France and national pride, UK and multiculturalism
This is not a polemic.
I am going to point to one assumption in the proposals announced today. For those who have not read through them, the idea is to require new migrants to sign up to a contract that outlines their rights and responsibilities as a French citizen. This process will also be required of long-term migrants to France when they renew particular documents.
Colouring these proposals is the fact that they are announced alongside other measures that might rightly be termed examples of 'gesture politics' - each French school child will be required to sing La Marselliase at least once a year (presumably in French), and the national flag is to be flown over more public buildings.
Okay. Here is my primary problem with the signing of a contract for migrants - that this very idea contains an assumption, that the integration into French life is the responsibility solely of migrants. If integration is the goal, perhaps every French citizen should be forced into a public acknowledgment of the changing nature of French society, and to sign a contract that recognises that those who take the path of naturalisation are in every sense as full a citizen of the Republic as those who have lived in France for centuries. Of course, that would reveal the opposition to the process of social integration, and so it is expedient that it is simply not mentioned.
Turning back to the UK, on a related theme, I've been listening to some thoughts on multiculturalism that explore similar ground. Firstly, it is rather clear that the multicultural ideal flows out of liberalism, and, as such, presents itself with some basic problems, such as, what do you do when the people you are tolerant of are not tolerant of you. This problem seems to reveal a paternalism, with the answer being that, finally, society will be better when everybody, of every cultural hue, subscribes to the tenets of liberalism. How handy! That the route to this is considered to be education, well, that just about says it all.
Anyway, what I was wondering is why, if Britain is a 'multicultural society', that I have never come across any politician or mainstream media commentary on how successful components of the lives of specific cultural groups might be used to improve the behaviour, for example, of white people. If Indian kids do better in schools than white kids, then what reason is there to not permit them to educate us as to how this success is achieved? If we, in turn, find out that the white child is simply not as gifted as its Indian counterpart, it would still be a valuable lesson! This is what is missing from the liberal conception of multiculturalism, it seems to me, that it does not feel that it has anything to learn, (but has plenty to share) and that simply living aside Westerners will have some miraculous civilising effect, as if there are not all sorts of existing social problems of the 'native' population. In that respect, multiculturalism appears to be an inverted form of colonialism, only this time around, it is a section of the UK population that feels itself being displaced from its own land and its own culture and reacts by embracing a narrow vision of what it means to be British, along with a siege mentality.
As a Times survey states today - "Nearly three fifths of voters say that they hardly recognise the country they are living in, while 42 per cent say they would emigrate if they could." Perhaps we could find Jamaicans, Indians, Nigerians, etc, saying much the same thing when the white man arrived on their shores a few centuries ago.
The question is - genuinely - is Britain under siege? The figures show that 2m people have come to reside in the UK over the last 10 years. Now the parties are seeking to gain from this :
"With 85% of voters worried about the population reaching 70m by the end of the next decade, the poll indicates that Cameron’s pledge to cut net migration to ensure the population remains below that figure could reap benefits."
Work out for yourself how this 70m figure has magically come to represent something terrible, I'd never heard of it until today. It is no coincidence that racism and nationalism make good bedfellows, and it is certainly no irony that the time of the British Empire is the reference point for those angry about the changing face of British society. What complicates things further is that Gordon Brown has made repeated use of appeals to just this same stock of nationalism, arguing for an Armed Forces Day, for example, and suggesting the revocation of migrants citizenship should they engage in activities that are considered somehow 'un-British', such as exercising their freedom to protest.
And, with all the mainstream parties committed to war, the need to maintain the brand strength of the UK armed forces remains a pressing concern. Today's Independent outlines one entertaining prospect, in the wake of the police proposal to monitor people using the same drone technology as is used in Iraq, military patrols:
Britain's armed forces could be used on a regular basis on the streets of Britain to confront the threat of terrorism, under the terms of a strategic defence review announced yesterday.
[link]
I feel safer already.