Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas

       Chapter 3

      The Campaign for a Post-National Model of Civic Membership

      By the beginning of the 1980s in France, politicians and intellectuals were increasingly realizing that immigrants were permanently changing the face of French society. In response to this recognition, groups on the French left began championing what was often called a “new citizenship” or nouvelle citoyenneté. As understood by its proponents, nouvelle citoyenneté was to be a more inclusive citizenship disjoined from nationality. In practical terms, the main political demand associated with it was relatively simple: to extend local voting rights to foreign residents of areas where immigrants had settled. In symbolic and historical terms, however, many advocates saw the initiative as promising much more: nothing short of a conceptual revolution in established ideas of political membership. In marked contrast to more conservative observers who saw immigrants’ settlement as a source of potential national crisis, those championing such a “new citizenship” greeted the changing character of French society with enthusiasm. They saw it as heralding a new, more progressive and inclusive social order, and as promising nothing short of a radical displacement of the traditional nation-state with all its dysfunctions.

      The “new citizenship” envisaged was “new” largely because it broke the traditional link between nationality, on the one hand, and citizenship as active political participation requiring possession of political rights, on the other.¹ From the conventional perspective centered on the nation-state, only French nationals could be citizens. From the “new citizenship” perspective, public recognition of foreign citizens was possible. In fact, having foreign citizens was even a sign of historical progress. Their enfranchisement seemed to herald the imminent eclipse of an increasingly outdated and outmoded political paradigm in which the nation-state held pride of place.

      The new citizenship campaign both participated in larger international trends and was in key respects uniquely French. The particular national flavor and character of this campaign in France owed much to the particular history of French syndicalism and, above all, to the unrivaled depth of political conflict concerning state-society relations in France. The radical and romantically pro-social, anti-statist character of France’s new citizenship movement contributed both to its initial appeal and later, as Chapter 5 will show, to its public delegitimation and political marginalization.

      The hopes of new citizenship’s French advocates were also strikingly close to those of many Anglo-American post-nationalists and multiculturalists. Given these close underlying affinities, the story of the new citizenship campaign’s rise and fall in 1980s France promises also to tell us something about the appeal, and the limitations, of post-nationalist thinking as well. That story begins in this chapter and ends in Chapter 5.

       The Perceived Crisis of Assimilation

      Optimistic Gainsayers

      As recognition of postwar immigration’s lasting character slowly dawned on immigrants and French thinkers and politicians alike in the 1980s, French society came to appear considerably more culturally and religiously diverse than had previously been imagined. By the 1980s, many French observers were persuaded that the country was witnessing a crisis of assimilation, though others remained relatively sanguine about assimilation, and encouraged greater patience. Meanwhile, where it was believed that assimilation was failing, this change elicited radically different responses from thinkers on the right (including those of the so-called “new right,” a strain then on the rise) and those on the left.

      Not everyone in mid–1980s France was ready to concede that a crisis of assimilation actually existed. Some members of the political and intellectual elite—particularly leading Gaullists—remained sanguine in their belief that even relatively recent non-European immigrants to France in fact were on the road to assimilation. Expressing confidence in France’s capacity to assimilate its most recent immigrants, Philippe Séguin—a leading critic of European integration within the RPR who was then minister of social affairs in charge of resources and rights of foreign residents—boasted that “the assimilative capacity of France is powerful, much more powerful than xenophobia.” Indeed, he claimed, the French melting pot was every bit as effective as the American one (Declaration in Tunis, 23 March 1987, Documentation Française transcript).

      Similarly, in 1986 Michel Hannoun, Gaullist RPR party secretary in charge of social questions, sought to reassure the public that despite the “cultural ambivalence” of second-generation immigrants, “one cultural element, one model of reference, dominates where the young are concerned, and it is the model of our French culture” (Hannoun 1986: 109–10). Nor was the perception that France was assimilating residents of foreign origin restricted to Gaullists like Hannoun and Séguin. Others on the left shared this perception. Notably, however, they often saw the continued strength of assimilation less as a reason for hope than as cause for concern.²

      Defenses of National Identity

      While some remained confident (or despondent) that assimilation was still working, in the early to mid–1980s it was widely argued that it was unrealistic to expect the large numbers of postwar immigrants from outside Europe, many of them non-Christian, to assimilate as earlier immigrants from European countries supposedly had. Because cultural unity and the very existence of the nation were frequently equated, the perceived crisis of assimilation was often seen as a crisis of the nation as well. This perceived crisis together with enthusiasm about it on the French left (see below), convinced many observers that non-European immigrants posed grave dangers to France.

      These reactions were clearly evidenced by contributions to two large colloquia on national identity organized in Paris by the new right intellectual circles GRECE and Club de l’Horloge in 1985. Paul Soriano, a contributor to the Club’s colloquium, maintained that European and non-European cultures were incompatible, too different to be combined into a single, internally integrated national ensemble. Soriano warned: “the clearest expression of the dangers weighing on our national identity undoubtedly resides in this ‘social project’: ‘multi-communitarian France.’” This project, he explained, was misleadingly called “multiracial and pluricultural France” by its intellectual defenders on the left. In reality, France was already “pluricultural,” but the multiple cultures comprising it all had a common European foundation that made them compatible. The danger of the left multicultural project, he implied, was that, in attempting to take in non-European cultural groups, France would become “multicommunitarian,” thus winding up ethnically segregated (Soriano 1985: 55).³

      The direct solution to this situation proposed on the right was, quite simply, to get unassimilating immigrants out of France. Interestingly, this approach was to an extent compatible with the agendas of certain firstgeneration immigrant associations organized along national lines. Republican Party (PR) deputy Alain Mayoud argued in 1983:

      One fraction of the current foreign population living in France has the vocation to assimilate. It is still necessary to define appropriate measures to facilitate and encourage the transition. For another fraction—the majority, according to us—of this population, return to the country [of origin] must be envisaged. (Minute, 24 September 1983; quoted in Delorme n.d.: 3)

      At