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November 09, 2005

Europe is Simmering
Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Well, I will say one thing for Dick Cheney -- he keeps it discreet.  Imagine your country mired in crisis and having the news screen full of senior officials, very senior officials, bickering over approaches in public.

That's what they're getting in France -- from cars burning in the suburbs to toupees burning in central Paris.

There is much to say about the disturbances in France, what they do or don't say about multiculturalism, what they do or don't mean about Islam, assimilation, and the value of US vs. European models of pluralism.  The New York Times in all its "select" wisdom won't let me link to it, but the two op-ed pieces by French commentators today are excellent, thoughtful contributions.  A few quotes from Oliver Roy, one of the world's pre-eminent observers of political Islam:

Many see the violence as religiously motivated, the inevitable result of unchecked immigration from Muslim countries; for others the rioters are simply acting out of vengeance at being denied their cultural heritage or a fair share in French society.  But the reality is that there is nothing particularly Muslim, or even French, about the violence.  Rather, we are witnessing the temporary rising up of one small part of a Western underclass culture that reaches from Paris to London to Los Angeles and beyond.

Read through that again...

But the French youths are not fighting to be recognized as a minority group either ethnic or religious; they want to be accepted as full citizens.  They have believed in the French model (individual integration through citizenship) but feel cheated because of their social and economic exclusion.  Hence they destroy what they see as the tools of failed social promotion: schools, social welfare offices, gymnasiums.

A fantastic gloss on a quote in the Washington Post over the weekend; the rioters, an older Muslim man said, are "destroying their kindergartens."

Now, before you get too smug about Europe, think a little bit about the violence that raced through New Orleans after Katrina (although, I know, the media overstated it).  This is just a grim, grim diagnosis of how we have allowed an indigestible lump of poverty and hopelessness to grow up in our midst.

Almost 15 years ago I spent an unlikely night in a Paris bainlieu.  My host was a junior French diplomat who had moved back to the capital and found his means very limited.  He picked me up at the train station, we got into the Metro and got out into a vista of high-rises and Arab faces.  It wasn't the Paris of my school trips, but it didn't seem to faze him.  I politely said nothing.  Later, we took the Metro back to Paris, this time with a sea of immigrant teenagers whose surprise at seeing us in their midst only grew as we switched back and forth between English and French.

Finally one of them said to my friend, "yo, where'd you get her?"

"In Vienna," he answered, as if that explained everything.  Finally, we struck up a conversation.  The kids were within five years of our age, but as my friend explained his career path -- university, learning languages, the diplomatic service, a posting in Vienna where, yes, there were women from all over, it was clear that he might as well have arrived from Mars.  Although he was himself the child of hardscrabble immigrants -- French repatriated from Algeria -- their lives had no points of commonality beyond the train we all sat in.  They couldn't imagine any of his options being opened to them.

I could go on forever about the broader implications of all this.  Instead, I think it's time for those of us who focus on foreign affairs to start thinking, again, about the implications of a Europe that is AWOL from its accustomed role in world affairs.  Last week I promised to track and post on Europe's reaction to the news that the US has outsourced its prisons to Central Europe.  But another diplomat friend gently chided me:

Europe is too busy looking inward to care, he said, and reminded me that, while Paris burns, Spain is wrenching itself around the problem of Catalan autonomy, the Dutch are having a parliamentary wrangle over why they went to Iraq and whether they should up their ante in Afghanistan; Italy is in the throes of yet another corruption scandal as its government continues a long (by Italian standards) slow decline.  Germany, remember, still doesn't officially have a government.

Progressives have gotten into the nice but lazy habit of figuring the Europeans will help us over the humps we can't quite get over ourselves: international pressure and money for Iraq, troops for Afghanistan, a new approach for Iran, aid money for Africa and Asia, greasing a final status deal for Kosovo, etc. etc.  Then there's the whole matter of trade policy, where the planets must align creativity and flexibility in both Europe and the U.S.

Fuhgeddaboudit.

I'm not saying Europe will disappear; but if you are a progressive thinker hatching plans that require Europe to stick its neck out, take the lead, or change its own policies dramatically, better start re-thinking.

November 09, 2005 at 08:32 AM in Europe |

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» Transatlantic views on French Riots from Transatlanticist
Some views from across the Atlantic (and the English Channel) about the French riots: - Interview with Victor Davis Hanson who just returned from France - Interview with Mark Steyn, US columnist - Post by British journalist Melanie Phillips Commen... [Read More]

Tracked on Nov 10, 2005 11:57:11 AM

Comments

Applause for the conclusion of this piece not to count on Europe presently and for the forseeable future. It's a sad state of affairs that hopefully will change one day even though one sees little or no evidence this will occur.

On the point of the French youth riots being mostly related to poverty I would inject a note of caution. It is both completely accurate and yet misses a broad contextual point. While it also about lack of assimilation and racism against North Aficans and to a lesser degree black Africans the fact remains it's young muslims (many of whom do not read, write, or even speak French) demanding automomy from a nation they do not feel a part of. It's much closer to the Intifada than the classic French tradition of demonstrations.

The large scale riots in the US these are being compared to were for people demanding to be full citizens. The two situations are hardly analagous in substance.

Lane Brody

Posted by: Lane Brody | November 10, 2005 at 12:38 AM

I completely agree with your conclusion. When you look at the economic figures, Europe still seems an impressive trade bloc. But the foundations of Europe (economic and social) are very weak and slowing eroding.

The US should not expect any support from Europe. I think it will be rather the other way around: the US will have to support Europe to cope with the inevitable changes.

Posted by: Sandra Plas | November 10, 2005 at 11:47 AM

I was going to write something substantive here until I started to look at the Terms of Use agreement. Bureaucracy on a blog. Feh.

So I posted here instead.

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