbikes in a local on the ground floor), ignored for almost one hour by the police and firemen. The solidarity of the inhabitants helped to evacuate everybody, and provide temporary shelter while the fire raged. Most people went back home the same evening as the fire was doused eventually.
A few cars were also burnt in the neighborood, but hardly more than usual. It's one of those things that happen and that you don't really worry about if you live there. This week, it goes on TV if you do it, so of course more are tempted to do so (last night saw 1300 cars burn, up from 900 the previous night), including in provincial cities. There is no coordination of anything, it's just mostly copycats by bored kids who are suddenly getting a lot of attention.
The police toughness is just plain posturing by Sarkozy, as the police know very well who does what in the neighborood and didn't and do not intervene. One reason is actually that the local gangs don't attack so much the locals (or the police) as they fight other gangs from nearby cities for sometimes trange turf or other arcane reasons. Also, there isn't that much violence, but isolated incidents and the spectacular, but mostly harmless, car fires. Firemen say explicitly that they let them burn out rather than intervene, as their interventions only excite the gangs more and have little use (unless the fire presents any danger of spreading, which is rarely the case).
Now one thing to note is that these neighboroods are not ghettos. My aunt lived there most of her life, she was a teacher in a nearby pre-school and has a mostly normal middle class life. There are lots of minorities, lots of kids with dysfunctional families, an obvious lack of jobs, and decrepit buildings, but it's not a rundown place, it's not cut off from the rest of the country, and there is a lot of solidarity between the inhabitants.
This is not to deny that the situation is tense, and that the events of recent nights don't signal some real problems in these neighboroods, but it's not like it's war, ot the "end of France" or a crippling crisis for the country. UPDATE: Note that the link goes to a site affiliated with the Vlams Blok, the Belgian far right, racist party
What it is is a real political crisis for the government, caught between the Le Pen-light shenanigans and provocations of Sarkozy (which are strongly approved and encouraged by a good part of the 'law'n'order' rightwing crowd in the country, but criticised by a majority today, including the moderate right)) and the silence of the rest of the government, led by Villepin, which was hoping that the crisis would burn Sarkozy but did not expect to be caught in the flames as well. The combination of tough, provocative words to start with, an unstable mix of toughness and conciliatory words, and nonstop coverage of burning cars on TV has led to more. Burning cars are nothing new - there was an average of 100 per day in France throughout the year, and it never made the news beyond statistical reports and an quick image once in a while when there was another incident to talk about. But today, it is having a political impact and the political outcry fuels the phenomenon. (The mayor of my aunt's city duly came to visit and be photogrpahed yesterday - sometimes it seems it's the only thing that bring these people around).
What's real is that social budgets for these cités (those that allow the associations to run sport activities, literacy classes and the like) have been cut in the past 3 years, because, as always, this is the easiest thing to do politically.
What is real is that local police forces have been reduced (in Clichy, where it all started, the police has 15 officers vs 35 in the past) and replaced by national police who do not know the neighborood and are pretty aggressive in their behavior - and especially in their overuse of id controls which target only people of color.
What is real is that France made a choice 30 years ago to preserve the jobs of those already integrated, and made it difficult to join that core. Thus unemployment, or unstable employment (temping, short term contracts, internships) touches only those that are not yet in the system - the young and the immigrants, or those that are kicked out - the older and less educated blue collar workers in dying industries. So in neighboroods where you have a lot of young immigrants, the problems are excerbated.
And finally, what is real is that everybody is aware that nothing serious will be done before the 2007 presidential election. With a lame duck, aging, corrupt President fighting it out with his ambitious interior Ministry (Sarkozy), policy is forgotten to spin, politicking and the like and nothing happens - but people are crying for solutions, and not everybody is willing to wait another 18 months for someone to have a clear mandate and do something. The feeling of fin de règne is pervasise and highly corrosive today.
Sarkozy would likely be an improvement over today, in that he would have a clear mandate if elected, and full powers, but he would be likely to run a Bushist policy of tough posturing, tax reform for the rich - and, this is France, getting the TVs not to talk about the banlieues anymore. He is an opportunist and a power hungry reactionary, I don't even see him "liberalising" the economy. But the banlieues do not need more growth, what they need is for the State to come back in full force - bring back the local police presence, give real support to the schools and all the associations that do integration work (it's criminal to cut subsidies to literacy classes, for instance), and actually get things done on improving the housing stock, instead of shuffling money between departments as emergencies arise, and, where necessary, improving transportation links to the big city where the jobs are.
What is not happening is any "intifada"; France is not burning; I still doubt that its integration model is failing ; what is clearly not tolerable anymore is how an underclass (not necessarily only the immigrants, but where they are clearly over represented, and definitely young and undereducated) has been sacrificed and abandoned in the country's (real and mostly successful) efforts to adapt to increasing international competition. They must be brought back into the fold, and toughness is not the way.
