French Riots - Continued

The protests in France, stemming from the electrocution and death of 2 teens running from the police (the police say they were not chasing them), has grown by the day.  In DEL's first post on the riots, I argued that the underlying tensions were largely due to France's socialist policies that have created immigrant neighborhoods with extremely high long-term unemployment.  This in turn has led to a large-scale disenfranchisement of French Muslim youth.  The long-run failure of the French system to provide jobs for their people is giving an opening to the elements of radical Islam that give a false sense of community to those affected Muslim youth.

The Christian Science Monitor approaches the riots from the unemployment perspective in this piece today:

"That incident [DEL: the death of the teenage immigrants], says social worker Michèle Lereste, "crystallized the hatred" that some of the most disaffected and hopeless young men living in what the government calls "sensitive urban zones" feel toward authority.

In these 751 zones that the government has designated for special programs, unemployment stands at 19.6 percent - double the national average - and at more than 30 percent among 21- to 29- year-olds, according to official figures. Incomes are 75 percent below the average."

The article goes on to describe the growing angst French immigrant youth feel towards the French government.

"'The kids learn all the French republican values such as equality in school, and then they find in practice that it's an illusion,' says Ms. Bouzar, who was recently named one of Time magazine's 50 'European Heroes' as a role model for those seeking to be good Muslims and good French citizens. 'There is an enormous gap between theory and practice.'

Nowhere is that gap clearer, say young men in Clichy-sous-Bois and adults who work with them, than in the behavior of the police. 'They check our papers everywhere, all the time, for no reason,' complains one youth in Clichy who did not want to be identified. 'And the checks are getting rougher and rougher.'

Those sorts of experiences 'delegitimize the state' in young peoples' eyes, worries Bouzar, which helps explain why authority figures such as firemen and doctors have been stoned on recent nights even as they tried - with police protection - to save lives and property."

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (the former French Foreign Minister) expressed an opinion that the protests are "organized".

"'I will not accept organized gangs making the law in some neighborhoods. I will not accept having crime networks and drug trafficking profiting from disorder,' Villepin said at the Senate in between emergency meetings called over the riots."

France's Interior Minister is trumpeting a similar line about the protests being organized.

"Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said in a television interview that he believed the rioting 'was not spontaneous, it was perfectly organized.' He said law enforcement authorities did not know who was organizing the violence and offered no evidence to support the statement."

Meanwhile the French government cannot agree on a course of action and appears paralyzed by the riots.

"De Villepin proposed no action to bolster public statements that have had no discernible effect on the violence. The cabinet has weighed proposals for a forceful response against concern that such a move would merely bring more rioters onto the streets.

'We see the situation in certain neighborhoods is not getting better at all, but degenerating,' Socialist Party leader Jean-Marc Ayrault told French LCI television. He said President Jacques Chirac's government 'did not know how to take control.'"

Dawn's Early Light believes a couple of different scenarios could be at play:

1. The riots were spontaneous based on boiling frustration from young immigrants about their poverty and treatment by the French government and police that were ignited by the teenagers' deaths.
2. After a week, the riots could be spreading based on similar spontaneous uprisings of more communities expressing their anger at the government in a violent fashion.
3. OR radical Islam elements could be using these protests as a means to organize more youth and deploy them against the French government in a larger Islamic movement.

However, without some type of direct evidence that the 3rd scenario above is true from the French government, it would look more likely that the French government is shifting the blame from its own failed policies to the ethereal threat of "radical Islam".

Time will tell which scenario is right.  Regardless, the French have a major systemic, long-term problem to address.  The riots will only lead to strengthening radical Islam in their country over the long run.  Failed socialist policies of Chirac's government appear largely to blame.

Comments

[John Gillmartin]

Outside Islamic countries, one need only look to the countries with significant Muslim-immigrant problems (France, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, and Spain) to see a common thread of failed social engineering to understand why they are having the problems.

Social engineering originates from a philosophy of weakness; most Third World men respect strength and see weakness as a sign of masculine failure. Ergo the French riots. And they may be closer than we think!

[Glenn Carlyle Smith]

> The long-run failure of the
> French system to provide jobs [...]

The above is a very common turn of phrase to describe job generation problems within a social/economic system, including that of the U.S. However, it suffers from the weakness that it's a bit ambiguous as to what “system” is failing.

Is the French government failing to provide jobs? As they're spending 54% of the country's GDP providing services, they could hardly provide many more jobs without running out of people and businesses to tax. It is the French social system itself that is failing. But why risk ambiguity about the failure -- particularly when people are so easily confused, as we sometimes see from U.S. elections, about the role of government in "providing jobs".

I suggest going forward we refer not to "the long-run failure of the French system to provide jobs", but rather to “the long term problem of French government (or French people) erecting barriers to job creation.” This more narrowly identifies the problem, and more obviously points out the solution.

Bill, it’s good to see you blogging up a storm again. Congratulations on the BBC interview!

[Bill Rice]

Glenn,

A very thoughtful comment indeed. It is also a pleasure to nave regained you as a reader of DEL!

Your point is valid and well taken. Regular readers such as yourself probably understand where I am coming from on this issue, but clarity is always the best policy.

To sum up my thoughts. The French people, through their choices in their representative democracy have sought immediate gratification in having benefits now at the expense of long term structural issues. As a few examples of these thoughts:
1) Socialist policies that create massive negatives for employers to hire, especially entry level jobs. These policies in turn have led to long term structural unemployment, especially among the young and migrant workers.
2) The fiction that 35 hour work weeks would create more jobs, rather than again incentivizing companies to make do with fewer workers and more capital (ie., efficient technological business methods).
3) Early retirement that gives gratification now at the expense of a labor force in the future of younger workers (much fewer) to take care of a massive population of several generations of retirees.
4) Lack of entry level jobs has cost France (according to one Economist article) 3.2 million jobs.
5) Protection of rural farmers at the expense of the developing world and long term French economic interests. The unions have a strangle hold on French political decisions that weaken the EU, France and hurt the developing world, not to mention the promotion of ever increasing non competitive jobs from a comparitive advantage perspective.

Hopefully this helps clear up what I am discussing above. Ther are many more expamples, readers are encouraged to list them here!

Kind regards,

Bill Rice
Dawn's Early Light

[beatroot]

As you would expect, there is a lot of fretting here in Europe about why young Muslims seem to not want to integrate into ‘European society’. The French have recently tried to define French-ness and what it means to be French by banning Islamic headwear from schools etc. In the UK they have introduced a ‘citizens test’ to try and get immigrants to identify more with Britishness – with hilarious results.

Apart from the fact that many Brits can’t even pass the test – which seems to equate ‘belonging’ to knowledge of UK history trivia – the French and Brits are missing the point. Nationality has lost its meaning to a large extent in Europe. Conservatives are distraught about this and long for yesteryear to make its reappearance. It won’t. Meanwhile, lefties have long since given up on the nationality thing and have been pushing multiculturalism and relativism as the answer – which it clearly isn’t

The left used to be about demanding equality for everybody and finding common bonds between people to unite them. But since concepts like ‘class’ have been tossed into the history bin alongside nationality, they have abandoned this idea and fallen back on what makes us different – which is the main plank of multiculturalism.

And western European culture has been thrown into disarray as a consequence. The only way we are going to integrate different communities is by trying to form an identity that we can all feel included.

The alternative is to watch our cities burning.