Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas
by the French Communist Party following a new round of efforts to increase support for it in the mid-1980s, most notably by FASTI, the leading French anti-racist group Movement Against Racism and for Amity Between Peoples (MRAP), and the Council of Immigrant Associations in France (CAIF) (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 28–29, 29 n1; Serres 1985: 4–5).9
In April 1985, Mitterand, then president, again spoke in favor of immigrants’ participation in local government, calling it “a fundamental claim” that “would inevitably be inscribed in the laws.” He made this statement at the 65th Congress of the Human Rights League (LDH), thus clearly expressing his enthusiasm for that organizations’s efforts (Le Monde, 23 April 1985). He did not go so far as to promise to extend new rights to foreign residents in the immediate future, however, hedging his support with statements that public opinion would have to be won over first, a process sure to be slow at best.
Critics of Mitterand’s position speculated that he was actually trying to fan a xenophobic backlash that would increase votes for the far-right National Front (FN) party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, thus weakening the mainstream right (RPR-UDF) opposition. Others accused Mitterand of taking a spectacular stand in favor of left humanitarian causes to compensate for his 1983 turn toward a more liberal socioeconomic policy (Times, London, 23 April 1985). Mitterand’s stance was thus always controversial, contributing to conflicts over citizenship and integration policy within the French left that would flare up still more dramatically by the end of the decade.
From this brief account of the new citizenship campaign, some of the particular flavor and significance taken on by the campaign for local voting rights as it developed in France should already be apparent. Two aspects of its typical framing in France proved particularly significant. First, its association with the history of French syndicalism inflected the way that new citizenship was understood. Second, and most importantly for understanding its later eclipse, the new citizenship movement in France had a decidedly anti-statist orientation, one that drew on deep resentments against both central state control and imperialism.
Back to the Labor Movement
As many recognized, the “new citizenship” agenda in a sense grew logically out of the same kind of reasoning and strategy that had informed the promotion of immigrants’ interests in France through syndicalism. The strategy and reasoning of the “new citizenship” campaign for immigrant voting rights unmistakably resembled those of the workers’ movement in several respects. Unlike British postwar immigrants from the New Commonwealth, first-generation postwar immigrants from France’s former sub-Saharan African and North African colonies arrived in Europe as foreigners and without the right to vote. Nor did foreigners have the legal right freely to form voluntary or political organizations in France before 1981. French trade unions therefore played a particularly privileged role as a legally available vehicle for organizing and advancing the collective interests of the country’s overwhelmingly working-class first generation of postwar post-colonial immigrants. The clear continuity between the logic of the workers’ movement and that of French associations close to immigrant workers is therefore not altogether surprising.
Foreign workers were accepted as union members by virtue of working in the same places as other workers and participating in the same daily round of productive activity. That is, foreign workers were entitled to union membership by virtue of their physical location and social roles, not their national legal status or legal relationship to the state. Not surprisingly, French unions aimed not at enabling foreign workers to obtain French nationality, but rather at preventing their exploitation and avoiding downward pressure on wages by ensuring that they enjoyed equal social and economic rights. Even while their status as foreigners barred them from participating in local or national elections, laws passed in 1972 and 1975 gave them “the right to vote in ‘social’ elections for shop stewards, union representatives and plant committees.” In 1975, those who spoke French and had worked in France for five years or more also gained the right to run for office within trade unions (Schain 2008: 51). This precedent was stressed by LDH’s vice-president and professor of history at Paris VIII Madeleine Rebérioux, who clearly noted that it was within companies, as workers, that nationals and non-nationals had first obtained the equality of rights that she hoped to see extended to other arenas (1986: 7). In defending workers’ rights, trade unions relied heavily on direct organization and mobilization. Finally, unions appealed to workers’ economic contribution to society, in exchange for which workers were to be granted rights. While regretting that it had so far left foreign workers largely deprived of political and civil rights, one advocate of new citizenship pointed to the workplace as the privileged site where a new form of “economic citizenship” had already developed (Leclerc 1986: 30).
Relying on a very similar logic, “new citizenship” advocates pointed out that immigrants lived in the same places and participated in the same round of collective daily life as other members of their local communities. The fact that those residents who were not French nationals did not have the same legal status vis-à-vis the state as other long-term residents was deemed irrelevant to their right to participate and be represented in local politics. As one article defending the “new citizenship” project argued, “What counts, in order to be a citizen, is to live, to work, [and] to love on a given territory. Nationality is a wholly different affair” (Guattari and Donnard 1988: 15). Another supporter of the “new citizenship” agenda advocated the extension of political rights to immigrants as a way of “permitting those who live in a territory to participate in the daily life of that territory” (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 29). Or, as FASTI in 1985 explained its own support for immigrants’ right to vote, “It [FASTI] sees the acquisition of this right as the recognition of a part of the population living in this country as citizens.”10 Thus, the appeal of the new citizenship campaign was, in part, to a Contract perspective emphasizing active participation in collective activity.
Following the unions’ example, the new citizenship campaign did not strive to make foreigners French; it sought to improve their rights as foreigners. The campaign simply transferred this logic from the field of social and economic rights, and voting rights within firms, to civil and political rights beyond firms. While the workers’ movement sought to ensure that foreign workers had the rights necessary to defend themselves from economic exploitation, the new citizenship movement sought to ensure that they had the right to vote and could defend themselves against racist, demagogic appeals. If permitted to participate in local elections “as actors,” it was argued, immigrants would be less likely to figure in them as an issue (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 27).
Here again, giving foreigners the rights they needed to avoid exploitation was to protect the larger community from harm as well, in this case from the rise of racism in French politics and society. LDH Immigration Commission president Henri Leclerc reasoned in defense of local political rights, “It is in not permitting immigrants to participate fully in daily life that one reinforces [social] separation, exclusion, racism” (Leclerc 1986: 31). Or, as FASTI announced following the killing of several foreigners by French police officers, in response to which other groups had engaged in demonstrations, “the analysis that it [FASTI] makes of the situation leads it to put all of its strength into a long-term struggle for equal rights between French and Immigrants and for the acquisition of a new citizenship for the latter. This is … the best form of struggle against racism.”11
Though the “new citizenship” cause aimed precisely to enable long-term foreign legal residents to vote and thus to participate in conventional electoral politics, its defenders often presented local voting rights as a step toward empowerment within civil society rather than national political participation, depicting local voting as more closely akin to participation in a cooperative or firm than national party politics. For instance, one article appealing for citizenship for non-nationals decried the existence of “[immigrant] masses … without civic attachment who haunt our walls like the slaves of ancient cities, dependent on their boss, on their landlord, on the policemen in their neighborhood, without there being granted to them in exchange a taking of citizenship (une prise de citoyenneté) in relation to the social spaces that concern them” (Guattari and Donnard 1988: 15–16). Meanwhile, the president of the Immigrants Commission of LDH explained League support for extending local voting rights to immigrants by drawing this parallel:
One