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The ongoing French riots bring into sharp relief the fantasy that if we just don't talk about race or religion, the issue will disappear. To be clear, I still prefer the French approach because if you don't measure something you can't really do much about it. The main beneficiary of France suddenly going the US/UK route of meticulously collecting racial and religious statistics wouldn't be the far-right but rather the far-left. Racial and possibly religious quotas would soon follow with official state-sanctioned discrimination as the end result.
Yet the rioters clearly view themselves as apart from French society. Even genteel liberal journalists concede as much.
What are the long-term effects going to be? Perhaps I am cynical but I suspect nothing much. France had these kinds of riots in 2005 and they changed nothing.
I remembering reading a lot about Islam and immigration in the 2010-2012 time period, during which many UK conservative personalities were praising the French approach of "aggressive assimiliationism" as opposed to the supposedly feeble multiculturalist approach preferred by the UK. It seems to me that there's no functional difference. The UK had its own riots in 2011. One could plausibly make the case that the BLM riots in the US during 2014 and then 2020 fall under the same rubric.
Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.
Right, people in the West, in France in this case, are much too comfortable to do anything here. And that’s for a number of reasons.
The threshold for “do something” is absurdly high. The most politically charged question for the French far-right is, of course, repatriation. That means stripping millions (at least 6-7m in France) of people of citizenship based on ancestry and then deporting them to a third country that doesn’t want them (you think Algeria or Morocco want millions more listless, angry young men?). This violates every constitutional statute, the EU, the ECHR. Most citizens still find even the idea of this shocking and distasteful. It is about as beyond the pale in Western Europe as banning women from the workplace or forcing 8 year olds back into factories. Even Zemmour, as I’ve said, doesn’t begin to hint at doing this.
France is a highly ghettoized society. In building the banlieues on the periphery, the French ensured the inner arrondissements of Paris avoided the same fate as the downtown areas of many American cities from the 1960s onward. But the price for that was ignorance. In London, social housing occupied by Somalis sits next to $15m townhouses. In America’s great cities, at least in their downtown areas, you now can’t walk a few blocks without encountering the ravages of the underclass. In Paris, what is out of sight is out of mind. And France is so centralized that what happens outside Paris really doesn’t matter very much.
The “choices” are becoming starker as demographics change. Even though the majority of the population remains native, birth rate disparities mean that a highly disproportionate percentage of young people - of particular relevance, obviously, young men - are from MENA communities. One can imagine a situation where 60% of the population is still native in 20 years, but 50% or even 55% of fighting-age males are from those communities. At that point, the situation is extremely dicey. The military and police have recruited from diverse communities heavily, there’s no guarantee what side they’d be on in a serious civil conflict. Most French with any money would flee elsewhere in the EU or overseas. A weak central government collapsing or maintaining limited control over a military kept in bases or deployed abroad and then roaming bands of young men fighting district by district is a possibility. At that point, one’s money might well be on the Algerians.
Comfort will be prioritized until it’s too late. What is unreasonable will become reasonable too late. What is foretold will become reality too late. A Lebanese Civil War that started in 1958 would have likely been much better for the Christians (who then still constituted a majority, before the PLO was forced out of Jordan) than the civil war that began in 1975 was. Ben-Gurion even offered to carve out a state for Christians in 1956. But the Maronites of 1958 were too comfortable. They never thought their position would be truly threatened. They could not imagine the rivers of blood that would flow through Beirut.
So it goes.
At first blush, this is an absurdity. Then I remember that race relations in the UK are different than in the US, with UK blacks ahead in life expectancy and nearly equal in earnings. I suspect this is largely a selection effect: a much greater share of blacks in the UK are elite immigrants from Africa compared to the US - though perhaps not Somalis.
Guillaume Durocher, a thoughtful French nationalist on Twitter, believes that the most likely scenario in the medium-term is akin to Brasil rather than Lebanon or Yugoslavia. His reasoning is that this underclass has no real political aspirations, let alone organisational skills, and their aims are purely criminal and opportunistically short-termist in nature.
So France will resemble Brasil where a small elite hoard all the wealth and a sizable minority of middle-class whites sit just beneath them. Below those two rungs, crime levels and general dysfunction will proliferate, leading to gated communities etc. We could also see a lessening of France's social model with high taxes as elites will be unwilling to shoulder such a high burden. Given that elite migration will be a very real threat, France's institutions may well oblige.
I guess the only real counter-argument to his view is that race relations in Brasil seem to be more amiable. I know relatively little about either country, but my impression is that the resentment in France (perhaps in part due to the colonial legacy, and partly as a result of ethnic French arrogance) is much greater among the non-white groups. If this is true then your more pessimistic view could well win out.
No, you were correct in your first understanding. It is a relatively small section of London, but in say, Notting Hill, you have large estates mostly divvied up semi ethnically e.g. Somali, Carribbean, Moroccan, cheek by jowl with £15m townhouses.
The road David Beckham lives on for example, is less than a 10 minute walk to multiple estates, and less than 20 minutes walk to Grenfell tower itself. This is (as far as I'm aware) a uniquely (West?) London thing, where the houses by Ladbroke Grove station will be £10-20m and yet 1 road next door will be a very poor housing estate. I used to think it was great, as an example of semi-integration (Ghettoisation leading to say bad shops, bad services). Nowadays, I'm ambivalent, but I appreciate its uniqueness.
