Month: November 2005

Ace JWN commenter Christiane tells us that
Le Courrier International
has an interesting interview with a sociologist specializing in the life
of the suburbs here. She even sent us a translation.

Thanks so much, Christiane! I am really glad to have something fresh, interesting, and well-informed to put up here– especially because I have been really busy leading a real life these past couple of days. Too complex to write about here, but I’ve had many experiences that I can reflect on, over time. So without further ado…

Interview:

Religion has nothing to do with the (French) riots

To sociologist
Eric Marlière, a researcher at
the CESDIP¹⁾
and the author,
among other books, of Young in the suburbs, diversity of biographies or
common fate?²), there is no relationship between the riots
shaking the suburbs and the fact that the young men belong to the Muslim
culture.

Q. On many occasions, these past days, in the
European media notably, we could read that the riots having burst in the
suburbs are mainly the fact of small groups of young Muslims who in this
way want to fight their personal jihad against the hated symbols of the secular
Republic. Is that true ?

A. We can’t say that.
The violences are sparked by social motives, not by religious ones, even
if many of the youth launching them are effectively
of North African origin and thus we can suppose – because there are no statistics
on this matter – that they are of Muslim religion. They are sons of immigrated
workers, frustrated by the impossibility to become workers one day by turn,
because of a social exclusion lasting twenty-thrirty years, because of discriminations
and of the racism they are suffering every days
. The fact that they are Muslims is absolutely unimportant. That’s not the
question.

Q. What kind of role are the religious Muslim authorities playing in the
riots ?

A. The
clerics tend to stay aside of the violences, they don’t take part in them,
they don’t enter in the political debate. Even the most extremists, a tiny
minority, are keeping a low profile these days, and anyway, they are marginalized
by the most part of the the Muslim population. Sometimes, the local political
leaders may ask the imams for an intervention, but they mainly want them
to use their moral authority in order to calm the youths
and to remember them that Islam condemns violence and anarchy, like
other monotheists religions.

Q. What is the youths’ profile ?

A. They aren’t thugs. The discontent is also expressed by young graduates
who would like to enter in the active life but don’t succeed because the
doors of the employement world stay closed to them. These youths
share a deep feeling of economic injustice, which crystallizes in
the riots. They feel socially insecure in
France
, as if they were an internal enemy in their own country. That’s why I think
that we aren’t facing an ethnic conflict, but a social conflict, animated
by youths of the working classes who have no future
perspectives.

Gian Paolo Accardo

__________________________

Notes

1)
http://www.cesdip.org/
The CESDIP, Centre de recherches sociologiques
sur le droit et les institutions pénales (aka Center of sociological research
about law and penal institutions) is a public academic institute engaged
both in academic teaching and research.

2) Eric Marlière « Jeunes en cité,
diversité des trajectoires ou destin commun ? » (L’Harmattan, 2005)
http://tinyurl.com/9h32q

