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One thing that I don't understand is how countries like France, with a larger and often more radicalised muslim population, doesn't seem to have the same problems. Sweden also has a larger muslim population (in proportionate terms) and while Jews in Sweden are under concurrent attack, at least elite institutions seem to weather the pressure fairly well. Their PM is openly saying things like immigrants from MENA have problems with antisemitism and even questioning their loyalty.
Perhaps it's a combination of two things. First, many Islamist radicals are not poor and downtrodden but often well-educated and from relatively more affluent families. Britain's status as a magnet for relatively more prosperous migrants from non-EU sources could perhaps account for this. Second, perhaps the British state itself has been a bit more hands-off rather than the forceful French assimilationist approach. I can't say that it seems like the French have succeeded with their attempts to assimilate these groups, but perhaps an inadvertent side benefit is that they have greater control over various radicals.
As a final note, in a sane society these remote Middle-Eastern squabbles should not have been a major issue in the domestic politics of various Western countries. But we are now well past that point in Europe.
I don’t think it makes a big difference. After 9/11 and 7/7 there were a huge number of commentators lauding the French approach of laicite, saying that the French handled Muslim assimilation much better than the Anglos, who had not only invaded Iraq but had clearly done something wrong to be subject to terrorist attacks domestically too.
Then, just a few years later, France became the epicenter of Islamist terrorism in Europe with the Charlie Hebdo attack, the 2015 Paris attacks, the 2016 Nice attack, the Toulouse attack on a Jewish school, the teacher beheading, the priest almost-beheading and so on. Of course, both the US and UK also saw Islamist terror attacks including the Pulse club, the Ariana Grande concert and so on, but France has had both a higher number of incidents and a much higher casualty count. Then, if people remember 2016, the Anglo-American approach of live and let live was widely lauded (especially by the center-left in France, which is pretty rare), whereas the French, who had supposedly discriminated against and annoyed their Muslim population, were criticized for stoking social tensions with burqa bans and tolerating ‘hate speech’ with Charlie Hebdo’s trolling that would have been banned in the UK and would simply not have been published by a mainstream publication in the US.
It doesn’t seem like the approach to assimilation really matters, unless you go Full Xinjiang.
(By the way, while France has a proportionally larger Muslim populations I don’t think it’s “more radicalized”. Some Arab French are radicalized, but the intermarriage rate is much higher, as is the percentage (iirc) who drink. There are millions of entirely secularized French Maghrebis, whereas most British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis remain socially conservative and pretty insular.)
For what it's worth, I think the French approach is less of a failure than the Anglo one, even if it evidently is a failure.
We have, in our country, a large contingent of well integrated immigrants and children of immigrants, people who have so adopted the values of the Republic that a lot of them are actually joining political parties that are most radical in opposing islamism.
Forcing the issue of integration has radicalized both those that would and those that wouldn't integrate, which makes the problem a lot more visible than the multicultural approach where multilateral tact is the rule.
Neither approach has managed to prevent the problem, owing I think mostly to the size of the flow, but I think the more forceful approach is less vulnerable to a complete dissolution of values. France will endure even if the ethnic French do not, this is not something I can say about England.
This is self-contradictory. What is France if not the home of the ethnic French? Is it just an economic/geopolitical administrative zone? What are “the values of the Republic” and why is the existence of an Arab country 150 years from now which pays lip service to those supposed values something worth preserving?
I guess you're not French, so you don't understand the specificity of French nationalism.
Unlike, say, the German nation which is ostensibly based on blood, the French nation acquired, through our sustained political troubles, a distinctly ideological, cultural and linguistic character.
An ethnic Frenchman who is unable to quote from Molière, Voltaire, etc; or doesn't speak French, or speaks it with a weird accent would very ostensibly be regarded as not or less French than a sub-saharan African who can do this.
And while in other places you may regard this as left wing subversive nonsense, this is actually true here.
Consider for instance the case of Charles Maurras, one of the towering figures of the French far right, someone who is more worthy of the title of nationalist than anyone, and one of our more notorious antisemites, whose only real problem with Jews had been and remained their cultural integration, and nothing else.
The French do not care much for blood. Though one must recognize that genetics are a real thing that plays a real part in shaping who we are, it is not a part of our national conception and hasn't been so for a very long time.
