Posts Tagged "National Identity"

Analysis: The Roma and the Republic

The news from France is very bad.

Over the summer, President Sarkozy and the French Government have deported about 1,000 Roma people to Romania and Bulgaria. The mass expulsion of a community (based on ethnicity), the likes of which we have not seen in Europe since the Second World War, was duly met with widespread condemnation.

The European Parliament passed a non-binding resolution that Sarkozy put a stop to his expulsion of the Roma, calling the measures “discriminatory and contrary to Community law” and pointing out that that collective expulsions violate European law because they discriminate based on race.” So the question of whether this was a good or bad, legal or illegal is essentially over.

However, in an article on LabourList (here) Claude Moreas MEP made only the most superficial analysis of the political situation in France, which was callous at best and wrong at worst; so what I hope to do in this article is explain in detail the political reasons why Sarkozy ordered the Roma expulsion.

Part One : A Classic Power Struggle

Unsurprisingly, the motive for the Roma Expulsions can be traced to the beginning of summer between a minister and his contemporary, both of whom have their power bases where I live in Nice.

Christian Estrosi, the Mayor of Nice, an MP and Minister for Industry has always been a close friend of Nicolas Sarkozy. Estrosi, locally, has a friend called Eric Ciotti, who used to be his parliamentary aide until he was installed as President of the General Council (the Department of the Alpes-Maritimes) as a sort of deputy figure, and also became an MP.

Ciotti became the darling of his right-wing UMP party, earning the creative nickname “Monsieur Sécurité” thanks to his plans to punish the parents of troublesome teens. Meanwhile, Estrosi was involved in an expenses scandal over his daughters Parisian apartment. Appearing several times consecutively in Le Canard Enchainé (that’s like Private Eye) means the press smells blood.

So the apprentice began to eclipse the master. With a big reshuffle on the way, Estrosi was terrified that he would be kicked out and, even worse, that he would be made the junior partner to Ciotti. Even worse than that would be if Ciotti were to become Interior Minister – the classic springboard to the Presidency.

Estrosi had to catch up. He had to show that he could out-do Ciotti on security. He launched an attack way outside his brief with a plan to punish “laxist” mayors who didn’t do enough to protect their towns. It was born out of the Grenoble incident and at the same time a jab at the Socialist Party leader, Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille who has no security cameras in the streets. (Crime dropped by 0.9% in Aubry’s Lille compared to 0.5% in Estrosi’s Nice, by the way.)

Part Two: The Big Red Security button

In his LabourList piece, Moreas claimed that Sarkozy was

“Playing politics with peoples’ lives, he has reinforced his centre right constituency, attracting votes from people who may otherwise have been happier with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s ‘Front National’. As a strategy it’s working.”

What the Labour MEP forgot to add is that in March there will be elections for the departments (Cantonales for the Conseil Général). More importantly, these elections will be the last electoral test before the Presidentials in 2012.

However, Moreas was wrong to think that the “Steal Front National votes” strategy is working. Think back to last March and the Regional Elections, it was the FN that was able to steal UMP votes after a disastrous debate on National Identity. The Socialists won 21 out of 22 Regions.

So on the one hand we have the upcoming elections, and on the other we have the ministerial financial scandal “l’Affaire Woerth” that Sarkozy has been desperate to get off the front pages. He needed an opportunity to change to a higher gear.

Part Three : The Roma scapegoat

I wrote about the Grenoble incident nearer the time (a Roma was killed by a policeman which provoked other Roma to commit acts of vandalism), remarking that I thought it was strange that the President would get so involved in a relatively minor event.

I hope it’s clear now that I have put it in the wider context. This was the spark that lit the bonfire. Sarkozy had everything he needed to push the debate away from corruption and economics to security and immigration. Suddenly the Roma were perfect targets.

I return to the piece from Claude Moreas MEP:

“In fact, I recently led a delegation to meet Eric Besson, the French Europe Minister. [...] Sarkozy will not worry too much – he sees his actions as popular amongst centre and far right voters in France. As with the burka ban, he knows too that French Socialists may not go out on a limb to make this a national election issue.”

