This is a big extract fromThe Guardian, Sunday 15th November 2015
"So how do we account for the way that terrorism has been nurtured in
assimilationist France too? And how different are French assimilationist
and British multicultural policies?
Many of the French criticisms of multiculturalism were valid. British
policy-makers welcomed diversity, but tried to manage it by putting
people into ethnic and cultural boxes, defining individual needs and
rights by virtue of the boxes into which people are put, and using those
boxes to shape public policy. They treated minority communities as if
each were a distinct, homogenous whole, each composed of people all
speaking with a single voice, each defined by a singular view of culture
and faith. The consequence has been the creation of a more fragmented,
tribal society, which has nurtured Islamism. The irony, though, is that
the French policies, from a very different starting point, have ended up
at much the same place.
There are, it is often claimed, some five million Muslims in France, making it the largest Muslim community in western
Europe.
In fact, there are five million people of North African origin in
France. Most are secular. A growing number have, in recent years, become
attracted to Islam. But even today, according to a 2011 poll by the
l’Institut Français d’Opinion Publique (Ifop), only 40% call themselves
“observant Muslims” – and only 25% attend Friday prayers.
First-generation postwar immigrants to France faced, just like their
counterparts in Britain, considerable racism. The second generation,
again as in Britain, was far less willing than their parents had been to
accept passively social discrimination and police brutality. They
organised, largely through secular movements, and took to the streets,
often in violent protest. In autumn 2005, riots swept through French
banlieues and cities as youth and police fought pitched battles, much as
they had in Britain two decades earlier.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, the French authorities had taken a
relatively laid-back stance on multiculturalism, generally tolerating
cultural and religious differences, at a time when few within minority
communities expressed their identity in cultural or religious terms. The
then president François Mitterrand even coined the slogan “droit à la
differénce” – the right to be different.
As tensions within North African communities became more open, and as
the far-right Front National emerged as a political force, so the
“droit à la differénce” was abandoned for a more hardline
assimilationist approach, with the problems of North African communities
presented in terms of their “difference”. Few of the youth who rioted
in 2005 saw themselves as Muslim. But the authorities portrayed the
riots and the disaffection they expressed less as a response to racism
than as an expression of a growing threat to France – that of Islam. In
principle, the French authorities rejected the multiculturalist approach
that Britain had adopted. In practice, however, they treated North
African migrants and their descendants, in a very “multicultural” way –
as a single community, and primarily as a “Muslim” community. Islam
became symbolic of the anxieties about values and identity that now
beset France.
A much-discussed
2013 poll
conducted by Ipsos and the Centre for Political Studies Sciences
(Cevipof) found that 50% of the population believed “the decline of
France”, both economic and cultural, to be “inevitable”. Under a third
thought that democracy worked well, while 62% considered most
politicians to be corrupt. The report described a “fractured France”,
divided into tribal groups, alienated from mainstream politics,
distrustful of their leaders and resentful of Muslims. The main
sentiment driving French society, the report concluded, was fear.
Faced with a distrustful and disengaged public, politicians have
attempted to reassert the notion of a common French identity. But unable
to define clearly the ideas and values that characterise the nation,
they have done so primarily by creating hostility against symbols of
alien-ness, the most visible of which is Islam.
The irony is that not only is France’s North African population
predominantly secular, but even practising Muslims are relatively
liberal in their views. According to the Ifop poll, 68% of observant
women never wear the hijab. Fewer than a third of practising Muslims
would forbid their daughters from marrying a non-Muslim. Eighty-one per
cent accept that women should have equal rights in divorce; 44% have no
problem with the issue of co-habitation; 38% support the right to
abortion; and 31% approve of sex before marriage. Only on homosexuality
is there a deeply conservative stance: 77% of practising Muslims
disapprove.
Yet, far from including North Africans as full citizens, French
policy has tended to ignore the racism and discrimination they have
faced and institutionalised their marginalisation. Many in France look
upon its citizens of North African origins not as French but as “Arab”
or as “Muslim”. But the second generation within North African
communities are often as estranged from their parents’ cultures and
mores, and from mainstream Islam, as they are from wider French society.
Consider, for instance, the Kouachi brothers,. They were raised in
Gennevilliers, a northern suburb of Paris. Cherif Kouachi, who appeared
to mastermind the operation, only rarely attended mosque and appeared
not to be
particularly religious, but was driven by a sense of social estrangement. He was, according to
Mohammed Benali,
president of the local mosque, of a ‘‘generation that felt excluded,
discriminated against and, most of all, humiliated. They spoke and felt
French, but were regarded as Arabic; they were culturally confused.”
According to Benali, Kouachi was most affronted by the imam’s
insistence on the importance of political engagement. “When the imam
told everyone to enrol on the register of electors so they could take
part in elections, and play their part in society, he refused. He said
he wasn’t a French citizen and wanted nothing to do with the democratic
process. He then walked out of the mosque.”
Kouachi’s story is not that different from that of Mohammad Sidique
Khan, the leader of the 7/7 bombings in London. They are of a milieu
caught not between two cultures, as it is often claimed, but between no
cultures. As a consequence, some of them have turned to Islamism and a
few have expressed their rage through jihadi-style violence.
There are aspects of both the multiculturalist and assimilationist
approaches that are valuable. The multicultural acceptance of diversity
and the assimilationist resolve to treat everyone as citizens, not as
bearers of specific racial or cultural histories, are both welcome. And
there are aspects of both that are damaging – the multiculturalist
tendency to place minorities into ethnic and cultural boxes, the
assimilationist attempt to create a common identity by
institutionalising the differences of groups deemed not to belong.
An ideal policy would marry the beneficial aspects of the two
approaches – celebrating diversity while treating everyone as citizens,
rather than as simply belonging to particular communities. In practice,
though, Britain and France have both institutionalised the more damaging
features – Britain placing minorities into ethnic and cultural boxes,
France attempting to create a common identity by treating those of North
African origin as the Other. The consequence has been that in both
Britain and France societies have become more fractured and tribal. And
in both nations a space has been opened up for Islamism to grow."
Kenan Malik
