The air is still thick with the smoke of those incinerated cars, but already a whole range of motives have been trotted out and examined. For American scribes, the riots in France were a Rorschach test, with every political pundit seeing precisely what he wanted to see in the violence and chaos. The real mystery was the motivation of the young immigrants and children of immigrants at the source of the disorder. And for this question — why did they do it? — most commentators had no problem providing an instant answer.
The Nation doesn’t even stop to take a second look. The reason is obvious to them: “The ghettos where festering resentment has now burst into flames were created as a matter of industrial policy by the French state.” The Republic alone is to blame for its colonial and post-colonial policies of luring North Africans to France and then abandoning them to gray and neglected existences on the outskirts of major towns. The writer, Doug Ireland, even quotes Martin Luther King who said that “a riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” In France, Ireland writes, “it’s the language of adolescents, kids caught between two cultures and belonging to neither; of kids who, born in France and often speaking little Arabic, don’t know the country where their parents were born but feel excluded, marginalized and invisible in the country where they live.”
For a completely opposite appraisal, turn to the other end of the magazine rack and the Weekly Standard, and see what its conservative writers have to say. They also see a problem that has been festering for a long time — not one created by a colonial state, but rather more of a societal mutation: “The culture of violence is reinforced on every side, by the anti-police, anti-West gangsta rap kids listen to, and by the blogs where young thugs parade their exploits of arson or mugging at gunpoint, thereby becoming neighborhood ‘stars’ and raising the stakes for other gangs.”
The answer to this bastard culture — one that a French news magazine editor compares to “Weimar republic just before the rise of Nazism,” is toughness. Whereas the implication of the Nation‘s analysis is that state intervention is needed to right the wrongs of colonialism and neglect, perhaps by some kind of affirmative action, the Weekly Standard demands intervention in the form of a “Giuliani-like ‘zero tolerance’ approach” that it sees represented in Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister.
Thankfully, there are magazines that don’t filter everything through a one-size-fits-all political perspective. The Economist is one. Its reading: “This rapid domino effect reflects two broader failings and two policy problems. First, the mass unemployment that persists in a welfare system supposedly glued together by ‘social solidarity.’ Second, the ethnic ghettos that have formed in a country that prides itself on colour-blind equality. These problems have been worsened in recent years by a deliberate hardline policing policy, and by disputes over how best to accommodate Islam in France.”
It then brings up some pretty sobering facts: “France’s overall jobless rate of nearly 10 percent is worrying enough; its latest youth unemployment rate of 23 percent is among Europe’s worst. In the ‘sensitive urban zones’, as officialdom coyly calls them, youth unemployment touches a staggering 40 percent.” The solution is as complex as the problem, the Economist contends, but the first step is throwing out “the myth of republican equality.”
Leave it to the counterintuitist New Republic to stand alone by striking a vaguely optimistic note. You see, since revolutionary violence is such an integral part of French history and tradition, the riots are actually proof that the immigrants and their children are becoming truly French.
“In this way, the young rioters in the French suburbs are far more French than many commentators presume. The troubled suburbs are not foreign lands within the Republic, but rather are increasingly a mirror of all French passions, the best as well as the worst — a reserve of talent and energy, but also a melting pot of racism, homophobia, machismo, and anti-Semitism. That is the enigma: These towns behave as if they are under siege by France, which herself behaves like she is under siege by the world.”
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.