In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

“French model of integration.”23 In light of these developments, perhaps the crisis of French national identity is not just a “real crisis” as experienced by the population but also and perhaps most important the tendency to overreact to that crisis among the country’s policy makers. The evolution of antidiscrimination policy in each country displays clear signs of convergence. As noted above, Britain has not wavered in its commitment to antidiscrimination, while France has been catching up. Most important, both the consolidation of discrimination law in Britain and its birth in France have taken place under the aegis of EU policy. The creation of legislation against discrimination in the workplace in Britain in 2003 was the translation into British law of a European directive, as were France’s efforts to create meaningful legislation and to establish the HALDE in 2004. Finally, some the most recent evolutions in France also suggest convergence because they seem to emulate some of Britain’s most recent initiatives. This is the case of some of the new French provisions on citizenship requirements for new migrants. A 2005 law on immigration, called the Law on Social Cohesion (Loi sur la Cohésion Sociale), created a Contrat d’Accueil et d’Intégration (CAI; Contract of Welcome and Integration) for newly arrived immigrants who want to settle in France for more than a year.24 Like the British measures, the contract involves language classes and a test on French history and culture. In the same period, the organization Fonds d’Action pour le Soutien, l’Intégration et la Lutte Contre les Discriminations (FASILD; Fund for Action and Support for Integration and the Support against Discriminations), which for decades has provided funds immigrant community organizations, has seen its funding reduced.25 Its name was also changed in 2006 to Agence pour la Cohésion Sociale et l’Egalité des Chances (ACSE; Agency for Social Cohesion and Equality of Opportunities). Convergence on Islam The convergence is also based on a common tendency to construct debates on diversity increasingly in terms of religious, rather than ethnic or racial, diversity, in particular with respect to the place of Muslims. Debates on immigration and diversity in both countries have become inextricably enmeshed with the dilemmas posed to the government by Islam. In Britain, this became particularly visible in the years that immediately followed the 2005 London bombings. Tony Blair’s speeches in the months following the July 2005 bomb attacks in London insisted on “the duty to integrate” and “shared British values.”26 A few months later he also noted that the suicide bombings of July had “thrown the whole concept of multicultural Britain into sharp relief.”27 Recent debates on immigrant integration in France have not become dominated by the question of Islam to the same extent as in Britain, but there is uneasiness in France about the religious dimension of immigrant integration, which does ROMAIN GARBAYE 172 echo that of Britain. As in Britain, the renewed drive to assert cohesion over diversity is in part driven by the challenge posed by Islam. In fact, France tightened its antiterror legislation as early as the late 1980s, in response to bombings in the Paris metro of July 1995 by an Algerian Islamist group, which included French members of immigrant origins. France then sought to bring the main trends of French Islam under the control of one single state-controlled group, the CFCM, with the aim of fostering the “integration” of Muslims and of countering radicalism . Creating such an institution is something that the British government seemed to want to emulate after July 2005 with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).28 The French controversies over the ban of head scarves in French public schools beginning in 1989 and concluded by the ban voted on by Parliament in 2004 also marked an early politicization of the integration of Muslims in French societies. Of course, compared to them, recent British debates about Niqabs (full-face veils) remain much less hostile to explicit signs of Muslim faith: the British state school system has a high level of tolerance for religious pluralism, which results from a history marked by the establishment of the Anglican Church and the gradual granting of the right to run schools to minority religions since the nineteenth century. Therefore one must be cautious in interpreting such recent British developments as the criticism of Niqabs by senior Labour Party officials: it has appeared in a context where the role of...

Share