1. Marina MOGILNER, “Ab Imperio”

Dear Alain,

[…] We are now working on the fourth issue of 2005 (with the thematic focus on “Empire after empire”); we intend to discuss how imperial legacies shape the languages of self-description and modes of self-presentation in post-imperial societies. Mussolini exploiting the legacy of the Roman Empire, Hitler’s Third Reich, and the imperial discourse in today’s Russia are all cases in point. You might still remember that we discussed the possibility of inviting French historians outside the field of Russian studies to contribute to that issue of AI? Particularly in the wake of the recent Arab riots, it appears to be a suitable time to raise the issue of the different legacies of the French colonial empire – and of the First and the Second empires. Could you suggest any candidates for this exchange?

Best,
Marina

2. Alain BLUM, “Cahiers du Monde Russe” and Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen (EHESS, Paris)

Dear Marina,

[…] I just want to have more precision: What do you mean by “the recent Arab riots”? I don’t understand what are you talking about.

Yours,
Alain

3. MM:

Dear Alain,

[…] I am sorry, I was writing in a rush and did not express myself accurately enough. Of course, I did not mean “legal aliens” but the rioters of Arab and black African descent. I was more concerned with avoiding assigning any Muslim agenda or identity to them.

Best,
Marina

4. AB:

Dear Marina,

You know, when I read all that has been published about these events,^[1] my reaction is always a very quick and strong one. In France, this was much more a social movement than an “ethnic” one. That is why I’m trying to avoid any terms that ascribe some kind of ethnic or religious identity to the participants of the events. And there is no evidence, except TV close-ups, that all of them are of that (or any particular) descent. Their origins are different. Of course many are of Arab or African origin, but these are not the only ones. Their protest is the protest of the people residing in the areas with poor living conditions, nothing else.
If you're interested in a more detailed discussion of these events in Russian, you can go to the website of the NZ magazine^[2] (http://www.nz-online.ru/) and check out the polemical piece that I wrote together with one of my colleagues.^[3]
Please, be assured that I have no doubts about your genuine interest in this issue. I know your intellectual and scholarly position. You are among those who are much concerned by all these questions […].

Amitiés,
Alain

5. MM:

Dear Alain,

Thank you for the reference to your very interesting text in NZ. It seems to me that the stress of your argument in that text is not on denying the importance of the ethnic origins of the rioting youth but rather on the fact that these people were born in France and have been socialized through basic national institutions, including schools, which made them into regular French citizens, or Frenchmen. The question then is whether the two are the same. Eugene Weber claimed so,^[4] but over the past decade very important studies have emerged that have significantly revised Weber’s argument about schools and the army as the ultimate nationalizing agencies.
Unlike you, I haven’t made any study of the actual composition of the rioters. But in my view, no less important is how French society perceives the problem and represents it for foreign observers through its mass media. Arguably, the social composition of the 1968 rioters was to a degree comparable to that of the recent rioters. But public opinion in the late 1960s saw the social tensions and political system as the major faults of the system, hence the dominant interpretation of the 1968 events as a cultural revolution, political protest, and social movement.
Today, regardless of the “true,” “actual,” statistically verified composition of the rioters, the society tends to ascribe confessional and ethnic meaning to the protest, which “by itself” could be as meaningless and spontaneous as suicide – a discursive “black hole,” an object of our projections and interpretations.
One may assume that today in France race and confession (or national identity and individual beliefs) have emerged as the greatest challenge to the existing social system and ideological consensus.
I certainly hope that serious sociological and anthropological studies will appear soon, analyzing the events in question, but that will be a different story. Since you follow the events and the discussions in France from the inside and you are much more closely and professionally engaged with them than myself, I’ll appreciate any thoughts and direct references on your part.
Thank you again for pointing my attention to your remarks in NZ.

