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| Europe |
| Vinocur: Frenchness: One size doesn't fit all |
| 2005-11-10 |
| EFL Even though he does write for the NYT, Paris edition, Vinocur is very perceptive and connected. RTWT On one hand, there is French hubris, and its gratuitiously insulting embrace of France's immigrants as partners in the country's threadbare formulas of grandeur, equality and universality. On the other, there is the eternal French dependency on the state, the allegiance to the French model that has failed to provide the jobs, education, housing, or respect adequate to integrate Arab and African Muslims into a rich and resourceful country with real claims to special grace. These two elements run together, and it is at the point where they cross that French reality has imploded: the intersection of the fakery producing a one-size-fits-all Frenchness, and the ceaseless defense of a rigidly statist social model refusing to reform the economy, open up the labor market, or consider affirmative action. So the violence here arises not only from specially French circumstances including massive housing projects in enclaves for the poor, and a dismal colonial history in North and Black Africa. It also comes, pre-rationalized, from the homegrown French who provided the conceits fashioning the rationale, however jumbled, of the rioters. An Arab kid in Clichy-sous-Bois may not articulate it, but what rage it must create to hear he lives in the greatest, smartest, most fair country in the world, revered as Islam's best-friend-in-the west from Algeria to Oman, and then have to deal with a French reality of racist scorn and rejection. Not to mention the French state which, clothed as the ideal republic, runs the school, the bus, the Métro, owns the housing project, operates the job center, and fails, in relation to immigrants, on all those levels. In the country of the 35-hour week, where the state is hardly the symbol of the work ethic, or civic sense in the land of the continuous public service strike, administrative and school buildings have become the choice targets of the rioters' Molotov cocktails. The republic's social welfare payments are there, but accompanied by private sector job creation so enfeebled and hiring discrimination so real that they turn any young person taking up the state's offer to wield a broom or toilet brush into his neighborhood's collaborateur. Alain Touraine, the sociologist and perhaps the country's best known academic, has pointed to the falseness and the lies in French society's portrayal of itself for itself as the place where the most profound causes of the violence and disintegration are found. The fact was that France paid no attention to an average of 60 cars (the figure is from the Interior Ministry) burned every night around the country in the months leading up to the riots. Or that in 2004, an internal security agency reported that there were 300 communities nationwide "in retreat," basically ones with a marked presence of Islamic fundamentalism, hatred of France and the West, anti-Semitism, and violence. Lionel Jospin, talking on the radio Wednesday morning, when asked about affirmative action as a solution, just dismissed it out of hand. The former Socialist prime minister, whose failure to provide the French a strong enough notion of personal security led to his defeat in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, said this kind of affirmative step "contradicts our republican tradition." If France is to go forward, he insisted, "it's got to be within our model." Indeed, a day or two before the riots began, Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, described affirmative action as "semantic debate" in a country known by one and all to be committed to equal opportunity. Now, Francois Bayrou, leader of the centrist group that with the neo-Gaullists, makes up Jacques Chirac's presidential majority, describes France as a "sick state, a state swollen into impotence" with "a democracy that doesn't work well." This means, he said, that "reality never enters political discussions." But asked why the riots were happening here, since France's neighbors seemed to be escaping its misery, Bayrou offered a general response that, like the answers of the other politicians he condemned, hid from the specifics of both responsibilities and solution: "As long as French democracy doesn't change," Bayrou said, "these accidents are going to continue." He left it there. |
| Posted by:Whogum Creack1778 |
| #3 avec les chiens=with the dogs ergo He who lays with the dogs wakes with the fleas? |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-11-10 21:54 |
| #2 Frog Speak? |
| Posted by: Frenchy 2005-11-10 19:28 |
| #1 Qui secouche avec les chiens se leve avec des puces. |
| Posted by: John Q. Citizen 2005-11-10 17:38 |