European Staycation
I’ve never before had occasion to visit the French consulate. After all, the closest personal affiliation I have to that government/culture is the unique spelling of my last name, influenced as it was by my father’s multi-year stint in Paris.1 So, when the opportunity arose to not only check out France’s stateside digs but also attend a lecture on the timely and provocative topic of Islam and national identity, I packed my bags right up and headed to that quaint island off the shores of Northern New Jersey.
The consulate’s physical space was as elegant as you’d expect. Located on Fifth Avenue, right across from Central Park, it’s full of old world accoutrements from chandeliers and tapestries to bona fide French people. The only thing that, quite annoyingly, ran counter to the general ambience was the endless stream of American soft rock (I’m looking at you, John Mayer) that preceded the lecture. I was a bit perplexed, too, by the utter lack of baguettes. On a similar note, there was no French wine, which caught some attendees off guard during the refreshments portion of the program. I’ll give the consulate the benefit of the doubt here and say that the lack of libations was a conscious (and thoughtful) nod to their Muslim guests.
Unpacking the Baggage
As for the lecture itself, it featured two experts, Justin Vaïsse and Jonathan Laurence, who literally wrote the book on Islam’s precarious standing in French society. Each speaker started off the discussion with an overview of Muslim institutional and societal development in France, an analysis of the recent moves to ban the burqa (more accurately, the niqab) from government-run buildings and public transportation, and some insight into the discourse on national identity that’s taking place not only in France, but the whole of Europe.
Despite such hot button topics, Vaïsse and Laurence both offered fairly even-handed commentary. Each was relatively optimistic about the outlook for Muslims in France (citing that, ironically enough, Islamic institutions have flourished under Sarcozy’s regime), and refreshingly realistic about the political motivations behind the niqab ban (pointing out Sarcozy’s need to court the right prior to the upcoming French elections). Together, they also revealed the enlightening, and at times surprising, realities of the national identity debate.
Dichotomies of Scale
With immigration escalating throughout the continent, European countries are facing mounting pressure to define their national “we” and subsequently deal with the “others” within their borders. Both of these appointed tasks have produced curious responses from government councils and the broader citizenry across Europe, as evidenced by a UK race relations body concluding that the term “British” is offensive and the passing of a Swiss referendum banning minarets in a country with only four such structures. As a citizen of France, Dr. Vaïsse highlighted the complexity of his “Frenchness,” which owed as much to chance (the survival of his ancestral patriarchs through two World Wars) as it did to choice (the conscious decision of his great grandparents, who lived in the disputed territory of Alsace-Lorraine during German occupation, to give birth to their children across the border in order to retain their French identity). Prof. Laurence approached the issue from a different perspective, briefly discussing the implications of broader European identity (which is a topic deserving of its own lecture), but really focusing more on the immigrant experience with French identity.
While recognizing the numerous ways in which immigrants, specifically Muslims, have successfully integrated into French society, Prof. Laurence still had some reservations about the system’s overall efficacy. He noted, for example, that qualified individuals still have difficulties obtaining a job on the basis of their foreign sounding names. Framing the discussion around these intrinsic, if invisible, barriers, Prof. Laurence asked: “How do you feel French and love France when you aren’t afforded the economic and social avenues of your fellow citizens?” This sentiment was echoed in a recent New York Times piece on the same genereal subject:
A current French discussion about banning the burqa — understood here to mean the head-to-toe garment that leaves Muslim women peering out at the world through a narrow slit — is really a politicized retreat from a potentially meaningful debate about Muslims assuming a more distinctly French identity in exchange for the assurance of a greater role in French life.
Overshadowing more pertinent issues, however, may be the least of it. Indeed, Prof. Laurence, in one of his more unequivocal statements of the evening, remarked that this debate highlights not only the diminishing self-evidence of French integration, but also the waning self-confidence of the republic as a whole. The general consensus, then, seems to be that, for whatever its short-term benefits, this national discourse may have more far reaching, even existential, ramifications for Sarcozy and French society.
But, though the Law of Unintended Consequences may be at play here, more troubling, I find, are the intended outcomes of recent European examinations into national identity…
(To be continued…dun dun daaaaaaa…)
- Subsequent family members shirked this precedent and chose to transliterate شهود into variations beginning, more accurately, with an “sh”. ↩
Tags: Burqa, Europe, France, Islam, Nationalism
[...] Perhaps my recent positive experiences at lectures with similar topics (one of which I document here) colored my perception of “what works.” More likely, the organizers at Cooper Union [...]