It is a commonplace for the mainstream media in France to depict the National Front and the Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR)—a postcolonial left-wing movement—as just so many different forms of ‘identity politics’. This has led to a campaign against ‘anti-white racism’, which is nothing other than a perverse way of legitimising racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia.1 Arguing along these lines, it would not be so difficult to claim that Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X were racists because they called for violence against white supremacy. Or that Martin Buber, author of Zionist texts on the mystical value of ‘Jewish blood’, was no different from the ideologues of German völkisch nationalism. This campaign against PIR did not withstand much scrutiny, because the insinuation it makes is too crude. But such claims do periodically resurface. The same people who denounce ‘anti-white racism’ recently launched a petition against the ‘ethnic cleansing’ that Jews would suffer in France because of Muslim anti-Semitism.2 Leaving aside this xenophobic and demagogic rhetoric, some ‘identitarian’ positions can indeed be fruitful. The PIR’s essentialist language and provocative slogans may arouse justified scepticism, but they do also stimulate some interesting reflections. It is important to distinguish between the identitarianism which aims at exclusion—like that of the National Front, which defends ‘the Frenchmen of French stock’ against immigrants, refugees, and foreigners—and the identitarian claims of oppressed minorities. We might discuss the form that their demands take, but overall the PIR has played a salutary role, both stimulating a left-wing political radicalisation of the banlieues and working against the attraction of religious fundamentalism, not to mention the slide toward radical Islamism and terrorism.
As for the National Front’s identitarianism—its new ‘ideology’ in a postideological age—it is remarkable to note the ineffective attempts to oppose it using a traditional republican rhetoric. The common idea that the National Front is a force alien to and incompatible with the values of the French Republic should be seriously scrutinized. Indeed, this discourse presupposes a very selective interpretation of the past. French colonialism reached its apogee under the Third Republic, a regime that was born of the crushing of the Paris Commune and that reached its conclusion with Vichy. As for the Fourth Republic, its history began with the Sétif massacres and the repression in Madagascar and ended with the Gaullist coup during the Algerian War. The pernicious rhetoric that cloaks the Republic in a mystical aura is nothing short of embarrassing. But the most surprising thing is the extent to which this mythology transcends political divides: it is shared by almost all political forces of both left and right. If, after leaving behind its old fascist drapes, the National Front does now want to become part of the republican tradition, then it is difficult to deny it such a ‘right’. In the national press, many editorials warn against the National Front, saying that it wants to exclude part of the population. This is certainly true, but it is also true that policies driving exclusion and the ethnic and social ghettoisation of immigrants have been implemented by all the governments of the Fifth Republic. This is one of the reasons why republican discourse is so powerless; and this impotence only increases when the people wielding this discourse are the very people who seek to combat the National Front by adopting its own arguments. Nicolas Sarkozy created a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, and more recently François Hollande proposed to strip terrorists of their citizenship, as if to exorcise their belonging to the national community. If all these proposals do indeed make up part of the republican intellectual, legal, and political framework, then it is hard to see why anyone should be so scandalised about Marine Le Pen calling herself a republican.
Aside from the French case, we can clearly see differences between national contexts, even if one should not overestimate them. In Spain, neofascism is almost nonexistent, and yet nostalgia for Francoism is very much a presence among the most conservative elements of society, who vote for the Partido Popular. The Falange has almost been extinguished, but the Catalan crisis produced a significant outburst of Francoist nationalism. In Italy we experienced a double change: on the one hand, neofascism—the Italian Social Movement (MSI), inheritor of the Salò Republic—turned into a liberal-conservative force that joined the traditional right in the mid-1990s; on the other hand, the Lega Nord, which originally had nothing to do with fascism, gradually became a far-right movement under the leadership of Matteo Salvini. As for Germany, a deep conservative impulse is above all apparent in the East, with Pegida3 and now Alternative für Deutschland,4 each of which feeds off the refugee crisis. Nonetheless, Germany has settled accounts with its own Nazi past; it recognised the Nazi crimes and made the memory of the Holocaust one of the pillars of its historical consciousness. For a large section of German society, ‘national identity’ means first of all ‘constitutional patriotism’.5 France, on the contrary, has never really acknowledged its colonial crimes, whose legacy keeps coming around again like a boomerang, what Aimé Césaire called a choc en retour.6 In Le suicide français (2014), Éric Zemmour contends that Frenchmen should defend themselves from the new barbarian invasion by the Muslim hordes coming from Africa and the Arab world.7 Nicolas Sarkozy’s speeches have long been peppered with similar ideas, ‘Love France or leave it’, or more recently, ‘When you become French, your ancestors are the Gauls.’ Ethnic minorities could very well take this first line and ask Sarkozy himself to live up to it. They insist that France is a culturally, religiously, and ethnically plural country, a mosaic of identities shaped by a century of immigration – that is how France is made, and if you don’t love it as it is, then you should leave. In this sense, this violent anti-immigrant discourse is literally ‘utopian’, for it is impossible to turn back the clock. With its disdain for the descendants of immigrants, the reactionary discourse about those who are ‘of French stock’ (de souche) presupposes and idealises a mythical France that does not exist, a country which died centuries ago, and which cannot return in an age of globalisation. Not only can it never return, but even if that were somehow possible, this would be a catastrophe; it would be a backward move that would produce a general isolation and impoverishment.
