In a dark and dangerous world, France is finding its place and asserting its authority where possible
BEING in France on this September day when schools reopen after the summer break amidst fears and expectations following the controversial headgear/scarf ban by President Jacques Chirac’s government has its own joys.
Flying out of a sunny south-western England after the wettest August, south-western France appears perennially balmy yet without being too hot and with its own impressive share of rolling miles of vineyards. But, more than weather and wines, it is the unique Georgian architecture that gives Bordeaux its own fair share of munificence. The profusion of town houses owned by wine growers and merchants come alive with a vibrant cafe culture that keeps the streets busy until quite late. Several cathedrals, a splendid synagogue and three mosques, all located in different neighbourhoods are not just visited by worshippers in this otherwise officially secular country but also a steady stream of visitors and tourists keeps them abuzz.
The French, like other Continental Europeans, not only enjoy relaxed evening meals at open-air restaurants, several of them still find time for elaborate lunches at neighbourhood cafes and bars. Life, despite historical relationship with England in the past and its permeating imprints, still is definitely slower and more relaxed here than in the north and further to the west.
The French Muslims, in spite of several reservations to the controversial law disallowing a choice in an otherwise republican society, did not offer any massive boycott of schools, and thus denied a sought-after opportunity to the racist National Front to further belabor the former.
Quite a few Muslim mothers — some wearing traditional scarves — waited outside the schools until the girls came out to be escorted back home. Fluency in French allowed these predominantly Maghrebi women a natural ease in communicating with their counterparts from other ethnic groups, though with children it was usually Arabic. A Muslim mother soon became a candy woman by donning her reflective jacket to control the traffic as the pupils came out of the lycee. A few streets down, close to St-Michel, a similar scene was in evidence.
Earlier on, I had detected some of these scarfed mothers socialising over coffee while their men folk disposed off goods at the flea market where a gypsy played his guitar. His explicit Punjabi features were simply unmistakable, as he seemed to blend well with the moustachioed North Africans and the Portuguese. Totalling around six million, France has the largest Muslim community in Western Europe. It also has the largest number of European converts to Islam and has comparatively the highest proportion of Muslims engaged in professional jobs.
France, like Britain, has its own colonial legacy and is an immensely plural society though even in a provincial town like Bordeaux one could see more mixed couples than one might encounter in Bristol. Emphasis on language-based assimilation during the colonial era through an inducement for citizenship-despite a powerful legacy of racial and moralist unrighteousness-had offered more cross-ethnic contacts. In private meetings, one could encounter the baffled anxieties over the continued detention of two French journalists in Iraq, especially when France has been critical of the Anglo-American invasion. Some liberal elements show unease with the partisan prioritization of their fellow citizens over the slain Nepalese and Pakistani workers whose regimes back-home endlessly dragged their feet in offering clear policy options.
The tragedy of Beslan added to their worries of an unstable world where forcible unilateralism often proves so counterproductive. One could also surmise concerns about yet another ethnic cleansing in the Caucuses where heavily armed Christian Ossetians might ventilate their grief on the Ingush Muslims.
The press in France has its own moments of lashing out at bureaucratic inertia and a continuously sluggish economy that have bedevilled the Fifth Republic under a 71-year old Chirac, named as “a republican monarch” by Financial Times. He would ideally like another presidential term. However, his own former protege and finance minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, is emerging as a rival from within Chirac’s power base — UMP, the centre right party.
The son of a Hungarian immigrant, and a former student leader, Sarkozy was groomed by Chirac. Though his liaisons with the President’s daughter and an unending penchant for media have evaporated the erstwhile cordiality. When asked about his hyperactive role before his departure from the cabinet, a haughty Chirac sarcastically quipped:
“I take the decisions and he implements them.”