There are relatively few places in London with $10-20m houses as standard (and as you say those are often concentrated in West and North London - Holland Park, Notting Hill/Westbourne Grove, Little Venice where the best villas border the Paddington Green estates, all the way up to St John’s Wood especially on the northwest side as you get up to Swiss Cottage, then also Belsize Park and Hampstead), but on a lesser scale it happens with $2-5m properties in Islington in the north, around King’s Cross, in Hackney and Shoreditch, and in parts of the south like parts of Wandsworth and Dulwich to some extent. There are relatively few prime and semi-prime parts of London that aren’t close to relatively bad estates. Possibly the Chelsea-South Ken-Belgravia-Mayfair continuum, although even there there are exceptions.
Interestingly, in 2011 the more spread out West London estates contributed much less to rioting than the outlying, arguably more Parisian ones in the south in Brixton/Lewisham and to the north in Tottenham.
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Is that the official platform of any French far-right party? I don't know, I'm asking. I don't know anything about French politics.
Repatriation doesn't have to be forced. It can be voluntary and financially incentivized instead. That's the platform of Patriotic Alternative in the UK, for example.
It isn't the official platform of any French far-right party that has achieved electoral success.
As for 'voluntary repatriation', Europeans imagine that it's like 'how much would I have to pay the average Greek-French to go back to Greece?' and the answer is maybe a couple hundred thousand euros or something. The calculus for the average Algerian, Senegalese, Ivorian or Malian Frenchman is completely different. Firstly, even returning to Abidjan with €200,000 isn't enough to make you an Ivorian elite by any means. Secondly, your entire extended family, corrupt local politicians and tax collectors and various other hangers-on will immediately take the money, and you know this. Then you will have no more safety net. You'd have to offer millions, even then it would be a tough choice.
It’s not analysis, it’s just making the case for mass deportation which presumably his entire readership agrees with. The objective analysis would note that, regardless of one’s personal opinion, getting to the stage where stripping people of citizenship and deporting them based on ancestry is inside the Overton window would seemingly involve a colossal shift in public attitudes toward ethnic nationalism, immigration and identity in Western European countries. In France, even collecting data on people’s race is banned, there are people of Middle Eastern and African descent in the highest offices in the land, billionaires, in business, in the arts, in almost every prominent national sports team. People’s acceptance of interracial marriage is extremely high, many French have non-native friends and coworkers.
Consider just how much of a total 180 turn in views on identity, on race and on nation would be required to get to the stage where repatriation is a widespread and popular viewpoint. Then consider that the media, state and other powerful organizations (like the EU) are institutionally opposed. There doesn’t seem to me to be a viable strategy for the far-right activist you link other than hoping the public suddenly “radicalizes”, which they didn’t do after the spate of terrorist bombings from 2001 to 2005 and again from 2011 to 2017, so it seems unlikely they’d do so now.
What do you think?
I read the Wall Street Journal and New York Times almost cover-to-cover (from politics and international to recipes and book reviews and fashion) every single day from the age of maybe 7 until I left home at 19. I also read general interest stuff like NatGeo and Scientific American every single month through my whole childhood. Then in my teenage years I was very online on tumblr, reddit, sometimes other forums. I met people from all over the world through family and in college, and since I started work I've been fortunate to meet some people who have a bunch of great stories. So I have a lot of general knowledge. I very much doubt I'm smarter, though, you've written some well-researched comments and I thought your criticism of some of the QAnon hmmposting a week or two ago was good.
But 'intelligence' is a large component in one's ability to prioritize facts to remember and use them to come up with interesting or novel points to make. And most people who are well read and know a lot across a wide domain still synthesize those facts into mediocre rationalizations of existing ideas or novel babble. On the upper end of that is a Tinkzorg, and on the lower end are internet schizos who ramble into the void. You seem to be one of the smartest mottizens imo, but it's hard to judge intelligence broadly from a single domain, there are plenty of people at the top of mathematics or science whose political opinions are still incoherent culture war stuff.
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Agree that the value of a Western Europe citizenship as opposed to Sub-Saharan Africa is millions easily.
Since we're talking outlandish ideas, here's a repatriation scheme that would work: Colonies. Deport people to French-run places in Africa. Living in a French colony in Ivory Coast would not be as great as living in France but certainly miles better than being ruled by Ivorians.
What if France paid Ivory Coast to lease some of their land? It would even be a win-win for both countries. France would lose their least productive citizens, and also develop a source of cheaper labor without the attendant welfare and public safety drain. Ivory Coast would get cash as well as the economic benefit from having a region that doesn't completely suck.
This would be a public relatons disaster (and politics get affected by public relations). Colonialism looks extremely bad in the modern era regardless of the facts on the ground.
Obviously. So is repatriation. I'm just suggesting an "out there" idea that would work if people were actually on board with it. 0% chance of actually happening. Just like repatriation.
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Yes, there would be a lot of details to work out in any voluntary repatriation scheme. How much money is involved, what countries are available as destinations, would those countries even accept taking people in, etc. It would be hard to come up with a package that any substantial number of people would accept. But that's sort of the whole point. Living in western Europe really is just that much better than living in these people's ancestral homelands. Which thus damages the credibility of any claims that non-whites are living under an oppressive regime of systemic racism.
It's a rhetorical gesture more than anything: "We were going to pay you to leave, but you chose to stay here of your own free will. Thus by continuing to stay here, you agree that you are fundamentally a guest in a society that belongs to us first and foremost. We're not going to actively antagonize you, but you should understand that our society is set up to cater to the interests and preferences of our native people, not yours."
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I’m not French, and I don’t think that kind of deportation is at all viable. I’m also not an ethnonationalist of any real description, although for my sake I’m quite glad Israel exists.
I’m more of a believer in law and order and a fan of functioning, stable societies. I certainly don’t believe those are impossible in multicultural countries, thought they often require special effort.
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