How integrated are French Muslims into the wider society. Are the on the news, like Asians and blacks on the BBC? Do they have a public visibility beyond the football pitch? When you walk into an office, how many Arabs and Africans do you see? Would it surprise you to see them?
If the poor have no stake in the society and no belief in the possibility of advancement, this is what happens. They aren't going anywhere and they are French. Now, they have to feel like it. And calling them scum isn't going to work.
The following is from a lecture on minorites in France
Statistics on Multi-ethnic France
The use of terms like ethnic minorities is, compared to its use in the USA or Great Britain, relatively uncommon. The terms `immigration' and `immigrés' are still commonly used in contemporary political debates in France to designate what, in the Anglo- American context, would be called ethnic minorities. The term immigré as it is used in France refers not just to recent immigrants but also to men and women of ethnic origins who have spent all their life in France and, in many cases, have been born there. Interestingly, the term is rarely used to describe immigrants, or their children, of European descent (Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgians, Poles etc.) and is mainly applied to those from North and Sub-Saharan Africa and from South-East Asia.
Another important detail to bear in mind is that in most major official classifications of people resident in France there are only two categories: national or foreigner/étranger (i.e. someone born abroad without French nationality). There is no institutional recognition for ethnic origin (e.g. Afro-Carribean) as there is in, for example, Britain or the United States. The French state does not officially recognise ethnic minority status and the nature of its data protection laws preclude any other organisations from doing so. The national body responsible for collecting census data, the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE), records the place of birth of all those resident in France but does not collect information on the birthplace of people's parents. It does not collect any information whatsoever on structurally identifiable ethnic communities in France.
Because of this it is very difficult to state with any degree of certainty figures for ethnic minorities in France or to assess the real impact of immigration on the French population. However, according to the French definition of an étranger as someone born abroad without French nationality, there are currently 4 million foreigners in France, of whom about a third have acquired French nationality. To this, one must add another 5 million who are the children of foreigners and a further 5 million who are the grandchildren of foreigners. So, out of a total population of 59 million, about 14 million (around a quarter) are either foreigners or the children or grandchildren of foreigners (Hargreave: 1995 p.5). INED, the Institut National d'Études Démographiques has, however, recently published some statistics which confirm this
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Immigration as Problem
Throughout much of les trente glorieuses immigration was a marginal issue in French political life. Immigration was largely the business of a few government ministries and agencies in consultation with key employers and trade unions and the governments of the sending countries. During this period immigration was largely depoliticized and seen as an essentially economic matter. Moreover, it was widely assumed that the migrants who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s from North and Sub-Saharan Africa would return home after having earned some money in France and that their residence would be short-term.
By the late 1960s this assumption began to be called into question and by the early to mid-1970s, at least in terms of political opinion and public perception, things began to change. In response to perceived increasing numbers of immigrants entering the country, France began to tighten it immigration policy. The growing economic crisis from the mid-1970s onwards - war in the Middle East and the resulting oil crisis in 1973 led to a recession that hit all major Western economies and which, of course, spelt an end to les trente glorieuses - added impetus to this process. In 1974 the French government officially stopped inward immigration. It was meant to be provisional but by 1977 the ban was made permanent.
Lionel Stoléru, the Minister of State for Immigrant Workers tried to encourage many immigrants to return to their country of origin. He began by offering them financial incentives (l'aide au retour) but these incentives were mainly taken up by Spanish and Portuguese immigrants who were happy to return home after the death of Franco in Spain in 1975 and the fall of Salazar in Portugal in 1968. The invitation was not taken by the real target: the Maghrebis. Stoléru went even further and produced proposals for forced repatriation. These proposals, however, failed to gain full parlimentary support.
There was, however, no ban on European immigrants or asylum-seekers and indeed those in certain professions. The ban, as you might have guessed, was aimed at immigrants from the Third World. The French government tried to ban family reunification under the 1974 ban but this was overturned in 1978 by the Conseil d'État, France's highest administrative court.
Paradoxically, it is after the block on new immigrants from the Third World that they become more and more visible within French society. Whereas, in the past, immigrant workers were often men living in hostels with other immigrant workers separated from the French, more and more were reunited with their families, or started families of their own and began to move into the housing estates and suburbs and working-class neighbourhoods alongside other French families. Unlike earlier generations of immigrants (i.e. the Italians), they were distinguisable by the colour of their skin and other somatic (relating to the body) features and by their religion (Islam rather than Catholicism). They were recognisably different, other and they were here to stay.
Maghrebis were met with far greater hostility than the many immigrants from Indochina (Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian asylum-seekers, the so-called `boat people') as they were considered relative self-sufficient and were valued for their entrepreneurial skills. Moreover, with their attachment to Arab culture (food, dress, music etc.) and to Islam, the Maghrebian community were perceived by many, not least by Jean-Marie Le Pen and his supporters in Le Front national, as a threat to the integrity of French national identity. Perceived as a culturally alien and unassimilable mass, the Magherbis represented, particularly during political flashpoints like the Gulf War, a menace to French society.
