The Republic of Dissent

Marshmallow multiculturalism

Sugary excerpt from Les Perraux's essential article on the different perceptions in Québec and the rest of Canada on the burka/burqa/niqab and what it says about Canada's brand of multiculturalism:

Prominent Quebeckers known for promoting equality, including Mr. Taylor, Mr. Bouchard and Ms. McAndrew, argued the gender segregation that comes with the niqab – along the practical barrier of a covered mouth – was too much to expect from a provincial Immigration Ministry class designed to teach spoken French and help integration.
In the rest of Canada, it was often the mainstream view in Quebec that was shunned.
One Toronto television commentator linked Quebec's fertility subsidies to the banishment of Ms. Ahmed – a barely disguised suggestion that Quebec wants women to be uneducated and pregnant.
Ms. McAndrew argues Canadians looking down on Quebec should consider why debate seems impossible outside the province.
“Public debate in Quebec is vigorous, and the level of the debate is complex. On diversity, the debate is very poor in Canada. It's marshmallow multiculturalism. You're okay, I'm okay,” she said.
“It's tolerance, but it's very soft and will face its own challenges at some point.”

Having addressed this issue several times, I have no doubt that it isn't going to go away because Québec is not going to give up its own views of secularism and integration to please the rest of Canada,. However, the key issue is being ignored in this debate and that is the state shouldn't have the right, any more than religious figures or anybody else, to tell women how to dress and to tell them that they defined by their body and how they present it. Anything else about gender discrimination and equality is gibberish designed  to mask a totalitarian view of gender with popular and seemingly modern principles.

American multiculturalism and homegrown terrorism

Quote of the day from Jonathan Laurence :

(...) recent cases show that the combination of extreme alienation from US foreign policy, whipped up with religious fervor, can trump even the relatively harmonious multicultural setting of American society.

Multiculturalism and diversity

Kenan Malik on the differences between multiculturalism and diversity:

The irony of multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is valuable about diversity as lived experience. When we talk about diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of clashes and conflicts. That's all for the good, for such clashes and conflicts are the stuff of political and cultural engagement.
(...)Multiculturalism, on the other hand, by reposing political problems in terms of culture or faith, transforms political conflicts into a form that makes them neither useful nor resolvable. Rather than ask, for instance, "What are the social roots of racism and what structural changes are required to combat it?" it demands recognition for one's particular identity, public affirmation of one's cultural difference and respect and tolerance for one's cultural and faith beliefs.
Multicultural policies have come to be seen as a means of empowering minority communities and giving them a voice. In reality such policies have empowered not individuals but "community leaders" who owe their position and influence largely to their relationship with the state. Multicultural policies tend to treat minority communities as homogenous wholes, ignoring class, religious, gender and other differences, and leaving many within those communities feeling misrepresented and, indeed, disenfranchised.

Britain's brand of multiculturalism has failed because it placed at its center the cult of diversity and thus sacralized differences in the name of culture and of religion making moral judgments difficult and segregation/sectarianism unavoidable. I'm uncomfortable with drawing sharp distinctions between Britain's multiculturalism and diversity because  in the mind of too many those two concepts have merged. Nowadays, people who argues fanatically for diversity are in fact doing so  by categorizing people, by hierarchizing particularities, and thus deciding which ones ought to more important than others. The trouble with both multiculturalism and diversity as they are commonly understood is that they lead to desindividualization. People are forced to identity with a group of people in order to matter and to avoid marginalization because identity politics is the most potent form of politics.
To put things more simply, the only acceptable multicultural society is one, which sees that people as individuals, not as member of a group/community/whatever else and recognizes that culture and particularities are never legitimate justifications for the erosion of the social compact and the unjustifiable.

Niqab, assimilation, integration, Québec, Canada,

Interesting: explanation of the different visions that Québec and Canada have on the Niqab, and more importantly on integration:

(...) English Canada embraces a multiculturalist ideal: Come to Canada, and bring your differences with you. In French Canada, you can have your differences, “but please do become a Quebecker.”
Quebec's francophone majority identifies itself as a fragile minority that must be ever vigilant against cultural erosion. In that context, collective rights often outweigh individual ones, especially when it comes to language or schooling. Quebec, like France, is also fiercely devoted to secularism. “We've had a long and painful struggle with the place of religion in this society, and a lot of people feel strongly about the separation of church and state,” says Mr. Lagacé.
The Quebec-English differences over immigration and integration echo those between France and Britain. France is contemplating a ban on the burka and niqab. In Britain, any politician who'd dare suggest such a thing would be denounced as a fascist.
In English Canada, provincial government officials are only too eager to distance themselves from intolerant Quebec. “We are an open Ontario,” said a spokeswoman for that province's immigration minister. “In Nova Scotia, people have a right to express themselves any way they wish around their faith,” its immigration minister said.

It makes sense that Québec would want its immigrants to assimilate in order to be Quebeckers first to increase its population and strengthen its special minority status within Canada and  Canadian second. The issue is whether it is framing the issue the right way and fighting the right battles. The problem is that these differences that exist within Canada are going to be increasingly difficult to coexist within the same country because they are based on very different visions of society and hierarchy of fundamentals value. The whole niqab episode has shown that even the politicians of Québec don't fully know how immigrants can become 'good ' Québécois, but they know what their fears are, which explains why the focus has been placed on the usual and weakest subjects: visibly "different" women.

Aura popularis

Quote of the day from Naema Ahmed, the student who was asked to choose between wearing the niqab and going to class to learn French in Quebec:

It wasn't fair for them to ask me to leave the exam. (...) I feel like the government is following me everywhere.(...) I'll just stay in my house. This will solve the problem.

The Islamic republic of Canada ?!

Lysiane Gagnon on the recent expulsion from a French class in Quebec of an Egyptian immigrant who was wearing the Niqab:

In Quebec, most agreed with the decision to expel the niqab-wearing woman, including constitutional lawyer Julius Grey, who has defended the right of inmates to smoke in prison and the right of Sikh students to wear ceremonial daggers in class. “Accommodation should not lead to separation,” he said.
Yolande Geadah, an Egyptian-born writer, said: “There is no possible compromise with people with such inflexible attitudes.” Raheel Raza, a Pakistani-born Muslim women's rights activist, said: “When we come to Canada, we're not coming to the Islamic Republic of Canada.”
The irony is that, last fall, Egypt's top Islamic cleric said students and teachers at Cairo's Al-Azhar University would not be allowed to wear face veils in classrooms and dorms on the grounds they had “nothing to do with Islam.” The education ministry later barred the niqab during exams, to prevent students from sending others to take the tests. Although an Egyptian court subsequently ordered a stay on the Al-Azhar ban and overturned the education ministry's decision, we have to ask ourselves: Should Canadian colleges be more tolerant of Islamic fundamentalism than Cairo's universities?

Wow, in what world do we live in to make the argument that a woman becomes dangerous and infectious because of what she wears? And how convincing is it for Lysiane Gagnon to argue that Canada must be as open on the so-called woman's issues as Egyptians?  Did I miss a big part of this movie not to be able to understand why the body of a woman can never be fully their own, but an instrument to make either a political or a religious point? I'm forced to realize that Islamists and feminists agree on at least a central issue : a woman is what she wears.

Geert Wilders as a freedom fighter

Toby Young, my favorite judge of Top Chef, defends Geert Wilders in the Daily Telegraph by arguing that he is a freedom of speech warrior:

are the Dutch people just fed up with being told they’re not allowed to criticise Muslim extremists because to do so is “Islamophobic”? As a defender of free speech, I don’t believe for one moment that the Koran ought to be banned. But if I was a member of the Dutch electorate I would vote for Geert Wilders’ party nonetheless because I don’t think he deserves to go to jail for 16 months just for arguing that it should.
Wilders doesn’t really want to ban the Koran, of course. It’s a theatrical gesture — a situationist move — designed to underline the absurdity of trying to limit freedom of speech on the grounds that certain words or phrases or images might move people to violence. What Wilders is saying is that if you believe the critics of Muslim extremism should be silenced because their words might incite religious hatred, then, logically, you ought to ban the Koran on the same grounds. It’s not a serious suggestion, so much as a reductio ad absurdum of a completely untenable, illiberal position.

It is for precisely this reason that I have always believed that European countries are wrong to attempt to censor what they consider to be hate speech or speech denying certain historical events such as the Shoah. Hate-speech laws or any other laws that try to limit free speech based on its content always make the extremist the victim. Moreover, they force people such as Toby Young who likes to provoke and who believe that freedom of speech is the most sacred of values to defend Geert Wilders without seeking to see behind the trees. Guided by his orthodoxy about free speech,  Young is convinced that Wilders can only be right because that it is always absolutely unjust to try to shut somebody hate because society doesn't like what he is saying or finds it too distasteful. It isn't an erroneous positon to take, just a limited and an absurd one because the conclusion seems to be that victims of censorship are always and absolutely right or rather they cannot be right or even extremist.

Deconstructing Geert Wilders

The Daily Telegraph has a portrait of Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-right politician whose party is calling for the stop of the Islamization of the Netherlands and increasing its popularity with that message. Sugary excerpt:

Wilders describes his far-Right label as "nonsense".
"My supporters say: 'At last there is someone who dares to say what millions of people think'. That is what I do," Wilders said before the European elections last year, in which the PVV took four of the 25 Dutch seats.
"People are fed up with the government; the leftist elite that has failed them," said Wilders.
(,,,).Arguing that "Islam is the Netherlands' biggest problem," Wilders has urged parliament to ban the Koran, comparing it with Hitler's "Mein Kampf."
He also wants a total ban on the burqa as well as a halt to immigration from Muslim countries and the construction of mosques in the Netherlands.
He is awaiting a hate speech trial trial at home and was barred from entering Britain last year to stop him spreading "hatred and violent messages."
"I want to defend freedom, which I think will disappear into thin air the moment the Islamic ideology gains a stronger foothold on this country," Wilders, who is married to a Hungarian, told AFP.