MM

6. AB:

Dear Marina,

Thank you for your answer and interesting remarks. I would like to comment on some of them.
First, I see the problem not in how the population looks at certain events, but in determining their meaning, in what is the social composition of a movement, and so on. This is what I intend to discuss below. Moreover, French society does not have a single and indiscriminate point of view. French media discourses have been much more diverse than you think, and especially very different from that of the foreign media. The difference is striking. I’ve been watching closely French TV news, and their coverage was indeed complex, the rioting youth (including those committing acts of violence) got a chance to present their explanation. And their arguments were never religious or ethnic in the true meaning of these terms – they were always social. Of course, they posited the question of discrimination, which is related to the question of origin. But I’ll comment on the nature of this connection below.
Le Monde, for one, presented a whole range of different opinions, but again, religion or “origin” were rarely evoked by the commentators. Instead what they discussed was the question of discrimination and, more generally, the milieu populaire problems. Echoing these public debates, the most recent report of our Renseignement généraux (the French equivalent of the Russian FSB) states that the recent riots cannot be understood as a religious (or any other organized) protest movement.
The best analysis in this regard, I think, is offered by the two sociologists working on our banlieue.^[5] Two years ago they wrote a very good book, Violences Urbaines,^[6] which has opened the discussion before the actual riots erupted. Their comments on the recent events in a form of a short but very interesting and convincing article are available on the internet.^[7] These sociologists have been working in the banlieues for many years; they conducted many interviews there, including during the most recent months. Thus, they speak about the milieu they know, as opposed to the journalists and intellectuals who have never been there and never actually spoke with these youngsters.
So, please don’t think that there is a common interpretation of these events in France. Of course, the immediate reaction is based to a degree on some kind of fear, leading to the provisional (I hope) success of our dangerous and populist minister of internal affairs. But it is a classical French post-revolutionary situation (our Parliament had never been as rightist as it was after 1968; the same can be said about the post-1870 developments).
Comparing the events of 2005 with other protest movements, first of all with 1968, we will find common features as well as differences. Thus, in both cases the protest was spontaneous and violent from the very beginning. Yet there is a great difference in terms of the social composition of the rioters: the students of 1968 came from rather healthy social groups, and were only later joined by the workers, for example. At the initial stage they lacked the political organization that would later emerge in the course of the movement. The movement that we observe today is not (and has never been) coordinated, it is localized in particular areas and there is no coordination between these areas. The reaction of the left political parties is rather cool. Thus, we cannot really speak about a political movement in this case. However, the consequences of the riots and their impact on the political debates in the country demonstrate their political character, even though as a “movement” the rioters lack any clearly organized structure and recognized leaders.
Let us turn now to the “ethnic” component. This problem is really a problem of naming groups, thus ascribing meaning to them. If you say “they are Arabs” or “black,” you mean that they constitute a coherent group of individuals who commit violence because of their belonging to such a group. But any student of these issues can see that:

1. The French media presents participants in the events as being of some foreign origin, even if those youngsters are French and were born in France. What does this “foreign origin” mean? It implies that their parents or grand-parents came to France from Maghreb or some sub-Saharan countries. But in fact these youngsters of the “foreign origin” don’t constitute a coherent group based on descent. Their identity is based on the cité where they live (a micro-region, a development), the department (region), etc. This kind of identity is in some way ethnic, but has nothing to do with geography of origin.

2. The rioters are often identified as “Maghrebian” or black (because they are subjected to discrimination) by the others, and outside the area they live. Such a mechanism can work, for example, when they look for accommodation, or when they are subjected to a special police control, etc. These issues are real, very important. But again, you cannot reduce the cause of discrimination to the outside qualification of them as “Arabs” or “black.” This is a more general problem of the relationship with the Other and the qualification of this Other is much more complex (or simple).

3. For this reason, I don’t think that studying the ethnic “origin” of the violent rioters makes any sense. If you do so, you inevitably ascribe to them a variable you consider to be the cause of the events. But if you listen to the rioters when they talk about themselves as subjected to discrimination, you hear only complaints about their living conditions, education, and finally their belonging to milieu populaire.

4. I think that the French experience in the field of immigrant education is interesting regardless of its partial success. The schools are organized not on the basis of the ethnic origin of students but on a geographical basis, i.e. special provisions are made for the schools in areas that are considered to be difficult in an economic and social sense. Such schools and the teachers working there get more state financial support. That means that the question of “ethnicity” is replaced by the question of area, and such a substitution is of a crucial importance. If one moves out of a “difficult area,” one completely changes one’s status vis-à-vis the society and the state, while “ethnicity” is something that remains unchangeable.

