Why globalization doesn't work

The New York Times
November 6, 2005
Unrest Spreads to Central Paris and Outskirts of More Cities
By CRAIG S. SMITH

PARIS, Nov. 6 - Scattered nighttime rioting around French public
housing developments continued early today, spreading to central Paris
and the outskirts of more cities, leaving the authorities frustrated by
an inability to stop what many are calling France's worst civil unrest
since the 1968 student revolts.

The French news media reported this afternoon that President Jacques
Chirac had summoned Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and the
ministers of defense, justice, economy and the interior for a 6 p.m.
meeting. On Saturday, Prime Minister de Villepin met with eight of his
ministers and a top Muslim official in an effort to find a way to break
the chain of violent events.

But the violence continued, with two schools destroyed in the Essonne
region south of Paris and more cars going up in flames. More than 1,000
vehicles and many buildings have been destroyed in the disorder that
began Oct. 27, with nearly 900 vehicles reported burned Friday night
alone, although the violence seemed to be lessening by Sunday morning.

Early today, local news media reported that a few cars had been damaged
by small firebombs near the Place de la Republique, in a neighborhood
in central Paris. It was the first report of violence linked to the
disturbances so close to the heart of the French capital.

In Evry, a southern Parisan suburb, The Associated Press reported that
the authorities had found 150 explosive devices in what was described
as a de facto firebomb-making factory. A senior Justice Ministry
official, Jean-Marie Huet, said today that more than 100 bottles, as
well as gallons of fuel and hoods for hiding rioters' faces, had been
found in the rundown building.

Most of the unrest remained confined to immigrant neighborhoods
surrounding Paris, where about 100 people were evacuated Friday night
from two apartment blocks after an arson attack set dozens of cars
alight in an underground garage. Rampaging youths have also attacked
property in the southern cities of Toulouse and Nice, and in Lille and
Rennes to the north.

Hundreds of young people, including teenagers as young as 13, have been
detained in the past 24 hours. Although the police have been unable to
stop the violence because of its apparent spontaneity and lack of clear
leaders, officials say they have also begun to detect efforts to
coordinate action and spread it nationally. In remarks on Europe 1
Radio, the prosecutor general in Paris, Yves Bot, said Web sites were
urging youths in other cities to join the rioting.

The police said that for the first time they had deployed a helicopter
to videotape incidents and coordinate with officers on the ground.
Roman Catholic, Protestant and Muslim leaders led a march of about
2,000 people on Saturday morning in Aulnay-sous-Bois, one of the
affected suburbs. The parents of two teenagers, whose accidental deaths
while hiding from the police touched off the rioting, also issued a
statement appealing for calm.

Many see the violence as a test of wills between Interior Minister
Nicolas Sarkozy and the young, mostly French Arab rioters. Many
immigrants and their children blame Mr. Sarkozy for alienating young
people with the way he has pressed a zero-tolerance anticrime campaign,
which features frequent police checks of French Arabs in poor
neighborhoods. But he has ignored calls from many French Arabs to
resign, and is keeping up the pressure. During a visit to a police
command center west of Paris on Saturday, according to local news
reports, he told officers, "Arrests - that's the key."

Ironically, Mr. Sarkozy, himself a second-generation immigrant, has
been one of the loudest champions of affirmative action and of relaxing
rules that restrict government support for building mosques.

The government has been embarrassed by its inability to quell the
disturbances, which have called into question its unique integration
model, which discourages recognizing ethnic, religious or cultural
differences in favor of French unity. There is no affirmative action,
for example, and religious symbols, like the Muslim veil, are banned in
schools.

"The republican integration model, on which France has for decades
based its self-perception, is in flames," the German newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung declared. An editorial in Germany's
Süddeutsche Zeitung called the violence around Paris an "intifada at
the city gates," a reference to the anti-Israeli uprising by
Palestinians.

The French approach to integration is one of three basic models in
Europe, which has faced large-scale non-European immigration only in
the postwar era.

Germany and Austria pursued a now largely discredited "guest worker"
policy that was based on the notion that immigrants were temporary
laborers who would eventually go home. But the guest workers did not go
home, and their European-born children have begun demanding citizenship
and equal rights.

While it is still difficult to become a citizen in Germany, there has
been a strong wave of naturalizations in recent years and children born
there to foreign parents now receive citizenship at birth.

Britain has followed a policy closer to that of the United States,
extending citizenship to newcomers and encouraging strong ethnic
communities. Immigrants arriving from Commonwealth countries in the
1950's and 1960's enjoyed immediate voting rights until Margaret
Thatcher put an end to the practice in 1981. But the law created
politically powerful immigrant communities.

France, too, has offered citizenship to its immigrants, but the process
was slower, and many of the Algerians who arrived to work in the wake
of their country's bitter war of independence against France were
reluctant to take up French citizenship. Not until naturalizations
became more common in the 1980's did immigrants and their adult
children begin to develop political power.

The country has tried to discourage "ghettoization" by ignoring ethnic
or religious differences and emphasizing French identity above all.
Until the early 1980's, foreigners needed government approval to form
associations.

But discrimination has flourished behind the oft-stated ideals, leaving
immigrants and their French-born offspring increasingly isolated in
government-subsidized apartment blocks to face high unemployment and
dwindling hope for the future.

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