Misfits

When resentment builds up to the point where desperation takes over, the more benign forms of social control are no longer effective. When 10% of a nation’s members are set aside because of their geographic ancestry, when their customs are stigmatised and their living space is ghettoised, and when crime is their most credible success story, there is a concentration of psychological and physical violence that the rest of society prefers to ignore, until it suddenly exposes itself in all its horror. The ghetto’s youth is supposed to be content with rap, tags and drug deals. A few cross the barrier, sever their roots and toe the line, which makes them dubious role models, but what of those who reject the deviousness of both ‘hustling’ and ‘integrating’? For them there is no place anywhere, so their refusal has to be radical.

A social outcast may find solace in religion, especially if it has a universal message that transcends race and class and offers a spiritual community. In the US, the Afro-American and Latin-American minorities are Christians, culturally if not in practice. In Europe, The minorities from French ex-colonial Africa, from the British ex-Raj in India and from the ex-Ottoman Empire are mainly of Moslem cultures. In the US, someone with Mexican ancestry may share his faith/culture with someone whose ancestors came from Poland or Italy, and someone with Congolese ancestry may share her faith/culture with someone whose ancestors came from Scotland or Germany. In Europe there is no such concurrence between the Moslem minority and the Christian majority, so the racial and social divide is aggravated by a religious one. And, as racism is universally condemned in its public expression, the religious/cultural difference has been given pre-eminence. Having found no place in secular society and having their faith pilloried and mocked, the recourse to violence by those whose only world is their religion seems a predictable reaction. In Islam there is no Gethsemane, no crucifixion, no tradition of being herded into circuses to be mauled by lions. From the start, Moslem martyrs went down fighting on the battle-field.

Europe is awakening with a start to a situation that has been smouldering for at least a generation. Thirty years ago in France, an anti-racist movement whose slogan was ‘Touche pas à mon pote’ (Don’t touch my pal) attracted massive support. And again in 1998, when France hosted the FIFA World Cup and won it with a multi-ethnic team, there was a great emotional sentiment of being all together. But nothing happened, no decisions were taken, no affirmative actions, no educational priorities, nothing on housing, no communal activities in the arts and sport, just some symbolic gestures, an institute, a museum, and all was back as usual. Except that the mounting pressure of new immigrants, many of them clandestine, could only make matters worse. Hannah Arendt’s comment on Europe in the 1930s is close to the present situation, only the names have changed.

Where a wave of refugees found members of their own nationality already settled in the country to which they immigrated – as was the case with the Armenians and Italians in France, for example, and with Jews everywhere – a certain retrogression set in in the assimilation of those who had been there longer. For their help and solidarity could be mobilised only by appealing to the original nationality they had in common with the newcomers. This point was of immediate interest to countries flooded by refugees but unable or unwilling to give them direct help or the right to work. In all these cases, national feelings of the older group proved to be ‘one of the main factors in the successful establishment of the refugees’ (Simpson), but by appealing to such national conscience and solidarity, the receiving countries naturally increased the number of unassimilated aliens. To take one particularly interesting instance, 10,000 Italian refugees were enough to postpone indefinitely the assimilation of almost one million Italian immigrants in France. (1)

Assimilating a different religious culture does not work, and ignoring its presence is a dangerous denial. Granting it the same rights and privileges, the same influence in public affairs and the same capacity to spread its ideas as the established religious cultures is possible in the US, which has never experienced a monolithic church. In all European nations church and state were intimately intertwined. (In the 17^th century, French monarchs styled themselves ‘The Most Christian King’, and Spanish ones were ‘The Catholic King’. For the Holy Roman Empire the formula was: Cuis regio, eius religio i.e. Rulers determine religion. And in England Protestant parliaments got rid of two Catholic kings, 1649 and 1688, before abolishing them for ever.) And their recent separations are still incomplete, so neither can admit a new partner in this waning relationship. Especially in those nations like France that had been ‘cleansed’ of Protestantism by war, murder and oppression, and where religious tolerance is a very recent experience that is tainted by a rejection of the Roman Church as a reactionary influence close to the absolutism of kings and tyrants. Even today the Catholic position on abortion, contraception, homosexuality and assisted suicide is contrary to opinions held by the liberal left. And the Moslem religion is perceived to be just as retrograde if not more so.

Because of the ambiguous relation between the lay Republic and the Catholic Church, and because of its colonial past in North Africa, France is least able to admit a Moslem minority. As an extreme simplification it can be said that the right rejects them for their origins, and the left rejects them for their faith. Those with racist or anticlerical opinions have a shared aversion, and each side can denounce the other’s attitude to justify its own, which has so far avoided unanimity. Yet, despite its incapacity to admit them, France has more inhabitants of Moslem cultural origins than other Western European nations. And the number is growing with countless arrivals from war-weary countries to the South and East of the Mediterranean. The outcome is not preordained, but Arendt’s analysis of the 1930s noted the premises of things to come.

The nation-state, incapable of providing a law for those who had lost the protection of a national government, transferred the whole matter to the police. This was the first time the police in Western Europe had received authority to act on its own, to rule directly over people; in one sphere of public life it was no longer an instrument to carry out and enforce the law, but had become a ruling authority independent of government and ministries. Its strength and its emancipation from law and government grew in direct proportion to the influx of refugees. The greater the ratio of stateless and potentially stateless to the population at large – in pre-war France it had reached 10 per cent of the total – the greater the danger of a gradual transformation into a police state. (2)

That is where the danger lies. The risk of falling under the total control of security agencies cannot be balanced by that of being murdered by distraught youths brought up on violence. And though individuals may without consequence value life above freedom, when a nation does the same it is doomed.

1. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, part 2, chapter 9, page 285, note 39

2. p. 287/8