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Pepper Culpepper on Changing Demographics in France and Europe

Growing tensions over immigration, integration, and assimilation are coming to the forefront in several European countries, affecting public policy, public opinion, and the debate over the proposed expansion of the European Union.

France has the largest Muslim population of any European country, a legacy of the days of colonialism. Recent rioting by immigrant and French youth of North African descent has brought the changing population of Europe to the world's attention. What does the recent violence in France bode for that country, Europe, and the rest of the world?

Pepper Culpepper is an associate professor of public policy affiliated with the Kennedy School's Wiener Center for Social Policy and Center for Business and Government. He is a faculty associate of the Center for European Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book 'Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make.'

Q: Many of the rioting teenagers and young adults in France are the children and grandchildren of immigrants, not immigrants themselves. Why don't they feel French? Has the distinctive French assimilation model failed?

Culpepper: Well, they don't feel French because they basically live an existence quite apart from what most French people live, and they experience systematic discrimination. They don't live in abject poverty, but they live lives that are totally separate from the lives they see on T.V., and probably the lives to which many of them aspire. That is what's driving this rage, this feeling that they are a society apart. It strikes at the heart of the French assimilationist model because under that model, as French President Jacques Chirac was recently saying in a speech, 'we are all children of the Republic.' And the republic doesn't even recognize racial difference as being valid.

The French statistical agency, INSEE, is legally forbidden to ask about race when it's collecting data. So not only is there no affirmative action, there's no attempt to collect data like that because it breeds what the French call, 'communitarianism.' They don't mean the political philosophy we associate with that name; they mean the idea that the unified French republic would be broken up into individual communities, which leads to another bad word for the French, 'multiculturalism.'

I think that the riots probably are the death knell of the French assimilationist model, though that will be a hard dying for the French elite, for they are very wedded to that model and very proud of the successes - rightly so - that it's introduced in bringing French citizenship to a very diverse - not ethnically diverse, however - population in the past. So, the riots appear to be dying down as we discuss this, but the question remains, given the gaping open sore, where can the French assimilationist model go after taking this lethal hit?

Q: Some analysts are saying the events in French cities are the result of political neglect. In other countries, such as Great Britain and the Netherlands, more visible efforts have been made to combat discrimination. Does the French government need to be more responsive to the root causes of the unrest?

Culpepper: It does. This is more easily said than done, however, because the root causes are not merely neglect - which is to say that public services are systematically worse, physical insecurity is systematically higher, schools are bad in the suburbs - but the fact that the immigrant society is very much apart. So, by introducing a social policy, which is a characteristic French response to many problems, you can't necessarily solve the problem of the separation and discrimination which these people feel. So, the future move can't be merely one of spending more money. There needs to be a change in symbolic politics and in the theory of how the republic engages its citizens. That's a very hard change to make, and the French political elite don't have an answer right now. They have a struggle ahead in terms of their model of integrating these people in suburbs, who live such different lives than many of the French people in the cities.

Q: How much do the problems in France have to do with religion? How much with unemployment?

Culpepper: The problems have very little to do with religion itself. This kind of violence has periodically welled up since the early 1990s. It's not really about religion; it's about the isolation, the alienation, which is driven by unemployment. The unemployment is generally very high, it's about 10 percent. Youth unemployment in these suburbs is sometimes at 40 percent. So that's a lot of people not being able to get jobs, not feeling like they can join the French model of which they hear so much. They don't feel like citizens because they can't be integrated the way people are so often integrated into a society: through jobs.

So, unemployment is a huge aspect and religion is a negligible aspect; not a non-existent aspect, since these are children of North African descent, but it's the racial component that identifies them. This difference affects not only this population's current views but their aspirations. Their aspirations aren't for a separate state; it's that the French state find a way to embrace them and accept them into French society.

Q: Overall, how do you think these events in France will impact public policy in other European countries and affect Turkey's bid to join the European Union?

Culpepper: Other countries were very nervous about the outbreaks in France because there are large pockets of Muslim, racially different, immigrant populations, or naturalized populations across Europe, in Germany in particular. These governments were concerned, but it hasn't led and it's not likely to lead to a generalized outbreak of violence.

