Nine or ten days straight of rioting, and French impotence plastered on the front-pages of newspapers round the globe (and a lot of US and British pundits barely able to conceal their glee)
What should be done in the short term? More debate and understanding? Send in the national guard? Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin seems to favor cuddling the rioters, while Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy seems to want to go middle ages on their collective asses.
I think we can conclude that Mitterrand was an ass. But what else will be the further implications of the Parisian riots? Is it the end of the dream that the welfare state can handle integration? The end of the end of the dream of multiculturalism and mass immigration? Is this just the first of a number of like problems that will spread across Europe in the coming years, or will it be forgotten as nothing but a fluke in a few years.
I’ve yet to read anything that suggests the rioters are motivated by anything other than typical teenage alienation coupled with a healthy dollop of social injustice.
The French are learning a lesson that we in the U.S. learned some time ago – don’t warehouse the poor in massive residential housing projects. It leads to problems. Low-rise, mixed-income developments are a much more successful model. When the French get the rioting under control, they’re going to probably end up moving in the same direction. And make no mistake, the rioting is about poverty and alienation, not Islam.
This is a perfect example of the result of the failure of the cherished pinnacles of the European left - the welfare state, and the multicultural ‘mosaic’ societal model. The result of these two policies has been to bring huge quantities of people of a different culture into the country, leaving them unassimilated into French Society, then ghettoizing them with a welfare program that concentrates them together in poor neighborhoods and gives them enough money that they are not forced to rise out of their station. So now there’s a huge culture of resentment and dependency in France, made of up of people who do not share French values or respect French institutions.
Those two kids who died were basically just the match that was thrown into the volatile result of these policies.
The same thing is on the verge of happening in countries all through Europe.
But the Europeans don’t have the option of stopping immigration - these countries have grown dependent on the cheap immigrant labor, and their own populations are barely reproducing and require immigration on a massive scale just to prevent a demographic meltdown.
This problem isn’t going to get better. It will get worse.
I agree. But given the degree of the number of youths involved I can only conclude that a common identifier, namely Islam, is what is responsible for the large scale of this insurection.
Your statement applies to the past situation in Israel as well, so I can’t agree that this current situation in France doesn’t compare to whats happened in Israel.
It doesn’t escape me that considering the degree of white poverty in America or elsewhere today, that you don’t see white non muslim people causing this degree of civil violence at one time. They do not have a common identifier outside of their poverty. Yet if you tally up all the minor civil disobediences of white youth in the long haul, you might find the two situations quite comparable, not in intensity but in volume.
I don’t think you can pin this on a welfare state or the ‘mosaic’ societal model. In fact, I would say its a failue to enact the ‘mosaic’ societal model that caused it. The root problem is not a large ethincally and culturally different population rather the root problem is a racist society that is refusing to integrate them into the larger society. Which I am not sure is any different that what would happen if the U.S. experienced a large scale immigration of Muslims. The best analogy we have to Muslim immigration in Europe is Mexicans. Mexicans, as opposed to Muslims, have similar religious and cultural values to Americans but are still the target of a great deal of racism. In France Muslims, especially conservative ones, simply do not share the same values as the French do and thus will experience more Racism and be much harder to integrate. It ought to be interesting to see what this does for Turkey’s EU membership.
I think a better common identifer is ethnicity rather than religion. France and Europe society at large is not so much anti-immigration as it is anti-Arab/N. African immigration.
Well, you would be hard pressed to show that whites have been systematically discriminated against which is the root cause for these riots. I actually think that the French Muslim riots are extremely similar to the Black riots that were seen in the early 90s in America. Resentment to racism built up and eventually it is ignited by a relatively minor incident.
I think it would be naive to think that ethnicity and religion isn’t a significant factor in these riots. That said, poverty and disenchantment with the system also play a significant part.
France (and Europe) are clearly having their problems integrating the Islamic minority in their midsts. I would suggest that a generation moratorium on immigration would significantly aid integration. There wouldn’t be the constant replenishment and growth of immigrant “ghettos” which would force immigrants to devle into mainstream French culture. Their offspring would then be more acclimatized and better suited to advance within France.
