
Gwynne Dyer-London : “Scum,” French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy
called the rioters who have seized control of many working-class
“suburbs” around Paris every night since October 27, when two teenagers
died in an accident that many blame on the police. Accused of pouring
fuel on the flames, Sarkozy responded: “For too long politicians have
not used the right words to describe reality.”
Sarkozy plans to run for the presidency next year, and he wants to seem
even tougher on crime and on immigrants (two separate issues that he
regularly conflates) than his main rival, Prime Minister Dominique de
Villepin. But his conviction that the policy of multiculturalism has
failed has become the new popular wisdom in France, where right-wing
commentators refer to the riots as the “Paris intifada” – as if the
rioters were all Muslims.
Nothing as bad as the Paris riots has happened in Britain, but last
month gangs of Afro-Caribbean and South Asian youth fought each other
in the Birmingham suburb of Handsworth-Lozells and many Asian
businesses were looted or destroyed. The talk in the media was all of
“ghettoisation,” and even Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission
for Racial Equality and himself of Caribbean descent, was carried away
by the panic.
“America is not our dream but our nightmare,” Phillips said, referring
to the existence of a permanent underclass in the US, largely defined
by race, which periodically rises in hopeless revolt and burns down
parts of American cities. Britain must not allow American-style racial
ghettoes to emerge in its cities, he warned, and linked that risk to
multiculturalism: “We have allowed tolerance of diversity to harden
into the effective isolation of communities.”
Meanwhile, right-wing American commentators gloat over the notion that
the French, who refused to follow the Bush administration on its
crusade against alleged Islamic extremists in the Middle East (you
know, like Saddam Hussein), now faced a Muslim uprising at home.
Multiculturalism, as an alternative to the US “melting pot” approach in
which second- or third-generation immigrants eventually lose their old
identities and merge into the majority, is now under attack everywhere.
The real problem with all this ranting about the failures of
multiculturalism is that the Paris riots are actually a splendid
demonstration of the successful integration of immigrants into French
culture (which has, after all, a long tradition of insurrection and
revolution). The riots in Paris are not a Muslim uprising. They are not
even race riots. They are an outburst of resentment and frustration by
the marginalised and the unemployed of every ethnic group.
The low-income housing estates that ring Paris and other big French
cities are the dumping ground for everybody that hasn’t made it in the
cool 21st-century France of the urban centres, and they include the old
white working class as well as immigrants from France’s former colonies
in Arabic-speaking North Africa and sub-Saharan black Africa and from
all the poorer countries of Europe. Unemployment there is often twice
the national average of 10 per cent. But they are not Muslim majority
communities, or even non-white majority.
Every ethnic group lives jumbled together in the apartment towers. The
kid gangs that dominate the estates steal from strangers and residents
alike and fight among themselves for control of the drug trade, but
they are models of racial and cultural integration. This can be little
consolation to the owners of the 28,000 vehicles that have been burned
on those estates so far this year, but what is happening now is neither
an intifada nor a race riot.
It is a incoherent revolt by kids, many of them gang members, who would
once have formed the next generation of the French working class. They
are no longer needed in that role and they have no future, so they are
very angry. But they are not politically organised, so after a few more
nights the violence will die down again for a while.
In Britain, where unemployment is half the French level and the council
estates are less grim and less isolated geographically, there is much
less anger. There haven’t been French-style riots in Germany either,
although many Germans have deeply racist attitudes towards
non-Christian and non-white immigrants, but German cities also do not
concentrate their poor people, immigrant and non-immigrant, in densely
populated one-class “suburbs.”
The French have little to be proud of in their immigration policy, but
what has been happening there since late October is neither
American-style race riots nor a Muslim rebellion. About half the kids
burning the cars and the buildings are white, working-class,
post-Christian French, and they get along with the black and Muslim
kids just fine.
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