The situation differs somewhat in France. In many other European communities, you have children with relatively low education levels and very high unemployment and they feel the same sense of exclusion, but the exclusion is particularly cutting in France because the model says 'We're going to embrace you,' and it's not embracing them.

Germany struggles with exactly the same problem as does the United Kingdom, but they struggle from different bases. The U.K. has been very aggressively pursuing what you might call in the U.S. a multicultural policy in trying to recognize these communities as being different. Similarly, in Germany, there's been an attempt to say, 'We had a bad policy in the past with our guest worker policy. Many of these people have been here for a while; they're going to be here for a while and we need to recognize their difference.'

France, as a result of its assimilationist policy past, its republican model, does not want to recognize that difference, so the issues are particularly acute in France.

The Turkish question - it's very hard to say. Turkey's chances of entering the EU any time soon went way down in June with the failure of the two referenda about ratifying the EU constitution in the Netherlands and France, partly on issues of worry about enlargement and Europe becoming too broad and not deep enough. Certainly, Turkey is a secular state, but it's a secular state with a very large Muslim population and the fact that France and other European countries are struggling with their own internal immigrant and Muslim populations means that Turkey's chances to enter the EU have declined.

Q: Where does France go from here with the realization that the assimilation model has not worked?

Culpepper: Normally, you would get political parties leading a drive to put together a new coalition or a new set of ideas together with policy entrepreneurs, people who always think about assimilation policy. To these people it's not news that the French model has failed, though it is to much of the wider public and many of the French politicians. But you have this elite consensus among the mainstream right and the mainstream left in France that is absolutely debilitating for generating new models.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who became the interior minister, became very much involved in accelerating these riots because of his denigrating language for some of the people who were protesting. But Sarkozy, himself the child of Hungarian immigrants, has been very active in pushing the mainstream Gaullist party to accept some sort of affirmative action, which is a radical break. No one else in the establishment has been willing to do that, on the right or the left. I suspect what you're going to have now is several years of contestation between the right and the left, because the National Front has a solution and it's not a solution that is palatable to much of the mainstream right and left. But they don't have their own solutions, so they're going to be wrestling with this hard issue that other industrialized countries have been wrestling with for quite a while, without a clear solution but certainly knowing that they need to solve it.

Reporters:

Please contact 617-495-1115 to arrange an interview with Pepper Culpepper.

Answers to questions submitted via e-mail:

Q: Professor Culpepper, you indicate the assimilationist model has worked well in France, despite the recent riots. We have not really had any race riots in the U.S. since the 60s, which seems to indicate our civil rights policies are working somewhat better. Can you give me some resources to read on assimilationism in France? I suspected something was up about a year and a half ago when a French-speaking attorney friend of mine gave me some insights in to the racial/ethnic politics in France.

Thank you,

— Reed G.
Kennedy School of Government '77
Boerne, TX

Culpepper: I am not sure we could say that American integration policies are working better than those in France: the race riots in Los Angeles in 1992, following the Rodney King beating, resulted in something on the order of 50 deaths, whereas one person died as a result of the riots in France. Certainly, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's devastation in New Orleans, we in the United States were reminded that we still have significant racial segregation problems in patterns of housing, education, and general access to government services.

What the French riots brought home, strikingly, was that a French society that pretended color-blindedness in fact suffered from practical problems of discrimination every bit as egregious as those in the U.S. It is noteworthy that both the Los Angeles riots in 1992 and the French riots this year were ignited by perceptions of minority groups of the police singling them out for bad treatment (whether that is true in the French case is still disputed). Perceived mistreatment by the police, as an instrument of organized and apparently legitimate use of force, can especially highlight the disconnect between principles of equal treatment and a very different practice on the ground. Since the French model has been so heavily premised on equality and nondiscrimination, the taking of targeted measures to help disadvantaged groups is especially difficult for French politicians to consider. This is why I consider the model in real crisis and unsustainable in its present form.

One thoughtful consideration of this problem is a recent book by Adrian Favell, “Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain”(2001). You can also look at a chapter by Virginie Guiraudon on the French integration model by going to my website (www.pepperculpepper.net) and, from the Publications Tab, previewing a book I have edited entitled “Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make.”

Thanks for your question,

Pepper D. Culpepper