This is also true of Europe as a whole. Immigration is its future: it is the condition for averting demographic and economic decline, for paying the pensions of an aging population, for opening up to the world, and for renovating Europe’s cultures and setting them in dialogue with other continents. All analysts reach these same conclusions, but politicians who prioritise their own lowly electoral calculations do not want to admit it. The ritual critique of ‘communitarianism’ is nothing but a pretext for pushing a regressive form of ethnocentrism.8
These considerations also apply to Italy, which still does not have citizenship based on jus soli. Unlike countries of long-standing immigration such as France or the United States, for over a century Italy has itself been a pool from which constant waves of migrants have headed out toward various continents, far from European shores. Only in the last three decades has the country transformed into a land of immigration in which nearly one million young people—the children of immigrants—remain foreigners in their own country. Of course, there are many reasons that explain the origins of a citizenship grounded exclusively on jus sanguinis—the mystique of blood is one of the most significant features of the national idea that emerged from the Risorgimento culture9—but clearly it is no longer suitable for today’s Italy. Not only is denying citizenship to millions of people who live and work in Italy (many of them born there) an intolerable form of discrimination, unworthy of a civilised country, but it is also counterproductive and harmful from a social and economic point of view. Anyone should be able to understand that faced with the challenges of globalisation, the presence of a new generation of Italians capable of speaking Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and Russian is an advantage in terms of exports, trade, scientific and technological exchange, and so on. Nevertheless, the attempts to reform citizenship laws continue to be hollowed out or blocked entirely, subject as they are to the xenophobic prejudices of most political forces.
Secularism is another controversial topic deeply related to the rise of the radical right. Today’s uses of the concept of laïcité—France’s brand of state secularism, the separation of Church and state as an article of the republican Constitution—are more than questionable and often they are openly reactionary. A distinction is usually made between two conceptions of secularism that emerged with the Enlightenment, in its Anglo-Saxon and French versions. Simply put, this corresponds to the difference between freedom for religion and freedom from religion and the restrictions that it imposes. There is a contrast between these two interpretations. The conception of secularism as freedom ‘for’ religion, which is particularly rooted in Protestant countries, makes the state the guarantor of all religious minorities, allowing for their free expression in civil society. This is a structuring principle of the United States, a country that welcomed the religious minorities persecuted and banished from Europe. Thus, the state guaranteed religious pluralism long before the emergence of anything like the modern meaning of multiculturalism. In France, conversely, the idea of laïcité is the fruit of a fight to be free of religion and was won in a tenacious struggle against absolutism: public space was progressively freed from the Catholic Church’s grip. In this context, the 1905 law on the separation of the church and state was a measure that the Republic adopted in order to defend itself against the attacks of Catholic, nationalist, and anti-republican conservatism. A conception of secularism that postulates the separation between religion and the state on the one hand and, on the other, the recognition of a complete freedom for religious beliefs (as well as for nonbelievers) is certainly defendable. In its broad scope, this general principle could be put into practice everywhere, from France to the United Kingdom, from the United States to India.