I'm not alarmed by the ascension of Geert Wilders because his ascension and his views are not new in Europe, Extremism, both on the left and the right, tends to rise everywhere especially in times when there is so economic, social, and political distress, which none of the "legitimate" parties seem to be able to address to the satisfaction of an increasingly impatient and radicalized electorate. One only has to analyze the short, but tumultuous and tragic political career of  Pim Portuyn in the Netherlands or even the long and flashy one of Jean-Marie Le Pen to realize that politicians such as Wilders are always very opportunistic, but that they are rarely able to leave any serious political marks or even to ascend to power without cleaning up their message or at least expanding because soon or later two things happen. The first is that their message is co-opted by other political parties who start to pay attention and to realize that they must find less "intolerant" ways to deal with the concerns of the voters who may be unsavory, but are very real. Sarkozy did it very effectively in 2007 and beat Le Pen at his own. The second thing that happens when politicians such as Geert Wilders are actually very good at politics or very ambitious is that soon or later, they come to the realization that they have to widen their message and that Islamization or any other message exploiting the fear of others and of unwelcome change is not enough to be more than a pestilent gadfly.
For these reasons, what I'm really wonder is whether Wilders is ever going to be willing to form a coalition with other Dutch parties of the right if his party becomes a political force or whether he will be content to remain on the margins believing that the system will collapse. I'm also wondering what is Ayaan Hirsi Ali's opinion of Geert Wilders.

The French's favored fear

I agree with Patrice de Beer this:

(...) the burqa (like the hijab before it) may be less a genuinely important issue in France than a blanket shrouding more fundamental problems - ones that that French society is unable or unwilling to solve.
There are, after all, other ways of addressing the realities of disaffection and refusal of which such Islamic symbols are seen as the expression (...). If, for example, more serious measures were undertaken to ease the integration into French society of young people of non-European origin (many of them Muslim); if an invisible (and often visible) “glass ceiling” that blocks their access to jobs they are qualified for were lifted; if there were more non-white business executives, top civil servants, or MPs elected from within metropolitan France (at present there is just one in this category). So often, politicians (especially but not only from the government side) prefer to pre-empt criticism for their inaction in such areas by projecting blame for France’s defects onto outsiders/immigrants/others (and Muslims above all).

Technology and the immigrant

Aleksandar Hemon's pertinent words on the effects that technology has on immigration and more specifically on the immigrants:

I think technology has a neutral value at best; it could be used for good things or bad things. I think it fundamentally changes the situation of assimilation or participation in society. Because you can stay in touch daily with wherever you came from and you can listen to live broadcasts of radio stations or the prayers from the mosques or read daily newspapers, complete with obituaries online. I met a guy in St. Louis, a city that has the largest Bosnian population [in America], who, when he got nostalgic would get on the Web and watch snow fall in Sarajevo.
Ellis Island immigrants, on the other hand, would come in, work hard, be exploited, make it or not make it but even those who made it would go back thirty to forty years later to the village of their origin and they would find that one or two people remembered them. So it was easy to sever connections, and in some ways it was natural: your life was here, your old life was there. But I know a large number of Bosnians in Chicago who send their kids to Bosnia over the summer—school’s over, they send them to Grandma. These kids are bilingual, bicultural. Displacement is not necessarily political. You can go back and forth. Transportation has become relatively cheap. Masses of people are moving around the world: immigrants, refugees, labor migrants. It’s an entirely different world.

I'm wondering whether technology isn't just a tool that is reflecting that the fact that immigration has changed because the world has gotten smaller and also that at the same time, it has become more fragmented. Immigrants when they move to a new country no longer leave everything behind; to the contrary, they are able more often than not to live within  a community of their compatriots that has recreated its home environment a best as it could. Globalization may have compressed both time and space, it has made people less willing to change their identities or adapt their culture for those have become too sacred to touch.

Europe and the fear of the clash

Great article in the Boston Review from John R. Bowen refuting the arguments of those who argue that Europe is becoming Eurabia and that it has everything to fear from its increasing "Muslim population." It is a must-read; here is a sugary excerpt:

Some Islamophobes claim that differences in civilization and religion between Islam and Europe will last because a fast-growing Muslim population is poised to take over European cities and establish political control in the name of a global ummah. This argument disputes the notion that Muslim immigrants (and, a fortiori, their children) will do what most immigrants do: adapt. To the contrary, the argument says, multiculturalist—as opposed to assimilationist—policies isolated Muslims just as ummah TV was reaching youth with calls for jihad, and the new generations will continue to be motivated by radical Islam in all areas of their lives: as they plan families, build schools, and riot, all with Islamic political victory as their goal.
(...)In creating sharia councils, British Muslims began to look “separatist,” and some do call for greater authority for sharia mediation. Against that British institutional background, a good number of younger Muslims call for governance “by sharia,” whatever that might mean. French Muslims began to look “corporatist,” as national organizations sought control over local mosque financing; everyone—Muslims included—calls for laïcité (secularity) to be applied equally. Throughout Europe, some Muslims developed ties with transnational groups: intellectual ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, spiritual ones with West African Sufi orders, financial ones with Gulf sheikhs.

In other words, these Islamic political actors have adapted to national opportunity structures with more or less success: more in the cases of British, French, and Belgian Muslims, less in the cases of German, Dutch, and Swedish ones. The organizing that ostensibly proves Islamism is on the rise in fact shows that these immigrants are following the examples of their predecessors. Like Catholics and Jews before them, Muslims build religious schools and associations—usually with external financial aid—and get involved in elections. (...)  Muslims are adapting like everyone else and are divided like everyone else.

French Halal Burgers

Charles Bremmer analyzes the polemic created by the decision of Quick, a chain of fast-food in France, to sell Halal burgers in order to cater to observant Muslims:

The burger fuss is of course just the latest manifestation of anxiety over what is perceived to be an assertive Muslim population. The sense of threat lies behind the popular steps to outlaw the full Muslim veil on transport, universities and other state-run services. It also fuelled Sarkozy's four-month great national debate on the nature of French identity. The exercise was called off this month after focusing only the six-million Muslims in France's midst.
(...) The opponents of Quick fastfood and Muslim veils draw on high-minded principles which go back to the equality of the 1789 Revolution and the Republic's more recent principle of laicité, the strict separation of religion from public life.

These "valeurs de la République" are cited by leftists and intellectuals as well as rightwing politicians to deplore the more visible practices of Islam. The argument is that religious behaviour outside the mainstream culture amounts to an act of separateness and should be discouraged (For the ideal of the mainstream, see yesterday's post on white Marianne, symbol of the Revolution). By setting themselves apart from traditional French life, Muslims are being "identitaire" and committing "communautarisme". Equivalent to sectarianism, this means putting one's ethnic or religious identity ahead of Frenchness.
Britain and the United States, with their supposed ghettos, are seen as examples of the ill. Anne Fulda commenting in today's Le Figaro, complained that France has imported communautarisme from the United States along with hamburgers and now it is too late to stop it. 
The problem is that the sin of communautarisme has a flexible definition. That is what makes it dubious when applied to Muslims. With France's record in world war two, no-one would publicly accuse the Jewish population of communautarisme, let alone complain to prosecutors. No-one protests against kosher restaurants -- or says Chinese or Italian ones discriminate because they do not offer French cuisine. Try substituting kosher for halal in the complaints over Quick burgers and the effect is offensive.

One of the problems is that France has already americanized on the question of race, religion, and society for it is indeed ghettorized. There are parts of Paris, Marseilles, or Lyon where only members of a "community" and where they do so trying to recreate not only the atmosphere, but the norms of the place that they or their parents left behind. At the crux of the issue is that France no longer has a workable integration model and that instead of accepting and creating a new one, the French elites and bien pensants are improvising according to their ideology, which means either importing parts of the American/British model or trying the impossible by reverting to the "assimilating" one that worked when there were no visible differences between new and old France. It is for that reason that I am one of the very few people who regret that the debate on French identity was a failure. I had believed that it could have been useful not in defining what it means to be French, but to find common ground on the limits of tolerance and at the very least to make once again essential the principle that not citizenship is about both rights and inescapable obligations.

European fantasies

Great point from Charlemagne on the current Euro/EU crisis:

Some voices in Brussels insist that the logic of this current crisis must lead to such a fiscal union, to preserve the euro. They make the comparison with the American federal government, sending money from rich American states to poor ones.
Mr Pisani-Ferry, a pro-European and a Frenchman, says such talk of a fiscal union within Europe is, "at this point, a fantasy", and he is right. He then went on: "It is also a fantasy to think anyone will make a fiscal union just to make a monetary union more robust." And crucially, he noted, America did not create its own federal union to prop up the dollar. Fiscal unions like that in America are created because there is political will to create new budget items at a federal level, such as a common military, or a single Social Security system, he said.

The question still remains what should be done short of tearing the whole system down for I don't think that it is possible, at least not by the current leaders who have too much invested in the success of the Euro and in the European Union is the perfect scapegoat at home for all their domestic troubles.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and a piece of clothing

I have been waiting impatiently for Ian Buruma’s take on the French and the burqa. Here it is:

One could take the view that national governments should enforce laws, but not values. But, whereas most democracies are less prone than the French Republic is to impose "national values" on their citizens, the law cannot be totally divorced from shared values either. The fact that Europeans can marry only one spouse is both a legal and a cultural norm. And views on sexual, gender, and racial discrimination, which change with time, are reflected in the laws as well.

On the whole, individual practices, as long as they do no harm to others, should be allowed, even if many people don't particularly like them. It may be undesirable to have people who carry out public functions judges, teachers, or policewomen, for example cover up their faces. But one can impose dress codes for certain jobs, without banning a type of clothing for everyone. After all, we don't have judges and teachers wearing bikinis on the job, either.

There is another, practical, reason why the burqa ban is a bad idea. If we are serious about integrating immigrants into western societies, they should be encouraged to move around in public as much as possible. Banning the burqa would force this tiny minority of women to stay at home, and be even more dependent on their men to deal with the outside world.

So what should be done about practices that are judged to be illiberal, if we don't ban them? Sometimes it is better to do nothing. Living with values that one does not share is a price to be paid for living in a pluralist society.   

I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed with Buruma's take for he uses a lot of mambo jumbo when he should be saying that a society whose slogan is Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité cannot focus on the burqa and ban it especially when wearing it can be a choice, one made knowingly by somebody comfortable with submission or whatever else. In other words,  picking on the way women dress is a reinforcement of the view that they are not  equals to men for afterwards, is there any men’s wear that any government on earth would even entertaining banning by arguing that it symbolizes something? There is none and that is simply because it is accepted that men are individuals and that how they dress  is their business as long as they don’t expose their “best friend.”