I end my comments here, but I am very interested in continuing this discussion with you. We are clearly completely within the topical focus of your current volume – the post-imperial condition is present in the events that we discuss. Just consider the law that was passed in March or April of this year, making teachers present in their lectures not only negative but also positive aspects of colonialism!^[8] But even observing such extremes, we need not overestimate the impact of the post-colonial condition. What frightens me in this regard is the easiness with which many people in France, and even more in the foreign media, produce evidence and make conclusions. And these people saw the riots only on TV, they never visited the “difficult” areas, never went to the schools there or spoke to these youngsters. Contrary to their approach, our background is, I think, scientific, for we study the events on the basis of factual data. I’ve cited already the work by Beaud and Pialoux as an example, but there is another well documented book by Wieviorka on violence,^[9] as well as many dissertations about the banlieues (unfortunately, they are not published). I personally have a limited experience in this area of research, although I know some of these young people and their teachers. I had many discussions with them, especially with the teachers, who of course never describe their job as an easy one, quite on the contrary. Yet they would not offer the kind of a caricature analysis that sometimes dominates the newspapers.
I don’t present this letter as an “argument of truth,” because I like the debate. But it is more a reaction to some articles by French intellectuals, especially to those published by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse in Russian newspapers, completely misled articles…
Sorry for being a little too passioné, but I like to talk about these issues, I appreciate your arguments and very difficult questions, and hope to continue this discussion with you.

Bien amicalement,
Alain

7. MM:

Dear Alain,

I am so glad I was able to provoke you into such a detailed and emotional response. I have to admit that my view of the situation was to a large degree formed by the media discourse produced outside of France, which is why your analysis is so important for me and people like myself. And I am really grateful to you for finding time for this correspondence and taking my interest seriously. I still have many questions left, some of them stimulated by this last letter. For example, you write that:

“The schools are organized not on the basis of the ethnic origin of the pupils, but on a geographical basis, i.e. special provisions are made for the schools in areas that are considered to be difficult in an economic and social sense. […] If one moves out of a “difficult area”, one completely changes one’s status vis-à-vis the society and the state, while “ethnicity” is something that remains unchangeable.”

This is obviously an important factor, but where can you find in modern multiethnic societies a regular public school based on ethnicity? One cannot but wonder what happens with the French schooling system if the area is ethnically more or less homogeneously “minority French.” In this case the state policy that you describe fixes the difference on two levels simultaneously: an ethnicity is assigned (not by law, but due to social and economic factors) to some locality, and social and economic benefits are assigned to this particular locality as well, and thus – indirectly – are connected with ethnicity.
I have many more questions related to what you have said in connection with the topic of AI’s “Empire after empire” issue: what would be the lessons (if any) that France learned from the past (including the imperial era)? Am I right to assume that for your analysis, the imperial/post-imperial discourse is irrelevant and artificial, and that you prefer the discourse of social and political problems to any colonial, national, etc. explanations?
There is a well-known methodological problem with attempting to explain the processes of social dynamics (a growing discontent among a faction of the population, a rapid protest mobilization, an outbreak of violence) by means of structuralist analyses. You can reconstruct the social composition of the group in question to a point of precision of one per cent, yet how does this explain why some localities were involved in the process and others were not, or why the events broke out on a certain date and time? (Unless you believe that the threat of police searches and accidents in hazardous facilities always provoke urban riots).