In France, however, the history of laïcité is also interwoven with the history of colonialism: the Third Republic waged its battle for laïcité at the same time as it built its empire, thus grounding republican citizenship in a colonial political anthropology. Under the Third Republic, the citizen was contrasted with the indigène, who did not enjoy the same rights. Whereas it defended itself against its domestic enemies, republicanism established legal barriers and political hierarchies that held its colonised subjects apart. In other words, secularism was inseparable from orientalism, thus participating in the construction of colonial dichotomies: civilised versus primitive, white versus coloured, European versus non-European, and finally, citizen versus indigène.10 While at the turn of the twentieth century the Third Republic upheld laïcité in a battle against a series of reactionary threats, today it weaponises it as a tool of exclusion. There is a certain continuity in this republican propensity to discriminate. But today this vision of laïcité strikes at the plural character of the real France: most of its critics are not seeking to question the basic principle of secularism, which is fundamental to any free and democratic society, but rather to highlight the contradictions of its history and the neocolonial character of its uses. The recent row over women wearing the burkini on French beaches11 was a telling example of this sectarian interpretation of secularism as laïcisme: not the state’s neutrality in religious matters but rather the obligation on the citizens to conform to an anti-religious position embodied by the state. In fact, this form of secularism became the instrument of an anti-Muslim campaign. As the burkini affair once again revealed, beyond the ambiguities of laïcisme, the heart of the problem is not secularism but Islamophobia. Indeed, it was precisely in the name of secularism that many anti-racists raised their voices in condemnation of the police’s odious intervention against the veiled women on the beaches and in defence of the vision of a multicultural France.12 And the burkini affair finally unveiled the historical background of the National Front’s republican shift. Indeed, there is a noticeable and rather troubling objective convergence between this laïcisme—which is to say, the aggressive pushing of an intolerant version of secularism—and an Islamophobic kind of feminism, as expressed by the likes of Élisabeth Badinter and Caroline Fourest. This is also a French peculiarity, insofar as in most Western countries—especially in the United States—Islamophobia is the obsession of neoconservative, Christian fundamentalists.13
At the end of the nineteenth century, Cesare Lombroso—founder of criminal anthropology, a leading positivist scholar, and a fervent herald of Progress—saw the European origins of Enlightenment philosophy as incontrovertible proof of the white man’s superiority over the “coloured races.”14 A certain feminism presupposes the superiority of Western civilisation and thus identifies with a similar conception of Enlightenment values. In this view, the very existence of veiled women is nothing but the proof that European colonialism left its civilising mission incomplete.
Various studies have shown that women choose to wear the veil for a variety of reasons that are hardly reducible to male domination alone. Many Muslim women—those who do and do not wear the veil—have expressed their views on this topic, recognising that this is a varied phenomenon. Sometimes the veil expresses a cultural rather than a religious identity. University lecturers who have had veiled young women among their students can testify to this. But even if the veil were exclusively patriarchal in character, the idea of combatting it with repressive legal measures—like the attempts to eradicate religion in the old Soviet Union—seems both unacceptable and counterproductive.15
When Elisabeth Badinter says ‘we should not be afraid of being called Islamophobes’,16 she simply legitimises a series of xenophobic and reactionary impulses that run throughout French society and feed the National Front. If, indeed, being secular means tearing the veils off the Muslim women who choose to wear it, then the National Front surely is the best defender of feminism! These convergences both reveal the old symbiosis between republicanism and colonialism and explain the National Front’s claim to the republican tradition. If populism is first of all a form of political demagogy, the current use of laïcité is evidently a fine example of this phenomenon. As for recent legislative moves, there has been a constant effort to mask what and whom they are really targeting: those who advocated for the law against the ‘display of religious symbols’ in the public space insisted that it regarded all religions and not just Islam, which is to say the only religion against which it has thus far been applied. Similarly, the constitutional amendment that sought to allow the stripping of dual nationals’ citizenship was justified by way of all kinds of rhetorical arguments designed to deny the fact that it was essentially directed against Muslims—and that this was an old National Front proposal. The message was clear: terrorists do not belong to France (even if it was indeed French society that produced them). Here, the effort to combat the National Front adopts this party’s own rhetoric and its own discourse: France has to protect itself against the barbarism and obscurantism that colonialism had been unable to eradicate.
