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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.
Belgians are still split after 211 years in the same country. Northern Ireland can't overcome differences so small that the average western European would have difficulties telling them apart. Czechs and Slovaks couldn't function together. Turks and Kurds have tried for a millennia. Sri Lanka had major terrorist attacks committed by people whose ancestors came there during Charlemagne's lifetime. Sunni and Shia arabs have spent 1400 years fighting over a minute doctrinal difference and the conflict is so infected that some believe it is a divine will to exterminate the other. Russia has tried to integrate Chechens for centuries. 70 years of Soviet propaganda washed off in a few years.
People are wildly optimistic concerning integration. While most people realize that they would not become Ugandan by taking a language course or reading about Ugandan values, people assume that Ugandans can become middle class westerners simply by being informed. There is a deep underlying Chauvinism behind the western view of assimilation. It is simply assumed that our way of life is superior and once the barbarians have been instructed in our superior ways they will adopt them. Meanwhile, the west is busy deconstructing the same "racist, patriarchal, oppressive social structures" that we are bewildered that the migrants don't adopt.
Integration is exceedingly difficult, takes multiple generations, and often doesn't occur at all. The lack of miracles is not failure. France has succeeded far beyond Syria, Mexico with its natives revolting, Kashmir or Ukraine.
I honestly think much of the debate is driven by wishful thinking caused by the fear of accepting that the multicultural project won't work.
And yet people who came to the US voluntarily as settlers and not asylum seekers integrated themselves just fine, even when they came as huddled masses. If you keep stirring, your sauce emulsifies just fine. The French state used to stir hard and actually blended most of the local ethnicities into the French nation. It could've done the same to the Algerians: ban the use of Arabic, force the migrants to take French names, break up and resettle any ethnic enclaves.
There was no assimilation. The decline of WASP-majority American institutions had a profoundly damaging and destabilizing impact on American political and economic life. Entire cities like Boston and Philadelphia were lost wholesale to the Irish and Italians. We can't imagine an America where the European population remained 70% Anglo, but it would certainly be a very different place.
Irish and Italian Americans never assimilated? How do you propose we measure assimilation, and what groups do you think have assimilated that the Irish and Italians fall short of?
They have “assimilated” in the sense of intermarriage (by this measure Brazil’s the all-time greatest success of diversity), but they didn’t adopt Anglo culture, they changed it to accommodate many of their own mores, habits and ideas.
Wait, so fourth generation Americans in Boston who add a lilt to their voices as they get drunker are actually just Irish because they don't pointedly refuse to talk about their divorces and put jam on their peanut butter sandwiches instead of marshmallow fluff?
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