Furthermore, unless you agree that social characteristics (I am avoiding the term “identities” following Cooper and Brubaker’s warning^[10]) are “objective” and innate, how you distinguish those that are relevant and true from those that are not social? As we know from the case studies of urban sociologists since the 1980s, as well as from post-colonial analysis, race and ethnicity are equally social categories and are constructs for that matter. Black Americans and Latinos live in US downtowns not because of their skin color, but for a complex of economic, occupational, and social reasons, including the structures of sociability and social mobility of recently arrived immigrants. We know that some US citizens with full legal rights and command of English, the Irish, were categorized de facto as the “yellow” in the late 19th century. Then came the turn of the Jews, then Italians. In the 1990s we observed the construction of the discourse of Russians as the new “yellows,” people with full legal rights yet a dubious social reputation. So how do you substantiate your discrimination of the categories of ethnicity and race as legitimate social categories and factors in social life?
I too am very partisan in my perception of current Russian domestic politics, yet I understand (hopefully) the limitations that my political sympathies impose over my research. The leftist paradigm in social sciences is justly credited for its serious and non-discriminatory treatment of social elements, particularly of those traditionally neglected by high-brow elitist scholars, who prefer to focus on social groups and categories that produce an abundance of self-reflective narratives and documents of their activities. The side effect of the leftist paradigm is an underestimation of individual motivations and the importance of values and rationality that modern society labels as “alien” or “archaic.” In my view, the renowned Dutch anthropologist, Anton Blok, managed to achieve a very balanced approach to the study of minority violence by combining a genuine respect for individual worldviews with an understanding of their particular roots and motivations that lay outside the norms of modern European culture.^[11]
Finally, I do not think that your arguments really dismiss my point that the most important aspect is not the riots and rioters themselves, who might well be of purely Gallic origin (if such a thing ever existed), but the way in which the society has interpreted them. This reaction – I can only speculate – is determined by the rivalry of political correctness as a value for many decent people and their natural prejudices; by the tradition of conceptualizing the “difference” and its various markers in public discourse, in culture (movies, literature etc.), in historical narratives. What was the impact of Nora’s enterprise and the popularization of the Lieux de mémoire^[12] upon different factions within French society? Have all the readers of Nora – or rather consumers of his approach as expressed in TV documentaries, textbooks, propaganda of historical monuments, etc. – related themselves to the same places of memory on French soil equally? In other words, is, say, Verdun the same symbol for someone whose family lost all its males a few generations ago as for those who were born in France 20 years ago, a few years after their parents had moved to the country (from Russia, Algeria, the United States)?
Similarly – but also in a different way – how does the historical legacy of France as a great colonial empire affect people? Someone has a grandfather – a veteran of the Foreign Legion, and the other has a grandfather who killed Frenchmen – or was killed by Frenchmen – in Indochina, North Africa, or elsewhere. Universal schooling is great, but at some point kids get home after school.
I believe that history does matter, in how it is interpreted in different quarters of society, and the past experience of “managing differences” is very important. Hence my question: how does the French imperial experience of coping with “aliens” affect its effort to manage diversity now?
I am really fascinated with the perspective of your response – as always, a serious and passionate response – to these thoughts and questions of mine (sorry, I failed to restrain myself from further questioning via the Internet). May I suggest that your next message be written as a think-piece for AI 4/2005? I am not an editor who would like to turn every private letter into an academic publication, but I think that my reaction to your thoughts (and the reaction of my coeditors) is quite representative of the response of AI's readership audience. I really view your letters to me as drafts of a discussion likely to be welcomed by AI’s audience.