As with the debate following the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo, it is worth pointing out that the right to blasphemy and to criticise religion is always exercised within a specific historical context. A joke will be perceived in different ways, depending on its circumstances. A funny story about Jews that would make people laugh in Tel Aviv might have appeared rather sinister in Berlin in 1938. Equally, the Muhammad cartoons published in the Western press do not have the same meaning as caricatures of Islamic obscurantism published in North Africa. A satirical cartoonist in Iran takes risks—and often pays a heavy price for this—in order to demand a freedom denied by an oppressive regime. In France or Denmark, there are cartoonists who exploit their freedom to deride people who are the object of exclusion. French sociologist Emmanuel Todd has pertinently observed that there is a fundamental difference between the right to blaspheme against your own religion and someone else’s religion. In France, he emphasises, ‘repetitive and systematic blasphemy against Muhammad, the central character in the religion of a group that is weak and discriminated against, should—whatever the law courts have to say—be treated as an incitement to religious, ethnic, or racial hatred.’17
The same arguments on laïcité are heard across the political spectrum: by no means does this debate conform to the traditional division between right and left. Think of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA), which had to confront an unexpected situation. It sought to root itself in the banlieues, and once it began to achieve a degree of support, a young hijab-wearing activist appeared on one of its lists of candidates. She was immediately subjected to a hate campaign by the media, which went on the offensive against this party’s ‘Islamic leftism’ (islamo-gauchisme), pointing to the supposed convergence between the far left and radical Islamism. Ilham Moussaïd, an activist of Moroccan background who asserts her right to wear the veil, spoke with real conviction as she reaffirmed her feminism, her anti-capitalism, and her commitment to the Palestinian cause. But the NPA’s culture was not up to the task of handling this unprecedented situation. It could not kick her out, and indeed it welcomed her as one of its representatives, but at the same time it emphasised its own anchoring in a Marxist, atheist tradition. This effectively meant establishing a sort of dual status among NPA members: the atheists, and then the religious, who are ‘outside the norm’ but tolerated. Ever since the 1930s, and especially during the Algerian War, anti-colonialism was one of the distinctive traits of the NPA’s ancestors.18 But their vision of religion did not go any further than the critique of obscurantism inherited from the radical Enlightenment. Notwithstanding the efforts made by some of its members—and in particular Michael Löwy, a sociologist of religions and author of important works on Latin American liberation theology19—the party was not prepared to confront this crisis and thus found itself divided between two opposite positions. Many young activists thus left the NPA. Its anti-colonialism had helped it to sink roots among the children of immigrants, but it was paralysed by its ideological atavism. Today’s France is not the France of 1905: it is a country of much greater cultural and religious pluralism than a century ago. Movements other than the NPA have taken a totally opposite path. The Indigènes de la République did not start out as religious, but today it identifies with Islam as a cultural and political rather than religious position, and any criticism of bigotry and religious obscurantism virtually disappeared from its discourse. The left is far from coming to terms with the realities of religion, especially since the latter has returned to being a fundamental dimension of politics after the defeat of the revolutions of the twentieth century carried out in the name of secular socialism.
Looking at the Indigènes de la République, we can extend the comparison with the 1930s. Many Jews who had nothing to do with Judaism as a religion, who had never set foot in a synagogue, and who had even joined atheist radical or Marxist movements, nonetheless recognised their Jewish cultural allegiance. They did this simply in order to declare, in a dignified way, their attachment to an identity that was being stigmatised and which anti-Semitism had in any case imputed to them. In her lecture upon her receipt of the Lessing Prize, Hannah Arendt said that in prewar Germany the only appropriate response to the famous question of The Merchant of Venice: ‘who are you?’, was ‘a Jew’: ‘That answer alone took into account the reality of persecution.’20 Early twenty-first century Europe clearly is not the same thing as Europe in the 1930s, but the social and cultural patterns of hatred remain the same even after the historical context has changed. Something similar is probably happening today for a lot of people of ‘Muslim background’: to renounce their origins would be to evade reality, or it would mean swallowing the discourse of oppression and exclusion to which they are subjected. But we also know that during the row sparked by the publication of her Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt refused to speak in the name of the Jewish people or to declare her loyalty to the supposed ‘Jewish community’. As she wrote to Gershom Scholem, she did not love an abstract people but only her friends.21 Her dignified stance in the face of stigmatisation, as well as her rejection of any complicity in tribalism, was highly salutary.