The burqa and the fight against Islamism in both France and the US

Strong points (I strongly disagree with them) from .Sadanand Dhume contrasting the French's approach to the burqa to the one of the United States and the effectiveness of their common struggle against Islamism:

(...) from a broader perspective – based less on theoretical abstraction than on practical reality – the pro-active French approach to the burqa is superior to the hands-off stand taken by the United States. First, the French parliamentary report strikes a balance between individual rights and the concerns of the larger community. (According to a poll published in the magazine Le Point, nearly six out of ten French citizens support the ban.) It makes no attempt to ban the burqa at home or on the street, but would curtail it at points of public service where citizens can reasonably expect not to encounter a masked stranger. Parliament has not moved to curb the use of the much more widespread hijab, though since 2004 it has been banned in France’s strictly secular state schools, along with other conspicuous religious symbols such as Jewish yarmulkes, Sikh turbans, and large crosses
Most importantly, unlike the Americans, the French recognize that both the burqa and the hijab can be as much a political statement as a personal one. Islamists around the world – from national governments in Iran and Saudi Arabia to local authorities in sharia-friendly places such as Indonesia’s Aceh province to non-governmental organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami – uniformly demand that women cover their hair. For them, the sight of a burqa on a Parisian bus or in a public hospital in Lyon is a sign that their cause is gaining ground. Like all utopian movements that seek to create the perfect society – in this case by imposing God’s law on earth – radical Islam feeds on symbols that appear to signal its ultimate victory. Rolling back the burqa contradicts this triumphalist narrative.

The problem is  that  in this struggle against a form of fundamentalism, women become, one more time, instruments, toys,  objects, sub-citizens, whom must realize that they are certain choices that they cannot make because it chokes society. Their choice to use their bodies the way they want to use, to clothe their way is taken from them because it is assumed that they are symbols first and people second. If the goal here is to affirm the equality between men and women and to stop religious extremism, it seems to me that the focus ought to be not on women and their choices, but on those who can force them to wear something that they do not want. Why not, pass a law outlawing any religious figure to preach that men are superior, that they can beat their wives, and force them to wear a certain way? Why not focus on Islamism or for that matter on any religion that do not offer women the same status than men? That would mean forcing the Catholic Church to have women priests in France for example or forcing many Imams and Rabbis to let both sexes pray together, which would do more than a ban on the burqa to affirm the idea that men and women are equals..

America, Canada and melting pots

Sugary excerpt of the day from Nav Purewal's fascinating article in the Walrus:

Canada’s kaleidoscopic shards form a culture more overtly variegated than America’s comparatively homogeneous stew, but they also elide both nations’ colonial pasts, a history that has particularly important implications for Canada’s complicated approaches to assimilation. The truism that everyone here came from somewhere else obliquely acknowledges that English and French imperialism supplanted existing cultures.
Modern Canada is as much a palimpsest as a mosaic, a truth perhaps engrained somewhere in our national consciousness — and one that manifests itself in two divergent traditions of immigrant assimilation. In English Canada, the fraught legacy of cultural imperialism — whether the slaughter of native tribes or the injustice of residential schools — results in a reluctance to impose a uniform Canadian culture on newcomers; whereas Quebec, ever afraid of diluting its francophone heritage, demands that immigrants conform to an atavistic conception of French-Canadian culture.

I am wondering whether both America and Canada integration's models are adaptable and suitable for any other country. I have the suspicion that that the answer is no and these variation of the melting pot model, which in fact lead to fractured societies made of communities (which can cohabit without "mixing" given the size of those countries),but which are in fact legitimated and thus, reinforced by the State (s). The most interesting question has to be whether those  models are sustainable. At the time, when analysts such as Bruce Bawer, Christophe Caldwell and Mark Steyn are making loud (and disturbing) noises about the end of Europe as we know to put things more tastefully, I wonder if they should look at America and Canada and wonder what might happen if the communities that form their societies stop having common interest and a share of the apple pie. In other words, what happens when American and Canada become even more unequal, and more "varied societies." Implicitly, I'm suggesting here that identity matters less in wealthy and prospering countries where the poor, and minorities feel that they have a shoot to reach the mountain top. This might suggest that Canada because it is a "fairer" society (one where welfare  and universal healthcare are not fighting words) might face great of an identity crisis than America. Unfortunately, literature doesn't have the answer to that question. 

Modernity has different faces

Good conclusion, wrong and disingenuous arguments from Raphaël Liogier on the French's discussion on the ban of the burka:

Women ­donning the full veil are not against modernity but represent rather its sophisticated product, just like ­westernised Buddhists. The veil, ­surprising as this may seem, is good news for modern values. Some smart young women keep a niqab in their bag but only wear it in Paris's Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, in order to draw attention to the fact that they belong to the best Muslim set, that they really have got that Muslim chic, something like the equivalent ­behaviour in a gay district. This deep western social movement is no threat to modern values, but rather vindicates the ­latter under unexpected aesthetic guise: it is so ­individualistic and depoliticised that it is more of a real threat for Islamism and terrorist ­networks themselves.It is a massive blunder to fight this new, ultra-modern Islam. And it is not only France that is heading towards a colossal error of understanding – ­politically capable of spinning into ­historic ­proportions – but also Europe, the United States, and all the other ­post-industrial countries, blinkered by Islamophobia, who turn out to be ­incapable of catching up on their own deep cultural changes and recognising their own best interests. It is a kind of collective, ­generational jet lag.

The issue isn't as complicated as Liognier makes it seem for all it comes down to is this: Can a woman with a burka, a veil, a niqab or whatever be the face of modernity and of individual liberties as the one of Demi Moore pregnant and Naked? My answer is yes, but too many people disagree.

The ideological warfare over women's bodies

Unconvincing and creepily artificial arguments against the Burqa (burka) from Alice Thompson in the London Times:

Face time, face-to-face, losing face, all these phrases show how we rely on scrutinising each other’s reactions, as do concerns about Botox and facelifts. The burka is not an invisibility cloak, it’s a passive- aggressive statement, a rejection of the community. The person wearing it is signalling that either she or her family wants her to remain apart from society. It implies that wearers believes that British men may become dangerously lecherous if they see their faces and that British women are too provocatively clad. Like smoking, wearing a burka doesn’t affect just the wearers, but those around them, who may feel shunned. With full-body tattoos, face piercing and a hoody, you can still smile to show that you are a friend.
(...)That doesn’t mean that Britain should ban the burka in public places. We don’t want the police stripping off women’s outer garments in the street. The French have gone too far by prohibiting the wearing of a full veil on public transport.
But we should make it clear that people should not be allowed to cover their faces when it impinges on others, That includes women working in schools, hospitals, courtrooms, shops and the service industries.

Yeah right...! In today's modern societies, don't we have the right to be loners and to say "fu*k you" to the majority as long that we don't harm anybody? How come these types of belittling and paternalistic arguments are only used when women are choosing a path that a society believes is wrong not only for her, but for their ideas of what she ought to be? It reminds  me of what too many parents do when their daughters want to assert their individuality in ways, which shock their value system or which they believe which have her labeled and thus scarred for life (she will never be able to get married). In any case, Thompson undermines her own arguments by rejecting a ban on the burqa, which shows that like me, the sight of a woman in burqa makes her feel uncomfortable, but that unlike me, she cannot tolerate/accept that discomfort because she believes that women can't be individuals, but should always be selfless and think about others. I'm tired of the idea that a woman's body is never solely her own, but instead always a vessel or symbol. When I see a woman with a veil, I have to remind myself that she has the right to do as she pleases with her body as long as she isn't engaging in obscene behavior. It seems to me that all of the discussions about the burqa and about whether to ban it in France and elsewhere just show that women are still the main instruments in an ideological, political and religious battlefield where the main combatants don't really care about their self-hood, but solely the preservation of their own misogynistic,but comfortable traditions.

The perpetual identity question

Agnès Poirier on what it means to French:

Eric Cantona didn't pull his punches when asked about the national debate: "They talk of the Marseillaise, of the French language, but politicians are asses. To be French is to be revolutionary and refusing all this politicking crap."
Precisely. Historical events have shaped the French mindset more than any debates will. The struggle of the French revolutionaries and the first republic up in arms against all the monarchies of the continent was the start of a profound shake-up and national identity construction. The Napoleonic setback and royalist restorations throughout the 19th century sharpened the minds, created deep national divisions, but also prepared for the glorious revolutionary episodes of the second republic (1848-1852) and the Commune (1870). The Franco-Prussian war, the Dreyfus affair, the Third Republic, the law of separation of church and state, followed by the two world wars, Vichy, the Résistance, the Algerian war and decolonisation at large made France as we have known it to be: confrontational, contradictory, unruly, restless, but also profoundly republican and secular.
And let's remember that, according to the National Institute for Demographic Studies, a quarter of the French have at least one grandparent born outside France.

The end of American exceptionalism

I would like to be able to disagree vehemently with Nick Cohen on this, but I cannot because experience has shown me that he is, alas, in part right when he makes the following point although it takes him to another direction than I because I don't make the mistake of confusing a symptom with the disease:

Pride in American exceptionalism ran through Obama's Nobel peace prize acceptance speech. "In many countries, there is a deep ambivalence about military action today," he told his doubtless deeply ambivalent Norwegian audience. "At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America." He would take no notice of it. "Make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms." Obama drew a map of a pacifist Europe, unwilling to face reality, and a tough-minded but idealist America ready to defend civilisation with "the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms".
Nowhere has American satisfaction with its uniqueness been more noticeable than in the applause it awards itself for its treatment of immigrants. Articles contrasting the success of the US in integrating Muslims against the failures of Britain have been a regular feature of the American press. Liberals emphasised that immigrants who wanted to leave their old identities behind were helped by a constitution and bill of rights that accepted them as equal citizens.
Conservatives claimed that immigrants could not sit resentfully at home living on welfare payments and developing sectarian grievances, as they could in corrupt Europe, but had to find jobs that inevitably brought them into contact with Americans from other cultures.
(...) Depressingly, Americans seem to be as bad as the British are at recognising the differences between Islam and Islamism. They can no longer, however, get away with pretending that Islamism is an un-American disease. Trying to explain the rise of religious hatreds and identity politics, Obama said in Oslo that "given the dizzying pace of globalisation, and the cultural levelling of modernity, it should come as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish about their particular identities", which was true enough in a platitudinous way.
I wonder if he yet understands that Americans are not exempt from the manias of our time and that his formerly special country is not looking so exceptional any more.