I am looking forward to your response.

Best,
Marina

8. AB:

Dear Marina,

I will try to answer your questions one by one, while being aware, of course, that I’m not always confident in my answers and that the debate around these questions in France is enormous.
Of course, our schooling system takes ethnicity into account. But for some states ethnicity is a much more precise political category, especially when they develop their quota policies. A focus on geographical aspects allows taking into account a truly complex set of variables. In addition, and for me this is the most important element of the French system, when a person leaves a “difficult” neighborhood, he/she leaves the situation of being ascribed to it (and of the identity of that locality being ascribed to him/her) as well. The complex set of variables behind the geographical approach represents the multidimensional nature of the social problem of immigrants’ integration: urbanism, education, relations with other areas, as well as employment policies. The word and concept of ethnicity, on the other hand, clearly leads to the forgetting of social conditions, for whatever the social position of a given person, his/her ethnicity remains the same. I consider such logic a dangerous misunderstanding. But, as you correctly point out, maybe my views are based on my experience of studying social dynamics. In my previous works,^[13] I attempted to demonstrate, using the example of nineteenth-century France, that the social dynamics of a given society are strongly related to social changes on the margins of that society, to changes in frontier zones where different groups interact. Thus, one cannot use rigid social categories to study such dynamics, for one will lose the most important aspects of the latter. And, in my view, ethnic classifications are much more rigid categories than categories of social classification: when you speak about Arabs, blacks, Bretons, or French in ethnic terms, you determine groups by their origin, and you preclude seeing different venues that lead to exits from group identities.
An important task for me, therefore, is to avoid rigid categories of classification. This goal may be achieved more straightforwardly by using common social categories instead of ethnic categories, even if (I fully agree with you here) ethnic categories are broadly speaking considered as a kind of social category. Let’s take as an example the study of a single individual’s trajectory: social optics require accounting for his/her settlement changes, professional position changes, demographic status changes, education changes. But what about ethnic optics? He/she will always be considered, on the basis of such a criteria, to retain his/her “primordial” origin. Of course, in the study of immigration one can integrate place of birth (of the subject and his/her parents), language spoken in childhood, languages spoken at work, etc. If one takes all that into account, things might work out, but one cannot establish synthetic categories and especially one cannot use popular ethnic labels such as Blacks, Latinos, Arab, Maghrebian.
Here, for me, the question of naming, of nomination, is a very important one. Let's take again the example of banlieues. Even though the population of banlieues sometimes is referred to collectively as “Black” or “Arab,” these ethnic categories are often useless for a researcher. Notice also that people from banlieues often invent terms of self-description (renoi – le noir inversed; beur or rebe – le arab inversed; pakpak – le Pakistani, but covering immigrants from the entire Indian subcontinent, etc.), not only because they want to have their own language (verlan – ie à l'envers, in inverse order), but also because they consider themselves as belonging to new groups based on the fact of their origin but also on their new kind of life. Moreover, these groups are always complex, and not based on “pure” origin. The popular “white” belongs to the same category of constructed groups. Speaking about Arabs or blacks, you loose this complexity. Now we can also observe a strong trend of mixing, meticization of these groups.
This brings us to your question about the relevance of imperial/post-imperial discourse for my analysis. This is, generally, a highly debated issue in France, especially among historians and sociologists. Some consider this perspective not really important for interpreting the contemporary situation, while others emphasize the postcolonial aspects of French culture. I do not deny the validity and relevance of imperial/post-imperial debate for understanding the recent riots. Of course, the fact that many immigrants came to France from Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa is related to the history of the French colonial empire. Of course, some of the people affirming this origin consider that France has a debt toward these populations. Of course, some legislative issues and processes are marked by this history (say, the 1955 law of Etat d'urgence, which has again been used during the last events; but I think this remains an isolated example). But the same can be said about all European history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I don't see how the imperial legacy helps to better understand the present situation in France. Any process has historical roots and their appreciation is important. But by emphasizing these aspects, you enter the discussion about “debt” and “responsibility” – a very important discussion in its own right (France has to recognize its colonial history and the violence it committed in the past), – but rather useless for a contemporary analysis of social dynamics and representations.
Alexis Spire, a young historian, has shown that in the 1960s and 1970s many of those who participated in developing and implementing practical immigration policies in France were former French colonial officials, and this “background” influenced their views.^[14] But this is not the case any more; today’s immigration officers are of a completely new generation and background and share different views. I think that all such issues are legitimate within imperial and post-imperial studies, but we have to remember that by focusing on them we risk discounting contemporary dynamics and changes. I don't think, for example, that the representations of the rioters characteristic of today’s French mass discourse are connected with colonial representations; they are rather reflections of a traditional racism and xenophobia. The French population reacted in the same manner to Polish and Italian immigrants in the 1920s. Why assume, then, as some researchers do, that the history of the colonial empire makes the problems of the immigrants from Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa more vital compared to the problems of other immigrants? And why do we have to assume that these problems define not only the life of the immigrant generation but also the life of their children born in France? If we examine the origin of these problems and the validity of the perception that they are less vital in the case of Italian or Polish immigrants (which I doubt), we find two explanations not directly related to colonial experiences:

– the present socio-economic situation (one migration always displaces the other, enforcing social mobility of the previous wave of immigrants; thus, the upward social mobility of Italian and Polish immigrations intensified with the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese immigrants after WWII, and WWII itself led to great changes. Spanish and Portuguese upward mobility increased with the post-colonial migration from Africa. But since the mid-1970s immigration to France has been limited and there were not enough new immigrants to ensure the upward social mobility of the African wave; it is interesting to speculate about the possible impact of European enlargement on this process;
– the European 19th-century representation of Africa and the South. Of course you can say that this is a colonial representation, but it is also much more than that. It was a result of the break between the North and the South that occurred during this period, which itself was an outcome of a much older process of forming religious and cultural gaps between Europe and the rest of the world. To reduce this to imperial policies seems to me a very narrow approach toward the history of representation.