Two embarrassing and worrying errors here. Most concerning is the simple error that Eric Besson is not the French Europe Minister, he is in fact the Minister for Immigration, Integration and National Identity. This is important to understand not just because the Labour MEP didn’t know to whom he was talking, but moreover the title of “Immigration and National Identity” deliberately implies that the first is a menace to the second.

The other error is the claim that the Socialists won’t oppose the expulsions very seriously. It’s wrong because they (we?) have done, last Saturday in Nice alone around 5,000 people from the Socialists to the Greens to the Trade Unions to Human Rights organisations protested in the streets. Nice, I remind you, is one of the most pro-Sarkozy places in the country, and the home of dear Christian Estrosi.

Conclusion

For the elections, it is likely that the Roma will not be a central issue though, largely due to the fact that it has backfired spectacularly against Sarkozy. I think the Socialists will be more likely to use it as an example to paint the government as anti-republican. In any case, the Socialists would be wise not to rise to the bait but keep attacking on the Economy and Pension Reform.

The events this summer have brought shame on the French Republic, and Sarkozy has assaulted its key values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity for his own cynical purposes. Certainly, the March elections will make an exciting run up to the 2012 Presidentials.

Then he came for the Roma

The Right, particularly the French right, always plays on fear.

It’s one of the major reasons why in 2002, Chirac and Le Pen ran their campaigns  on security, which made the distinctly un-authoritarian Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin loook quite far out to sea.

Sarkozy, with a distinctly more right wing agenda than Chirac ever ran, has moved from one enemy to the next.

First, he came for the racaille, which roughly translates as ‘scum’ or perhaps more appropriately the ‘chavs’. Then he went after the burka, a post I’ll write soon enough.

His next target to divert attention from his flailing popularity ratings is to attack… the gypsies!

It follows from this weekend in Loir-et-Cher, where the police shot a gypsy in a road-block related incident. Upset by this, the ‘travallers’ began a rampage of vandalism in the local villages.

This morning in Cabinet, he thus announced a special meeting on the 28th to “tackle the problems posed by ‘travellers’ and their behavior” while also announcing the expulsion of all ‘irregular’  encampments.

Sarko’s “hyperpresidentialism” is well known, but I really do not consider this, though unacceptable, to be an event worthy of such a large amount of attention from the President of the French Republic. At the very limit, it’s something for the Prime Minister, and certainly more in the domain of the Interior Minister (that’s the Home Secretary.)

I come back to my introduction for a moment; the French right always plays on fear, and is an expert in focusing on a detail to turn it into a generalisation. It scares people.

The next issue is that he called the entire community gens du voyage which I translate as ‘travellers’ or at least ‘travelling people’. It of course supposed to imply that the entire group have no fixed domicile, don’t pay taxes, don’t have incomes (fortune telling not included) yet do have cars and spend a lot of time begging.

The French have never liked gypsies (they’re not French, after all), but for Sarkozy to start finger-wagging at such a group, no matter how marginal and poorly integrated (probably their fault as much as the French’s) at what is quite simply just delinquency and petty crime, which are by no means rare activities, seems misleading to me.

Francophones might like to read this piece from a journalist at Le Figaro as well, here.

The cynical manipulation of National Identity

The phrase National Identity has become increasingly familiar in current political discourse, despite the fact that nationalism and nationhood are far from being new ideas in Europe.

Typically, it is the Right and Far-Right which profits from and occupies itself with concerns over identity. Excluding Gordon Brown’s occasional remarks on possibly considering planning a “British Day” and citizenship classes, British National identity tends to be restricted to the hard-line Eurosceptic Tories and UKIPpers as a means to denounce the European Union and the core campaign front of the British National Party.

In France, by contrast, National Identity has been a strong recurring theme since President de Gaulle in the 1960s. Even now, Nicolas Sarkozy has launched a campaign for a ‘great debate on National Identity’ in events organised across the country.

However, though I am well known for clear opinions and a willingness to discuss contentious issues in free, pluralistic and useful debate, Sarkozy’s campaign has none of these three traits. It is not free because it is his government which sets the agenda, asks the questions and controls the answers. It is not pluralistic because it tries to hammer diversity into a single rigid identity. It is not useful because it is nothing but a divisive tool designed to stigmatise foreigners.

National Identity, as opposed to regional identity, is an artificial Napoleonic concept. As such, it is driven by the state as a means to define a citizen’s place in order to encourage and pressure people into conformity and submission.