Questions began to be raised about the threat to social cohesion that these ethnic minorities were posing, particularly in the increasingly deprived 1972 the sociologist René Giraud articulated the concept of the seuil de tolérance (threshold of tolerance). By this he meant the point at which the numbers of a minority group became too high for social cohesion to be maintained. If, for example, the numbers of minority groups became too high on a suburban housing estate, social unrest and conflict between different ethnic groups would become inevitable. Moreover, any breaching of the threshold of tolerance by minority groups would entail the exodus of members of the dominant groups, inevitably leading to mono-ethnic ghettos. This theory was a flawed one - it did not, for example, specify the precise percentage that would breach the threshold of tolerance - but it was an enormously influential one.
In the space of just a few decades, immigration had gone from being an essentially economic phenomenon to a social problem of the highest order at the heart of political, cultural and religious debates in France. But to what extent do those immigrants, and their children and grand-children, of non-European descent represent a threat to French national identity? Is the `problem' of an apparently unassimilable and culturally alien population really all that new? And what of the immigrants, and their children and grand-children, themselves? How have they coped with living in France? How have they conceived of their own identities?
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Discrimation in France: The Historical Background
To answer these questions, let's go back to the statistics from my first lecture. France has received, since the late nineteenth century, large numbers of immigrants. By 1851, the first year official records of this nature were kept, there were 380, 000 étrangers in France or 1% of its total population. By 1881, just thirty years later, that number had nearly tripled to 1 million or 3% of France's total population. And by 1931 it had increased to 2.7 million or 6.4% of France's total population of 42 million. This was a higher proportion of the population in percentage terms than the United States of America, the main destination for European immigrants since the middle of the nineteenth century.
So France then, has seen large numbers of immigrants entering the country at earlier points in its history. The attempts of these immigrants to settle in France shows up the persistence of hostility and resistance by the French to them. Contrary to the myth of earlier culturally similar immigrants settling in easily, many European immigrants in France faced fear, hostility and racism and found their integration into French life to be a difficult process. Anti-immigrant prejudice was rife. For example, the Belgians recruited into the coal, iron and steel industries of northern France were often pejoratively described as pots de beurre or vermines (Bernard: 1993 p.20). Here is an extract from La Patrie from 1896 that gives a flavour of early French attitudes to Italian immigrants:
Ils arrivent telles des sauterelles, du Piémont, de la Lombardie-Vénitie, des Romagnes, de la Napolitaine, voire de la Sicile. Ils sont sales, tristes, loqueteux. Tribus entières immigrant vers le Nord, où les champs ne sont pas dévastés, où on mange, où on boit. Ils s'installent chez les leurs, entre eux, demeurant étrangers au peuple qui les accueille, travaillant à prix réduit, jouant tour à tour de l'accordéon et du couteau. (Quoted in Mestiri: 1990 p.11)
Behind the hostility to immigrants was often the fear of l'invasion, the invasion of France by large numbers of foreigners who were seen as briseurs de grève, pushing down the wages of the honest and hard-working Français de souche, threatening the social order and the purity of French womanhood (Bernard: 1993 p.21).
The other fear was of l'inassimilablité, the concern that these immigrants would not integrate sucessfully into French society. Italian and Polish immigrants, for example, were attacked for their religious devotion by a French working class that was no longer regularly attending Church (mass, confession etc.) and given the derogatory term Christos (mainly the Italians) or calotins (mainly the Polish). Their religion - Catholicism not Islam or Judaism - hampered immigrants' integration into French society.
This hostility inevitably led at points to violence. The economic downturn that occurred in the late nineteenth century led to a rise in violent xenophobia and attacks on France's immigrants were frequent. Anti-Italian riots, for example, occurred in Marseilles in 1881 and Lyon in 1894. The most notorious attack on immigrants occurred in 1893 when a mob, inflamed by the assassination of President Carnot by an Italian anarchist, set upon Italian immigrants in the town of Aigues-Mortes in southern France killing eight Italians and injuring many more.
The contemporary `problem' then of recognisably different immigrant communities that cannot or will not assimilate as opposed to earlier generations of immigrants who could and did assimilate, can be seen to be myth. At many points in French history, sections of the population and political élites have felt threatened by immigrants and have responded with hostility to them, blocking their integration. The enforced and often violent repatriation of Polish miners in the 1930s is the clearest example of this.
Perhaps the real issue that we should be considering is not the degree to which immigrants are willing to integrate into French society but how sucessful has French society itself been at welcoming the immigrants it encouraged to settle in France in the first place? This inverts the terms of the `problem' - the `problem' is one of a faulty perception at best and of racism at worst rather than one of unassimilable immigrant communities
posted by Steve @ 2:14:00 PM