Defining national identities

I would like to say amen to these words from Jim Wolfreys on the debate on the definition of Francité (Frenchness) that is occurring in France, but a part of me is resisting it:

At one extreme those who find themselves concentrated in the poorest areas of France do so not out of choice, but through ethnicity and income. Neither Islam nor "ethnic communitarianism" are responsible for such divisions: they are the product of social deprivation and racism. At the other extreme, however, is a section of society that wilfully separates itself from the rest of France. The top 10% of earners choose to live in the most segregated areas of the country, well-heeled districts like Neuilly and St-Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. It is they who have created what Maurin calls "the bourgeois ghetto".
If the present debate is to reassert the historic republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity then government priorities will need to be overturned. The targeting of "illegal" immigrants – Besson aims to deport 27,000 people this year, more than double 2002 levels – focuses attention on a tiny proportion of the population. Likewise, high-profile campaigns to impose a republican dress code on Muslims are a distraction from more fundamental divisions shaping French society, divisions determined less by religion than by poverty, racism and inequality. In France, as in Britain, if debates on citizenship are to involve denouncing the extreme right while pandering to its bugbears, they will only obscure the real issues – and in so doing become part of the problem.

I believe that the trap of any debate on national identity, whether it be French, British, Moroccan, or Nigerian, is to cast it in the terms  Wolfreys is choosing to frame by emphasizing the risks as if nationals of a country should be afraid to define/decide who they are or who they would to be.There is this morbid and unhealthy connection between patriotism, any attempt to show national price and fascism and there is one between any admission that national identity can grow, change or even be redefined drastically with self-hatred, deculturation, Arabization, de-europeanization, and dewesternization.

Cultural cloning

Hum, I'm tempted to agree with Samir Shah on this ( I think his main point can be made about the US, France or any other country dealing with a population, which is diverse and mixed), but it would be too easy and moreover, I have the feeling that he is only offering part of the picture even though it is one, which I find both uplifting and depressing because it leaves open the possibility that race doesn't have to doom the future of a country and to pollute its politics:

The plain truth is that Britain is developing an underclass who share more in common with each other than they do with other members of their own ethnic group. What are these traits? Everyone will have their own theories. But here are mine.
The first impediment to progress is a community’s determination to cling on to elements of their own cultural traditions and ways of life. Parents from certain Muslim groups, for example, have a tendency to bring up their children in such a way that they never interact with members of other cultures — restricting the ability of their children to get ahead. Then take the ‘babyfather’ phenomenon. David Cameron has urged Afro-Caribbean fathers to attend to their parental duties — an issue because half of black children live in lone-parent households, double the ratio of whites. Jack Straw made this point rather well with the surprisingly pithy ‘Lads need Dads’. The need for a father is not specific to children of any race.
If we are to hunt for discrimination in 21st-century Britain, then we should look at other factors that make us different. Each distinguishing feature — class, culture, accent, being Northern — plays a part. For example, in some liberal industries such as the media, being right-wing doesn’t help. But why should this surprise us? The kind of people who make decisions — white, middle-class, metropolitan, liberal, male — all think that the best people for the job are, er, white, liberal, metropolitan, middle-class and male. To describe this phenomenon as ‘institutional racism’ (as many are inclined to do) misses the problem by a country mile.
The real problem is what I call ‘cultural cloning’ — the human tendency to recruit in one’s own image. Recruitment, instead of being about picking the best people, becomes a process of finding people like the ones already there. The overwhelming need for a kind of cultural comfort blanket takes precedence over every other consideration — and rules out those whose backgrounds don’t quite fit. This is what a 21st-century Equalities Commission should have in its sights. Cultural cloning is, in my opinion, the main source of discrimination in Britain today.

Redefining assimilation

I don't fully agree with this, but it just shows that too many feel that integration isn't working, I'm wondering if that perception isn't just based on the sense that there isn't enough pie left to share:

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the "agony and splendour" of assimilation has come to an end in Europe, both for Jews and other groups. The life and death pressures to homogenise are no longer there. The means of reshaping our identities – through cosmetic surgery, dress, internet personas, photoshop – are accessible to millions. At the same time, as Gabriel Sheffer's work shows, such processes can also be used to maintain the distinctiveness of Diaspora groups, which are not disappearing as many have predicted, again reducing the need to fear cultural oblivion.
We would all be far better off if we took a more relaxed attitude to assimilation. A strong society can accommodate fundamentalist religious groups that want to keep themselves apart from society, as long as they accept the fundamental principle that "the law of the land is the law". And if, for example, Muslim or Jewish groups wish to mitigate the effect of assimilation on the identities of their youth in non-coercive, voluntary ways which are compatible with common values, this too poses no danger to society and can be of mutual positive benefit.

Defining explosive terms

I almost agree totally with this:

I guess what it all comes down to is that when we say we are multicultural, we exaggerate. What does a multicultural country look like? It looks like India -- there are many different languages there spoken by millions and millions of people generation after generation. Different religions practice their creeds without restraint. It doesn't mean they all get along peacefully all the time -- on the contrary, Pakistan exists because they don't. But here's an example of real multiculturalism -- an old man stark naked walking down a sidewalk thronged with people not taking the slightest notice of him. It turns out he was a monk in a small religious sect that does not allow its monks to wear any clothes at all. What would happen if he were walking down a busy street in Toronto? He would be arrested. And he might say to the policeman: "But my culture requires this and Canada is multicultural." The policeman would answer: "Yes we are multicultural and isn't it wonderful. And you're still under arrest."

Culture of fear or fear of culture and humanity

Pankaj Mishra on what he considers to be a culture of fear that is created in too many countries by the increasing popular sentiment that foreigners are assailing their land, their culture, and their national identity as seen in Christopher Caldwell's latest book on the threat of Islam and of Muslims to Europe, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West :

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai claims in Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger that "minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties".
This at least partly explains why a few hundred women in headscarves incited such fierce passions in a nation-state whose geopolitical and cultural insignificance in recent years has only been partly obscured by its hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy. In The Politics of the Veil, the distinguished scholar of gender studies Joan Wallach Scott explains how the banning of a small piece of cloth that covers the head and neck affirmed an "imagined France", one that was "secular, individualist and culturally homogenous" and "whose reality was secured by excluding dangerous others from the nation". Scott demonstrates that French Muslim girls, who were directly affected by the law on the foulard, were "strikingly absent from the debates" in France, which were dominated by intellectuals and politicians frantically defining the dangerous "other" (typically by describing the veil as, in Jacques Attali's words, a "successor to the Berlin wall").
The veil has now been turned into, Scott writes, a highly charged "sign of the irreducible difference between Islam and France". Elsewhere, too, politicians and journalists - self-proclaimed "liberals" as well as unabashed rightwingers - rhetorically ask whether "Islam", which allegedly enforces a harsh divine law on all Muslims, is compatible with "European" values of reason and tolerance, which are supposedly derived from the Enlightenment (or Christianity, as Sarkozy blurted out in 2007, in a revealing breach of republican protocol).

I have always thought that the debate about culture, assimilation, and identity masks what I believed to be the essential debate of our time, which is how free are we allowed to be when choosing who we are as people, citizens or whatever else? Because if one really thinks about the subject, one has to come to the realization that only people who believed in the totalitarianism of the Good./traditions/God are really obsessed with culture and with the idea that civilized people/nations can become barbarians or barbaric. The idea that if there is no God, no moralistic state or culture then everything is permissible is laughable and obscurantist because it dooms humanity since it asserts that people are incapable of making good decisions and that there is nothing that they won't forbid themselves to do if something or someone doesn't forbid them to do bad things or rather things that are for them. I may be stupidly or charmingly naïve but I don't think that banning the veil in France solves any problem with Islamism and I don't even think that it is the goal because otherwise, Sarkozy would have had the wildly imaginative idea to just ban Islamism and to therefore put the State at the center of deciding what kind of Islams are compatible with French Society.

Integration in Canada and the US

Fascinating...:

The reality is that Canadians talk about multiculturalism but don't practise it. That does not mean we don't embrace diversity. Both Canada and the United States, because of high levels of immigration, are diverse societies, but diversity and multiculturalism are not synonyms. Diversity encompasses a variety of characteristics that differentiate people, including dress, culinary and musical styles. An example is Toronto's hugely successful Caribana festival. Such events are hardly unique to Canada; several major U.S. cities have Caribbean festivals too.
Diversity is not divisive in secular democracies that respect individual freedom, such as Canada and the United States. On the other hand, culture is not just about superficial differences but also about core values. The people who were attending cock fights in Cloverdale simply don't understand our tender feelings toward animals. This is a difference in values and there is no room for compromise.
The notion that Canada is a mosaic while the United States is a melting pot does not survive scrutiny. In 1994, a study by two University of Toronto sociologists, Jeffrey Reitz and Raymond Breton, found that language retention of third-generation immigrants was less than 1 per cent in both countries. This was significant. One would expect foreign languages to dissolve into the American melting pot. But Canada is supposed to be a mosaic: a set of separate and distinct cultural entities. If it really were a mosaic, ancestral languages would survive through the generations. But they don't, because the offspring of immigrants are quickly absorbed into the dominant language milieux of North America.

Distracting fixations

I agree with this:

(...) fixating on conspicuous religious symbols like the turban or burqa does not feel like an effective way to preserve French traditions and identity, especially when it keeps people out of state schools or other public institutions — just the kind of places where I imagine they have opportunities to study and participate in the culture and traditions that are part of a nation’s heritage.

