Editorial

Assimilate or Die
by Mark LeVine


About 130 years ago, Josiah Strong, celebrated evangelical preacher and a chief ideologue of American empire, offered a stark choice to the "inferior races" the United States would encounter as it fulfilled its "manifest destiny" across the seas. Their only hope would be a "ready and pliant assimilation" to the wishes of the new, "peculiarly" vital and aggressive Anglo-Saxon-Christian civilization bursting forth from the United States. Assimilate or die -- in Strong's terminology, become "extinct" -- those were the only alternatives for the weaker races in what Strong, in most respects no fan of Charles Darwin, believed was a contest that could only be described as the "survival of the fittest."

At the same historical moment, France was defining its own imperial and nationalist identities, based on the concept of "assimilation" to a republican consensus founded on liberté, egalité and fraternité. For those deemed truly French (vrais français) -- from Brittany to the Basque regions, from the Germanized-Moselle to the Italian-speaking Savoie -- innumerable distinct ethnic and regional identities could be subsumed in the citizen and his beloved republic.


At the turn of the twentieth century large numbers of the colonized began migrating to their autre mère -- France -- to work at the kinds of jobs the French, facing a severe labor shortage, didn't want to do. Not surprisingly, the republican ideal of equality for all citizens remained a distant dream. Indeed, the binary and hierarchical divisions of French colonialism only intensified in the mother country. There, the danger that the vrais français might be contaminated by the backward and (even today in the view of Interior and Religion Minister Nicolas Sarkozy) not-fully-human Other, was that much greater. Indeed, the republican ideals of liberty and equality, when adopted by immigrants from the colonies, threatened both French rule abroad and white supremacy at home. Segregating immigrants into ghettos, where they could be better monitored by security forces specifically created for such purposes, seemed an effective solution.

The policy hasn't worked.

As the French historian Emmanuel Todd pointed out recently in Le Monde, the immigrants and petite bourgeoisie, who otherwise have "profoundly divergent interests," together produced the stunning "no" vote on the European Union Constitutional referendum, precisely because both saw the Constitution as forcing France along a neoliberal path not faintly in their interests. But as Interior Minister Sarkozy's comments at the start of the violence laid bare, neoliberal globalization has a nasty habit of intensifying the prejudices and suspicions alternatively nurtured and suppressed by France's republican-nationalist ideology.

In fact, Sarkozy's language makes even more sense when we recognize that, in the present advanced era of globalization, the order is no longer "assimilate or die," but rather (as a New York Times editorial described it years ago), "dominate or die." In this zero-sum context, the refusal of the banlieues' Muslim inhabitants to "readily and pliantly assimilate" to either the republican or the neoliberal order has left the forces of law and order little choice but to (threaten to) cleanse them from the body politic. How else are the true French to retain some semblance of their thirty-five hour work-week and generous retirement benefits?

Muslims might be physically ghettoized, but hundreds of interviews with teenage youth in the French and American press since the start of the violence offer a striking picture of those in revolt: They are rebelling precisely because they still dream of being accepted as French, not because they've given up on such a project. (Indeed, how one defines French identity is certainly one crucial issue that is up for grabs here). Several thoughtful French commentators even interpret the violence as a "refusal of marginalization" that reflects a deep acceptance of fundamental French values expressed in the "coupling of liberty and equality."

That may be. But if French society supports Sarkozy's push to crush the violence by cleansing the ghettos of their "troublemakers," the next "intifadah of the cities" could well be in honor not of Marianne, France's national emblem and the personification of liberty and reason, but of Musab al-Zarqawi and his successors.

Mark LeVine, professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture, and Islamic studies at the University of California at Irvine, is the author of a new book, Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld Publications, 2005). His website is www.culturejamming.org.