The pleasant death of the national identity debate

Complaint about a lack of Breton instructions at the Rennes train station. (click to enlarge)

While the big discussion in Washington (other than the snow) lately seems to have been the atavistic Tea Party Convention and the various fantasies of the American that were put on display within (I won’t link to anything since, remember, I’m no longer reading about US politics), the debate about national identity in France, an official debate launched by the government in the beginning of November, died a quiet death. Finished with a few toothless suggestions. But it’s worth looking into what, exactly, happened here over the past three months to see if, perhaps, national identity is changing as a means of categorization.

First, though, the context and “les repères”: Sarkozy promised a “grand débat sur l’identité nationale” during his presidential campaign, and he tapped erstwhile socialist Éric Besson, the Minister of Immigration, to manage the project. Over the course of three months, 350 debates were organized around the country, and there was a site established for online debate. Mostly, though, the debate provided opportunities for Sarkozyists in the government to stuff their feet into their mouths, as it became quickly clear that this debate was, actually, as Laurent Joffrin explains in his editorial in today’s Libération, “Pet de lapin [a rabbit fart, a puff of air],” an injust and catastrophic indictment of Islam.

Libé put together a timeline of the good and the bad, and it reminded me of how much effort there was to get the government to drop the whole issue, but the government kept up the façade of caring until now, as PM François Fillon has “buried” (in Libé‘s words) the whole debate. Besson is political poison, and the suggestions, which include, basically, “um, take teaching civics classes seriously and give kids a chance once a year to sing la Marseillaise” are a mockery.

In a recent poll, 63% of respondents claimed that the debate was unconstructive, and I can give anecdotal evidence toward that. Last weekend, I was chit chatting with some young French, and somehow I felt it ok to bring up this topic. I was immediately punched in the arm and yelled at by one of the people, who spun around and walked away. My crime had been that I said that I was “interested in the debate.” I later corrected myself to say that “what interests me about the debate is that the government thought that this would be a good idea.” The puncher relented; she agreed that it was insanity.

Similarly, only a few weeks into the debate, I was handed a flyer, penned by the PCF. The short version of the text was something like this: “with the economy collapsing all around us, the Sarkozy government thinks that every French family should be gathered around the dinner table, discussing what it means to be French.”¹

But this all feels like, mostly, introduction, since there are a few thoughts beyond this context that the debate has brought up. First, the PCF argument recalls the century-old argument about using national identity to fracture a class. During a time of economic crisis (or, say, J.P. Morgan’s War), it seems like a cynical ploy in the extreme to start the wheels of xenophobic wagon. I read elsewhere that the debate was immediately blown off as a transparent ruse to gain support for the UMP in the upcoming regional elections (elections where, at least according to recent polling, the PS stands to maintain its dominance). Yet by even launching the debate, it suggests that there are non-French within France, which problematizes the idea of equality, since now some people are more French (those who don’t wear baseball caps or speak verlan, in one minister’s terrible turn of phrase) than others. So what has a fantasy about equality ends up generating precisely the opposite, as anger and resentment bubbles to the surface.

Second, though, and this returns to the puncher mentioned above, I found it interesting that people were perhaps afraid of the debate. They called on the president to halt it. They punched people who brought it up. The debate would have consequences, and so on. But this is a sort of flip of the same coin–the French are convinced that they’re (largely? loudly?) racist and xenophobic, and don’t want to broadcast that, so they wrap the xenophobia, as it were, with debates about burqas and identity. Since in France, perversely, the happy multiculturalism that is the neoliberal state’s explosive wet dream is tossed aside for a militant “laïcité,” in which demonstrating religious affiliation in public is seen as promoting the “communautaire” (the anti-republican “community” of clannish or religious ties), a debate over national identity becomes muddied by the very desires (equality) that it cannot help but undermine.

That is, on the one hand, the debate inherently wrecks equality, since it assumes that there is a proper “French” and an improper “French.” The ludicrous flaccidity of the recommendations shows how disinterested in actually figuring the scale out the government was. On the other hand, equality is used as the reason for the debate: we’re all equal here in France, so those of you acting unFrench have to get with the program if you want to be a part of France–you have to learn to respect equality. The preferred solution seems to be to put off the debate, so that the inequalities in France, both social and economic (it remains a fact in France that it’s much tougher to get called in for an interview if your CV has a foreign-looking name or lists a telling address from a bidonville), get put out of view as well.

It’s not just that the debate reveals some French as racist and xenophobic, which it does, but it also forces a subsequent debate on money. And that, I would argue, is the debate that the Sarkozy government really doesn’t want to have (or, say, the person who punched me).

Yet the begged question here remains that national identity itself is important. Questioning that seems to have not really come up, even in the anti-debate press I’ve read, but that, to me, seems to be the crucial question. It shouldn’t be “What does being French mean to you?” (“Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final…“) but, rather, “why do you care what ‘being French’ is?” I don’t think this is, immanently, a racist question, but I wonder if its current unintelligibility–and the attendant anxiety over that–is a feature of a post-Europe world, which is to say, the “l’identité nationale, je m’en fous!” world. As such, it becomes ironic that it’s the neoliberal Sarkozy government, aligned with trampling worker’s rights and globalizing, that’s panicking over the state that its policies have wrought.

So who knows. I’m new to this stuff, but I found it a pleasant coincidence that the debate happened contemporaneous with my arrival. I have no idea what it means to be French (though lately, I’ll settle for “having raclette at least once in the winter”), but after rereading U.S.A., considering how Dos Passos cares somehow very deeply about an American identity, and then rereading Probyn’s Outside Belongings, which argues for a sense of identity that is not fixed in a person’s interior, but is still important, I wonder if I haven’t been too cavalier about the “en” in the “je m’en fous” above. In a Probynesque reading, “being French” is important, then, but it’s not important to figure out how one is French. Belonging, and feeling like one is part of a network–that’s the key. And that’s something that I don’t think the French have to worry about yet.

1. A similar reaction surrounds the effectively theoretical debate over whether it should be legal to wear a burqa in public (theoretical considering how few people would actually do it), as this post on the NYRB‘s blog, brought to my attention by Sepoy, demonstrates. [↩]

Tags: Chapati Mystery, elspeth probyn, Éric Besson, France, identity, John Dos Passos, laïcité, Libération, nationalism, new york review of books, Nicolas Sarkozy, t.s. eliot