“THE FRENCH,” wrote journalist James Cameron, are “an erratic and brilliant people, who have all the gifts except of running their country.” By the time French officials tease out just why gangs of disaffected “youths” have been torching cars and attacking policemen, large swathes of the Paris banlieues may recall Dresden circa 1945.
The Gallic chatterati have no shortage of explanations for the rampaging: discrimination, poverty, dismal economic prospects, bleak living conditions, insensitive French law enforcement, provocative “anti-Muslim” statutes, the de facto segregation of Muslim and North African immigrant families from native Frenchmen. No doubt some–perhaps many–of these factors have stoked the anger.
But few dare call the violence by its proper name: barbarism. Those who do talk tough–like France’s interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy–find themselves scorned by the elite tolerance brigades and threatened by the goons. President Jacques Chirac implored that “the law must be applied in a spirit of dialogue and respect” since “a lack of dialogue and an escalation of disrespectful behavior will lead to a dangerous situation.” Note the words “lead to.” Chirac made those comments on November 2nd. The riots were already a week old.
It’s long been predicted that France’s simmering cauldron of lawless Muslim ghettoes would someday combust. But few anticipated the degree of coordination among the rioters, their rapid proliferation across the country, or the apparent glee they’ve taken in setting their neighborhoods ablaze.
Along with the chronic troubles in Iraq, the 7/7 bombings in London, and last year’s murder of Theo van Gogh in Holland, the French riots pose one of the central geopolitical questions of our age: Does democracy quell ideological fanaticism?
President Bush thinks so, and he’s based his long-range anti-terrorism strategy on spreading liberal institutions and decent governance in the Middle East. The intellectual linchpin of the “Bush Doctrine”–as enunciated most prominently in the 2002 National Security Strategy and Bush’s second inaugural–holds that democracies don’t make war on each other and dysfunctional tyrannies breed radicalism. Hence, America should make the promotion of freedom–economic, political, and religious–the lodestar of its foreign policy, especially (but not solely) in the Arab world.
The French have never had much truck with the Bush doctrine. Too risky in its military aims and too quixotic in its democratic triumphalism, has been the Chirac government’s basic stance. Of course, anti-Bush doctrine attitudes among the French can partly be explained by sheer resentment of the American hyperpuissance. But as the riots indicate, they were also a function of pragmatic fears–fears that support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq would spark France’s ethnic-Muslim powderkeg.
This is not to excuse French intransigence on Iraq. Chirac behaved unforgivably not by opposing the invasion, but by actively undermining America’s anti-Saddam diplomacy. If anything, as Mark Steyn and others have noted, French Arabs interpreted Chirac’s resistance to the war as a signal of weakness.
No doubt the French also looked askance at Bush’s linkage of Arab democratization and Western security. After all, France is a democracy, and yet its own domestic Arab population becomes more radicalized by the day. Surely this offers proof that Islam and democracy don’t mix?
Well, no. The riot-torn Paris suburbs are all but shut off from the “blessings of liberty,” at least as Americans understand that term. There are two principal reasons for this: a bloated social-welfare state and a suicidal multiculturalism. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the Continental European economic model has produced “a persistent underclass. That is because labor rules aimed at protecting workers against low wages and layoffs also tend to deter companies from hiring–especially workers with lower education or from minority backgrounds.” And according to New America Foundation scholar Joel Kotkin, “joblessness among [French] workers in their 20s exceeds 20%, twice the overall national rate. In immigrant banlieues, where the population is much younger, average unemployment reaches 40%, and higher among the young.”
So the sclerotic French economy deserves a share of the blame. But perhaps more destructive has been the refusal of French officials to fortify the mechanisms of assimilation–the means by which previous generations of French immigrants gradually came to identify with their new home country. Indeed, the past half century has witnessed the steady erosion of a cohesive French culture. France has nothing approaching America’s “melting pot” creed of adaptation and adjustment–quite the opposite.
French elites are wracked by the twin European scourges of post-nationalist conceit and post-colonial guilt. They fashion themselves above atavistic concepts like patriotism; they are European patriots–E.U. patriots?–if anything. This may assuage consciences and boost moral self-regard. But by not demanding–not even encouraging–the integration of second- and third-generation French Muslims, while refusing to adopt much-needed economic reforms, Gallic leaders have midwifed havens of extremism.
This is an all-too-real phenomenon elsewhere in Europe, as well. As Andrew C. McCarthy and others have discussed, militant Islam thrives in such Western democracies as England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, and Sweden. Indeed, the 9/11 plot was hatched chiefly in Hamburg. “Militant Islam has repeatedly used democracies to project power,” McCarthy writes. This gets to a crucial distinction between the American and European outlooks on thwarting terrorism.
How often have we heard it said that fighting the jihadists “over there” will make it harder for them to strike us “over here”? From a U.S. perspective, the over-there/over-here dichotomy makes a degree of sense. (Small wonder it’s a favorite Bush administration talking point.) Better to take the battle to the enemy on his turf–Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, the Philippines–than to sit back and merely retaliate against an attack on our turf.
But clever though the over-there/over-here formula is as a rhetorical device, it’s truer for Americans than it is for many Western Europeans, simply because America does not have to worry about homegrown enclaves of Islamic fanaticism metastasizing on its own soil. (At least not yet.)
For the French, British, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedes, “over there” is “over here.” That is, the front lines of Europe’s war on terror can be found in the outlying slums and mosques of cities like Paris, Leeds, Madrid, Rotterdam, and Malmö. In a recent op-ed, political scientist Francis Fukuyama broached the awkward reality that “a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe.” Fukuyama’s prescription for the Europeans? “Two things need to happen: First, countries like Holland and Britain need to reverse the counterproductive multiculturalist policies that sheltered radicalism, and crack down on extremists. But second, they also need to reformulate their definitions of national identity to be more accepting of people from non-Western backgrounds.”
Solution No. 1 is patently obvious. No. 2, though, is highly debatable–in fact, it would seem to nullify the first. In any successful assimilation process, the burden rests most heavily on the immigrant. If France integrates the 5 million or so Muslims living within its borders, it will do so by sharpening the “definition” of French identity, which has very nearly been “reformulated” out of existence. Indeed, being “more accepting of people from non-Western backgrounds”–which in practice has meant turning a blind eye to radicalism and violence (“honor killings,” gang rapes, etc.)–is what landed France in its current predicament.
Democracy may well cure the poisonous political culture of the Arabs, as President Bush has predicted. Whether it quashes the mini-intifadas set to explode in Holland, England, et al. will depend on the self-confidence and self-assertion of European elites. Are they up to the task?
Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
