In recent months, France has been engaged in a debate about its national identity, not surprisingly initiated by the Minister for Immigration Éric Besson. So lively has it grown that it’s even prompted Prime Minister François Fillon to announce a series of measures – mostly symbolic – aimed at improving what is glibly called France’s ‘social cohesion’.
These measures include displaying in French classrooms a copy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (which is actually aimed at the rights of citizens, not humans in general); the wider availability of French language classes for adults; and the creation of a commission of intellectuals and parliamentarians charged with ‘deepening the debate’ on national identity.
However, remember that according to the British Caribbean scholar Stuart Hall, identity – one of the central concerns of contemporary society – is never about ‘who we are’, but rather about how we represent ourselves. It’s always about the national ‘us’ in opposition to the immigrant ‘other’.
In France, the debate is presented as the urgent need to define Frenchness, though it is clear that one of the aims is to prise voters away from the anti-immigrant National Front before the local elections.
The French debate is focusing on two issues – the country’s immigration policies, and the practice of Islam in France – which is leading Muslim representatives to express anxiety that French identity stigmatises all Muslims.
Indeed, a prominent French Muslim group reported that swastikas and racial slurs were painted on the walls of a mosque in Saint-Étienne in the Loire region, and the French Council of Muslim Faith said such acts of vandalism have recently become more common.
Yet despite the large number of Muslims living in France (between 3.7 and 4.15 million, about six per cent of the population), the French state’s moves to ban the burqa send clear signals that being French stands in contradiction to being Muslim.
The debates over what it means to be French, or Danish, or German, or Irish are always linked to the presence of the other, something seen as a threat to the status quo. Hall suggests that this talk of identity is about the wish to return to an old, unmediated core – a shared root that we belong to. But does such core identity actually exist?
We all possess multiple identities, not only in terms of our nationality and ethnicity, but also in our lifestyles, our families, our occupations, our likes and dislikes. Indeed, Hall reminds us that identities are not about our roots at all, but rather about our journeys through life. Our identities are always constructed in relation to our experiences; our national identity in particular is one based on the exclusion of others.
Thus, the urgency about debating what it is to be French is actually discussing who isn’t and can’t become French. And the same can be said for Ireland, a place where I’m still asked ‘Where are you from?’ every time I step into a taxi or strike up a conversation on the bus, even after all these years.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann
