France and multiculturalism

By: Ricardo Israel - 11/07/2023

After the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old boy of Algerian and Moroccan parents, France has experienced days of protests, with a predominance of violence against the State and society. Those who have expressed their anger and anger are generally second or third generation immigrants, as French as Macron or Sarkozy, who with a Hungarian father became president only being the first. French problem? or considering that there were minor aftershocks of this real earthquake in Switzerland and Belgium, is it also a European problem?

It is not the first time that it has happened, the memory of the state of emergency that lasted for no less than three months in 2005 is enough. And just as African blood has given them satisfaction in football, it has also been a reason for division when they face the countries of origin of the parents, and sometimes of the same players. Not only for France, like Belgium versus Morocco that brought the Qatar 2022 sports rivalry to the streets.

However, what has been experienced in recent days in France corresponds to a new, more dangerous and much more worrying level. And there is not a single thread, but a mixture.

For some, what happened was not only the reaction to the death of a young man at the hands of the police but the expression of “systemic racism”, as none other than Erdogan pointed out in his tone of heir to the Ottoman Empire. Something similar was said by the president of Algeria, taking advantage of reviewing the colonial excesses of the war of the last century.

The most heard word is discrimination. For others, more than racism, it is a problem of abandonment of peripheral neighborhoods, lack of opportunities and economic improvement.

Those who insist on the European problem intervene, adding the current situation in Sweden, where there is also a resounding failure in integration, measured in situations of ethnic gangs and various crimes, to which is added a kind of pact of silence in the press. about its severity.

The difficulties in restoring public order in France and the criticism of what would be an insufficient level of social and political support for the police also reflects a problem for democracy in general, which is how it defends itself when violence is acute and uncontrolled.

Another precedent is that what is happening in immigration would be benefiting certain political groups in Europe. Not only Le Pen, but also Scandinavian countries. Furthermore, it also helped Meloni's triumph in Italy and appears in the comparison made of how improbable violence similar to the one experienced in Hungary or Poland would be, and the difference would lie in the refusal of those countries to receive irregular or illegal immigration. , which in practice boils down to hindering Muslim, Arab or African immigration. That is, cultural cohesion over open borders, even though those governments are criticized for being illiberal.

Everywhere you look at it, the traditional European moral superiority in general and France in particular, has received a severe blow. Even compared to the USA, a country that has bad racial relations, but its immigration model has been more successful than the European one, which in general has sought to integrate them with worse results. The US model has worked better than the European model, which includes the settlement of immigrants on the periphery of cities, the "banlieus"

Goodism has not worked and an expression of this would be the assorted criticisms that a personality admired by many such as Angela Merkel receives today, above all, for the reception given to those fleeing repression and the Syrian civil war.

By the way, there is racism in France as there are racists in all parts of the world, including Latin America, Africa and Asia. But that's not the issue, otherwise there wouldn't be so many people risking their lives to get to Europe. They arrive there and apparently it does not occur to them to ask for asylum in those societies or countries under governments that habitually criticize them.

The problem is that France seems to have no answer to the problem of attempting an integration today that was successful when parents and grandparents came to work in the 50s and 60s, but as job opportunities dried up, it seems that beyond social benefits of the welfare system, it does not work now, neither with newcomers nor with those born there, and the underlying problem is that there is no answer to the question of whether those who do not want it can be integrated.

The question is hard, but even more so is the lack of answers in conditions where in some neighborhoods in France and other European countries, the sharia law has been imposed when the State fails to apply its laws, not even to all those family members who commit " honor killings."

Especially hard for a country like France, with a national ideology of self-affirmation based on a republicanism that says little to the new generations, who, unlike their parents, do not feel that there is a space for them, and who, in return They are pushed to the margins.

This verification far exceeds the problem posed by the protests of the yellow vests or those who have questioned for months that one has to work more years to retire, since they are actions within the system, and not a radical and total questioning of the idea of what what is France and what constitutes the essence of what is “French”.

It also far exceeds whether Macron is the leader that France needs today, even if he displayed the utmost insensitivity by allowing himself to be photographed at a recital while Paris burned.

The truth is that in France at least three cultural models are facing each other, not just political ones. The first two are that of the new rights of identity nationalism and that of the globalized left, also with an identity spring. The point is that there is a third party, which includes Islam in religion and the ethnic component of the colonial past, especially in the Maghreb. It is not just the skin color of other African immigrants, since the sum of the problem is an identity model, which also comes into conflict in the neighborhoods where they live, feeling neither respected nor welcomed, whose numbers grow while the French older ones lose presence and prominence.

In a particular aspect of this problem, Oriana Fallaci was sentenced by an Italian judge for her views on the West and Islam after the attacks of September 11, accused of being Islamophobic.

Part of her argument was that Europe itself had the greatest responsibility, not so much for losing the demographic war, but, above all, for doing so in what is now called the "cultural war" and that she reflected in the double movement of deny their Christian heritage and maintain the traditional sin of anti-Semitism. Without being entirely sure, perhaps she was thinking of the way collaborationist France handed over thousands of French Jews to the Nazis for concentration camps or the regular attacks on Jewish buildings and cemeteries, with numbers increasing instead of decreasing. .

Rightly, wrongly or reflecting a different time, Fallaci got to know another failure in the rescue of the European heritage, in what was a last attempt to incorporate Christianity as a constitutional cement. Thus, as president of the Convention, former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing officially presented the proposed Constitution for the European Union on June 13, 2003. Despite having been signed by the heads of government, it was a failure, an unratified treaty, since it could not meet the validation requirements, being rejected in plebiscites that took place in France and the Netherlands, for which reason the proposal failed to enter into force.

Since then, Europe has not been able to find its way around what unites, and, therefore, the effort that it demands from its immigrants. Europe is today a large market, a giant in history, but not strategically and militarily relevant, and, therefore, a junior partner (and increasingly so) of the United States, without a single foreign policy. Neither in immigration.

In this last subject, the pressures and influences that France receives have a diverse origin. On the one hand, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria mobilize their descendants on issues of their interest, which leads to the last two fighting over the Spanish Sahara, which differs from what happens in the USA, since Paris fails to institutionalize this situation. Another influence is the patrimonial influence of the Gulf countries and that, in the case of Saudi Wahhabism, includes an extremist component and financing of mosques. The third influence is from non-Arab sub-Saharan Africa and the fourth from the French-speaking Caribbean.

They are different influences so they also compete. However, religion makes the difference and, in fact, as in the United Kingdom, integration is not promoted and is sometimes hindered by some religious, who instead seek radicalization, which, in the case of Switzerland, led to tougher legislation on expulsion and the closure of mosques. What is surprising about this issue is that, due to electoral needs, some government has wanted to promote a “French” Islam from the Eliseo Palace, supposedly coinciding with republican values.

However, as important and far-reaching as this issue is, it does not seem to have predominated in what was experienced on the streets of France in the last week. Nor was it a simple anarchy and it was different from the spontaneous outbursts that occur in the USA, for example, in the face of police abuse of Afro-American citizens.

The key to what happened in France lies in the identity and the particular form it acquires, since more than the religious, in that crowd the anger of not feeling part of the European project or of France predominated, anger that in no way justifies the senseless violence that was experienced and the difficulty to control it.

The line for the sum is the failure of the republican model that France has long been proud of as well as a motto that has lost its meaning: liberty, equality, fraternity. The tragedy is that France has not managed to have a debate without cancellations or accusations of “fascist” versus “globalist”, about what could unite majorities in this 21st century.

The document signed by more than 1,000 soldiers in April 2021 warning about the surrender of the State does not seem to be the solution either, although it should not have been received with such suspicion. For its part, “Submission” by Michel Houellebcq should be seen as a literary work and not as an instrument of polarization.

Multiculturalism has been the European vehicle for immigrants from its ex-colonies, but it is not working well. What happened was serious enough for France to react with the depth of its magnificent history, since it is a situation that has to do with its very concept of republic. France has no answers, perhaps because it has not yet asked the right questions, it is only in the game of thrones to find guilty.

@israelzipper

Lawyer, Ph.D. in Political Science, former presidential candidate (Chile, 2013)

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