The complexities of navigating political and confessional identity in modern France have also been recently raised in the debate over Houria Bouteldja’s recent work. Some accused her essay Whites, Jews and Us of adopting anti-Semitic positions.22 Such highly debatable accusation is inevitably based on tearing this or that passage out of context. Undoubtedly, there are some unfortunate forms of wording, but the claim of anti-Semitism simply does not stand up when one reads her book in an honest spirit. It is worth remembering, once again, that Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X were sometimes accused of ‘anti-white racism’. Houria Bouteldja’s positions are often controversial, but her essay is interesting and provocative. It is a very personal, intimate work, a deftly written text that is also very political: it is a provocation, in the best sense of the word. She tears away the veil of republican hypocrisy and insists in no uncertain terms that there is a racial question in France, linked to its colonial legacy. And she is clearly right on this point, when we see how far the spatial segregation of minorities shapes today’s urban landscape. In the attempt to confront us with the question of race in modern France—a question constantly overlooked by the dominant discourse—Bouteldja uses words that many find troubling: the ‘Whites’, the ‘Jews’, and the ‘indigènes’, meaning Blacks and Arabs, in large part Muslims.
From this point of view, it is interesting to draw a comparison with the United States. The United States is hardly a model of coexistence between different ethnic groups, but it is accepted that it is a diverse country. In 2016, the New York Times published a report on its website called Race in America: Your Stories, posting numerous interviews online. People of all backgrounds and religions contributed and said what it meant, for them, to be Americans; what their cultural and religious roots were; and what prejudices they encountered in the course of their lives in the United States. Le Monde has never done anything similar. In short, Houria Bouteldja’s semantic provocation did not come from nowhere: she did not do it ‘in cold blood’. This was the result of thirty years in which the discussion of the colonial question did not produce any significant change, after the 1983 Marche des beurs23 (young people of North African background) for equality ran up against a brick wall. It was answered with a patronising badge bearing the slogan ‘hands off my mate’ (touche pas à mon pote).24 The final step came with the demonstrations of 11 January 2015 when France took on the guise of ‘Charlie’. Common causes do not arise spontaneously. These movements have to be built, including through the recognition of the different subjectivities therein. If this diversity is not recognised, then universalism will always be hypocritical and deceptive, as in the case of republican colonialism. The problem with Bouteldja’s essay is not that she talks about whites, Jews, or blacks. Rather, it is that even in making clear that she is using these categories in a ‘social and political sense’, free of any form of ‘biological determinism’, she in fact makes them into homogenous entities, erasing the differences and the contradictions that characterise these terms.
Bouteldja thus ignores the Arab revolutions and transforms Islam into a monolithic bloc opposed to the West, a little like Samuel Huntington (an author whom she doubtless has little sympathy for) does in his Clash of Civilizations.25 Nor does she say anything about Islamist terrorism, even though it plays a crucial role in defining the relations between different groups of Muslims. We can bet that her positive view of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s humour is not shared by gays in Tehran, nor her apologia for North African machismo shared by the women who suffer it, regardless of their origins. Bouteldja writes that ‘Male castration, a consequence of racism, is a humiliation for which men make us pay a steep price’, before reaching the conclusion that ‘the radical critique of indigène patriarchy is a luxury.’26 Her essay constantly wavers between being a persuasive and sincere text that offers sharp analysis, and nasty surprises that are sure to throw up obstacles to any common cause. This psychological mechanism is nothing new: it was precisely because of their ‘tribal loyalty’ that many Jews who had experienced Nazi anti-Semitism refused on principle to criticise Israel, and many communists refrained from any criticism of Stalinism in order to avoid ‘playing the enemy’s game’. This attitude is an understandable one, as a psychological reaction, but it always has disastrous results.
