3. On Building Fortresses Under Siege
7 March 2011
Pat Bertroche, running for American Congress on behalf of Republicans in the state of Iowa, proposed on his blog that illegal immigrants ought to have microprocessors grafted into their bodies: after all, he explained, I may graft a microprocessor in my dog’s body, if I wish to be able to find it. Why not do the same to the illegals? Indeed, why?
In recent European reports from the scenes of massive clashes between pro-democratic protesters and the forces defending dictatorial regimes throughout the Arab world, two types of information took pride of place. One was the plight of the citizens of the reporting countries: their lives are in danger; they should be as soon as possible moved away at a safe distance from the spots of inflammation, from the southern to the northern coast of the Mediterranean; to make it happen is the government’s most urgent task, any delay is criminal. Another was the danger of the northern coast of the Mediterranean being flooded by the refugees running for life away from the battlefields of civil wars raging on the southern coast; to stop it is the government’s most urgent task, any delay is criminal.
One could hear similarly deep sighs of relief in the two simultaneously transmitted and reported news items from blood-soaked Libya: of the boat packed with British evacuees mooring at La Valetta, and the crowds of Libyans running for shelter – but towards the Egyptian and Tunisian borders. The first reaction of the Italian government to the news of the change of regime in Tunisia was sending additional navy units to guard accesses to the Italian island of Lampedusa to stop Tunisian asylum seekers. And now Francois Fillon, the French prime minister, has announced that France will send to liberated Benghazi two planes with medical help. Nice gesture – you would say – testimony to our solidarity with the gallant fighters for democracy, and our willingness to join them in the battle. You would say that – unless you read Fillon’s own explanation: this is one of the measures to stop the wave of immigrants threatening to flood the Mediterranean countries; the best way to stop it is to make sure that the situation in Libya will soon stabilise.
Schengen’s Dark Side
It would be easy, but wrong, to explain that as extraordinary events or emergency measures. For almost two decades the policy of the Schengen countries on the northern side of the Mediterranean was to ‘subsidiarise’ the detection and confinement of the would-be immigrants inside their native countries or those native countries’ immediate neighbours on the southern coast; in virtually every case, the ‘bilateral agreements’ were signed or entered into unofficially with tyrannical and corrupt regimes, profiting – alongside the gangs of unscrupulous smugglers – from the misery of the impoverished and persecuted exiles, thousands of whom never managed to cross the sea in gangster-supplied, overcrowded, un-seaworthy dinghies.
And yet one cannot but note that the regular strictness of the European immigration and asylum laws grows ever stricter while the toughness of the stance taken towards successful and prospective asylum-seekers grows also – all this has no connection with the unrest spreading from Tunisia to Bahrain. On the sudden hardening of Nicolas Sarkozy’s posture towards the aliens recently turned Frenchmen or Frenchwomen, Eric Fassin, distinguished anthropologist and sociologist, commented in Le Monde that its purpose is to make the rest of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen ‘forget the defeat of the President’s policies on all fronts – from (falling) purchasing power to (rising) insecurity’, and most particularly to use the politics of national identity as a cover-up for replacing social protection with the market-operated free-for-all.
Nothing new here, to be sure. The aliens inside (and particularly the domesticated ones among them), and aliens at the gate (and particularly those who have good reasons to be let through), have been by now firmly fixed in the role of usual suspects. Whenever another public inquiry of a successive misdeed or misdemeanour, failure or flop in the governing circles, is initiated – such aliens are the first to be brought to the police station, filmed avidly and shown on TV with the frequency of the memorable videos of the hijacked aircraft hitting the twin World Trade towers. In the footsteps of the picking on the immigrants-generated internal security problems as the most urgent tasks of the French government, came the decision to put the biggest of the big-wigs at the helm of foreign affairs, interior affairs and defence departments. The meaning of the reshuffle was promptly spelled out by the President in a way leaving nothing to imagination: ‘My duty as the President of the Republic is to explain the future stakes, but above all to protect the present ones of the French’ and this is why I’ve decided to ‘reorganise the ministries dealing with our diplomacy and security’. And so such persons have been appointed as are ‘prepared to confront future events whose course no one can predict’.
