Positive Liberty

A reader e-mails,

The question of “what is causing the riots in France” is, as you note, complicated — and clearly France, of all countries, has a history of urban populations rioting in the absence of Islam, radical or not, so we can’t reduce it to the simple religious variable. Yet the presence of radical Islam could (I almost said “does”) make a difference, as the Russian and the French and the American Revolutions were different; ideas matter, and the causes of an action do not wholly determine the course of an action. To put it in terms [Daniel] Dennett might approve of, we have to weigh the intentionality of an actor, and so we cannot immediately dismiss the implications of an ideology that holds that the purpose of “the good life” is the reestablishment of the Caliphate.

That said, such ideas may only motivate a few among the rioters. Of course, worse ideas motivated only a few in Russia in 1917…

He makes good points all around, although, as to the last sentence, I’m not really sure which one is worse. More (much, much more) below the fold.

Getting into the rioters’ heads – to understand them, even while we never cease to find their actions abhorrent — is exactly what we should be doing right now, particularly if France wants to end the rioting and avoid a possible unholy alliance between the rioters and militant Islam. I stress the word possible, too, as the violence so far has none of the hallmarks of Islamic militancy: There have been no suicide bombings, no outright bombings of any kind for that matter, and few human casualties considering the degree of destruction. Major financial and governmental centers have more or less been left alone. Shooting at firefighters is reprehensible beyond words, but it’s a far cry from al Qaeda’s usual tactics.

The few but troubling examples of Islamist tendencies among the rioters don’t impress me yet. As one commenter on the linked site noted, “‘Baghdad’ has pretty much become shorthand for a war-torn city, like ‘Beirut’ was in the ’80s. I don’t see what that has to do with Islamist motivations. The business about jihadi websites isn’t convincing either; of course they’re trying to claim that these people as their own, but that alone doesn’t make it so.” Not that the difference makes the French riots any more decent or legitimate, but still, distinctions like these are important. For now, it remains true that most of these kids are Muslim, that they’re painfully aware of that difference in a society that has never fully accepted them, and that some of them are using their Islamic identity in the one way guaranteed to scare non-Muslims the worst. It may be only a matter of time until they forge genuine ties with al Qaeda, but I doubt that we’ve seen them just yet.

My sources in Paris complicate things still further, by insisting that contrary to what one reads in the right-wing press of the United States, some of the rioters are indeed the children of immigrants — but of Lebanese Christian immigrants, whom the police mistreat on account of their race, not their religion. These are some of the last people in the world one would imagine signing up for an Islamist jihad. I don’t have any terribly firm sense of the degree of involvement of these individuals, if any, and I would like to know more about their participation (or not) in the riots.

Of course, claiming that this really is a French intifadah is a win-win proposition for certain segments of the blogosphere. If the evidence works out your way, then you get to chortle disgracefully while France burns (Do you hear me, Little Green Footballs?). If the evidence doesn’t support your claims, you can always cast aspersions on the media for failing to report the “real” story. Then you report exactly what you’d expecting to happen all along: Some sinister force is behind all the riots, and it’s thinking, “Let’s reduce impotent France to dhimmi status and take over the world with the evil powers of Islam,” as Belle Waring recently put it. No matter how the evidence shakes out, you’ve outsmarted the whole world in that oh-so-satisfying Walter Mitty kind of way.

Meanwhile, back on earth: In the French newspaper Le Monde, sociologist Alain Touraine writes that the bad feeling between immigrants and natives is worse in France than elsewhere in the world. He finds that this is “both because the network of close relationships has more completely broken down in France than in Italy or Germany, and also because integration has always been conceived of so strongly here. This approach has many positive aspects, yet it also makes separatism all the more serious.”

For the most part, I think he’s right. The differences between the American and the French ideas about ethnicity and assimilation are subtle but very important.

In the United States, most people take it for granted that we all have a slightly different cultural heritage and that this variety is one of the charms of living in America. For most ethnic groups, ethnicity itself is a perfectly trivial distinction, while only for a few (blacks, Latinos) does it really make a serious political difference. Even for them, there is strenuous public debate about just how much influence ethnicity should have in politics, with many in all parts of the political spectrum insisting that complete race-blindness is either our ultimate goal or, more hopefully, the route that we should be taking right at this moment.

Ethnicity still exists, to be sure: Whenever I meet a new group of people I am invariably asked about my last name: “Is that Polish?” Yet never is it asked with any racist intent at all. This consciousness of ethnicity — coupled with the sense that none of it makes very much difference — has done a lot to erode institutionalized racism in the United States. The decent, middle-of-the-road position here is that you may have green skin and three eyes, you may come from the planet Venus and pray to Mithra every morning, but so long as you’re a citizen (and hold a steady job), everything’s pretty much okay.

A similar sensibility is much harder to find in France. Ethnicity matters there in ways that it does not matter here. A powerful strain in French culture declares that you’re either 100% French, nationally, culturally, and even racially — or else you’re a total outsider. No in-between states are thinkable to one infected with this tendency; it’s champagne-and-brie or the highway.

I don’t want to overstate the case, mind you; it would be completely incorrect to conclude that the French are racists while the Americans are not. As I said, blacks and Latinos are still commonly thought to have politically meaningful ethnic differences here, while in France a good many decent and liberal people will declare that they are indifferent to questions of race.

Yet the idea that the ethnic must inevitably map onto the political can be found not just in far-right anti-immigrant French political parties like the Front National, but also in the expectations of many French liberals, who tend to concern themselves not only with the economic welfare of the poor, but with their cultural purity as well, in ways that today’s American liberals would never think to do. I think it’s safe to say that to far more people in France, a different ethnicity simply must entail a different politics.

