source of France’s international appeal, Braudel also depicted the French state in critical terms as the product of active “conquest” of the provinces by the richer, more industrial region around the capital. Furthermore, he blamed this constant unifying effort by the center, sometimes against the will of the periphery, for depleting the wealth and vital energy of the country, thus undermining its economic dynamism (Braudel 1985: 139–40).
Another intellectual supporter of “new citizenship,” Daniel Lindberg, argued that nationalism had retarded the universalization of citizenship and thus its extension to other historically excluded groups, including women and Jews. Again, it was suggested that de-nationalizing citizenship would finally allow for fulfillment of the universalizing logic evident in French citizenship’s naturally progressive historical-developmental trajectory (1985: 94). The nation thus occupied the position of the (national) state in this discourse, un-naturally blocking the healthy development that would occur were it not for this artificial and unfortunate distortion and restriction.
This perspective was not unique to Braudel or to the intellectual elite, but also informed the discourse of organizations at the forefront of the new citizenship movement. A 1985 editorial in FASTI’s monthly magazine argued:
aside from its internal justification, the demand for the right [of immigrants] to vote in local or even national elections has the attraction of a decompression valve, of a channeling of the struggles to be led against the hypocrisy of the authorities and for the integration into society of this part of the population which, although less dramatically than in South Africa, is excluded from it. A progressive evolution toward this integration apparently being blocked, obtaining the right to vote would be like a surgical operation to bring about integration. (Lefranc 1985: 6)
Here there is a natural “progressive evolution” toward the “integration” of all segments of the population into society. However, this evolution is “apparently blocked,” by the French legal-political order. The “struggles to be led,” are to be directed against “the hypocrisy of the authorities,” because the state and those exercising legal authority are seen here as standing in opposition to authenticity as well as to natural growth, social evolution, or development. More than civic equality was thus understood to be at stake in demands for local voting rights for foreigners in France; the new citizenship campaign was also seen as a means of removing artificial legal-political roadblocks to a deeper process of progressive social development.
Social Change, Political Interpretation and French Policy
The peculiarly anti-statist cast of the French new citizenship campaign is particularly important to recognize and bear in mind because it helps explain how the movement was politically marginalized and delegitimized in France, as nationality law reform moved to the center of the political agenda in the 1980s, a process examined in Chapters 4 and 5. Given that the new citizenship campaign was the political movement that in late twentieth-century France perhaps most clearly embodied the hopes and expectations of observers convinced of growing post-nationalism or multiculturalism internationally, understanding the political sidelining of this initiative helps explain why France’s recent politics of belonging have not confirmed post-nationalist or multiculturalist expectations. Like many of the new citizenship’s political and intellectual advocates in France, those convinced of post-nationalism or multiculturalism’s inevitably growing momentum have typically placed too much faith in unilinear, progressive, and supposedly inexorable processes of social development, with insufficient attention to the continued importance of national politics and political interpretation.
As will become increasingly clear in the chapters that follow, France’s citizenship politics has been shaped by competing political interpretations of and reactions to new social developments as much as those social developments themselves. Through those interpretations and reactions, both the privileged role of the state and the continued centrality of the nation-state as a favored form of political community have been strongly and consequentially reasserted. This reassertion may not suffice to stem the social processes that post-nationalists and multiculturalists have noted, but it has clearly inflected recent French policy regarding the integration of immigrants and their descendents. That inflection is evident in regard to policies concerning public recognition of cultural and religious difference, as we shall see in Part III, and it is also unmistakable in the field of French nationality law, as the remainder of Part II reveals.
Chapter 4
Nationality Law Reform: Launching a New Debate
As the 1980s continued, France’s politics of belonging took a new twist as political struggles over changing French nationality law came to the fore. The issue of nationality law reform had previously been raised by immigrant advocates on the left, but was in the 1980s originally associated with the political right, with positions on the issue framed primarily in conventional left-right terms. Public education and its integrative role, later greatly emphasized, was not a major theme in the early, radical campaign for nationality law reform.
As late as 1986, a conceptual gulf separated influential nationality law reform advocates’ understandings of political membership from those of leading advocates of “new citizenship.” Demands for reform of French nationality law originally proved politically polarizing and led to a decidedly unproductive political impasse. In the end, however, the conflicts of the 1980s over nationality law reform had surprisingly enduring consequences.
These struggles, and the political stalemate to which they originally led, set the stage for the French government’s appointment of an influential expert commission on nationality law.
There is a natural but anachronistic tendency for analysts and observers to see only the obvious historical continuities between the Nationality Commission’s work and France’s long-term political and intellectual history. In reality, however, the apparently consensual and historically continuous “republican” parameters of France’s politics of belonging that crystallized around the work of the Nationality Commission were markedly different from the prevailing terms of French membership politics just a few years earlier, when nationality law reform first emerged as a major national issue.
The Nationality Commission’s widely publicized work played a key role in promoting the political rise of an influential neo-republican position bridging the former conceptual divide between the nationality law reformers’ understandings of political membership and those of their opponents. This work thus contributed significantly to toning down the crisis over nationality law change, and constructed an amalgamated theoretical basis for new patterns of more centrist political cooperation, albeit still fragile ones. At the same time, the decisive and consequential conceptual reorientation encouraged by the Nationality Commission also placed an increasingly heavy symbolic load on the integrative role of public schools, thus setting the stage for more recent, school-centered controversies.
The Retreat from Forced Return of Immigrants and Emergence of Demands for Restrictive Nationality Law Reform
As we have seen, the late 1970s and above all the 1980s were a time of growing realization that culturally diverse immigrants were in France to stay, and thus a moment of rising anxiety about cultural assimilation. Certainly, it would be an oversimplification to see all this anxiety as symptomatic of underlying racism. Not everyone anxious about how immigrants’ long-term settlement might change the face of France understood culture as directly linked to race. For some, including intellectual historian Raymond Polin, culture was instead regarded as the product either of education or of choice and loyalty (Polin 1987: 624–25, 636, 639).
The years 1978–1980, however, saw a surprising French governmental initiative from President