Sarkozy’s Islamophilia
In the good old days of 2003/2004 when prices of stocks and real estate climbed sky-high by the day, GNP figures were going up and those of unemployment stood still, when the wallets in the middle classes’ pockets and in the pockets of those hoping to join them went on swelling with credit cards, Nicolas Sarkozy’s voice warmed up whenever he spoke of l’islam de France, of France’s diversity, multiculturalism, even affirmative policy or positive discrimination, and their role in assuring peace and friendship in les banlieues. He would not bear with the populist habit of picking up Islam as a peculiarly suspect phenomenon demanding particularly watchful attention. In his La République, les religions, l’espérance (published in 2004) Sarkozy pointed out that Islam is one of the great religions, that France of 2004 is no longer an exclusively Catholic country, that it had become a multicultural nation, that instead of assimilation one should rather speak and worry about integration, which is a totally different kettle of fish: unlike the now abandoned postulate of ‘assimilation’, the policy of integration does not require of the newcomers the renunciation of what they are. Even in 2008, when dark clouds were already covering the notoriously blue French skies, the President, as Eric Fassin reminds us, emphatically condemned the principle of ‘consanguinity’, demanding to replace it with that of ‘equality of chances’, pointing out that ‘the best medicine against communitarianism (communautarisme; in French discourse is the concept of the population split into autonomous and partly self-enclosed and self-governing communities) is the Republic delivering on its promise’.
Well, it is an altogether different ball game now, to borrow an American idiom. It all started in the early 2010s with the hue-and-cry after the Roma settled in Grenoble; Roma are, aren’t they, the first among the first as the usual suspects go. But the Roma incidents have proved by now but modest hors-d’oeuvres; more to the point, mere appetisers. For once, the presumption of symmetry between ceux qui arrivent (the arrivals) and ceux qui accueillent (their hosts), underlying until recently the pronouncements transmitted from government buildings, has all but disappeared. No longer is respect required of both sides in equal measure. Respect is now due solely to France, and paying respect is the duty of the accueillis (the ‘received’) – bien or mal (well or badly), does not really matter. French community (whatever that may mean), so the announcements announce, does not want to change its way of living, its lifestyle. But the unwritten condition of those ‘received’ remaining ‘received’ is that they do change their mode of life – whether they want it or not. And, in line with the habit already noted to be the trademark of modern hypocrisy by the great Frenchman Albert Camus (a Frenchman whose personal contribution to the glory of France is next to no one), the evil is once again done in the name of good, discrimination is promoted in the name of equality, and oppression in the name of freedom. For instance: ‘We don’t want to compromise on little girls’ right to attend schools’.
Identity and Security
This is a thorny issue, no doubt… This is why the slogans ‘no tolerance to the enemies of tolerance’ or ‘no freedom to the enemies of freedom’ sound so convincing. They do – as they take for an axiom what had yet to be proved, as they pre-empt the question whether the side whose condemnation and suppression that slogan is meant to legitimise are indeed guilty of the transgressions of which they stand accused, and as they omit the question of the prosecuting rights as well as glossing over merging, illegally, the prosecutor’s and the judge’s roles. But does indeed the prohibition of wearing headscarves in school help to entrench the ‘little girls’ right to attend schools’?!
André Grjebine of Sciences Po–Centre d’études et de recherches internationales, in the same issue of Le Monde (S’ouvrir à l’autre: oui. A son idéologie: non) noted that ‘the alterity, perceived generally as the source of spiritual openness, can be as well a carrier of fundamentalism, obscurantism and closure’; would not he, however, agree that his order of reasoning, with all its appearances of impartiality and sine ira et studio intention, is already a judgment in its own right, only disguised? He did not mention, after all, that ‘the spiritual closure, perceived by some as the carrier of identity and security, is all the same the source of fundamentalism and obscurantism’ – a connection at least as real as the one he preferred to put to the fore. Nor did he say that much as the presence of spiritual openness in some may push some others to closure, it is the absence of spiritual openness that offers the invariable and infallible mark of all and any fundamentalism. More often than not openness encourages, promotes, and nourishes, openness – whereas closure encourages, promotes and feeds closeness.
Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese author writing in French and settled in France, considers the reaction of ‘ethnic minorities’, that is to say immigrants, to the conflicting cultural pressures which they are subjected to in the country to which they have come. Maalouf’s conclusion is that the more immigrants feel that the traditions of their original culture are respected in their adopted country, and the less they are disliked, hated, rejected, frightened, discriminated against and kept at an arm’s length on account of their different identity – the more appealing cultural options of the new country appear to them, and the less tightly do they hold on to their separateness. Maalouf’s observations are, he supposes, of key importance to the future of inter-cultural dialogue. It confirms our previous suspicions and conjectures: that there exists a strict correlation between the degree of perceived lack of threat from one side, and the ‘disarming’ of the issue of cultural differences from the other – this as a result of overcoming impulses towards cultural separation, and the concomitant readiness to participate in the search for common humanity.
All too often, it is the sense of being unwelcome and guilty before committing a crime; threat and uncertainty (on both sides of the supposed frontline – among the immigrants and among the indigenous population alike) are the principal and most potent stimulants of mutual suspicion followed by separation and breakdown of communication: of the theory of multiculturalism degenerating into the reality of ‘multi-communitarianism’.