Race riots are nothing new to America, but for France, they come as something of a surprise. Parts of some Paris suburbs have been burning for over a week, starting in Clichy-sous-Bois and Aulnay-sous-Bois, and the riots have recently spread to more than 300 towns and cities, including Dijon, Strasbourg, Nice and Marseilles, with the first fatality occurring on Nov. 7 — a 61-year-old man was beaten into a coma and then died in a hospital. This is the first eruption of popular frustration on the part of French-born children and grandchildren of immigrants who feel that discrimination against their skin color and religious affiliation has prevented them from escaping poverty or from ever being considered truly French.
The rioters are mostly young — teenaged boys with an education but no job. Unemployment has reached an estimated 60 percent among French-Arab and French-African youth, according to BBC News, and it’s a difficult situation for them to take, given that French companies largely took care of their immigrant parents in the 1950s and 1960s, and the French government provided free schooling; but they are not seeing the same job security their parents found.
The French government, largely helpless in this crisis, originally claimed the riots were the work of organized gangs, but numerous publications have since featured stories of random acts of arson by groups of unemployed young men looking to act out, and the chain reaction that produces in other towns. “We don’t plan anything. We just hit whatever we find at the moment,” said one rioter to the Washington Post, speaking on condition of anonymity like most of those who were interviewed. What they found were gyms, classrooms, youth centers, local businesses and over 1,400 cars.
Residents of the violence-wracked areas cited high unemployment, discrimination, “heavy-handed policing” and poor housing as their main frustrations.
These are internal French problems, but we should be paying close attention. We should also be paying attention to the recurring tensions in Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands, which spotlight the difficulties of a mostly homogenous continent coping with relatively recent growth of ethnically distinct immigrant populations and their first- and second-generation descendants. It also helps illustrate one aspect of the problems Europe is having with its growing Muslim minority.
It’s clear that this is no Islamic insurgency; it’s a riot of at least two ethnic groups that are facing frustration and shattered hopes. But the danger lies in it becoming a religious fight. If Europe cannot succeed in integrating young Muslims into its society, then the way will be open for Islamic extremists to give them the identity, recognition and sense of empowerment they want.
European governments have taken different approaches to immigration, the most dramatic contrast being between the Netherlands, which tries to emphasize and celebrate diversity wherever it is found, and France, which has long emphasized complete assimilation of immigrants into French culture. Neither approach seems to have worked. Young French-Arabs frequently assert that they do not feel, nor are they treated, as if they were fully French.
“I’m a citizen of France, but I don’t count,” one man told the New York Times. And in the Netherlands, Muslim communities have largely isolated themselves from the rest of Dutch society, inciting friction as well as creating a sort of identity crisis in which the Dutch have seen their vision of the Netherlands as a haven of acceptance seriously challenged by creeping Islamic fundamentalism.
Ethnic Europeans have plenty of their own complaints and fears, and not just about their burnt cars and businesses. The Dutch Immigration Minister, Rita Verdonk, described the problem concisely. “We thought that everybody who wanted to live in the Netherlands would easily find his way around Dutch society,” she said to London’s Daily-Telegraph last May. “Now we have about 700,000 people who have been here for years but who don’t speak the language or have a clue about our most basic rules and values.”
The current violence is not about religion. It’s about young kids, living in poverty, who are facing extremely high unemployment and the knowledge that they are not completely welcome in their birth nations. But those conditions are ripe for, and exacerbate, the fanatical religious exploitation that is already taking place in Europe.
Most European Muslims have no ties to terrorists, nor could they be called Islamists. But that does not change the fact that London was bombed last July by Muslim fanatics, or that acts of anti-Semitism in France have been growing. It does not change the fact that there are Islamists spreading throughout Europe who preach hatred of the West and a radical form of Islam that is incompatible with European social values. It does not change the fact that the Islamic fanatic who murdered Theo van Gogh just over a year ago expressed no remorse, but stood up in court and told van Gogh’s mother, “I do not feel your pain,” or the fact that some Muslims cheered when they passed the murder site in the days after.
It does not change the arson attacks against Dutch mosques that followed, or the Dutch and French politicians who have gained popularity by talking about barring non-Western immigrants, referring to them as “scum,” or arresting Islamists who haven’t yet broken the law. It does not change the fact that radical Islamists often threaten with death the politicians who say such things. Nor does it change the fact that the Sept. 11 hijackers were mostly European-educated men who felt they did not fit into the world of their ethnic homeland or the world of a largely secular Europe, and who turned to a radical form of Islam for meaning.
It’s hard not to see the young kids rioting in France as potential converts, and the really perverse thing is that such an attitude could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Many of these guys are no more Muslim than other French people are practicing Christian,” Christophe Bertossi of the French Institute of International Relations told the International Herald-Tribune. “But if they are given no other identity, the Muslim label risks becoming the thing they fall back on.”
If the war on terror is really a war of ideas, then Europe is one of the main fronts in that war, and the riots in France are drawing attention to a lot of kids who seem ripe for exploitation by the other side. Moderate Muslim leaders are working to prevent that; some of them marched into the violence-torn areas alongside Catholic and Protestant leaders to plead for calmness. But moderates often look like fools with their hands over their ears when placed alongside radical leaders who can point fingers at oppressors and offer a much easier answer than moderates ever can.
Europe can only win if it succeeds in making its new minorities into fully integrated citizens, not just Arab Muslims, but those of African descent as well, and that goal will require some give-and-take from both sides.
Governments like that of France will most likely have to settle for integration more in the style of Britain and the United States instead of the full assimilation they want. They will also have to seriously evaluate whether their rigid policies against religious wear in schools and against any kind of affirmative action -— measures meant to promote assimilation — are in fact alienating young citizens who attempt to find good jobs and identity with religion, and harming true integration. Other governments must try hard — harder than they have been — to make the economic opportunities of Europe a reality for minority citizens.
Certain immigrant communities will have to recognize that they chose to live in countries with entirely different standards of free speech and religious, gender and sexual equality, standards which they are not free to violate under the guise of religious expression. They will most certainly have to recover from the damage to their reputations that the ongoing rioting is causing.
“It is a mutual thing,” Verdonk said. “The native Dutch should give newcomers a fair chance and be open to them. But we are also convinced that we can make demands of those coming here.”
