Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas
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logic of historical social evolution, arguing that granting immigrants the right to vote was the next step in the development of increasingly universal citizenship rights. Historically, various excluded groups had obtained voting rights and recognition as citizens. The use of guest workers, and thus the nation’s use of non-nationals, represented a new, late twentieth-century form of inequality, to which a new round of progressive reinterpretation of citizenship and civic incorporation (a “new citizenship”) would respond (Darriulat 1988: 54). Invoking a similar progressive logic, Algerian historian and expert on the Algerian War Benjamin Stora argued that granting immigrants the right to vote was part of the movement toward more equal rights for all social groups (1988: 57–58).
The “new citizenship” campaign was critical not only of the authority of the state, but also of the constraint and artifice associated with it. Stora argued that abolishing “the frontier between social and political rights” would be a way of “allowing the true conception of French nationality to emerge (surgisse) through citizenship” (1988: 57–58). His rhetoric suggested that the “new citizenship” could deliver not just equality but also authenticity. Eliminating the artificial constraint and unnatural distinctions drawn by states thus promised to release the “true conception of French nationality.” This authenticity would be achieved by aligning the political with the social, aligning political rights (currently limited to French nationals) with social rights (already extended to foreign residents). Realigning the political with the social was, for Stora, to go hand in hand with decentralizing authority. He contended, “granting the right to vote to immigrants, at all levels, means that an ultra-centralized conception of authority will also have to be done away with” (58). The new citizenship campaign was not only progressive but also clearly anti-statist in its appeals, and this attack on the state was—in classic Rousseauian fashionn—understood as promising freedom from artifice and inauthenticity as well as central state power and authority.
Seeking extension of new, political rights to non-nationals, “new citizenship” supporters called for legal reform at the national as well as the local level. Nonetheless, supporters saw the source of progressive change as located outside of the state, in a process of increasingly transnational social evolution with its own inexorable logic. As historian Fernand Braudel underlined at a 1985 conference where new citizenship supporters’ vision of France’s future was elaborated, politicians could not arbitrarily choose the lines along which society might be reshaped; they could not go “against the current” of long-term historical development. Instead, they needed to recognize and work with the flow of history. Even while applauding Paris as the source of France’s international appeal, Braudel also depicted the French state in critical terms as the product of active “conquest” of the provinces by the richer, more industrial region around the capital. Furthermore, he blamed this constant unifying effort by the center, sometimes against the will of the periphery, for depleting the wealth and vital energy of the country, thus undermining its economic dynamism (Braudel 1985: 139–40).
Another intellectual supporter of “new citizenship,” Daniel Lindberg, argued that nationalism had retarded the universalization of citizenship and thus its extension to other historically excluded groups, including women and Jews. Again, it was suggested that de-nationalizing citizenship would finally allow for fulfillment of the universalizing logic evident in French citizenship’s naturally progressive historical-developmental trajectory (1985: 94). The nation thus occupied the position of the (national) state in this discourse, un-naturally blocking the healthy development that would occur were it not for this artificial and unfortunate distortion and restriction.
This perspective was not unique to Braudel or to the intellectual elite, but also informed the discourse of organizations at the forefront of the new citizenship movement. A 1985 editorial in FASTI’s monthly magazine argued:
aside from its internal justification, the demand for the right [of immigrants] to vote in local or even national elections has the attraction of a decompression valve, of a channeling of the struggles to be led against the hypocrisy of the authorities and for the integration into society of this part of the population which, although less dramatically than in South Africa, is excluded from it. A progressive evolution toward this integration apparently being blocked, obtaining the right to vote would be like a surgical operation to bring about integration. (Lefranc 1985: 6)
Here there is a natural “progressive evolution” toward the “integration” of all segments of the population into society. However, this evolution is “apparently blocked,” by the French legal-political order. The “struggles to be led,” are to be directed against “the hypocrisy of the authorities,” because the state and those exercising legal authority are seen here as standing in opposition to authenticity as well as to natural growth, social evolution, or development. More than civic equality was thus understood to be at stake in demands for local voting rights for foreigners in France; the new citizenship campaign was also seen as a means of removing artificial legal-political roadblocks to a deeper process of progressive social development.
Social Change, Political Interpretation and French Policy
The peculiarly anti-statist cast of the French new citizenship campaign is particularly important to recognize and bear in mind because it helps explain how the movement was politically marginalized and delegitimized in France, as nationality law reform moved to the center of the political agenda in the 1980s, a process examined in Chapters 4 and 5. Given that the new citizenship campaign was the political movement that in late twentieth-century France perhaps most clearly embodied the hopes and expectations of observers convinced of growing post-nationalism or multiculturalism internationally, understanding the political sidelining of this initiative helps explain why France’s recent politics of belonging have not confirmed post-nationalist or multiculturalist expectations. Like many of the new citizenship’s political and intellectual advocates in France, those convinced of post-nationalism or multiculturalism’s inevitably growing momentum have typically placed too much faith in unilinear, progressive, and supposedly inexorable processes of social development, with insufficient attention to the continued importance of national politics and political interpretation.
As will become increasingly clear in the chapters that follow, France’s citizenship politics has been shaped by competing political interpretations of and reactions to new social developments as much as those social developments themselves. Through those interpretations and reactions, both the privileged role of the state and the continued centrality of the nation-state as a favored form of political community have been strongly and consequentially reasserted. This reassertion may not suffice to stem the social processes that post-nationalists and multiculturalists have noted, but it has clearly inflected recent French policy regarding the integration of immigrants and their descendents. That inflection is evident in regard to policies concerning public recognition of cultural and religious difference, as we shall see in Part III, and it is also unmistakable in the field of French nationality law, as the remainder of Part II reveals.
Chapter 4
Nationality Law Reform: Launching a New Debate
As the 1980s continued, France’s politics of belonging took a new twist as political struggles over changing French nationality law came to the fore. The issue of nationality law reform had previously been raised by immigrant advocates on the left, but was in the 1980s originally associated with the political right, with positions on the issue framed primarily in conventional left-right terms. Public education and its integrative role, later greatly emphasized, was not a major theme in the early, radical campaign for nationality law reform.
As late as 1986, a conceptual gulf separated influential nationality law reform advocates’ understandings of political membership from those of leading advocates of “new citizenship.” Demands for reform of French nationality law originally proved politically polarizing and led to a decidedly unproductive political impasse. In the end, however, the conflicts of the 1980s over nationality law reform had surprisingly enduring consequences.
These struggles, and the political