While the British press, especially the tabloids, have been displaying pictures of Jemima Khan (Goldsmith!) and Hugh Grant in amorous close-ups, several columnists across Europe have ‘rediscovered’ Nasseri, an Iranian exile, endlessly stuck in the corner of Paris’s Charles de Gaul’s transit lounge. Despite a Scottish mother, Nasseri had been denied stay in Britain and Belgium, and ended up at the French airport about eighteen years ago. While some human rights groups fought his case for asylum in France, Nasseri has continued to live in the corner of the lounge for almost two decades and his story has now assumed a global profile due to Steven Spielberg’s film, The Terminal. Poor Nasseri, according to psychiatrists, cannot resettle in the normal society given his long cooped-up existence. However, the saddest expose has been from the United States, where according to the surveys by National Geographic and also by Washington’s Center for Media and Public Affairs, 85 per cent of Americans aged between 18 and 24 could not find Iraq on the map while only 17 per cent could locate Afghanistan.
The French media, like its British counterpart, have been focused on the glitzy life-styles of Lord Black, the owner of Telegraph, Spectator, Jerusalem Times and dozens of other papers across the world. His stupendous corruption and lavish living, more in the tradition of the disgraced Enron executives, reminds one of Robert Maxwell of the early 1990s, the owner of Mirror and a resident of Oxford, who left thousands of pensioners broke in the UK and eventually opted to be buried in Israel.
Lord Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel, an aggressive supporter of Israeli policies and a committed Islamophobe, has lived a life that could put even Mrs Imelda Marcos into shame.
While Britain still dithers on a complete integration within the EU, and several powerful sections, especially on the right including many from amongst the Conservative Party, remain abhorrent of an integrated Europe, France and Germany have been the persistent flag carriers of a united Europe. However, both these countries along with Belgium and Austria and erstwhile Greece, have been reluctant on Turkish entry into the EU.
The draft constitution, prepared by a commission headed by Valerie D’Estaing — the former French president—is under serious EU consideration for adoption, while Italy, Poland and Ireland insist on Europe to be defined as a Christian community. France and many other liberal groups across Europe are not enthusiastic about this epithet, yet entertain reservations on Turkey’s record on human rights especially on issues including the Kurds, capital punishment and adultery. Whereas Greece and Britain, on the added prodding from Washington, may push for Turkey’s overdue entry into the EU, France is gradually relenting its reservations against a 70-million strong Muslim country to the east.
While the French opinion makers relish an integrated Europe owing to peace dividends and greater mobility they are also wary of a growing drift with the United States over Iraq and Middle East. A few French academics even refuse to characterize their country’s objection to war as a kind of neutrality in “war on terror”. To them, France is simply against military unilateralism and not inherently anti-American or soft on political Islam.
On the other hand, there are French experts, to whom, the EU is already a United States of Europe with the world’s largest economy, strong political and cultural institutions, formidable defences and unparalleled mobility among its various echelons, something that even many ordinary Americans may still dream of. Unmatched inter-state harmony, often complimentary economies, manageable pluralism and more fulfilling lifestyles owe to an enduring peace, regional cooperation and grassroot empowerment that can also be emulated elsewhere like in South Asia. While the Americans may mistake this for an ‘old Europe’ and would still visualize it within the historical context of its continued security dependence on Washington, Europe, in fact, has moved on by strides.
Europeans are not opportunistically thankless to the US; they simply do not want any more dissension around them. While Timothy Garton-Ash and such other British analysts may urge for a greater understanding for the post-9/11 America, Europe, excluding Blair and Berlusconi, sees itself less tied up with the latter, at least in geopolitical realms. Still, it does not mean that the EU has finally reached “the end of its history”, as economic growth, relationship with the neighbours to the East and South especially the Muslim world and Russia remain imprecise. Its increasingly powerful racist outfits, certain xenophobic media organs and declining populations are formidable challenges where strong executives like in Britain and France have been overriding democratic structures. This ‘old Europe’ including the French, requires fresher blood and maybe, like Muslim Spain or Ottoman Turkey, it could, once again, rise to the challenge by offering a better alternative on global egalitarianism. Standing outside the privately-run mosque and talking to the robed, bearded young French converts to Islam, one gets the feeling that Europe is still as diverse as it ever was when the Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, Normans, Vikings, Turks and Germans attempted to transform it and in the process got integrated into a different Europe.
In a dark and dangerous world, France is finding its place and asserting its authority where possible 