Identity is not assigned, fixed and then closed; it is based on a set of political and social principles which are open and organic. This is why the EU struggles time after time to create a European Identity. The French Republic, above all else, is founded on its liberty of expression, its equality of rights and its fraternity of people. Equally, Britain is based on values of justice, tolerance and respect.

Thus the Far Right can only profit from National Identity using an outdated and narrow definition. As part of Sarkozy’s debate, Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of the Front National, held a rally in Marseilles (he is standing in the PACA Regional Election) claiming the debate swung in his party’s favour. This announcement was backed up by the polls; the FN has now hit 10% in the region; up four points since October. He promised a “cruel surprise” for Nicolas Sarkozy in March.

In my summer by-election, there was a party known as Nissa Rebelda, which is also known as Nissa Identiaire; which is a good example of fascist “identity politics” though fairly new they did equally well as the FN.

Similarly, in Britain, Nick Griffin was attacked on Question Time for hijacking Churchill’s image by declaring that he would have been a BNP member. He stole an important symbol of National Identity to use for his own political gain, suggesting that he would protect Britain from a perceived threat using Churchill standing up to the Nazis as an ironic metaphor.

The threat has traditionally been on racial and religious grounds, well before nations were founded. Now, as academics (and myself) discuss the nature of globalisation, national identity is attached to immigration and sovereignty despite, or as a consequence of the fact that national borders are becoming more porous and nations more co-dependent.

As sovereignty is increasingly shared and people are increasingly mobile, National Identity as a political construct can no longer exist as a single, rigid image. Identity is a perception. If someone feels that their identity is threatened it is often the case that their identity is at odds with the identity of another.

Though concerns about immigration and citizenship should not be dismissed, it is not acceptable to suggest that, in the name of National Identity; someone is “less” British or has “less” right to be in the country than someone else.

This is the politics of fear; bitterness and aggression. The discussion on National Identity is not framed around who you are; it is about who you are not.

Facing the French public, and joining in

Today I embarked on the first of the international political practice of leafleting and petition signing.

I’ve thus been getting involved in the campaign against the construction of line 2 for trams on the Promenade des Anglais, which is the long walkway and road that goes along the front of the sea and, of course, the beach. I’ve only been there briefly so far (where I saw that, like English beaches, it is in fact mainly stones, but, unlike English beaches, the sea is blue and appealing) but all you need to know is that the site is very beautiful, and that’s what everyone comes to see. (Evidence of this to follow in the post).

A group of us went to the Palais de Justice (the courthouse) where there is a square outside at 1000h to get started. Approach someone with the clipboard: “Bonjour Monsieur/Madame, dites non au tram sur la prom?”

The majority of the time I just got a simple but polite “non merci” though in two hours I managed to get about 20 signatures. My main cultural question is at what point a Mademoiselle becomes a Madame, so I had to restrict my efforts to old women in that sense to remove all doubt. A few people where busy, a few poilte, a few in favour of the tramway there and a few people with questions.

I managed to develop a few arguments in case I had some inquisitive people (and some took AGES to make their point, so I smile and nod and make affirmations like “Really?” “You’re right” until they stop and sign), though they were more akin to 1970s Soviet Rockets that an American Stealth Bomber in their sophistication, but it is day 3 after all.

If there are any French speakers who read this, I suggest you head over to the campaign website.

Still, all good fun for cultural learning.

In a similar vein, I’m delighted to say that I have already been asked directions by tourists who speak French badly worse than I do. It seems like I’m joining it quite well.

On a slightly more fun point, if any one you are going to France soon, see how many stereotypes cultural experiences you can find (I’ve done all these ones so far):

• People walking around with more than one baguette under their arm
• Someone throwing a cigarette not at you directly, but just where you are about to walk
• A French flag
• A French flag flying next to a European Union Flag
• A French flag flying next to a European Union Flag flying next to ANOTHER French Flag
• The words Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité inscribed somewhere
• Seeing someone almost get hit by a car even though they were at a crossing when the green man was shining
• A woman on a bicycle with a basket full of vegetables (I assume there were onions)
• Someone almost getting their toes cut off my a cyclist
• A man playing an accordian!