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ok...this may be late in the game of this thread.
north african folk were welcomed into most western european countries through most of the period of heavy industrialization to deal with labor shortages primarily at the assembly-line level of production. they also had the advantage of not participating easily in already existing unions, so there was a political motive from the outset. and you see something of the pre-history of current stuff in this: in france, algerian workers formed seperate political organizations that played an important role in the earlier phases of the anti-colonial movement in algeria: the political focus of these organizations was algeria; the politics that informed it drew heavily on what was going on in the french left in general.
the pre-history is in the seperation. i do not know exactly how it came about: if it was the french unions and/or political organizations that refused to mobilize north african workers, of if it was north african workers who chose to form seperate organizations: either way, the political seperation was evident in the choice of "home" as an orienting point.
keep in mind that alot of these folk were and are citizens.
but they maintain ties, personal, political, religious, to north africa.
and then there is the question of ethnicity.
and the association of maintaining a connection with family history through teaching arabic.
none of these features is necessarily a sign of a refusal to integrate into the nation-state. rather they can be seen as a particular frame of reference within which the process of integration unfolds--a kind of syncretism in operating that includes these elements. you can easily see it either way.
the preamble to this is meant to state that the far right did not invent the distinctions between the modes of integration particular to north african communities and those elaborated by other groups in parallel situations. rather, they took advantage of them and reframed them in a particular way. which required a political argument be floated and that it resonate for these elements to be framed as indices of non-integration. that is what, starting in the early 1980s and continuing today, the front national did.
what is the problem?
first there is nothing necessary about the front national's argument. they chose for particular political purposes to route their definition of frenchness through categories of religon and race. they did it in order first to use for tactical advantage tenisons between communities generated by the implosion of the labor market that drew most north african workers to france in the first place. it resonated in part because the ideology recoded (misdirected) resentments about the consequences of economic reogranization. it turned outcomes of this economic reorganization into matters of religion and race.
second, it presented an idea of nation that appeared stable and more or less trans-historical. this functioned as reassurance in a situation where not only were there economic problems being generated by the processes associated with globalizing capitalism at the local level, but more importantly the notion of the nation-state was itself coming under significant pressure as a function of the e.u. this can be seen as setting into motion a crisis of identity at some levels. the front national ideology is an attempt to react--i use the word deliberately--to this anxiety, and to defend the notion of nation precisely by shifting how it is understood away from any historical role into the realm of the transcendent.
one way of seeing the consequences of this is that it shifts the question of national identity into a register that is not open to feedback loops. it then also builds a logic of racism, covered by arguments concerning religion, into the centre, and uses these elements to generate a sense of inside and outside "the nation"....it situates these racist elements by linking them to a pseudo-history of the nation which reinforces the tendency to eliminate feedback loops and writes the race/religious war dynamic into the center of how an entire far right community defines itself.
once people start to act in the basis of this way of thinking, you get a situation that looks alot like what you saw in germany during the 1930s with reference to the jews getting under way. you can see entire histories of integration wiped out, the sense of being-part of a national community erased on the basis of race and religion. you would maybe understand if this would prompt a defensive reaction on the part of the folk who now find thsemvles written out of any sense of belonging to the space where they live. but any defensive reaction can be interpreted as confirmation of the racist/religious war dynamic the right itself puts into play--the right forces the debate into this area, uses it for its own political ends--it generates responses from the communities it attacks--it uses these responses to reinforce its intitial argument--and because the premises of the argument have functioned to eliminate feedback loops up front, it sets into motion an entirely self-confirming dynamic.
is the far right's ideology "true"? does it speak about nation in "accurate" terms?
no. what is "true" in a political context? what matters is how compelling the arguments presented are: how they resonate with people---but this resonance needs have no relation to accuracy--it can just as easily speak to a vague sense of unease or dislocation. it can speak to ways of thinking that understand religious belief as teh central set of dispositions around which a sense of being-in-the-world is articulated--which means that arguments about nation would resonate because of formal symmetry with religious arguments, rather than resonating because the content of those arguments is "correct"---so no, this kind of nationalism is not "accurate" is not "true"---what makes it dangerous is the process outlined above" the centrality of a particular way of defining the nation that sets in motion a self-confirming logic of racism and religious dsicrimination set up in a framework that eliminates dissonant information by eliminating feedback loops altogether, if possible.
it is a dangerous, dangerous ideology. it is very close to american conservative ideology. except that in the states, you have no residual left that functions to name it neofascism. here, it is common sense for many. and that is terrifying.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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