Secularization, Christianity, and Europe

Terry Sanderson on Secularization, Christianity, and the future of Europe:

A Eurobarometer poll (pdf) reveals that when asked about what they value most, only 7% of Europeans nominated religion. That same poll tells us that about half of Europeans think that religion is afforded too much importance. When asked about what values the European Union represents, the ranking starts with human rights (37%), then peace (35%), democracy (34%) and way down last again is religion with only 3%.
So, if Christianity is not the future of Europe, will the continent become Islamic?
The answer is again, no. The capitulation of western governments to the violence of Islamic jihadists and the subsequent channelling of all discourse about Muslims through religious representatives has created the impression that all Muslims are deeply pious and inimical to western values. They are not.
We have been bamboozled by the term "Islamophobia", which suggests that Islam is under systematic persecution in the west. But new research by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (pdf) shows clearly that while people who identify themselves as Muslims are, indeed, victims of much discrimination, by their own account hardly any of it is because of their religion. Another poll showed that young Muslims have a strong desire for westernisation, which again contradicts those who have been appointed to speak for them from the pulpits.

The dangers of mediocrity

Tim Rutten reviews Bruce Bawer's new book on his favorite topic of the West, Immigration, Islam, Dechristianization, De-westernization, and terrorism, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom:

A mediocre book on an important topic always is disappointing.
When the treatment also is shallow and vulgarly argued -- as is the case with Bruce Bawer's "Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom" -- this reader is inclined to get up with a sour sense of resentment over time wasted, the sort of feeling that comes from being seated next to a garrulous bore at a dinner party.
A literary critic and writer for various neoconservative cultural and political journals, Bawer is also openly homosexual and has written extensively for a number of gay publications. He and his partner have lived in Europe for some time, and since moving there, Bawer has become one of those writers alarmed by what he sees as a cultural fifth column of Islamic immigrants gnawing at Europe's traditions of tolerance and democracy.
There certainly are dangerous, intolerant Islamists among Europe's immigrants, and their allies, he argues (not always inaccurately), are the dogmatic multiculturalists who find cultural equivalency between Magna Carta and sharia. The problem is that Bawer spins glancingly off that interesting, rather important point into descriptions of a vast, interlocking conspiracy of cultural, literary, journalistic and even entertainment elites he believes want to appease fundamentalist Islam and sell out the West's tradition of individual and civil liberties.
Why they're engaged in this betrayal is anybody's guess. That doesn't stop Bawer from enveloping one alleged case in point after another, rather like the rhetorical equivalent of a kudzu vine -- and with about the same logical structure.
Too often Bawer simply gets things wrong, both factually and by degree. For all his academic prominence, the late Edward Said never enjoyed anything close to the influence Bawer imagines for him; the notion that his debated book "Orientalism" changed the way the majority of Western writers and intellectuals perceived Islam simply is preposterous.

European cowardice

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on what she believes to be an identity crisis in Europe, which makes Europeans unwilling to die for their values such as free speech and willing to tolerate the intolerable from Muslims :

Europe has become a place for new religions, new creeds, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. Everything is thus relative. This is an uncertainty that the Muslim does not share. The Muslim ethic and tribal spirit are far more resilient and fierce in war than the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.
(...)Take the debate on freedom of expression. In 1989 and afterwards, the provocations in the name of Islam were greeted with a confident, "No way! This is Europe, and you can say what you like, write what you like," and so on.
Two decades later, Europeans are not so sure about the values of freedom of expression. Most members of the media engage in self-censorship. Textbooks in schools and universities have been adapted in such a way as not to offend Muslim sentiment. And legislation to punish 'blasphemy', if not passed, has been considered in most countries - or old laws that were never used are being revived.
(...) Muslims try to abolish freedom of expression using the vocabulary of freedom
The terrifying paradox about these developments is that Muslim immigrants were admitted into European borders on the basis of universal rights and freedoms that a large number of them now trample on, while others perhaps watch passively, or seek to defend only the image of Islam.
(...)In reality, if Europe falls, it's not because of Islam. It is because the Europeans of today - unlike their forbears in the Second World War - will not die to defend the values or the future of Europe. Even if they were asked to make the final sacrifice, many a post-modern lily-livered European would escape into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection. All that Islam has to do is walk into the vacuum.

I don't know, but there is something is this Ali's arguments that seems artificial and even insincere. I think that Glenn Greenwald is right to assert that people such Ayaan Hirsi Ali go out of their way to clash with Islam because they believe in global clashes and that there is indeed a clash of civilizations, which must be won by the West by taking the fight to the barbarians. However,  it is difficult to deny that there is a malaise within Europe caused not solely by Muslim immigration, but also by the critical debate, which has yet to happen or to least lead to some decisive political action about what it means to be European and whether nationality and citizenship can be about something other than culture especially when the later clashes with the present social compact.

To count, to categorize and to discriminate

I agree with the sentiments expressed by Kenan Malik, but disagree with the substance of his arguments and his conclusion:

The foundation stone of the secular French republic is that all citizens should be equal and free from distinctions of race or religion. But senior politicians have begun to recognise that France remains deeply disfigured by racism. To combat this, Sarkozy argues, it is necessary to collect ethnically based data. The British experience suggests that such policies often do more harm than good.
Two assumptions underlie the argument for ethnic monitoring: first, that ethnicity and culture are the most important labels we can place on people; and second, that there is a causal relationship between membership of such a group and disproportional outcomes between groups.
(...) A system obsessed by ethnic categories, however, is rarely able to make those kinds of connections.
Ethnic monitoring does not just produce misleading data. The process of classification often creates the very problems it is supposed to solve. Local authorities have used ethnic categories not just as a means of collecting data but also as a way of distributing political power — by promoting certain “community leaders” – and of disbursing public funds through ethnically based projects. Once the allocation of power, resources and opportunities become linked to membership of particular groups, then people inevitably begin to identify themselves in terms of those ethnicities, and only those ethnicities.

If collecting ethnic/racial stats is to categorize and to force people to identity with an ethnic group, then why keep any kind of statistics at all, why count the numbers of men and women, of adults and children, of single and married people if the presumption is that they identify people according to certain traits, which shouldn't define them and thus fragment a society by encouraging discrimination and ghettoisation. I may be naive, but I don't think that stats lie and create different realities rather they just reflect what is happening because they are a tool. As all instruments, they become dangerous when people are allowed.able to use them to discriminate, which means that it is narrow-minded to argue that they are intrinsically bad and should be used. The point is that modern societies have never, for long, forbidden themselves from using informative tools as ethnic/racial stats based on what may happen, based on the possibility of mischief and of terrible wrongs happening. The sad fact is that we use tools  in our societies, which we wished we didn't have to use and which we know can have disastrous effects such as judging the accused and putting them to jail when they are found guilt. We do so even though we know that there are risks that innocent people can end up in jail or that punishment may never lead to rehabilitation, but an aggravation and a multiplication of dangerous behaviors. We do these things because they are necessary for the health of society, its stability and its evolution. We do them while taking all the necessary precautions to avoid wrongs. It is true that ethnic/racial stats are not a panacea and can lead to problems, but it isn't true that societies, which use them don't have choices and can't avoid the wrongs, which may ensue by utilizing them. There is no determinism here and more importantly, no fatality. I'm not going to say that there is no alternative to ethnic/racial stats, but rather that they are a tool not an end. What matters is the how, the hard work of creating policies, which make them use. Everything else, all the bad tings, which may happen depend on our ethics and our willingness to accept that policy still matters.

Data is king !

Arthur Goldhammer on Racial stats and France:

(...) what we don't know in the French case, precisely because we lack adequate statistics, is the degree to which high observed unemployment rates are distributed among different groups issus de l'immigration: Is high unemployment primarily a phenomenon of the first generation? To what extent do the second and third and fourth generations also exhibit differential unemployment and education rates when compared with les Français de souche? How do neighborhood patterns vary with assimilation? None of these questions can be answered by inference from data on last names and parental origin alone. That is why better data are needed.

To put it simply, data is king especially if the goal is to have policies that aren't about fear and fantasies, but that actually try to address problems by being in touch with reality. The issue might be that in France as in most Western countries, immigration policy is about everything else but facts and data.

Key issues

From Andrew Brown, a good summary of Gilles Kepel, criticism of the British and in my view Anglo-saxon version of Multiculturalism and identity politics:

The fundamental criticism of multiculturalism and identity politics, raised by the French sociologist Gilles Kepel amongst others, is that it creates a class of politicians with a vested interested in separatism and extremism, because without it no one would care about them.

In my view, there is a difference between identity politics and multiculturalism even though in the mind of most it is no longer to differentiate the two. In any case, Kepel with whom I don't agree often, puts his finger on the key issue, which is the one of power in a system where race and other categories, which reinforce identity politics are valued and recognized as legitimate basis for social and political identities. Kepel's criticism reminds of Professor Anderson's pronouncement during the presidential campaign that Obama was part of the new class, which has a vested interest in creating conflicts in order to solve them:

Obama is a classic New Class elitist, by education, outlook, everything. So is his wife. Their professional lives have consisted in - community organizing? please - the elite management of the poor and, of even greater importance today, management of, but also production of, communalist tensions through multiculturalism and identity politics. That’s what the New Class does; that’s what it exists to do. Along with, to be sure, extracting rents for managing social conflicts that it also has much interest in creating.

In America, the fact the NAACP still exists and will never disappear proves in a way Kepel's point that separation and extremism are political sources of power in a system where social and political dialogues aren't possible without shaming and without recriminations. Unfortunately, the French approach to these issues is not better as proves the fact that France is still debating whether to use ethnic statistics to count its minorities. It is,  in my opinion,  as bad even though it is based on the noble idea that color, race, religion or whatever else shouldn't matter to the State.

Finding beautiful symbols

This is precisely  the reason why I hate the increasing popular idea that diversity is all about image and that putting people who look different, but are beautiful and attractive (beauty is stereotypically a sign of intelligence) in position of power absolves States from elaborating coherent policies to fight discrimination and to decrease inequalities whether they are about race, gender or simply class. The fact that Sarkozy is thinking about replacing Rachida Dati with a beautiful black journalist proves my point. Symbols when they are only symbols and valued simply for what make them difference are just figure-heads and are almost condemned to fail because they are expected to be perfect or at the very least not to be their authentic self if that self isn't what people expect or desire to see.

