Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas
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of interests, a tie based on mutual political management (gestion politique) where democracy must be expressed as fully as possible, that is to say, through the expression of all those without exception who are part of it [the community of interests] regardless of their birth. Only residency [not nationality] should therefore be taken into consideration [in determining voting rights]. (Leclerc 1986: 31)
This human rights organization official thus likened participation of foreign residents in their communities to participation of workers in their factories, and to empowerment within civil society more generally.
Again framing moral claims in terms familiar from labor politics, intellectual advocates of “new citizenship” also regularly highlighted the economic contribution of foreign participants to French society, through both working and paying taxes (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 29; Weil 1993: 2). The campaign thus appealed not only to Contract but also to Monetized Contract models of membership. As Rebérioux complained in an address to the Collective for Civil Rights (Collectif des Droits Civiques), an organization of second-generation Franco-Maghrebin youth whose positions in 1985 included support for local immigrant voting rights: “Civic rights are always refused to foreigners. They have the right to work, barely [have the right] to be unemployed since [then] they are threatened by exclusion, [and they have the right] to pay their taxes.” Rightfully, she argued, they should therefore have the right “to participate in the choice of those who tax.”12 Implicitly pointing to their economic contribution to the community as a basis for a legitimate entitlement to citizenship, LDH president Yves Jouffa also believed that the fact that only some taxpayers were citizens contributed to racism, thus suggesting that, to discourage racism, all taxpayers should enjoy the benefit of citizenship (Jouffa 1986: 3). The president of LDH’s Immigrants Commission also criticized the exclusion of the non-national resident from political rights, despite the fact that he “pays taxes and is … counted as a contributor in the determination of the rate of local taxation,” and despite the fact that public taxing and spending already implicitly required recognizing him as a member of the community because the nature and amount of “local facilities is calculated as a function of his presence (Leclerc 1986: 30).” In defending the idea of local voting rights, SOS-Racisme president Désir argued not only that they would encourage greater attachment and responsibility toward the local community and that non-national residents were concerned with the same local matters—such as municipal day-care centers and swimming pools—as everyone else. He also argued that foreign residents paid taxes like everyone else (Désir 1987).
Like the workers’ movement, the “new citizenship” campaign thus actually drew on two different ideas about the moral basis for equal rights, appealing to both Contract and Monetized Contract understandings of political membership. First, foreigners and French nationals were seen as members of a single community by virtue of their presence in the same place and participation in the same activities. Second, their economic contribution to the community was highlighted to justify more equal rights. Whereas for conservative critics like de la Bastide the displacement of cultural ties by economic ones spelled the breakdown of moral limits and social order, for parts of the French left it instead presaged a new form of more inclusive and democratic society. Because voting rights were seen as making one a “citizen,” and thus a full and equal member of the community, not only rights but also membership itself came to be defended by reference to migrants’ economic contributions.
The Pro-Social Storm Against the State, Eager But Inaccurate Forecasts
The new citizenship campaign in France had a peculiarly “anti-statist” quality, one that owed much to the singular intensity of political conflict centered on state-society relations in France since the Revolution, a conflict more recently replayed in conflicting attitudes regarding French colonialism and imperialism. The underlying claim regularly advanced in favor of a “new,” post-national citizenship was that it was necessary given the inexorable evolution of an increasingly transnational society. The drive toward greater European integration seemed to confirm this trend, and to presage an inevitable dwindling of nationality’s importance (Stora 1988: 57–58). New citizenship advocates argued that the existing equation between nationality and citizenship—that is, between membership in the nation and the fact of having equal civic rights—was increasingly passé (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 27; Jouffa 1986: 3).
Given that immigrants were in France to stay, new citizenship’s supporters maintained, they needed to be incorporated politically as citizens. Equating citizenship with nationality perpetuated their exclusion from the polity. According to Rebérioux, the very “grandeur of the national tradition” led “many French, including people on the left, to ask themselves how these foreigners could valuably exercise the rights of citizens.” The very idea of France as “la grande nation” (“the great nation”), she maintained, was in turn inextricably linked to memories of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and colonialism, and thus also to anti-foreign sentiment (1986: 7).13
Following a slightly different line of argument, history professor and Algeria expert René Gallisot argued that “racist criteria” of religion and origin often factored in evaluations of immigrants’ ability to become French nationals, so that the equation of citizenship with nationality barred some immigrants from citizenship. Yet, he argued, immigrants thus excluded from legal recognition as nationals were nonetheless really French “by [virtue of] their stay in France (par le séjour) and of economic, social, and cultural participation.” Responding to this problem, Gallisot sought to separate the concept of citizenship from that of nationality, pointing out their distinct historical origins (Gallisot 1986: 8). The question, he argued, was not whether immigrants would become French nationals, and thereby become citizens. Instead, the real issue was “the exercise of civic rights for the generations and communities taking part in economic, social, and cultural life who have become elements of civil society in France.” Gallisot emphasized participation through autonomous social movements and voluntary organizations (rather than voting in national elections). He argued that the way to gain access to “the full range of civic rights,” including the right to vote, was to be found in “the dissociation of nationality and citizenship” (15).
Like Rebérioux, Gallisot saw the connection between citizenship and nationality as part of the legacy of French colonialism, particularly the proimperialist patriotism widespread in France during the 1930s. As an effort to dissociate citizenship from nationality (and nationalism), Gallisot therefore situated the “new citizenship” campaign within a longer history of political conflict within the French left, one largely centered on conflicting attitudes toward nationalist, imperialist projects. From Gallisot’s perspective, the tension between “new citizenship’s” defenders and its detractors within the left during the 1980s was the latest chapter in a conflict which had historically pitted (anti-imperialist) revolutionary-syndicalists against (pro-imperialist) socialists during the 1950s or (anti-imperialist) French Communists against (pro-imperialist) French Socialists in the wake of the 1920 Congress of the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) at Tours (10). Though he did not, Gallisot could very well have extended the same argument to the SFIO schism over the Algerian War at the end of the 1950s and the resulting formation of the competing, “Unified” Socialist Party (PSU). Indeed, the PSU was earlier and more strongly supportive of new citizenship demands than was the PS.14 Ironically, as Rebérioux explained, the peculiar French historical split between socialism and syndicalism developed precisely because of the nineteenth-century French valorization of citizenship, which made French socialists far more interested in political democracy, and more distant from syndicalists, than were socialists in other nineteenth-century European countries (Rebérioux 1986: 5–6; also see Portelli 1980).
In a sense, these organizational schisms can be seen as symptomatic of a long-standing division within the French left between a statist and an antistatist tradition and sensibility. Attitudes toward emancipatory imperialist projects have always been one of the clearest litmus tests of this difference, as this issue has repeatedly split the French left along statist versus anti-statist lines. Immigration, and the question of the terms on which members of immigrant populations should have access to rights as full members of the community, continues today to divide the French left along this same fault line.
Other “new citizenship” defenders,