-
40. Republican Integration: Reflections on a Postcolonial Issue (1961–2006)
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
40 republican integration Reflections on a Postcolonial Issue (1961–2006) vincent Geisser in the 1980s and 1990s, integration became a catchword, an incontrovertible refrain in political discourse for government intervention, used by nonprofit organizations , social experts, and researchers.1 Though historically a highly charged term, this “notion” has annihilated the possibility of critical distance. integrationist rhetoric has functioned as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, finding its justification in its very enunciation. The sociologist dominique schnapper, now a member of the Constitutional Council, wrote the following in 1991: “By definition , no matter the national ideology, the nation constructs itself through a process of continuous integration. The so-called politics of ‘integration,’ through which we debate the issue of immigrants, is not a choice among other possibilities . rather, it is a fact, a necessity.”2 There is no denying that an “integrationist doctrine”3 has dominated French thought, and that it has gone all but uncontested, that is, until a handful of “critical intellectuals”4 dared to break the republican idol. They underscored both its “nationalist overtones” and its reputed filiation with colonial ideology: “This discourse legitimizing the continuation of colonization was supposedly a way to break with ‘assimilation,’ which negated cultural uniqueness. it appears, however, that this change was more nominal than substantive.”5 some even saw this term as a kind of symbolic balancing with respect to the excesses and failures of colonial assimilation.6 all told, integration as a “quotidian active concept” is a euphemized renewal of the old assimilationist project. as such, it reproduces the culturalist divisions inherited from the colonial period,7 and hides behind a “rigged universalism”8 so as to better convince the most egalitarian and humanist among us. The figures of the immigrant and of the migrant descendant have come to replace that of the native. Though this sociohistorical critique—integration as a “modernized” form of assimilation—is indeed coherent, it is important not to be duped into a myth of deus ex machina, as though the “doctrine of integration” formed a totalizing whole. Here, Jim Cohen’s critique of modes of representation that reify the 497 498 | Geisser “model” of american integration can, in large part, be applied to France.9 integrationist rhetoric, rather than being unshakable, is a translation of a confusion of symbolic elements, as well as a disenchanted vision of the world: it affords individuals , groups, and institutions the possibility of decoding an increasingly complex reality, feeding a fantasy of a society on the verge of a breakdown. The polysemic notion of integration is a symptom of the current trend to create prescribed meaning and anxiety-based uncertainty with one sole element (postcolonial immigration): “in this sense, it contributes more to the problem than it does to solving it.”10 starting with the profound ambivalence of the French myth of “republican integration,”11 i shall attempt to trace the filiation of this notion with both the old Third republic assimilationist “dream” and the dying Fourth republic’s final projects of integration (1954–1958).12 in my opinion, integration should be considered as a rhetoric of crisis, a discourse that attaches itself to feelings—not always articulated—that the “old world” is coming to an end and a “new world” emerging . it is not random that integration, in terms of its common sense meaning, has been “summoned” at three key moments of our contemporary history: the reevaluation of the foundations of France’s colonial empire following the second World War (1944–1946), the search for a “French solution” to the algerian crisis (1954–1958), and, more recently, the rejection of the “great socialist utopia”13 (mideighties ) and the subsequent economic and social “realist” turn. at each point, integration came to signify efforts to “re-nationalize French identity,”14 which was thought to be threatened by centrifugal forces. The history of integration thus traces a kind of Republican genealogy,15 a political rhetoric of crisis(-es). it tells the dramatic story of the “empire’s demise,” the fall of which can still be felt today. a Brief “republican Genealogy” of a discourse of Crisis(-es) integration’s success story belongs in the context of a labyrinth of discursive turns and rhetorical devices used by successive French governments to deal with pressures from colonial emancipation movements in asia, sub-saharan africa, the Caribbean, and the Maghreb. it is a performative narrative, with real consequences , that covers all aspects of a problématique imposée (given problematic):16 the central state and its...