Counting the Blacks, the Arabs, and the Others

France has had a remarkable tradition (remarkable in every sense of the word) of not counting its minorities. This reluctance to use statistics to identify its minorities has made it harder for the State to fight discrimination or to even fight the increasing accepted idea that there are too many people from the wrong kind of minority groups in France. The problem is that there is no other to even start to deal with minorities and the problem, which they face without using statistics, which actually inform the country about its ethnic, racial make up or whatever else you want to use to acknowledge the fact that France in 2009 is very different from France in 1909. A sugary excerpt from Charles Bremner on this issue:

The idea has split the country -- and not always along the usual lines. Some anti-racism groups are heavily against it while others support it. Fadela Amara, the feminist activist of Algerian background who is Sarkozy's Minister for the Inner City, said: "Our country must not become a mosaic of communities. No-one must ever wear the Star of David again" -- a reference to the war.(...)Louis Schweitzer, head of the High Authority for the Struggle against Discriminations and Equality (Halde) is strongly opposed to ethnic statistics. "There is only one human race," he says in today's Libération. "In creating ethno-racial statistics you create a reality. You risk turning these categories into reality." 

It is very romantic and idealistic to believe that France is one republic, which shouldn't be divided by numbers even though those numbers reflect only a reality that is irrefutable. The trouble is that even in France, romance doesn't erase human prejudices, doesn't fight discrimination or facilitate integration. France has been increasingly divided by the fact that visible differences are still equated to foreignness and  have become the fantasies not only of the extreme right, but of those who believe that it is hard, not to say impossible, to be /to become a normal (read acceptable) French citizen when one looks a certain way, has a certain religion or comes from particular places in the world. It isn't pleasant to count the Blacks, the Arabs, and the others, but until Earth becomes a magical land where ethnicity, race, and all the other categories, which too many love to taut or to decry, don't matter, it is an act, which countries are going to have to do. 

Foreign legion

Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books on the French Foreign Legion:

Francophone to the last, the Legion is praised for being monocultural despite the diversity of volunteers. But the core of the organisation is French: about half, according to Tony Geraghty’s rollicking history, March or Die (1986). That figure has remained more or less steady since the 1980s, despite the recent appeal of the Legion to Latin Americans and Eastern Europeans like Svarusko.

I've always found the Foreign Legion fascinating because it embodied for a long time the idea that nationality could be earned by fighting for France. I think that it isn't what it once was because France has changed and because the French have become ambiguous, not to say reluctant, to have certain groups of people earned citizenship.

Islam, values and integration

Interesting and incredibly insightful sugary excerpt on Muslims immigrants in the West and integration : (hat tip: Daniel Finkelstein):

A new Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris demonstrates that Muslim migrants do not simply reflect the traditional cultural attitudes and conservative social values which are commonly found in their countries of origin; instead the basic values of Muslims living in Western societies fall roughly half-way between the dominant culture prevailing within their countries of destination and origin. (...) across all the scales there is a sizeable and significant gap between the publics living in Islamic societies of origin and Western societies of destination; Muslims living in Islamic societies proved far more religious, and far more traditional in tolerance of gays, women and sexual issues, as well as slightly less supportive of democratic values. By contrast, Western societies were far more secular in orientation as well as liberal on the social value scales. But, equally importantly, Western Muslims were not as conservative as their compatriots in their countries of origin; instead Western Muslims were consistently located roughly half-way between their countries of origin and destination. (...) one reason why Muslim migrants express values located between their countries of origin and destination may be self-selection: people already sympathetic towards Western cultures, as well as those with the higher skills and status which facilitate mobility, are more likely to relocate to live in affluent post-industrial societies. Nevertheless in the long-term, there is probably a reciprocal process at work, especially for the second and third generations of migrant families.

Desperately seeking a French Obama

The Guardian has a worth reading article on Rachida Dati,Sarkozy’s Minister of Justice, whom had become last year the symbol of a new France because of her Moroccan and Algerian origins. The article is titled “the rise and the fall of Dati” which I think is misleading because Dati’s popularity was always in limbo; it was based on the French hopes and dreams that she could prove to them that integration doesn’t have to painful and doesn't require more efforts on their part. The fact that Dati was a newcomer meant that it was always going to be difficult for her to live up to the hype. She had never dealt with people from her new milieu. It is always harder for symbols to last when they make mistakes, which reinforce the fact that their particularities make them neither particular nor extraordinary. That is at the crux of the matter because it seems that France’s Obama obsession is like its obsession with Zidane because it shows that it wants its immigrants and minorities to be special, to be extraordinary before it accepts them. What is interesting is that Angelique Chrisafis, the author of the article, deals with this new, obsessive, and desperate quest of French to find their Obama. She shows that Dati that it has both helped and handicapped by the French obsession to find or to grow little Obamas in their banlieues. Sugary excerpt:

Dati has been hailed as the nearest thing France's fractured society has to Barack Obama. The French justice minister was raised in poverty on a housing estate in deepest Burgundy. Sarkozy said appointing her sent a message "to all the children of France that with merit and effort everything becomes possible". He also hoped it would neutralise the bad feeling after the riots on the run-down housing estates and his comment likening the wayward youths to scum.

Despite scepticism that this "window-dressing" at the top did little to change the discrimination poisoning French society, Dati immediately became one of the most popular figures in France. The speed of her rise has been staggering. But that of her fall could be too. The Dati fairytale has started to go spectacularly wrong.

[…] Mainland France currently has only one non-white MP and, in a recent poll, 80% of French people said they might vote for a black person at president, but only 58% could bring themselves to vote for one of millions of the French citizens of Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian descent. As a role model, Dati is perhaps not the easiest person to warm to. But her appointment under the patronage of Sarkozy, and more importantly her survival, which now rests entirely on his whim, shows the real depths of the problem for minorities in France, who feel they are not being allowed to rise of their own accord. Fadela Amara, another woman of Algerian parentage whom Sarkozy appointed as a junior minister, says an Obama would have got nowhere in France. "It couldn't happen in France unless Sarkozy turned emperor and appointed a black president himself," she says.

There is something morbid and self-derogating about the French obsession with Obama because it is a way to look for quick answers to complex issues, which cannot be resolved by finding perfect people who make perfect speeches about hope and its audacity. Rachida Dati shows that Sarkozy may love America, but that he doesn’t get it and more gravely doesn’t have an intimate connection to France to understand that fundamental and existential reasons explain why the United States is the country of Walt Disney and France the one of Charles de Gaulle. In other words, America not only has a different history and views of race, but it also is more willing to believe in Fairy tales. America is still an adolescent country, which believes that both childhood and adolescence are the best periods in one’s life. France doesn’t have the same history and views of race and cannot therefore look to America for solutions even though it may look to it for inspiration. France is an old country. The French are less willing to accept political experimentation even though they may long for it. They always convince themselves that they want political experimentation, American-like hopeful politics because it is new and hip when it is happening in America and because it is always hard and melancholic for grownups to realize that they have lost their innocence and have become cynical. It is as dreaming of marrying Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, but in real life, knowing that a former prostitute cannot become the housewife of a billionaire. It is hard to be an adult in front of an adolescent who still believes s/he can fly.

In any case, there is already a French Obama, but the only trouble is that she is a white woman, which means that she has no excuse for being naively hopeful, she was born in Dakar, she has four kids, and her hopeful speeches sound menacing and Forrest Gump-like to the French ear. She isn’t as popular as Obama in France because she is more French that he is (which makes her better and more political in my opinion) and thus more provencal and more difficult to be idolized by those who have given to Obama God-like Status in a country that he doesn’t know.

 

 

Hidden Identities

To be a beautiful French Black talented woman and to have no exit

Ramatoulaye Rama Yade is a beautiful French black and talented French politician who is sometimes referred as Sarkozy’s Condoleezza Rice because she works under the Foreign Minister (Bernard Kouchner) and is the Human rights Secretary. With all of her assets, one would have thought that Yade would be ensured to have a bright political future in France, but as Tim King asserts correctly she stuck in a mold due to her race and gender and may have nowhere to go:

[…] she is in a closed cubby-hole of a ministry, with no way out. Think about it. The ministry of human rights isn’t really a ministry – it has no mission, no agenda, no crack team to back up the otherwise empty words which is all she can offer. As Azouz Begag found in the previous government, working as a coloured face in a meaningless ministry like “Equal Opportunities” or “Human Rights” is a one-way ticket in the wrong direction.

Rama Yade has learnt the hard way that she can’t mention human rights abuses in “le pays des droits de l’homme” itself (in the overcrowded prisons, or the repatriation of sans papiers): when she tried, going to see some immigrant squatters faced with eviction in a Paris suburb, she was keenly and patronisingly reprimanded by her seniors. If she can’t mention France, she can only pass judgement on other countries. But the countries with human rights abuses are the very countries where the market for French goods is still strong, or with which France needs to remain on good terms (the USA for example with Guantanamo Bay). Twice now she has put into words what most of us think: first about Colonel Gaddafi being a dictator and more recently about the Olympic Games. But both times she has been made to look ridiculous by her senior colleagues. When the President went with a huge entourage and much pomp to China last November, he made the last minute decision to leave Rama Yade ignominiously twiddling her thumbs at home.

Now she knows she has the choice of either speaking out and having her wrists slapped, thus being made to look a fool in public, or saying nothing and being forgotten. Either way she is side-lined for the next job. For apart from the fact that she clearly has very definite thoughts about human rights, it is probable she accepted the job as a stepping stone, and so she needs to shine. Her contemporary and white male equivalent, Laurent Wauquiez, has just been promoted from spokesman (where the job-definition is to shine) to junior minister in charge of employment – a real job with targets and measurable success (or failure). She is stuck, losing out whether she acts or does nothing. The Ministry for Human Rights is an empty shop window. [Emphasis added].

The problem for Yade is that what made her succeed quickly, her smarts, her guts, her gender, and her race, is not what is limiting her options and putting a ceiling on her future even though the possibilities given whom she is, what she represents and what she can do should be limitless. In France, politicians don’t know what to do with talented members of minorities who are ambitious and won’t shut up after they are given a ministry. The fact that Rama Yade finds herself stuck so soon in her political career, that she can never escape the received ideas that when you are Black and French and a minister, you should be satisfied and not only ask, but not want more, shows us that France still hasn’t fully accepted that it is the motherland and not the borrowed country of people who do not look Gaul and yet want to be treat as French and not as symbols. The trouble with people who are viewed as symbols is that they almost never last because as the novelty of their presence and success fade, they become ordinary. People, in politics, don’t like it when minorities in politics are ordinary, they want them to be special, to make them feel great about themselves for voting for a difference that will change the world and not just do what politicians do.