This has puzzled Anglo-americans numerous times, such as when we won the FIFA World Cup and some of your pundits found proper to opine that "Africa won" because a lot of the team was ethnically African, and our Ambassador had to write a letter to request that you stop trying to force your weird Anglo race obsessions on us. Or the oft remarked upon fact that ethnic statistics are illegal to produce here as they're regarded as means to sow division, which seems nonsensical to Anglo outsiders, but makes perfect sense from within.
This is too vast a topic for me to give a succinct answer, but I will say that when I say this I mean a lot more than the mere organization or even civic religion of a political entity. Frenchness is down to even small habits of character and weird quirks that are acquired culturally such as our simultaneous interest and detachment with philosophy, our gastronomic tastes or the outsized amount of prestige rendered upon literature.
Or perhaps it's just old left wing subversive nonsense? Now French 'conservatives' herald this old subversive nonsense as the ideology they are nostalgic about, while calling 'reactionaries' or 'ultra-mecha-final-form far-right' those calling it left wing nonsense.
That was a cope.
That type of French does not seem to be reproducing much.
Who can quote Voltaire ?
That'd probably get you jailed, better not try it.
Why not the Bible? In Latin? French people used to be Catholic.
Most foreigners who care about the so-called 'French culture' don't seem to really care about the modern, left-wing stuff in my experience. Tourists come for Versailles, Le Louvre, Notre Dame... Perhaps they are interested in Napoleon's achievements.
Nobody's buying a 'French' brand of globohomo that they can get straight from the tap almost anywhere now.
The biggest cultural achievement of the 'values of the Republic' seems to be convincing a large share of the French people that they are a significant human achievement, better than their competitors, worth preserving and expanding the world over. But not by breeding. Just writing strongly worded letters about their 'diverse' sports teams.
You seem to be under the strange impression that these things, Napoleon, the Ancien Régime, la fille aînée de l'Eglise, that these are somehow separate from the Republic and the Nation, that these achievements, good and bad, are not part of an unbroken through-line that is entirely recognized as our patrimony.
Napoléon c'est la France, Robespierre c'est la France, Louis c'est la France, Gambetta c'est la France, Maurras c'est la France, la Commune c'est la France.
One can deplore the sorry state of our country and how much we have erred over the centuries or in recent times, but even the ultra-mecha-final-form far-right would immediately detect a silly American infiltrator in one that would deny this proposition. The best you'll get is people saying the continuation of the ethnic French stock is necessary for the continuation of the French culture, and I don't even disagree with this, but no self respecting Frenchman would deny Alexandre Dumas nationhood.
And to get back to the original point, I don't think we should take lessons on solutions from people who haven't solved the problem either.
They necessarily are, considering the Republic and the Nation came much later and are killing these other things.
Not really. Why not add the soccer team to that? Or Vichy? Or Algeria? Somehow Vichy which gave current France its retirement system is not 'la France'. Nicely played!
You can't have both absolute monarchy and republic at the same time, for example.
If you're going to include everything and anything into your patriotism, why restrict yourself to some arbitrary borders from a thousand years ago or so? At least the early French saw themselves as people of God, in communion with a greater Christian community, from Rome to Byzantium.
Why are you so triumphant about a culture that is sterilizing that very people then?
Do you include the millions of Frenchmen that lived and died before Alexandre Dumas ever wrote a word?
You can add traffic laws, identity cards, national police and a whole lot of other things.
But I thought it went without saying that those are part of it as well. Pétain c'est aussi la France. Though our claim to Algeria is, as you know, a bit more complicated because of the multinational nature of Empire.
I wouldn't say I am. But you don't really get to pick your culture, ironically. I am what I am and if that leads me to oblivion, so be it. I couldn't bear to be anything else.
I still think there is hope we can deal with this problem. And frankly I think we already would have if the American thumb wasn't pressed so hard on European populism.
Well it's a bit weird asking physically impossible hypotheticals, but what you're really asking is a spiritual question: whether the spirit of France before the Revolution would still have recognized him as one of ours.
I think it would. But I can see how one would disagree. Ultimately it's not really the sort of question that can be resolved through reasoned argument, is it? Nationhood is magic, it works on faith.
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