I can agree with you that my position can be described as politically “partisan.” I can refer to Louis Dumont’s interpretation of modernity,^[15] which is very interesting (although I do not fully accept his interpretation of totalitarianism). But his idea that the presence of old holistic representations in our modern world produces conflicts with individualist tendencies is very important. And I agree with you regarding the practical implications of labeling by one part of a society the “other” part of the same society as archaic or alien. On the other hand, I think that the “official” point of view presented by politicians in public debates is not neutral as well.
Let's take the debate in France about whether it is necessary to introduce ethnicity in the population statistics (in the context of the fight against discrimination): discrimination is a serious problem and the desire to distinguish people according to some simple criteria is an influential social factor. But I think that if we create appropriate categories, the effect will be the recognition of groups that are not in fact groups. This will solidify the distinctions and give them an apparent scientific basis. Moreover, if skin color is the criteria, what does it mean? It means that this classification is based on interaction – one individual sees another one and evaluates him/her from his/her own point of view. But classification is not able to reflect interaction, because different “observers” can place an individual in different social groups, and this belonging can change depending on the context, etc. What really can help to deal with the issues of discrimination is not statistics but public debates around it. As far as statistics as the method goes, sociology has invented many methods that are much more appropriate for understanding discrimination and therefore much more capable of generating proposals for action.
Finally, I fully agree with you on the issue of participating in French common memory and history. However, I think that now France is going through a period of complex rethinking of its history, which also explains the importance of public debates. Some textbooks from the times of the French colonial empire spoke about “our ancestors, the Gaulois,” as if this were the case not only for France proper. Now you cannot find any book like this. Colonial history is gradually finding its place in the general French historical narrative (see the controversial debate about this absurd law on teaching the positive side of colonization). And migration is now also included in this history (consider, for example, plans for the new Paris museum of immigration^[16]). Of course, many problems remain (for example, how to deal with religious history or rather histories, especially in a secular country like France), of course the “histoire de France” remains a “histoire de France,” but that does not mean that it is “a histoire des Gaulois...”
Of course, history is an important factor when one thinks about the representation of events. In this sense, I agree with you, history does matter. But, as I wrote earlier, the representation of the last events was not uniform, many people offered alternative interpretations of the actions by participants in the November demonstrations (I might be too politically correct avoiding terms like “rioters,” but I think that in this debate words are important...). Thus, I agree with you that we need to take into account the external discourse of “black and Arab rioters,” but we also have to remember that this was not the only one.
I'm also very excited by this exchange with you. And of course, if you think you can do something with it on the pages of your journal, I would be very honored and pleased. And thank you a lot for continuing this discussion. I know that Ab Imperio is now at the center of intellectual debates and I’m very happy to take part. Looking forward to hear from you again...