Canada and Bilingualism

Konrad Yababuski has written a must-read essay in the Globe and Mail on Canada, and bilingualism, which shows that it is in too many cases a failed policy. Bilingualism can only work when the two languages to be learned are considered equals and when it isn’t more valuable to learn one than the other or not to know it. In Canada, it is obvious that French is only indispensable in Québec and even then it is possible to survive without it on a short stay especially if one pretends not to be an English speaking Canadian. In the rest of Canada, French is so absent that one would never know except for the street signs written in both languages that Canada has a French speaking population. Jean Chrétien, the former Prime minister, used to state, mostly during times when Québec was deciding through a referendum whether to secede from Canada, that Canada without Québec isn’t Canada and that Quebec without Canada isn’t Québec, I believe that that the “language question” puts that affirmation in doubt. Sugary excerpt:

If English Canadians cared about learning French, they would. That is simply human nature. Around the world, everywhere, when people need and want to learn a language, they do. .

[…] If learning French is a luxury in English Canada, most people in Quebec consider learning English a necessity. Yet Quebeckers know they are playing with fire. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Quebecker who does not feel he or she has been personally and professionally enriched by learning English. But when census data show, as they did in December, that mother-tongue francophones now make up less than 50 per cent of the population on the Island of Montreal, and less than 80 per cent of Quebec's population for the first time since the 1930s, it gets a people thinking in survivalist terms. It gets a newspaper such as Le Devoir to write this headline: "Historic retreat of French in Quebec."

The issue gets framed — more or less — in these terms: Without a thriving francophone metropolis at its core, Quebec will be reduced before long to a Louisiana with sugar shacks.

Each of the solitudes maintains a tortured relationship with the language it doesn't speak first. English Canada needs the French fact to distinguish itself from the United States, but apparently not enough to become truly bilingual. Quebec needs to learn English to thrive in North America and avoid a retreat into isolation, but fears that each step out of its shell might deprive it from the option of going back.

Behind Geert Wilders's veil

Spiegel has an interview with Ian Buruma in which he discusses the latest controversy surrounding Dutch politician Geert Wilders and his anti-Islam movie. It was an instructive read. The most interesting part of the interview is Burama answers when asked whether Wilders should be compared to Jean-Marie Le Pen (the French Far Right leader) and Jörg Harder (the Austrian Far-Right leader) and whether the Netherland’s guilt over its brush with Fascism made it a liberal and tolerant society for decade:

I would compare him in the sense that he taps into the same feelings of resentment and fear. The common man feels the threat of Muslims moving into his neighborhood, whereas the elite live in leafy suburbs and don't have to confront these issues. Immigration and the Muslim issue in particular has become the focal point of a much larger sense of anxiety which has to do with the European Union, globalization, erosion of the authority of the nation-state and economic uncertainty. That general sense of insecurity and resentment makes a country very vulnerable to the kind of populist demagoguery that you get from people like Wilders and Pim Fortuyn before him.

Still, while Holland may have had a National Socialist Party in the 1930s, there has never been a true right-wing tradition and people are very suspicious of it today -- and the fascist tradition seen in right-wing movements in Austria or Germany has not been apparent in the politics of Wilders or Fortuyn. Their demagoguery is based on the idea that we live in a free country and our liberties are being threatened by foreigners.

[…] It [the guilt of the Dutch’s brush with Fascism) did a lot to drive tolerance, but it also stifled necessary debate -- and in that regard people like Theo van Gogh had a point. As soon as people started talking about the potential problems of integrating large numbers of non-Western immigrants in Europe in the 1990s, they were quickly denounced as racists, with people evoking the war in a knee-jerk reaction. By the same token, other people, including van Gogh, suggest that anybody who makes accommodations to Muslims in Europe (who these detractors call the "Islamofascists") is tantamount to a Nazi collaborator. This kind of response also silences the debate.

Ethnonationalism

Jerry Z. Muller has an article in Foreign Affairs on Ethnic nationalism and its enduring power. It discusses the history of ethnicity and its implications in Europe and the role that it plays currently in  societies that have to deal with populations that are different from the ones of their past. It is a good read. Sugary excerpt:

The most dramatic transformation of European ethnic balances in recent decades has come from the immigration of people of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern origin, and here the results have been mixed. Some of these groups have achieved remarkable success, such as the Indian Hindus who have come to the United Kingdom. […] As a result, some of the traditional contours of European politics have been upended. The left, for example, has tended to embrace immigration in the name of egalitarianism and multiculturalism. But if there is indeed a link between ethnic homogeneity and a population's willingness to support generous income-redistribution programs, the encouragement of a more heterogeneous society may end up undermining the left's broader political agenda. And some of Europe's libertarian cultural propensities have already clashed with the cultural illiberalism of some of the new immigrant communities.

I don’t like the term cultural illiberalism because it is more offensive to me than the term barbarism. More importantly, it puts the emphasis on culture by divinizing it, which encourages fruitless confrontations when the emphasis ought to be on togetherness and the separation between the public sphere and the private sphere.

Beating around the...

A good example of muddle thinking from John Rentoul on Multiculturalism:

Multiculturalism has become the great boo-word. No one is in favour of it. At one level, though, it simply means respecting different cultures. Nearly everyone is in favour of that. At another it means the opposite of integration, and in that sense nearly everyone is against it.

In practice, nothing is as simple as either meaning. Should pupils be allowed to speak Punjabi in schools where the majority speak Punjabi at home? Most people might say that schools should not have multilingual signs, that English should be required in classrooms, but that what pupils do in the playground is their own affair. […]The funny thing about multiculturalism is that it brings out the most tangled of muddled thinking from people with a reputation for being too clever for their own good. First it was the ABC, as the Archbishop of Canterbury's own office calls him; last week it was Robert Gascoyne-Cecil. First we had "liberal" nonsense about accommodating sharia in British law; then we had jihadist terrorism blamed on the soft touch society that fails to stand up to the "firm self-image of those elements within it who refuse to integrate".

This is nonsense not just on stilts but in a helicopter gunship some distance above the Earth's surface. The reasons why Mohammed Atta flew his plane, or why Mohammad Sidique Khan put on his backpack, did not include the separation of their families from mainstream society by misguided policies of multiculturalism. Their hatred of the West was, if anything, driven by the opposite: by their fear of a culture of consumerism, hedonism and sexual equality that seemed to them to be all too attractive to their largely integrated fellow Muslims.

Just one question is skillfully avoided: what is exactly is multiculturalism?

History and Integration

I agree with this:

What's interesting about sport is that it has always been ahead of the game. Integration through sport is nothing new. In the US it was black athletes who were the first to be recognized as Americans. In France too.
We're in the process of giving birth to something. But giving birth is always painful. And what will be born? Things can't go backwards, people are suffocating. Previously, those who suffered discrimination used to say nothing, because they couldn't see how it worked. They accepted what they had, and thought they were lucky. But young people born in France who feel completely French want to have a share in everything. Are we going to tell them that they are wrong to make demands, to tell them that they cannot have the same dreams or the same hopes? They are demanding the same rights.
And I think that this is a good thing for France. Discrimination means neglecting people who have a contribution to make. An intelligent approach would want everyone to be involved. But are we going to start thinking this way before it's too late?
What is happening in France is fundamental for Europe. After the riots in 2005, many people in Europe said: "The French model of integration has had it; we mustn't do what they have been doing." Even though we're more advanced. I'm lucky enough to be able to travel and I can see that France is light-years ahead of some countries. It's incredible. That's what I felt in Italy and today in Spain, for example.
[...] Yes. My friends are first and foremost French and, what's more, they don't even understand the kind of thing that people say about this. For example, why speak about "first, second, or third generation"? They're French. Why speak about minorities? Do the others see themselves in terms of a majority?
But – to get back to history – you would think from the way that some people's minds work that the population of France became fixed sometime way back in the past. In reality, even in the past it was not fixed. Nevertheless, it is only since the 1970s that people of different origins have really been living together. In mainland France it was long thought that slavery and colonization were justified by a "racial hierarchy". The whole culture, the whole of society was characterized by this way of thinking. And today we're asking all those people to live together and to believe that everyone is on the same level. But they haven't been taught to accept that, because the ideas of racial inferiority and superiority have never been challenged. The French population itself was not directly linked to the institution of slavery. But the state sanctioned, organized, and took advantage of slavery and the slave trade. Slavery is not just about colour: it is a system in which some people had interests and which the state controlled and assisted.

France and Race

Charles Bremmer on France and Race:

So France is one of the few developed nations which does not ask for ethnic origin in the national census. There are no reliable statistics that can be used to measure discrimination or gauge diversity in education and the work place.

[…] Last summer the Sarkozy parliament passed a law that reversed the statistics ban. It allowed the collection of ethnic data in projects approved by the national agency for the protection of personal data (CNIL).

The new law was furiously opposed by some groups, such as SOS Racisme, which raised 90,000 signatures on an internet petition against it, including that of François Hollande, the Socialist Party leader. It was also strongly supported by other groups. "We are about to open the way to something fabulous," said Patrick Lozès, president of the Representative Council of Black Organizations. “We are going from just talking about equality as a moral standard to doing something to help achieve it.”

Then two weeks ago, the Constitutional Council threw out the law and upheld the old ban, saying that measuring ethnicity contradicted article one of the Constitution. The decision has been welcomed as a blow against racism while others deplore it as a set-back in the fight against discrimination.

Its immediate impact has been the suspension of a planned survey by two state statistical agencies (INSEE and INED) which would track the impact of ethnic origin on French citizens of African origin. Those involved have been voicing their frustration, saying the ruling, designed to uphold the noble ideal of the constitution, will block attempts to remedy discrimination.

[…] President Sarkozy himself carries some of the blame for the confusion because he has muddied the waters over race. On one hand he is in French terms progressive. The son of a Hungarian immigrant and part Jewish, he favours affirmative action, or positive discrimination, to balance diversity in work and education (There is no chance that the Constitutional Council will let this happen). Yet he has also played to the unhealthier instincts of white France by creating a new ministry of Immigration and National Identity, headed by his old friend Brice Hortefeux. His parliament stirred the pot further by adding the possibility of DNA testing for people seeking permission to immigrate to rejoin family members. The Constitutional Council upheld this at the same time as rejecting the change on ethnic data.

