organized by new right intellectual groups that year.
The respective titles of the edited volumes resulting from the three conferences attested to their organizers’ recognition of the competition among them. The first, resulting from the conference sponsored by the new right intellectual circle Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE) (GRECE 1985), was titled Une certaine idée de la France (A Certain Idea of France), suggestively alluding to the ambitious and restorative national vision of Charles de Gaulle; the second, following from the other new right conference sponsored by the rival new right circle Club de l’Horloge, was called, simply, L’identité de la France (The Identity of France) (Club de l’Horloge 1985). The left counterpoint to these two collections, from the Espaces 89 conference, was in turn titled L’identité française (French Identity). The collection offers a telling look into the terms in which issues of national identity, and the stalling of assimilation, were then being discussed on the left by those hopeful about the social developments they believed were occurring.
Socialists were enthusiastic in the early 1980s about cultural diversity and had been campaigning for “the right to be different” (le droit à la différence), a movement with some impact on policy under the first Socialist-led government beginning in 1981. Like demands for the right to be different, the Espaces 89 conference drew together French regionalists and defenders of the rights of immigrants qua cultural minority groups (Espaces 89 1985: 115–57). One active participant in the Espaces 89 meeting, for example, called for the “recognition of citizenship for millions of people who live in this country, who profoundly hope to integrate themselves here but without thereby cutting themselves off from their identities, their cultures, their beliefs, their traditions” (124–25). Another participant, political thinker Sami Nair, called on people to reject assimilation as a prerequisite to social acceptance, arguing that just as assimilation had not helped the Jews very much during World War II, it would not help other minorities subject to prejudice today (129).
The position of another contributor to the conference—a supporter of decentralization, self-management, and enhancing the economic viability of the periphery—was also illustrative in this regard. He contended that beause the more recent immigrant populations were not assimilating, a “pluricultural” France was taking form. This produced a need “to identify the cultural communities, to recognize them institutionally,” and to grant them collective rights. “The right to be different,” he stressed enthusiastically, was to be “a new right of the citizen” as well as “a new human right” (115–57). Here, as in the new citizenship campaign, the upgrading of citizenship for a new era was seen as closely associated both with expanding rights and with severing the longstanding link between citizenship and cultural unity.
Pascal Ory argued at the meeting that the French left needed to find a new alternative to the two positions it had typically favored regarding cultural minorities: (1) cultural homogenization through the treatment of areas dominated by cultural minority populations as departments like any others, and (2) defense of the right of “peoples” to self-determination. As a way out of this political dilemma of assimilation (political integration qua departments) versus segregation (independence), Ory advocated extending democratic citizenship to cultural minorities while offering weaker cultural groups active protection, thus making France a multinational state. Such a state, he argued, would realize the once utopian project undertaken by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and would “liberate the debate regarding the nation from all association with territory and language.” In many respects, including his interest in a form of political membership that was territorially rather than culturally based, his fears about the potential creation of a stateless population, and his enthusiasm for the historical example of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ory’s position closely followed the well-known thinking of Hannah Arendt (1979: 158–302). Ory’s invocation of the pieds noirs correctly pointed to the last serious—and failed—French attempt to transcend the fundamental dilemma of assimilation versus segregation. When efforts to develop a “third way” out of that dilemma failed and it proved impossible to integrate Algeria into the French Republic as departments like any others, Algeria’s secession, and the traumatic migration of uprooted pieds noirs European settlers to France, resulted. The nation-territory link, he reasoned, threatened to leave some people with nowhere to go, creating problems even worse than those faced by the pieds noirs, who fled Algeria en masse following independence (Ory 1985: 149–51). Like the leaders of human rights organizations who supported the “new citizenship” idea, Ory thus suggested a certain parallel between the historical problems of French colonialism, particularly those surrounding France’s failed project in Algeria, and current problems regarding cultural minorities within France.
In the mid–1950s, some had advocated a third alternative: a federalist alternative to French republicanism that seemingly offered a way out of the long-standing dilemma of assimilatory integration or secession. The problem in the Algerian case, however, had less to do with Algerian demands for recognition as a distinct nation within the French state than Ory’s rhetoric suggested. Indeed, such recognition would have made little sense given the striking presence of several socially and culturally distinct potential national groups within Algeria. The true crux of the Algerian crisis arguably lay less in assimilation’s inadequacies than in the inadequacies and inconsistencies of France’s supposed commitment to assimilation. Because of resistance from the metropole to the possibility of seeing the French legislature swamped by Algerian representatives, and because of resistance to reform on the part of a “French” Algerian minority fearful of losing its prerogatives, French leaders were never politically willing and able truly to extend the equal treatment entailed by the “assimilation” option to the non-European population of the Algerian departments.
As these varied contributions to the Espaces 89 conference revealed, many observers on the left agreed that assimilation was in crisis in 1980s France. Unlike critics on the right, however, they saw this crisis not as a danger to France, but instead as an opportunity for new kinds of progressive reform that were long overdue.
In France as in Europe: France’s “New Citizenship” in International Context
Demands for a “new citizenship” marked one logical response to that perceived crisis of assimilation: retreat from nationality as a basis for citizenship and extending increasingly equal rights, particularly local ones, to all residents of given areas.. The thinking and expectations of new citizenship’s supporters in 1980s France were closely akin to those of observers who have since announced a progressive or triumphal international or European turn to post-nationalism. The French campaign for a new citizenship was, in fact, part of a broader European movement at the time.
A report to the European Parliament, written by an Italian Communist representative, for example, recommended that migrants be granted the right to vote in the country in which they resided, and resulted in an official recommendation passed by the European Parliament in the spring of 1985. The currency of the local voting rights idea on the left in Europe at the time thus apparently reached well beyond the smaller, northern countries where extensions of local voting rights had already been passed (Wihtol de Wenden 1986:
29). The demands of the new citizenship campaign in France in some ways simply reflected these larger European trends (cf., Hammar 1990: 169–200; Bauböck 1994: 199–232).
In France as in France: The Specifically French Character of the New Citizenship Campaign
The arguments advanced in favor of the “new citizenship” idea in France and French understandings of its significance were, however, at the same time distinctive in key respects. To understand how the idea was later discursively delegitimized, it is essential first to understand its distinctively French referents and perceived significance, particularly the role of French labor history as a referent and the decidedly “anti-statist” cast of French defenses of new citizenship. When the new citizenship campaign was delegitimized, however, what was defeated
