Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas
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an unlikely convergence of political perspectives. Foreign worker organizations were also originally interested in encouraging workers’ eventual return to their countries of origin, and their position initially corresponded to skepticism on the political right regarding the likelihood of many immigrants assimilating.
Mayoud’s perspective was ultimately reflected in the official position of the Parti Républicain as a whole. In its 1978 program, the party asked: “Collectively, how can anyone accept that communities that develop a way of life, habits, [and] practices that offend the sensibilities of our fellow citizens, that aggressively maintain these differences, that deliberately accept the risk of forming veritable foreign corps, that impose on themselves—sometimes in the name of a misuse of the ‘right to be different’—a veritable apartheid, might settle in France?” Anxious to deny that it was a “nationalist party,” the PR at the same time defended the belief that all people, regardless of origin, could assimilate (Parti Républicain 1978). The problem, according to the PR, was merely that some refused.
This “assimilate or leave” position was by no means universally criticized by French intellectuals at the time. Spelling out the reasoning behind his own defense of assimilation as an essential prerequisite for foreigners’ acceptance in France, intellectual historian Raymond Polin argued that, “Felt, lived, recognized nationality” was “inseparable from a national culture.” A “multicultural” nation, he maintained, was as unviable as a person with multiple spirits or a body with multiple souls. Immigration and naturalization of foreigners were therefore beneficial only where assimilation occurred. In that case (but only then), Polin argued, “the new citizen becomes, better than a Frenchman like others, a Frenchman among others. He is able to participate harmoniously in the unfolding of a culture that is thenceforth his, and in the destiny of [his] new country” (Polin 1987: 634–35, 639).
For Henri de la Bastide, another participant in the 1985 Club de l’Horloge conference, a society not bound by such a common culture was in danger of becoming driven by money and fraught with crime. The seemingly more assimilated new generation of French-raised children of Maghrebin immigrants, he warned, knew nothing of Western civilization beyond its consumerism, for which they needed money. If they could not get it, then, being communally oriented, they formed gangs and robbed people in the métro (de la Bastide 1985: 222). For de la Bastide, the displacement of cultural ties by economic ones thus spelled the breakdown of moral limits and social order.
Good-Bye, Nation, Good-Bye!
The “new citizenship” campaign grew also from responses on the left to the apparent waning of assimilation. Many on the left agreed at the time with new right critics that immigrants were not assimilating. In contrast to conservatives who saw assimilation’s breakdown as a harbinger of national crisis, however, they saw foreigners’ “failure” to become culturally French as all for the best. François Mitterand, former head of the Socialist Party and France’s president from 1981 to 1995, maintained that “ethnic groups of immigrants” who came to work in France nonetheless understandably preferred their home countries and did not want to assimilate (Interview, “Le monde en face,” TF1, 17 September 1987). Many intellectuals on the left seemingly agreed, as evidenced by the anti-assimilationist bent of the papers and commentary at a key conference on French identity organized in Paris by the left intellectual group Espaces 89 in 1985. No mere gathering of a few specialists, the conference drew some 2,000 participants. The Espaces 89 meeting and the edited volume resulting from it stood as the clearest left political and intellectual counterpoint to the two sizable conferences on French identity organized by new right intellectual groups that year.
The respective titles of the edited volumes resulting from the three conferences attested to their organizers’ recognition of the competition among them. The first, resulting from the conference sponsored by the new right intellectual circle Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE) (GRECE 1985), was titled Une certaine idée de la France (A Certain Idea of France), suggestively alluding to the ambitious and restorative national vision of Charles de Gaulle; the second, following from the other new right conference sponsored by the rival new right circle Club de l’Horloge, was called, simply, L’identité de la France (The Identity of France) (Club de l’Horloge 1985). The left counterpoint to these two collections, from the Espaces 89 conference, was in turn titled L’identité française (French Identity). The collection offers a telling look into the terms in which issues of national identity, and the stalling of assimilation, were then being discussed on the left by those hopeful about the social developments they believed were occurring.
Socialists were enthusiastic in the early 1980s about cultural diversity and had been campaigning for “the right to be different” (le droit à la différence), a movement with some impact on policy under the first Socialist-led government beginning in 1981. Like demands for the right to be different, the Espaces 89 conference drew together French regionalists and defenders of the rights of immigrants qua cultural minority groups (Espaces 89 1985: 115–57). One active participant in the Espaces 89 meeting, for example, called for the “recognition of citizenship for millions of people who live in this country, who profoundly hope to integrate themselves here but without thereby cutting themselves off from their identities, their cultures, their beliefs, their traditions” (124–25). Another participant, political thinker Sami Nair, called on people to reject assimilation as a prerequisite to social acceptance, arguing that just as assimilation had not helped the Jews very much during World War II, it would not help other minorities subject to prejudice today (129).
The position of another contributor to the conference—a supporter of decentralization, self-management, and enhancing the economic viability of the periphery—was also illustrative in this regard. He contended that beause the more recent immigrant populations were not assimilating, a “pluricultural” France was taking form. This produced a need “to identify the cultural communities, to recognize them institutionally,” and to grant them collective rights. “The right to be different,” he stressed enthusiastically, was to be “a new right of the citizen” as well as “a new human right” (115–57). Here, as in the new citizenship campaign, the upgrading of citizenship for a new era was seen as closely associated both with expanding rights and with severing the longstanding link between citizenship and cultural unity.
Pascal Ory argued at the meeting that the French left needed to find a new alternative to the two positions it had typically favored regarding cultural minorities: (1) cultural homogenization through the treatment of areas dominated by cultural minority populations as departments like any others, and (2) defense of the right of “peoples” to self-determination. As a way out of this political dilemma of assimilation (political integration qua departments) versus segregation (independence), Ory advocated extending democratic citizenship to cultural minorities while offering weaker cultural groups active protection, thus making France a multinational state. Such a state, he argued, would realize the once utopian project undertaken by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and would “liberate the debate regarding the nation from all association with territory and language.” In many respects, including his interest in a form of political membership that was territorially rather than culturally based, his fears about the potential creation of a stateless population, and his enthusiasm for the historical example of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ory’s position closely followed the well-known thinking of Hannah Arendt (1979: 158–302). Ory’s invocation of the pieds noirs correctly pointed to the last serious—and failed—French attempt to transcend the fundamental dilemma of assimilation versus segregation. When efforts to develop a “third way” out of that dilemma failed and it proved impossible to integrate Algeria into the French Republic as departments like any others, Algeria’s secession, and the traumatic migration of uprooted pieds noirs European settlers to France, resulted. The nation-territory link, he reasoned, threatened to leave some people with nowhere to go, creating problems even worse than those faced by the pieds noirs, who fled Algeria en masse following independence (Ory 1985: 149–51). Like the leaders of human rights organizations who supported the “new citizenship” idea, Ory thus suggested a certain parallel between the historical problems of French colonialism, particularly those surrounding France’s failed project in Algeria, and current problems regarding cultural minorities within France.