Sarko's hard line on last week's riots -- saying that they had nothing to do with any social malaise -- has further fanned suspicion among minorities and on the left that he does not understand the exclusion that they suffer.  He has promised a new approach to the plight of the banlieue, to be announced next month. All we know so far is that, as he put it, "this will not just be another attempt to throw money at the problem."

What disturbs me is the fact that Bremmer’s unsavory assumption that the banlieues is related to ethnicity and immigration rather than to assimilation integration and unemployment and crime. In other words, one would logically assume, after reading Bremmer, that France has problems controlling its banlieues because it is more multiethnic and multicultural than it knows and that the French youths get in the streets because they have foreign roots and look different than Sarkozy. The problem is in my opinion more complex in the sense that French youths are rioting because they have foreign roots or look different but precisely because to the contrary of Sarkozy who had a father who came from Hungary, people assume without even knowing their name that they aren't french and that they are lazy, uneducated, and potentially dangerous. They don't enjoy the presumption of Frenchness and for these reasons, they believe that the State doesn't treat them like every other citizen. The refusal of France to acknowledge its multi-ethnicity has made French society unwilling to accept that Francité, frenchness is neither about race, ethnicity, or religion, which means in other words that even those who don't have french blood can become French. The solution  to this problem starts with the realization that Integration means in part the acceptance that foreignness doesn’t pollute the French national identity, but enriches it.

France and the Non to Europe

Certain Ideas of Europe has a post wondering if the French would vote non to the European Constitution if they had to do it over again. I think that not only would the French vote non , but they would do it by a stronger majority this time. There are two reasons for this increase of French Euroscepticism. The first reason is that Sarkozy had legitimated Euroscepticism with his criticisms of the European Central Bank, of the strong Euro, and by insisting that Europe needs to become more protectionist and more about identity. Mitterrand and even Chirac to a lesser extent all used the idea of European integration to make the French dream that they would not only be able to compete with the United States, but that they would become a member of superpower again. Of course, the technocrats of Brussels have always been easy scapegoats for national problems, but it was rare to hear French presidents criticize the EU because they knew that it was their machin (object). Sarkozy understands that the EU no longer makes the French dream and that he is everything to dream by showing the French that he intends to make France great and prosper even if it means weakening the EU or rather forcing it to follow French interests.

The second reason is that by drafting a new treaty after the French voted No, the EU has shown that it is willing to move forward with European integration without taking on the important and unavoidable task of convincing Europeans of its necessity. It is that kind of paternalism, which had been with the EU since it was a small organization focused solely on coal that frustrates the French and other Europeans because they feel that EU considers European integration too great to be left in the hands of the people.

The problem in short is that because the idea of European integration was oversold to the French as the solution of all of France’s problems, the French today are blaming the EU for not delivering and especially favoring speed and economical interests over everything else. Finally, as the video below shows, French politicians and European politicians don’t know how to talk about Europe to the people. The reason for this ineloquence and this inarticulateness is the fact that they don’t have a vision for it, they simply feel the responsibility to continue something, which de Gaulle and Adenauer, Giscard d’Estaing and Schmidt, and Mitterrand and Kohl dreamed of, and felt in their gut and their heart was necessary to avoid other bloody and divisive conflicts. In other words, the trouble is that very few European politicians are able to talk about Europe, the way Sarkozy talks about America.

Name, identity, and profiling

Via the New York Times, there is the following interesting bit on what a name means in France:

IN France, a person’s name can signify as little as a measure of what’s big on TV at any given time, or as much as an entire country’s nature.

The recent publication there of two annual guides charting the popularity of first names could only prompt more soul-searching in a nation already painfully struggling with how to define its character. The issue appears so urgent that President Nicolas Sarkozy felt the need to create a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, and the government has passed a law authorizing DNA testing to establish family links among would-be immigrants.

[…] In a recent article pegged to the publication of one of the guides, Joséphine Besnard’s “Index of First Names in 2008,” the newspaper Libération asked 15 people to talk about their own names, prompting a lively debate on its Web site. A few readers commented on some French assumptions. “What of the new first names — Binta, Jamila, Lin, Ahmed, etc. — of an increasing number of French people?” wrote one commentator at the Web site. “It would have been interesting to look into that issue and how society perceives people with those names, people who may be born here but whose parents almost certainly weren’t.”

But Guy Desplanques, a demographer, pointed out in 2002 that names like Ahmed and Jamila actually were on the wane, and that second-generation French men and women work toward integration by coming up with variations like Yanis or Rayan; the latter has become popular in some banlieues, evoking both the Maghreb and the relatively widespread Ryan.

[…] Sociologists like Mr. Besnard observed that first names were often quick markers of social and educational status. […] Indeed, bourgeois French parents are unlikely to give their children “Anglo-Saxon” names; Jennifer was the most popular name for girls from 1984 to 1986, but it’s a safe bet few Jennifers came from well-educated families. (The craze is commonly explained by the success of the TV series “Hart to Hart” in France at that time — Jennifer Hart was one of the title characters — while “Beverly Hills, 90210,” featuring a popular character named Dylan McKay, is sometimes blamed for the explosion of Dylans a few years later.)

This quick profiling can hamper those looking for a job: Several studies have shown that all things being equal, applicants with “foreign”-sounding names are less likely to be hired.

It is possible to expand the discussion to America with the case of Barack Obama for example. The fact that it is possible to un-Americanize him by using his middle name by purposely confusing his last name with Osama without paying any political prize speaks volume about the importance of a name and of race in America. It shows that in the US, to the contrary to France, the main problem with having a different name and looking foreign isn’t so much the difficulty of finding a job, but rather the difficulty of becoming the representative for all Americans and of acceding to the highest class status through other means than entertainment and sports. Sarkozy loves to tell the story that his father told him that he wouldn’t succeed in politics with his name. However, Sarkozy had the advantage that he looked French and that he could take off the “de Nagy Bócsa” of his name to make it sound less foreign. All he had to do was to wrap himself in the French flag and to use extreme language against immigrants to look more patriotic than the French of pure blood to get to the Elysée palace. The recent polemic about Obama and his supposed lack of patriotism shows that the perception of one’s foreignness is reinforced by one’s name and one’s physical appearance. To come back to France, a large part of the French elite and politicians knows that the French integration model doesn’t work. However, because they are conservative, they are still clinging on to the idea that it doesn’t work because France got the wrong immigrants who don’t want to become French or rather cannot become French because of their cultures and religions.

French and slang

Agnès Poirier has a nice article on French Slang and of its significance. She makes the point that Le Léxik is the language of a multicultural France. Sugary excerpt:

The very names of the four boys and seven girls behind Le Léxik speak of a multicultural France: Alhassane, Alhousseynou, Cédric, Franck, Boudia, Cindy, Dalla, Imane, Kandé, Marcela and Marie. It's this colourful France whose language they decided to decipher for the whole country. They were helped in their work by the pope of French language, Alain Rey, 79, in charge of French dictionary Le Petit Robert's editions. The introduction to the book, a formidable exchange between Alain Rey and French rap artists Disiz la peste (a word play on disease and the plague), sets the tempo.

The selected words, almost all fruits of immigration, have been born in the last few years. They are often of Berber, West Indies, English, Romani and even old French origins. For a taste of what you will find in Le Léxik, see here. Paris suburban slang has spread to all playgrounds in France, whatever their social and ethnic backgrounds, leading many parents to buy the book in order to, at last, understand their children's "tchatche" (or what they're chatting about). Others, lovers of the French language, have bought it to follow the evolution of the language. "It is fascinating to see how a language evolves with time. Words are incredible world travellers, they come and go, and when they come back home, they are forever changed from their adventures abroad. There is no such thing as a ministry of Immigration for words," says Alain Rey, referring to the new Ministry of Immigration set up by Nicolas Sarkozy.

Language plays a big part of someone’s identity. What is happening with Le Léxik is that young French who feel rejected by France are trying to claim their Francité by marking the French language with their own stamp and making it theirs.

Central Europe and the EU

Stefan Wagstyl writes in the Financial Times about the great divide in Central Europe. He argues that the political malaise that exists in Poland and other central European countries is due to their weak governments and public institutions and to the sharp divisions that exist between anti-communists and former communists. Sugary excerpt:

The malaise of weak government extends across central Europe. In Slovakia, a leftist coalition holds power only through the support of the far-right Slovak National party. In Hungary, Ferenc Gyurcsany, the Socialist prime minister, is pushing reforms in the face of popular protests and attacks on his credibility after he admitted lying to the electorate over the public finances. The Czech Republic endured six months without a government after last year’s inconclusive elections, before the centre-right Civic Democrats put together a three-party coalition.

To some extent, these governments’ weakness is the inevitable result of the proportional representation electoral systems introduced after the fall of communism. Even in the more stable political world of western Europe, PR systems are often associated with weak short-lived governments, as in Italy.

In central Europe, the problems are compounded by deep divides between former communists and former anti-communists, which hinder political development, especially the flexible formation of coalitions. The splits were partly concealed in the years before the 2004 EU enlargement, as mainstream parties pulled together to secure accession. But in the past three years the conflicts have re-emerged with a vengeance, often fuelled by widening access to communist-era archives. A few enterprising politicians try to bridge the gap but for many central Europeans, it could be another decade before such alliances become normal.

Public institutions are still too weak to act as a check on politicians’ excesses. The courts, for example, are susceptible to corruption and political influence. Bureaucracies are often too interested in defending their privileges to contribute effectively to policy debate. The media and non-government organisations plug some of the gaps but their resources are often limited.

Wagstyl’s analysis leads unavoidably to an examnination of the enlargement of the European Union and  to the question of whether not only it was done not only too soon, but also in the right manner. The most convincing argument in favor of the quick integration of Eastern and Central European union countries within the EU was that it would ensure that the stability of Europe and facilitate their transition ito a free-market economy and a democratic society. However, one has to wonder whether by moving too fast the EU didn’t give these countries the illusion that it was going to solve all of their problems.Thus, it isn't grotesque to argue that enlargement not only weaken European Integration by increasing the differences between its member-states tby making the EU more difficult to manage, but that it also increased both the demands on and the suspicion of Brussels felt by its citizens.