In her book, the Whites are also considered a homogenous category: they are Whites, with no different hues. But this issue is rather more complex. Think of Italy. As seen from Libya or Ethiopia, Italians are certainly whites, indeed the very embodiment of ‘white brutality’, with their legacy of concentration camps in Libya and extermination by chemical weapons in Ethiopia. For the Africans crossing the Mediterranean on a boat in the hope of safely reaching the Sicilian coast, Italy is the border of an armed fortress called the European Union. But the Italian migrants who disembarked at Ellis Island a century ago were not all that white. As peasants from Southern Europe, as Catholics, these ‘ugly, dirty, wicked’ Italians would for at least one or two generations remain trapped in the status of an ‘inferior race’, very different from the dominant WASPs.27 Gérard Noiriel has recalled that a century ago there were anti-Italian pogroms in France.28 Are today’s Turkish immigrants, heirs to the Ottoman Empire and citizens of a state that oppresses the Kurds, ‘whites’? I would not use these categories with such sharp dividing lines. Several passages of Bouteldja’s essay seem to confirm Vivek Chibber’s assessment that postcolonialism often takes the form of an Orientalism turned on its head.29
The notion of intersectionality—originally coined by the legal thinker Kimberlé Crenshaw at the end of the 1980s—posits that the social question and the racial question are deeply interwoven.30 It is undoubtedly a productive idea, which inspired the Black Lives Matter campaign, the most important movement in the United States since Occupy Wall Street six years earlier. The question of ‘identity’ was posed in the United States long before it was in continental Europe. At the origin of this sensibility was the African-American Civil Rights Movement, which itself drove the emergence of other movements not immediately reducible to economics, from feminism to LGBT and environmentalism. This demands a critical reflection on the ‘foundations’—one could almost say the philosophical, and not only strategic, assumptions—of the European left.
The Marxist left has always had difficulty connecting class, gender, race, and religion. Since the nineteenth century, it has thought these various dimensions to be hierarchical: it has always privileged class conflict, holding that gender, race, religion, and so on should be combined with class but in a subordinate role. The solution to these questions would supposedly come as the result of the end of class exploitation. In the 1960s, the New Left tried to articulate these other dimensions in a nonhierarchical fashion, without reducing them to mere corollaries of class identity. For its part, the radical right draws a strong connection between social questions and identity: the National Front’s discourse clearly and forcefully attacks social inequalities but proposes the reactionary response of defending ‘poor Whites’. There are many reasons for their success in this regard: first of all, the electoral collapse of the Communist Party and the withering away of its culture. Historically, the matrix of fascism was anti-communism, and this limited the scope of its social discourse. Today, the far right can advance its critique of neoliberal Europe without blurring its elastic ideological boundaries. Where the left does mount a strong opposition to neoliberalism and takes on an anti-capitalist dimension, the far right will be neofascist (as in the case of Golden Dawn in Greece): its social discourse is completely obscured by its racism and xenophobia. The National Front has won popular support on this terrain for the simple reason that the left was unable to offer an alternative.
The forces of the radical right seek to mobilize the masses. They call for a national reawakening and demand the removal of the corrupt elites ruled by global capitalism and responsible for policies that have opened up the countries of Europe to uncontrolled immigration and an ‘Islamic invasion’. As Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre have pertinently observed, the radical right has not abandoned the old myth of the ‘good’ people opposed to the corrupted elites, but it has significantly reformulated it. In the past, the ‘good’ people meant rural France as opposed to the ‘dangerous classes’ of the big cities. After the end of communism, a defeated working class struck by deindustrialization has been reintegrated into this virtuous national-popular community. The ‘bad’ people—the immigrants, the Muslims and Blacks of the suburbs, veiled women, junkies, and the marginal—merge together with members of the leisure classes who have adopted liberal mores: feminists, the gay-friendly, anti-racists, environmentalists, and defenders of immigrants’ rights. Finally, the ‘good’ people of the postfascist imagination are nationalist, anti-feminist, homophobic, xenophobic, and nourish a clear hostility toward ecology, modern art, and intellectualism.31
Essentially, when the right talks about identity, its main concern is identification, that is to say, the policies of social control adopted in Europe since the late nineteenth century.32 This means controlling population movements and internal migration and registering foreigners, criminals, and subversives. The invention of identification papers was more a matter of this will to control than a recognition of citizenship as an acquisition of legal and political rights. Identification is just one aspect of what Foucault called the advent of biopolitical power, with its mechanisms for the control and governance of territories and populations considered as living bodies.33 The radical right would combine very modern biopolitical measures of identification and control with a very conservative identitarian discourse that aims at denouncing cosmopolitanism and globalisation as vectors of rootlessness.
