By Mark LeVine, professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture, and Islamic studies at the University of California at Irvine:
At the turn of the twentieth century large numbers of the colonized began migrating to their autre mère -- France -- to work at the kinds of jobs the French, facing a severe labor shortage, didn't want to do. Not surprisingly, the republican ideal of equality for all citizens remained a distant dream. Indeed, the binary and hierarchical divisions of French colonialism only intensified in the mother country. There, the danger that the vrais français might be contaminated by the backward and (even today in the view of Interior and Religion Minister Nicolas Sarkozy) not-fully-human Other, was that much greater. Indeed, the republican ideals of liberty and equality, when adopted by immigrants from the colonies, threatened both French rule abroad and white supremacy at home. Segregating immigrants into ghettos, where they could be better monitored by security forces specifically created for such purposes, seemed an effective solution.
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If globalization produces many economic dilemmas, it creates cultural crises no less potent in their threat to the status quo. As a recent article in Liberation argued, "The French model" in which people have "to forget their identity" to assimilate "cannot survive globalization." This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. Decades of discriminatory assimilationism have produced, geographically at least, a "ghetto Islam" that is now viewed as a primary breeding ground for al-Qa'eda's global jihadis. But if the violence of the last two weeks has revealed anything positive, it is how unsuccessful extremist Muslim groups have been in significantly penetrating the urban youth culture of the banlieues. Islam is not the problem, then; rather the problem is that the majority of the residents of the banlieues are Muslim and/or black, and have been discriminated against on account of this for the entire history of the Republic.
Muslims might be physically ghettoized, but hundreds of interviews with teenage youth in the French and American press since the start of the violence offer a striking picture of those in revolt: They are rebelling precisely because they still dream of being accepted as French, not because they've given up on such a project. (Indeed, how one defines French identity is certainly one crucial issue that is up for grabs here). Several thoughtful French commentators even interpret the violence as a "refusal of marginalization" that reflects a deep acceptance of fundamental French values expressed in the "coupling of liberty and equality."
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