perfidy

Perfidious crony NDR has it all over many of the rest of us in one regard. Not only has he traveled to Europe - to France - in the very recent past, but his doctoral dissertation is on the vexed questions of identity and assimilation in the Alsace region. He relates a long and very interesting story about a conversation on a train with a French Muslim about the unique, and to an American, incomprehensible, problems facing French citizens who nevertheless are on the outside looking in.

As I equated things that made sense to me about integration and advancement, I hit a nerve. "More education!?" he said. I wasn't sure what had given him a shock. "Why should I have more education? I move on to the next level, studying more, because the degrees I have earned don't help me to get a job. I look forward only to more education." He had no faith that an employer would give him the chance to practice what he studied (he tried hard to find a job) so he continued to study.

This chance meeting was not unique. I've had it many times in France and Germany: a conversation with an enthusiastic Muslim or African who is surprised that someone will pay attention. Listening to them, I find that they are enthusiastic about their European homeland (adopted or natal.) They are culturally aware, exhibiting (what I consider) good social practices for their milieu. Yet they remain outsiders. I have also asked Frenchmen and Germans about Muslims and Africans: "Why are people who seem assimilated not accepted?" The question can turn a conversation on its end, turning transnational discourse into national defense.

The explanations that I hear through gritted teeth are nothing but cliches. "Immigrants" (which describes even the second generation born in country) are not assimilated. They retain backward traditions. They come just to earn money and send it home. They get brides from the mother country, locking them away and not doing anything to assimilate them. They don't learn the language, so they become rabble-rousers rather than hard workers. They are a problem for society.

The litany of complaints are familiar to me: Frenchmen used them to discredit the protests of Alsatians in the 1920s. They were used to discredit regionalist movements in Brittany and Provence. They were used to discredit traditional Catholics. They belong to a discourse of nationality and nationalization that shifts attention from discourse between national identity and ethnicity to the "other." Indeed, the most understanding Frenchmen said that it was not up to them to understand Alsatians, only for Alsatians to change. Race deepens the problem.

At least in Germany Muslims and Africans know that they are not accepted. The Turks, generations after being invited to work in the factories, are still not citizens, and they are subjected to an arduous process of naturalization. And there is an ongoing, albeit uncomfortable, discourse about how Germans view race. But the French constitution, which calls anyone born in the territory a citizen, obscures the problems of acceptance. Being taken seriously as a Frenchmen require more than a passport.

A very interesting and a fairly off-the-wall take on an issue that 'mericans are fond of pontificating on but that we - let's face it - know crap about.