To turn the immigrants into consummate natives as fast as possible was the ideal in 19th-century America; it remains this way in France today, too often with the addendum that if they cannot be made French, then they should be relegated to some distant, gloomy Le Courbusier housing project and forgotten about. Most importantly in all of this, the French government has played a central and often heavy-handed role in trying to shape its ethnic minorities — and, when things fail, in rejecting them.

In general, the political boundaries of official French culture are sharp and rigidly enforced in exactly the places where our own are fuzzy and elastic (indeed, in most cases, it is nonsensical to speak of “official” American culture). A few examples from French history and culture help illustrate the point.

Consider that in common French parlance, second- and even third-generation children of immigrants are still termed immigrés, even long after acquiring French citizenship. In the United States, anyone who spoke this way would be thought an intolerable bigot. In a country where few families have been there for very long, it’s the height of bad manners to think oneself superior over the difference of a mere few decades.

Consider also the example of federalism, the idea of a central government competing with relatively strong regional sub-governments. Federalism became the central framework for governing the United States after its Revolution; it could hardly be otherwise, given the varying and… ah… peculiar institutions of the thirteen original colonies. Yet in the French Revolution, “federalism” became synonymous with treason. After all, what good could possibly come of a divided government, when the French are one people? A divided government could only be in the service of something un-French and must not be suffered to exist.

During the Terror, many were executed — yes, executed — for their alleged federalism.

Consider also the case of the Jews; particularly in the nineteenth century, many French continued to think of the Jews as insufficiently French. Even those who professed to care for the Jews still considered them a problem, or, unselfconsciously, a question, one that required a governmental answer. French society, even in polite circles, extended this judgment even to those Jews who had abandoned their traditional religious laws and adopted French dress, dietary habits, and patterns of employment.

Among these, a certain French army officer illustrates quite clearly the anxieties of the era regarding France’s Jewish minority. Top-down, institutional attempts to turn “Jews into Frenchmen” often only made matters worse, reinforcing the stigma of religious difference (Napoleon, for example, hoped to reunite all the Jews of the world under something he termed the Paris Sanhedrin, and he may even have entertained some hopes of being crowned their Messiah. Neither plan amounted to very much, but you get the idea: State control over religious minorities has a long, long history in France).

Anti-federalism and anti-Dreyfusism have one thing in common, a certain strident insistence on solidarity and uniformity among all Frenchmen, an intolerance of difference within the national family. The same impulses can be seen in France’s present-day political culture as well.

Consider the ongoing French controversy about prohibiting Muslim women from wearing the veil in public places. While this imposition on the religious liberty of Muslims seems quite unrelated to the riots, and while the overwhelming majority of Muslims acquiesced to the measure, one still gets a clear sense here of a typical French assimilation policy: Plan from the center; insist that everyone follow along; doubt the patriotism of those who do not. Meanwhile, among Americans, wearing a veil is an innocuous act that barely draws notice. A great many decent folk — including conservatives — would react with anger if anyone proposed such a measure here.

And here’s one final example: Before living in France for a year, my academic advisor warned me that work stoppages and strikes were ubiquitous. Having only once encountered a serious strike in my life, I thought maybe I would see another one. I believe, however, that I lost count of just how many strikes they were, and that this happened sometime within the first couple of months.

If a subway operator gets mugged, if there is a suicide on the tracks (un accident grave de voyageur, in the delicate French language), or if there are any number of other mischances on the Paris Métro, the lines involved will typically be closed the following day. For larger issues, the whole system closes, busses and all. More than once I had to skip my research work because of just these sorts of strikes. And on two occasions, a strike called at midday meant that I had to walk across more than half the city just to get back home. In the snow. With tens of thousands of very grumpy Parisians.

A liberal in the United States might note that these strikes hit the poor far worse than the rich, an effect contrary to the very intent of striking. Yet the French seem to see things differently; for there to be true social solidarity, the misery of the few must be shared by all. Here the ordinary French bear some resemblance to the current rioters, who are mostly destroying property in the poorest areas of the suburbs.

Mainstream French political culture may yet be repudiating this kind of social solidarity, even as the rioters seem to embrace it. The following comes from a hopeful editorial by Sylvie Kauffman in the same edition of Le Monde:

Can a country like France… dismiss, under the pretext of a horror for Anglo-Saxonism, all other social models besides its own, even while the unemployment rate and the malaise in the suburbs inflicts a spectacular counterexample to the success of the French system? Can it continue to block negotiations on the rules of global free trade for the sake of a small clientele of farmers? Can it consider itself the moral winner in the transatlantic standoff over Iraq, and remain silent in the face of disastrous revelations about the corruption of its former ambassadors and its big businesses by Saddam Hussein?

These are good questions whose answers are all very difficult, and I am glad that someone in France is asking them.

I truly don’t know what I would do if I were in charge of the French state today; the many factors leading up to the riots, including institutionalized racism, an over-regulated employment system, a defective concept of citizenship, bad urban planning, and, yes, Islamic separatism, all have a very long history. I do like to think that if, thirty years ago, France had provided a more expansive definition of what it means to be culturally French, more economic opportunities for immigrants, greater political and cultural religious tolerance, and in general more real incentives to join French society, none of this would be happening.

Instead, the integration of ethnic Arabs into French society would have happened a lot more like the present-day integration of Latinos into the United States: It’s a pervasive but relatively nonviolent trend about which few have any real objections. And even while many countries in South and Central America have had poor human rights records, no one ever wonders whether Latinos are unfit for democracy.

If a similar trend had taken place among the immigrants to France, it would have provided a powerful counterweight to Islamic militancy in both Europe and the Muslim world. More than invading any particular country, the cultural capital generated by such a counterweight would have done wonderful things for the war on Islamic militancy. Sometimes it’s nice to dream like that.