Left-wing identity politics are something quite different: they are not a matter of exclusion, but a demand for recognition.34 Mariage pour tous was a demand for rights for gay couples, that is, an extension of existing rights and not a call for the restriction or denial of other people’s rights. Veiled women in Europe are asking for acceptance; they are not trying to ban mini-skirts. Black Lives Matter is not an ‘anti-white’ movement, but a protest against the oppression suffered by a minority subject to growing police violence.
It is nonetheless useful to shake off the ambiguities that are often connected with this discourse of identity, for the very notion of identity (from the Latin idem = same) lends itself to all sorts of uses. It may be worthwhile to return to Paul Ricœur’s distinction between two types of identity, namely identity as sameness and identity as self, or ipseity.35 The first responds to the question ‘what are we?’ and refers to a biological identity, our DNA, something that is already-given and unchangeable. This is the identity concocted by the right: an ontological identity connected to a person’s very essence; it is an identity determined at birth (‘our forefathers, the Gauls’). And this is also the object of modern biopolitical identification: our biometric passports. The second type of identity instead answers the question ‘who are we?’ and is the result of a process of self-construction. We are what our lives have made of us and what we have chosen to be. This identity is subjective, open, and liable to further transformation. It should be distinguished from citizenship, which determines one’s belonging to a political community. Since it presupposes cultural and religious pluralism, it also lays the bases for a useful conception of secularism. There are myriad ways of being a member of a community, of belonging to it and identifying with a common destiny. The richness of France and Europe—as well as the United States or Argentina—owes precisely to their multiplicity of identities. In France, for instance, the fact that the country was once a colonial empire does have at least one positive aspect, namely the wealth of identities and cultures that live there. This is not something that we always find elsewhere. Benjamin Stora has analysed one notable example of this: while in Algeria there is one dominant, official memory, in France the legacy of l’Algérie française embodied by the pieds-noirs coexists with that of exiled National Liberation Front dissidents, of the Algerians who emigrated there after the war, of the Arabs who fought on the colonial side (Harkis), of the French anti-colonialists and veteran fighters. All of them bear a part of this memory, which is a multidirectional memory.36 These identities are not reducible to a ‘national epic’ or an origins story.
Identity is subjective and necessarily makes up part of a socially and culturally plural pattern. It demands recognition, and politics has to take account of this request: but an exclusive identity politics—politics reduced to identity claims—is as short-sighted as it is dangerous, for the role of politics is precisely to overcome and transcend particular subjectivities. In the United States, identity politics produced contradictory results: on the one hand, it conquered fundamental rights; on the other, it scattered Blacks, feminists, gays, and environmentalists into separated and often marginalised movements. Identity politics has failed where it has abandoned any perspective of unity, thus risking becoming a merely conservative attitude. This is not how we build common causes.37
Today, the public sphere is dominated by the memory of wars and genocides, first among them the Holocaust. This turn in Western societies’ memory dates back three decades. In France, this took place with Vichy’s return to the arena of public debate as well as with the rise of Jewish memory, particularly after the release of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). In Germany, it resulted from the broadcasting of the American TV series Holocaust and then the Historikerstreit (1986), the ‘historians’ dispute’ that opposed a group of conservative scholars led by Ernst Nolte to the progressive front led by Jürgen Habermas.38 In a sort of belated, hyperbolic, and compensatory reaction to previous decades in which it had been relatively neglected, the Holocaust became the object of an obsessive focus. This change had been presaged in some ways in the 1960s (especially with the Eichmann trial), but this phenomenon really took on its full importance some two decades later. Today, the Holocaust memory institutionalised by governments, ritualised by official commemorations, and reified by the culture industry less and less fulfils a pedagogical and cohesive role. It has become a selective and unilateral memory that tends to produce division and resentment. During World War II the Jews were the victims of a genocide, but today they are no longer an oppressed minority in any European country, and the foundation of Israel now implicates them with an oppressor state. It is worth getting a proper measure of the perverse consequences of a politics of memory that makes the Jews into the paradigmatic victim and, at the same time, silences or trivialises the memory of the victims of colonial violence.