The anger-fueled rioting in the banlieues (suburbs) around Paris and some other big cities in France has gone on every evening for the past ten days now. It seems very diffuse and ill organized and looks really tragic. Who knows at this point if it will harden into some recognizable and lasting social movement supported by the marginalized, mainly immigrant-origin families stuffed into the banlieues?
One of the friends who came to our place for dinner last night commented that while the US news broadcasts he’d seen all tended to focus on the fact that most of those rioters have been Muslim, the BBC had given a lot more stress to the fact that the anger came out of the “housing estates”– that is, to give a socioeconomic interpretation to what was happening.
Here on JWN commenter David made some reference to “the Paris intifada”. That launched an interesting discussion, which didn’t really belong on that post and should anyway have its own post, so I’ll reproduce it at the end of this post.
I’ll just note here that the anger of this generation of mainly French-born young adults from immigrant-origin families seems largely parallel to the anger of their counterparts in the immigrant-origin communities in Britain– though in France, the anger has not yet spawned a violent, Qaeda-linked underground like the one that killed 55 people in the London Underground in July.
Here in the US, members of the “white”-dominated political elite are slowly coming to grips with the idea that the country’s self-image and actual practice of social interactions needs to change to incorporate the facts of the growing empowerment of African-American and other non-white citizens, and the growing empowerment and increasing numbers of Hispanic-cultured citizens, in particular. I see it as a pretty exciting, challenging and open-ended process.
In Europe, the pressing facts of demographic change have been quite a lot slower to become reflected in the self-image and social practice of the “indigenous” and dominant white majorities. I’m not sure whether the proportion of non-“white” residents is noticeably higher in the UK and France than it is in other European countries. But it is certainly interesting that it is in those two countries– the two that maintained the largest overseas empires for so long, and that for so long even defined themselves by reference to their worldwide imperial role– that the children and grandchildren of the formerly colonized have been most bold in staking their claim to equal rights with the indigenes of the metropolis.
Bill the spouse, who has done a lot of research on the modern history of North Africa, suggests that many of the young people now rioting in the banlieues of France may well be the children and grandchildren of the harkis, the Algerian indigenese who had been impressed into the French colonial forces and who, when De Gaulle finally took the French forces out of Algeria, were allowed to retreat with them rather than face the wrath of the FLN.
As anyone who has ever read Fanon will recall, one special feature of French imperialism was the conceit that the French cultural administrators spread within their various colonies that the indigenous people could actually become “French”, if only they could learn the language of Racine and Voltaire with enough flair and become sufficiently au courant with all the latest in Parisian literary thinking. (My ex-spouse, who grew up Lebanese and went to a number of French-run schools in Lebanon, vividly recalls all the pupils being taken out of school on quatorze juillet and given little French flags to wave in the streets as they shouted “Vive la France!”)
So you could see how Algerians or other North Africans who had fought for France against the FLN, then fled to France, and had been raised with this idea that they and their families could actually, seamlessly become French, might find the reality of the situation once arrived there fairly disappointing…. the kind of disappointment that might easily harden over a further generation or two, if most of the members of that community remained on the economic, social, and political margins.
… Social change ain’t easy. Our small city of Charlottesville here in Virginia is nowadays sometimes called by its detractors the “People’s Republic of Charlottesville”. That’s because we have a strongly Democratic-dominated city administration, a general commitment (not always well implemented) to support the full empowerment of the 50% of the city’s residents who are African-Americans, a strong-ish peace movement, and a general commitment to decent, generous, liberal values.
Back in the 1950s, however, the whitefolks who dominated the city council voted to close the city schools rather than accede to the federal government’s demand that the seperate white and black school systems in the city should be integrated. The whitefolks just couldn’t see their sons and daughters getting any benefit– or even, being safe!– if they sat down in the same classrooms with Black kids. The city’s changed a lot– in its self-image, aspriation, and practice–since then. Not enough, I might say. But certainly, significantly.
Are there forces in the “indigenous” white communities in France and the UK who, jointly with immigrant-origin leaders, can spearhead some analogous moves towards far greater inclusivity? I hope so. Certainly, I hope the streets of Europe never ring again to the cries of race-hatred that dominated so many of them back in the 1930s…
Anyway, here are what Christiane (who’s Swiss) and Hammurabi wrote earlier in response to david’s comment about a Paris “intifada”:
Christiane:
Concerning the riots in Paris which are now spreading in other provincial cities, I don’t understand why you call them Intifada. No-one in France name them so, not even the participants, at least I didn’t hear it.
What we have in France has nothing to do with terrorism; it’s a wide social movement which is caused by joblessness and exclusion.
They have much more to do with the right wing policies a la neocons which were imposed on France by Chirac and above all by Sarkozy : many many funds were cut in social programs aimed at integration, while more resources were put on repression. Sarkozy developped a theory of “zero tolerance” which has produced the opposite results.
After an incident (which isn’t yet completely clear but for the fact that two young people who took refuge in an electric transformator died electrocuted – with or without the police chasing them, that is the question) the whole leftover suburbs went in flames. At first they responded to Sarkozy’s provocation, because he named them thugs to be cleaned away. But sure enough if the whole suburbs are now burning since a week, it is for other serious social reasons. Since 1968, I haven’t seen such an important social movement. Hundreds of cars are burned out. And also a police station, some schools and many public busses.
Beside the many social workers and mediators trying to cool the spirits, there are two different groups pushing to the riots : the gangs and drugs dealers holding the different suburbs, who fight to extend their territories and also perhaps, some Islamist activists.
It is not impossible that Islamist movements try to organize this social movement. But it isn’t the only force around. And Muslim movements come with different flavors. I hope that this movement will cause the fall of Sarkozy. It is well possible, because he has been so irresponsible in his provocations. On the other hand when elections take place after riots, people tend rather to vote for the right parties, for the restoration of order.
Hammurabi:
au contraire…Sarkozy understands the need to coopt the Le Pens on the far right (by taking a strong law and order position and on illegal immigration) while making the French citizens from North Africa stakeholders rather than seething “outsiders”…that is why in the home of egalite and French “grandeur”, he favors meaningful affirmative action policies… “I think some people accumulate so many handicaps that if the state does not help them, they have no chance of making it,” he explained. Europeans pride themselves on their commitment to multiculturalism but in practice there is far less of the melting pot diversity that serves as a safety valve on the other side of the Atlantic. He also favors public financing of mosques in the land of banned head scarves.
With high unemployment, an aging nativist population and an increasingly alienated and growing Muslim population, France – like many European countries – faces a demographic challenge not just to funding its generous pension and other social programs but to help prevent Islamic extremists from exploiting the situation.
… [Back to HC] Thanks so much for those contributions. Everyone is warmly invited to continue this conversation here.