I lifted it from the linked article. I found it ironic in light of the French position on the Israeli / Palestinian conflict. But perhaps you prefer “insurgence”?
Well call me old fashioned, but to me “typical teenage alienation” make for sulking teenagers and irresponsible sex, not for large scale, week long riots. There are alienated teenagers and social injustice everywhere, more so supposedly where the welfare state is less comprehensive than in France, yet the whole world is not ravaged by such riots everyday – so there must be something that singles out the French experience.
Also what makes you say they’re mostly teenagers? Just now two 25 year-olds and one 27 year-old male rioters were sentenced to 8 months in prison.
Yet, there are many other groups of immigrants which are coping vastly better and not engaging in large scale rioting. I don’t see immigrants from China, The Philippines, India or Tamil Sri Lanka rioting - nor do I see Polish, or Russians or other East Europeans torching cars and shooting at the police. Yet if the problem was racist France, supposedly these groups would suffer under the same kind of racism. Perhaps we can conclude that it’s not so much France that refuse to let them integrate as it is those groups now rioting that refuse to integrate and assimilate into France.
How does this square with what you wrote above? If the immigrants into France simply do not share basic core values with France, you can hardly expect France to alter to accommodate them. Nor write it off as racist French not wanting let them integrate, if that would entail changing their society in central ways they do not want. How can you say it is racism not wanting to change society to the liking of, as you write, conservative Muslims?
One of the strongest arguments for Turkey that is often put forward, is that it can serve as a buffer towards the more conservative arab islamic countries. And generally there is little love left between Turkey and the Arab world. I don’t know that it will, but the riots ought strengthen Turkey’s bid.
Are any of those immigrant populations as large as the Muslim one or have they faced the discrimination that the Muslims have?
Becuase the people that don’t want to change their values don’t have to they just have to allow the Muslims to live according to their own. What they do have to do is modify their definition of “French” to include the Muslim population.
And the opposition to Turkey largley lies upon the fact that it is not a white, christian, “European” country. These riots will do nothing to change that viewpoint.
The fathers and grandfathers of many who are rioting (likely either a) Muslim or b) of north African or Middle Eastern ethnicity or c) both) emigrated to France because they were attracted to the factory jobs and the French were attracted to the cheap labor. The second and third generation offspring of these immigrants must deal with the fact that because of the decline of the French industrial base, those entry-level factory jobs that gave un-and under-educated immigrants a chance for jobs (and the dignity that jobs provide, and the ticket into mainstream society) are long gone.
France’s socialist economic model appears particularly ill-equipped to thrive in a 21st century milieu, and certainly appears poorly equipped to deal with a rapidly shrinking and flattening world. It also appears to me to favor the old and inefficient at the expense of the young, especially the young “beurs” and “noirs”, considering that the unemployment rate has risen to 25% for those under 25 (cite).
I don’t think Islam is driving the riots - I think if the riots were an expression of typical Islamic rage, the targets would likely be synagogues instead of Peugeots. However, I think the people who are rioting - young, undereducated, unemployable, unskilled, unassimilated, ghettoized, despised, and obviously second-class French citizens - will likely migrate to Islam as a way to express their rage, if history is any teacher.
France, as well as other European countries, have a hell of a problem on their hands. Which I guess means that we can add this to the list of items America has to worry about.
This statement is based on several undemonstrated assumptions:
How many people are there in France from China, The Philippines, India or Tamil Sri Lanka?
What is their general level of income? In other words, are they actually a tiny number of well-educated immigrants who have never been relegated to ghettoes, rather than a much larger group of poor relegated to ghettoes?
Where is the evidence that people from those regions are viewed in the same way, racially, as people from M.E.N.A. countries? I see no reason to assume that the same sort of racism is applied to all peoples. In the U.S., anti-Asian racism was pretty much a localized West Coast phenomenon for many years. An ethnic East Asian who made it to the central or Eastern portions of the U.S. had decent odds of being treated as a welcomed exotic rather than as a despised interloper. (Not a wonderful condition, but not a reason to lash out at society.) In addition, France has a long tradition of fascination with the Far East with no similar bad feelings arising from the rather brutal campaign in Algeria.
How many Russians and Poles have actually immigrated?