Amicalement,
Alain

9. MM:

Dear Alain,

The issues you raise seem to be really important and your arguments very interesting and provocative, and invite a further clarification of terms and concepts.
First of all, I see a problem with your major theoretical assumption regarding the nature of ethnicity. It seems that your understanding of ethnicity (or nation for that matter) as a “category of analysis” replicates its popular usage as a “category of practice” (in popular discourse). I agree that when a state, for its legislative purposes, produces a “list” of ethnic categories and then attaches to them some privileges (as was the case in the early Soviet project), it fixes these categories and limits the possibilities of self-interpretations for the members of this or that ethnic group, as well as imposes a certain language of nationality (one that can bring real benefits to a particular group). But already these outcomes reveal that the very same state that fixes nationalities and uses ethnicity in its primordial meaning simultaneously constructs these nationalities and the meaning of such terms as nationality or ethnicity. Here again one can refer to the Soviet case. (I think that the dialectic of this primordial-constructivist role of the state is excellently explicated by Francine Hirsch in her “Empire of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union.”^[17] I wrote a review of this book for the latest AI 3/2005,^[18] you should receive the issue soon.) Thus, taking ethnicity into account on a practical level might be as “constructivist” and dynamic as working with a set of social categories.
You seem to argue that a range of “local” identities emerged – de facto new ethnicities – based on the localized territoriality (cité, département, banlieue) where people of various, often African and Arab origins, experience the same kind of social, economic, or racial discrimination. At the same time, can we not speak of an overarching identity, an ethnicity in the making that in fact is defined by the common experiences of immigration, adaptation, and economic and social despair? To substantiate this view, one can refer to the letter in which you talk about the emergence of a particular popular culture of immigrant (and non-immigrant) suburban France, in particular reflected in the use of verlan or “verlanized” parlance, and I would add – of popular music with Arab and African influences, and a strong sense of exclusion from the French society.
Another way to look at these issues is suggested by a student of French colonial empire, Frederick Cooper, who criticizes post-colonial scholarship for taking for granted the lines of exclusion of the population of colonies from that of the nation-state of the metropolis.^[19] He is far from denying colonialism and racism, but he makes a point that, historically, the French imperial regime operationalized the concept of integral citizenship for colonial subjects and colonial subjects framed their claims in this language of integration and legal equality. Does that mean that we can exclusively focus on the textual dimension of the political language of colonial elites and conclude that they were no different than the social groups of the nation-state that used the same language of inclusive citizenship? I am afraid this will result in the wrong conclusion. We need to take into account the context of this “speech act,” to grant the speaking subjects the right to redefine creatively the terms of political dialogue. In other words, we need to problematize the situation of the representation of rebellious groups in Parisian suburbs without recourse to essentialization, i.e. we need to ask the question of why siblings of the French colonial legacy frame their representation in the language of integration and French nationhood. Is there something that makes them repeatedly affirm their Frenchness, while other members of French society do not feel this pressure and are aware that their Frenchness is taken for granted? If we are to believe Stephane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, the suburban “others” indeed often describe their own problems, in fact, formulate their own difference, in terms of social and economic discrimination rather than any particular ethnic/cultural demands. So, to what extent do you think this is due to the fact that they follow the acceptable parlance in France, where the stress is always on equality and discrimination in social terms rather than on ethnic/cultural/racial differences?
When I mentioned in my previous letter the post-colonial perspective, I did not mean to bring in the issue of “debt” and “responsibility”, but as you wrote, they may have played an important role in structuring expectations of the immigrants, the French legal tradition, etc. Thus, based on your own reasoning and not on my arguments, do you not think that the virtual absence of “ethnic” language on both sides – the expert community and the recent rioters – by itself calls for an interpretation? And are there contexts, beside the sphere of French public politics (generally, the public sphere) and academic debates, in which we can directly trace the language of ethnicity/nationalism/race (for example, when the French rioters report on their actions and aspirations in their own or some foreign, for example, Arab media)? Do you not think that by being predisposed against ethnicity as a category of analysis, you not only block the possibility of studying different registers of the protest language, but also de facto support the dominant paradigm within which the protesters expressed themselves in order to be heard? The term “ethnicity” can be overloaded with primordial connotations, yet recently, theoreticians of nationalism suggested redefining the existing apparatus of our analysis with neologisms, such as nationness (Anderson) or nationhood (Brubaker). In other words, there are other ways to take into account the cultural and historical distinctions of groupness without recourse to the essentialist and primordialist language of ethnicity.
In this light, how would you comment on the British kind of criticism of the French “civic nationalism” (which you refuse to call nationalism)? For British commentators (again, I am relying here on media discourse), London is an example of a multicultural city that does not have a “suburban problem.” They present their policies toward immigrants in cultural rather then exclusively social terms and speak about the imperial legacy as a positive value. Do you think their critique of French “self-satisfaction” is relevant?
I wonder whether you followed Russian discussions about the French riots. Here the analogies between France and post-Soviet Russia were employed to support the nationalist agenda of not allowing illegal immigrants in the country, especially in the Moscow suburbs. The nationality (i.e. ethnicity) of the immigrants was the most important argument compared to social, economic, and demographic factors. Obviously, the French “precedent” is used and redefined in each national context, but what do you think in principle about the analogies made between France’s immigration policies and those of contemporary Russia? Are these analogies appropriate and useful analytically?
I promise to stop questioning you for a while […]

