Integrating, tolerating immigrants
THERE ARE really only two European models for integrating immigrants, the French and the British. Neither has succeeded and both are now being questioned.
The French insist on assimilation. You are either French or you are not, and all Frenchmen, no matter what their background, should be French. This dates from the French revolutionary ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
The British have favored laissez-faire multiculturalism; you are free to follow your own culture as long as you stay within British laws and certain norms of British society.
Both models have been sorely tested by Islamic radicalism and riots, which have revealed large bodies of disaffected and alienated peoples who seem resistant to absorption -- even down to the second and third generations.
Other European countries with large immigrant populations follow one model or the other, the northern countries tending to follow the British model, while the southern countries tend toward the French. But all are having second thoughts about the efficacy of their preferred model.
Presidential candidate Nicholas Sarkozy has written that there are fewer opportunities for North Africans and blacks today in France than when Charles de Gaulle was in power. He lists the causes as "social stratification and ghettoization of neighborhoods," social codes, and "finally there is discrimination," both deliberate and subconscious.
He has mentioned the dread words "affirmative action," which go against the French ideal that such could never be necessary when all are equal as Frenchmen under the law.
He criticizes the ban on keeping statistics that take account of the origin of French people. For under the French system the state is forbidden to know who is of North African, Turkish, or Chinese origin. To refuse to measure the diversity of France "is to refuse to do anything about it," Sarkozy wrote in his campaign book "Testimony."
Sarkozy is not questioning the values that make up French identity, but he asks: "If you don't extend them to immigrants, how can they integrate?" As interior minister, Sarkozy instituted a contract that would oblige immigrants to learn the French language. Yet his suggestion that France might need a ministry of immigration and national identity was lambasted by his opponents for being a sop to the xenophobic far right.
For some, the memory of Vichy France's ministry of Jewish affairs was too raw for such a suggestion. The British, with no Vichy past to worry about, created a Communities and Local Government department last year, with a director for race , cohesion and faith .
Britain, too, is having its own reappraisal. Conservative opposition leader David Cameron famously faulted the American integration model by saying: "We don't do flags on lawns."
When I asked him if he had second thoughts, his answer was: "I said that because we don't do flags on lawns." But he regretted that "multiculturalism has come to mean an approach which focuses on what divides us rather than what brings us together."
In a speech, he told the British people that multiculturalism "often treated ethnic or faith communities as monolithic blocks, rather than individual British citizens."
Late last year, Prime Minister Tony Blair said that "the whole point is that multicultural Britain was never supposed to be a celebration of division, but of diversity . . . . The right to be in a multicultural society was always, always implicitly balanced by a duty to integrate, to be part of Britain." Blair saw a need to "reassert the duty to integrate, to stress what we hold in common . . . ."
Cameron and Blair agree that English should be a sine qua non for citizenship.
Both Blair and Cameron seem to be wishing for just a touch more of French-style assimilation in Britain -- "respect for this country and its shared heritage," as Blair put it. While in France, Sarkozy notes, some of the fears of "opening the door to Anglo-Saxon style communitarianism" have now become almost trendy."
The concern across Europe, of course, is not about all immigrants. The fear concerns militant Islam and the emerging trend of European-born terrorists. Most European Muslims reject their extremists, "but it's daft to deny" that the militants "justify their extremism by reference to religious belief," Tony Blair said. "The more understanding there is between religious faiths, the more knowledge and the less ignorance, the better the prospect for mutual respect and tolerance."
This is not going to be easy, for it's hard for Europeans to accept that theirs is a society of immigrants the way America has always been.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 