Did they bring technical skills or just strong backs?
Why would one assume a racist attitude toward a group physically indistinguishable from the local residents?
Have the Eastern Europeans yet been confined in housing projects or other ghetto conditions?
I suspect that a claim that racism is not a part of the problem, here, is either wishful thinking or disingenuousness.
I hate repeating things in two threads but it may bear repeating.
The set-up for this catestrophe is not that a “multicultural mosaic model” has failed as much as that it has never been tried there.
French culture is not about multiculturalism. That is the American model of secularism, where being American and also being a member of another cultural group identity is entirely the norm: Irish-American; Italian-American; Chinese-American; American Muslim; American Jew; and so on. To not have more than one group identity, to not be part of some hyphenated crowd, sets you apart. Not so in France. In France secularism is used as the tool to enforce a solitary national identity, no hyphens allowed. Certainly no multicultural mosaic model.
Muslims are very much the provisional hyphenated others. They are different, visibly so (despite rulings against headscarves). And as others they are segregated from mainstream society. They are denied full participation and acceptance. Maybe if the jobs and education had been there so that each generation could become increasingly middle class things would have played out differently, but such was not the case. Of course many are disaffected. In another time and place the religious identity would have provided enough of a community norm to provide its own constraint against acting on disaffection (as it has and does for many other groups of others and outsiders discriminated against throughout history), but the shard of Islam that these youths have glommed onto does not offer that.
Still, what explains what’s going on in the U.K. or the Netherlands, where one could plausibly argue the multiculturalism mosaic model has been tried, and yet many of the Muslim and/or MENA community still find themselves outside the “mainstream” with living conditions similar to those facing the rioters in the Paris suburbs? To what extent do Muslims and/or the MENA community self-segregate and how is that contributing to the situation?*
I’m not necessarily arguing this is so; I’m just asking the question.
No undemonstrated assumptions, just an observation. It is someone else who claims the root cause of the problems is widespread French racism. I put up some cases that I find hard to reconcile with such a theory. It’s not my job to disprove other peoples’ accusations of racism, which, one might add, is rather harsh, and by all reason ought be followed with a very good argument by itself, it is their job to prove such an accusation with arguments which takes into consideration what facts may be. Among those facts are that some immigrant communities run riots while others seem not to.
I don’t know how many Chinese, Tamil or Philippine immigrants moved to France, certainly nowhere near as many as from the Middle East. However, if it’s anything comparable to Denmark, quite a few never the less. Also Chinese, Philippine and Tamil immigrants are on average less educated and less literate than immigrants from the Middle East. But those rioting are probably not immigrants, but 2. and 3. generation immigrants. They’ve had good opportunity to educate themselves.
Where is the evidence they’re not?
France had a rather brutal campaign in Indochine
I think a French person in general can distinguish a Polish or Russian immigrant from a native French, and certainly the Nazis had no trouble having racist views on Slavic people “indistinguishable from the local residents”
France is not a totalitarian state, so I find it very surprising that anyone is relegated or forced or confined to live anywhere. Do you have a cite to backup such a claim?
disingenuousness eh? Who claims racism (going both ways) is not be part of the problem. But saying it so doesn’t make it so. And I’m just looking for some convincing arguments to back up that racism is not only part of the problem, but the root problem.
But most everybody agrees the French Muslims are not very religious and do not to any great length identify themselves with Islam, and in fact, scarves and other visible religious symbols are rare – wherefore they should have no need to bill themselves as Muslim-French. And French society stress religion very little. And there are also other non-catholic religious communities in France which don’t seem to have the same problems, amongst them the largest Jewish community in Europe (and the third largest in the world I guess). Do French Jews need to cast themselves as Jewish-French, or Protestants as Protestant-French? Etc. And as I said, Buddhist-French and Hindu-French don’t seem to tear through the streets torching cars. So perhaps religion is not the cause after all.
Integration and assimilation is precisely changing values so they fit with those whereto one is integrating. What you’re describing here is not integration – but parallel societies. One can certainly argue that is to be preferred, but then lets not put the onerous on the French for “refusing to integrate them into the larger society”, when integration is not what you had in mind.