Marina

10. AB:

Dear Marina,

Thanks a lot for this letter, which is indeed very convincing. I’m trying again to answer it.
I agree with your arguments about the constructivist potential of ethnicity, but if so, the problem is really a problem of “naming” (how not only to speak about, but to “name” the subjects of our analysis). Here we have to acknowledge the persistence in our language of such names as “Arabs” or “blacks,” or “Africans” or “of foreign origin,” which are not reflective of the nature of the processes they are meant to designate. Of course, the groups we speak about are defined by many cultural aspects, particular cultural practices. But this culture is overall a suburban culture, though connected in many ways to many different cultures; it is also a self-developed culture that is clearly a part of French culture now.
The problem with the “categories of practice” is that they are so omnipresent that for analytical purposes we have to get rid of these categories. Therefore, I’ve decided for myself (but maybe it is a conceptual mistake) that to begin with the idea of social groups and then to extend this idea through the inclusion of cultural elements would be more correct than to start my analysis with ethnic categories.
You could say that to speak of “popular groups” is no less a caricature than to speak about “Arabs.” But, as I suggested earlier, a “popular group” can be seen as a dynamic concept, while ethnic categories are more historically and culturally conditioned. If we are capable of inventing fluid ethnic categories, then why not? But the idea of origin is preeminent in these kinds of categories anyway. Therefore we need a more convincing theoretical approach within which it is possible to speak in terms of “local” identity. But in doing so, we need to remember that one of its characteristics should be fluidity and that its temporary manifestations are evident in the form of identities. Brubaker based his argument against “identity” on the fact that it includes many completely different meanings that can be named by different words. Just for this same reason I consider this concept to be relevant, although we should speak in plural about “identities” and not the “identity.”
On the question of language for political and social claims I completely agree with you and Frederick Cooper. On the one hand, indeed, people from the Paris suburbs follow the French language of legal equality and integration. More than that, as I wrote earlier, they accept the idea of the state and the public sphere as it has been presented traditionally in public debates in France. But again, does this automatically refer us to a colonial discourse? I'm not entirely sure. For example, the process of integration in Colonial Algeria also dwelled on a clear distinction between indigenous and French populations. The most important issue here is that these protesting youngsters today not only appropriate the French political language, but ask for an “application” of their claims. As you wrote, one part of French society is ready to do this and affirm their Frenchness, while other (many?) members of French society consider them as not quite French. This is one of the major problems, major contradictions of the current French situation.
Coming back to our discussion of the postcolonial perspective, which almost inevitably (again, in public debates but also in scientific discussions) brings up issues of debt or responsibility, I think it is important to understand through which channels it is (the colonial experience) coming, as well as the direct consequences of the transfer of colonial practices and thinking. This was the subject of Spire's book, which I mentioned in my previous letter. The other question is how the colonial perspective structures expectations of the immigrants and their children. I think that if this is a legitimate perspective on the first-generation immigrants, their descendants found themselves in a completely different situation; hence their claims contain no references to this colonial perspective.
And again, being predisposed against ethnicity as a category of analysis does not mean forgetting about geographic and historic roots or other ways of representation. I’m reluctant to use the concept of ethnicity directly because I prefer not to stress one traditional conceptualization over another. What I am trying to do instead is to problematize different ways of understanding the phenomena under consideration. I think that social and also geopolitical (focusing on urban segregation) conceptualizations are more complex and inclusive than ethnic ones. Obviously, we cannot assume that a common language is completely independent from the language of the social sciences. And the language of ethnicity is too close to primordialist thinking and therefore leads to much confusion.
This brings us to the issue of French civic nationalism and the British critique of the French integrationist model. I think that French self-satisfaction is based on the ambiguity of which I spoke earlier – the contradiction between the model and the actual practices. But, for me, the model is deeply inscribed in our institutions and history, and institutions are very important in understanding social processes (again social). On the basis of this particular institutional tradition, it is not possible to “invent” communitarianism in France. In Great Britain there are many associations based on such criteria, the society works in this way, but this is not a French pattern. There are institutional limitations that would not allow a direct import of either a model or representations. They might be valuable in one place but not suitable for another. Instead of such British criticism we need to develop a complex set of concepts that would reflect both the social and the cultural aspects of integration.
What does all this mean for Russia? Indeed, I did follow the Russian discussions of the French events and even took part in them (see my discussion piece in NZ-online.ru, a kind of an answer to the interviews with Hélène Carrère d'Encausse publicized in the Russian media). I was disturbed by the degree of essentialization of the problem, by the no doubt primordial ethnic language of analysis and the anti-immigration and religious sentiments. For me, it is obvious that the ethnic description frame is so dangerously present in Russia.
However, generally speaking, the French analogies highlight an interesting aspect of Russian development. More than a decade ago, I used a post-colonial analogy (you see, this post-colonial point of view sometimes is present in my works as well) to put forward a hypothesis regarding the patterns of immigration from Central Asia to Russia.^[20] I wrote about that in 1993, just after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and today my prognosis has been partially confirmed, which testifies to the importance of the strong connection between old “imperial” and new “post-imperial” political spaces. However, the possibilities for direct French-Russian analogies are, in my view, rather limited because, as you pointed out, the claims of the social groups involved are very different […]

Alain.