8 Reconfiguring Nations

8 Reconfiguring nations Identities, belonging, and multiculturalism in the wake of postcolonial migration Introduction ‘Will we still be French in thirty years’ time?’ asked Jean Raspail in Le Figaro Magazine in 1985. By 2015, ‘France would no longer be a nation’ but rather ‘nothing more than a geographical space’, and his anxiety over the allegedly imperilled ‘fate of our civilization’ centred on the differential birth rate of two composite ‘communities’ into which he divided the nation’s population. The first consisted of persons of French nationality together with those who had come to France from other European countries; the second of ‘non-European foreigners’ hailing primarily from south of the Mediterranean, 90 per cent being of the ‘Islamic culture or religion’. While the fecundity of the first was weak, that of the second was estimated as three times higher and showed no signs of abating. So many non-Europeans could never be assimilated, he stressed, not least because the groups in question possessed values that made them unlikely to want – or even be able – to integrate. Raspail continually returned to Islam along with the identity and size of the next generation of ‘non-Europeans’ as constituting pivotal national threats. Moreover, after family reunification in France became increasingly common in the wake of what initially had been a predominantly male labour migration, Muslim women became as significant as their children within French public discussions of the threat ‘immigrants’ supposedly posed to the nation. Raspail’s article was accompanied by a series of graphs and charts detailing population projections and a photograph depicting Marianne, the female allegorical sym- bol of the republic, wearing an Islamic headscarf. This visual image was intended to support his assertion that ‘darkness was falling on the old Christian country’; Islam, in other words, was descending to enshroud France’s deep-rooted and cherished traditions. He predicted that by 2015 each school would have one ‘Maghrebi or African’ child for every two ‘Français de souche’, children of ‘French stock’. While the notion of the old classroom expression ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ being ‘imposed upon little Algerians or little Africans’ might seem risible, it could be no laughing matter: ‘The Gauls could be swept away and with them all that remains of our 322 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universiteit Maastricht, on 18 Jan 2021 at 11:57:53, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139047777.009 Reconfiguring nations 323 traditional cultural values’.1 In this understanding, children of North African or sub-Saharan African immigrants not only were not, and could never be, French themselves. Even more worryingly, their very presence and difference threatened to subsume the nation’s historic culture under their weight – a ‘culture’ he implied was homogenous, unchanging, and closed, at least to non-Europeans. Raspail proposed forced repatriation as the only viable solu- tion to this peril. By 1985, both Jean Raspail and his chosen subject matter had been familiar features of France’s ideological landscape for well over a decade. Espousing ideas of the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right) that coalesced in the late 1960s and proliferated throughout the 1970s, he was one of many commentators to draw upon a long history of anxieties about France’s birth rate and population decline to promote a defensive brand of ethnic nationalism. Outlets like Le Figaro Magazine, the weekend supplement of a conservative daily newspaper launched in 1978 that was owned and edited by prominent Nouvelle Droite figures, allowed these views to incrementally make their mark on public and political culture. At its core, commentators like Raspail argued, France constituted an organic community whose cultural integrity derived from ancient Greco-Roman roots.2 This version of national identity (often but not invariably containing strong Catholic underpinnings) was one firmly fixed north of the Mediterranean – a radical and profoundly forgetful departure from the conception of the nation so recently widespread among defenders of French Algeria, who had proclaimed much of North Africa to be an integral part of France as well. Having retreated into its European hexagon so unwil- lingly, France was now deemed internally jeopardized by the very peoples over whom it had failed to maintain sovereignty overseas through ‘reverse colonization’.3 1 Jean Raspail, ‘Serons-nous encore Français dans 30 ans?’, Le Figaro Magazine, 26 October 1985, 123–32 (quotes taken from 123, 125, 126, 129, 132). Images of Marianne in a headscarf appeared on the cover of this issue and on p. 123; to view the cover, see www.nouve lordremondial.cc/2014/09/19/figaro-magazine-en-1985-serons-nous-encore-francais-dans-30-a ns/, accessed 28 July 2015. 2 J.G. Shields, The Extreme Right in France from Pétain to Le Pen (London, 2007), 144–59; Charles Tshimanga, ‘Let the Music Play: The African Diaspora, Popular Culture, and National Identity in Contemporary France’, in Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom (eds.), Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France (Bloomington, 2009), 261–3. 3 Christopher Flood and Hugo Frey, ‘Questions of Decolonization and Post-Colonialism in the Ideology of the French Extreme Right’, in James D. Le Sueur (ed.), The Decolonization Reader (London, 2003), 404. Raspail discussed similar threats of Third World ‘invasion’ in his apoc- alyptic novel Le camp des Saints, first published in 1973 and soon translated into English as The Camp of the Saints. Ever controversial, over time it developed a following among white supremacist groups in the United States and elsewhere. See Jean-Marc Moura, ‘Littérature et idéologie de la migration: “Le camp des Saints” de Jean Raspail’, Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, 4:3 (1988), 115–24; Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy, ‘Must Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universiteit Maastricht, on 18 Jan 2021 at 11:57:53, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139047777.009 324 Migrations and multiculturalisms in postcolonial Europe What Raspail’s rendition wilfully overlooked was that in the mid-1980s many if not most second-generation descendants of postcolonial migrants upon whom he fixated were already French citizens, either through being born in France or by automatically becoming French after reaching the age of majority.4 Nor was he alone on the European right. As Ahmed Boubeker observes, ‘[t]he foreigner is no longer one who comes from elsewhere, but rather one that is permanently reproduced within the social body ... Like a social or ethnic partition of the hexagon, there is a radical rupture between recognized citizens and second-class ones.’5 Did non-European ancestry render formerly colonized peoples and their descendants perennially unable and/or unwilling to belong in France and other European nations where growing numbers had been born and raised by the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Were they condemned to a status as ‘either/or’ within essentialist constructions of cultural and national identity – as either Algerian or French, Pakistani or British, Surinamese or Dutch, among many others – regardless of their citizenship, and whether they sought to integrate or not? In grappling with these questions, this chapter assesses national responses to cultural and ethnic pluralism alongside the hybrid cultures and new ethnic identities that emerged, and continually evolved, among postcolonial diasporas across the generations and more broadly within the societies where they settled. In so doing, it positions local spaces such as the schools, multi-ethnic neighbourhoods, and cities where cosmopolitan cultures were most commonly produced, consumed, experi- enced, or observed as central to the history of remaking European nations after empire. By the late twentieth century France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal were already home to ethnically-diverse citizenries, but the extent to which they accorded legitimacy and official recognition to minority cultures varied considerably and fluctuated markedly over time. Albeit multicultural in reality, they often fell far short of espousing multiculturalism as part of their national imaginary. Multiculturalism emerged starting in the 1970s as ‘a broad set of mutually reinforcing approaches or methodologies concerning the incor- poration and participation of immigrants and ethnic minorities and their modes it Be the Rest Against the West?’, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1994, www.theatlantic.com/ past/politics/immigrat/kennf.htm; Lionel Shriver, ‘Population in Literature’, Population and Development Review, 29:2 (2003), 153–62. 4 Alec G. Hargreaves, Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society, 2nd edn. (New York, 2007), 29–30. 5 Ahmed Boubeker, ‘Le “creuset français”, ou la légende noire de l’intégration’, in Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire (eds.), La fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris, 2005), 188–9. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universiteit Maastricht, on 18 Jan 2021 at 11:57:53, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139047777.009 Reconfiguring

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