The memory of the extermination camps focuses on anti-Semitism, whereas today Islamophobia is growing everywhere. Standing in separation from the present, this memory thus ends up becoming sterile. It may, indeed, be a good idea to get schoolkids to watch Shoah or organise visits to the Nazi camps, but this risks becoming a mere diversion if at the same time parliament is passing bills that vaunt the merits of colonialism, as occurred in France in 2005. When political leaders unanimously condemn anti-Semitism in the most intransigent terms and at the same time endorse anti-migrant xenophobia, this completely wipes out the virtues of Holocaust memorialisation.39
Thus, colonialism has become a controversial legacy even within the camp of anti-racism. The museum of immigration history—Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration (CNHI)—is a particularly telling example. Created in 2007 in Paris, it is the only national museum in France not to have been opened by a government minister. Its official inauguration by President François Hollande took place almost ten years after it was founded! The museum emerged amidst a storm of debate, even among its proponents, which focused on its site. In fact, the building that hosts it has great symbolic significance because it was created for a colonial exhibition in 1931. Should a museum of the history of immigration be set up in a building that would surely have been the natural home for a museum of colonialism? While there is in fact no such museum in France, the CNHI undoubtedly goes some way to making up for this with its fine temporary exhibitions focused on colonisation.
CNHI is a good museum; its qualities are not at issue here, but it also mirrors a historiographical misconception: namely, the idea that the legacy of colonialism can be dissolved into the history of immigration. There are certainly deep connections between these two phenomena, but they need to be distinguished in order to be properly understood. The contempt and disrespect that targeted Polish, Italian, or Spanish immigrants during the twentieth century is something different to the oppression of the colonised. These immigrants were not ‘indigènes’ like their African counterparts; they were never put on display in a cage or shown off as exotic objects in a colonial exhibition.40
An interesting clash between national republicanism and postcolonial memory as two conflictive forms of French identity took place after the terrorist attacks of January 2015. On this occasion, national republicanism experienced (at least for a moment) an extraordinary reawakening in which it redisplayed its old habits as a civil religion. Many observers pointed out this unexpected vitality of an old, apparently archaic belief. Suddenly, under the shock of a massacre in the heart of Paris, the old patriotic feeling found again its ancient strength: the Republic’s constitutional values were once more sacralised, and citizens paraded again in the streets to embrace them as an act of faith. The Republic is sacred: this is what prime minister Manuel Valls told us after the attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher kosher supermarket, as did François Hollande in the wake of the Paris attacks in November 2015. Amidst these events, republican rituals were indeed effective. Régis Debray wrote how happy he was to attend the 11 January demonstration that followed those tragic days, acknowledging the strength of the republican tradition as a divine surprise.41 The size of the demonstration in defence of the Republic, in which very powerful emotions were on display, was indeed impressive. But once again, these demonstrations spectacularly exhibited all the contradictions of republican nationalism. When Charlie was integrated among the symbols of the Republic, the spectres of colonialism came back in force. If, indeed, Charlie is the quintessence of the Republic, then Muslims are forcefully excluded from it.
There were also more spontaneous forms of commemoration in Paris’s Place de la République. For instance, we can see this in the shrine set up in front of the La Belle Équipe café, covered in flowers and messages in tribute to the victims. This was a spontaneous moment of compassion, but it did not have the same symbolic force or the same political dimension as the demonstrations that took place after the attacks. On the one hand, this extraordinary mobilisation was deeply authentic: people expressed their anger and pain and their attachment to freedom and democratic values; on the other, its overwhelming slogan Je suis Charlie clearly circumscribed the republican boundaries. Beyond claiming freedom of expression, the pluralism of ideas and religion, or even right to blaspheme, this slogan bluntly set down a dividing line that excluded not just the terrorists from the Republic, but the Muslims, that is, a significant section of French population who were stigmatised every week in the pages of Charlie Hebdo. ‘The neo-Republic’, Emmanuel Todd points out,
demands from some of its citizens an intolerable degree of renunciation of what they are. In order to be recognized as good French men and women, Muslims are forced to accept that it is a good thing to blaspheme against their own religion. And this comes down to asking them, in actual fact, to stop being Muslims. Best-selling ideologues mention deportation as a solution.42
There lies the ambiguity of the republican civic religion. Since the nineteenth century, this contradiction has been a running sore throughout the history of the Republic.