Citation :
DIFFERENCE
Issue of 2005-11-21
Posted 2005-11-14
Eight days ago, when the violence that had erupted in three hundred of the immigrant housing projects that circle Frances big cities spread, briefly, to Belgium and Germany, the sigh of relief among French politicians could be heard from Lille to Marseilles. Voilà! It isnt us, they seemed to be saying. Its everywhere. And, in a way, they were right. The immigrant poor are everywhere in Europe now, and what the French novelist Antoine Audouard, writing in the Times a few days later, aptly called Francea society that no longer knows how to enforce its own rules or how to create the dream of a better life for its new generationsdescribes more countries than his own. Since the end of the Second World War, Western Europe has been at the center of a labor migration that, in its proportions, rivals the great forced migrations of the Roman Empire; and since the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when Europes own empires unravelled, the strains of that demographic shock have been compounded by what could be called an implosion of difference, as the colonized fled the chaoseconomic, tribal, politicalthat the colonizers left behind. It is easier to manage difference at a safe colonial remove than it is at home. To say that Europe was unaware of this is an understatement.
Every country with an influx of migrant workers had to scramble toward some sort of social formula to absorb them (or, as often as not, pretend that they werent there). And before long those formulas had frozen into easy, and, not surprisingly, competing, certaintiesall of which have turned out to be as shortsighted as the government-sponsored agents who first combed Africa and Asia and the Indian subcontinent recruiting labor for Europes postwar factories. There was the British multicultural modelor, to put it perhaps more accurately, the You will never be us model. There was the Well support you, but please be invisible until you are us Scandinavian model. There was the integrated but not assimilated oxymoron called the Dutch model. There was the Youre guest workers, so youll be going home German modelwhich, until the late nineties, put off even the possibility of citizenship for most immigrants and their children. Everyone had something to contribute to this debate: the social theorists and social planners and social workers and politicians and, of course, the people who hated immigrantseveryone but the immigrants themselves, who were rarely consulted. The only thing most Europeans agreed on was that the American model was wrong, although the American model wasnt really a model at all but a kind of success ethicthe Europeans said dollar ethicin which making money and moving up in the world was what made Americans out of strangers. It was, for better or for worse, the one model that seemed to work.
The French model could be called the You will be us imperative. All children born in France are citizens at birth, and citizenship, it was believed, confers an instant, almost mystical Frenchness on them. But the cités, as the immigrants call their projects, belied that fantasy. They were social planning at its most earnest and its worstthe glitch in the French republican case for assimilation. Back in the early fifties, when Le Corbusier designed the first of these projectsUnité dHabitation, on the outskirts of Marseillesthey were called villes nouvelles and declared to be the last word in progressive urban thinking. The idea at first was that soon the middle classes, fleeing their crowded cities, would arrive, and merchants would open stores and big business would start investing. But it was hard to imagine anyone French moving to a project who didnt have to. Most of the immigrants had nowhere else to live.
The projects were huge, some of them built for as many as fifty thousand people. And they were grimcheaply made, almost impossibly monotonous (the government said modern), and well beyond the pale of city life or, for that matter, country life. Social psychologists were hired to make the projects friendly, which is why you will occasionally find, say, circles of faded pink or purple paint on the cinder-block walls. But there was nothing to do in a cité, nowhere to go, nothing French to attach to. Within a few years, the projects had deteriorated into slums; the new oneswelfare ghettos, targets of choice for construction boondogglersnever pretended to be anything else. The only real investment in most of the cités was in cheap chain stores and in schools that taught Frenchness but had no way of folding an immigrants child into anything resembling French life. Children sang the Marseillaise and memorized the lengths of Frances rivers, as their parents had in the colonies, but in most ways remained as far from France as their parents had been.
The statistics you read about young Muslims in the cités are true: six times the national unemployment rate; five times the incarceration rate. Some ten per cent of Frances children are Muslim, and, like all children, they are vulnerable to promises of a newer, truer identity that will transform their lives. The problems in the cités today are arguably complicated by, or perhaps obscured by, the politics of Islamic identityby imported imams and Islamist chat rooms and bin Laden posters in teen-age bedroomswhich may be why, when the rioting started, the countrys politicians panicked to the point of dazed withdrawal (President Jacques Chirac), or grandstand threats of deportation (Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy), or meaningless pronouncements about a plan for France (Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin).
The riots were undeniably alarming, as much for the carnageone man beaten to death, sixty-five hundred buses and cars torched, a dozen schools set on fireas for the political incapacity they revealed. (The number of arrests has, in fact, been smalla couple of thousandcompared with the fifteen thousand arrests in October of 1961, when Algerians were demonstrating in Paris.) By now, the rioting has become sporadic, but the rioters rage was so self-punishing, so focussed on their own lives and neighborhoods, that an obvious lesson should have been drawn by the Élysée the day the first bus burned. The kids who are rioting hate their lives. They are lonely for France; they are sickeningly disappointed in France, in the promise of France. And, in desperation, they are attacking their own half-world cités. They want the real cities, where the French live. A few years ago, the Minister of Urban Affairs, Jean-Louis Borloo, took the unthinkable step of demolishing tens of thousands of apartments in the worst of the cités. Richard Descoing, the director of the Institut dÉtudes Politiques, or Sciences Po, launched what amounts to an affirmative-action programthe French called it positive discriminationbringing bright young graduates from the cités into one of the most prestigious schools in France. Those men made the first cracks in the national myth that the badge of citizenship makes happy citizens. But, so far, no one else has.
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