`Le foot' victory sharpens debate on diversity

Champion du monde,

champion du monde,

champion, champion,

champion du monde!

It is hard to get the chant out of my mind after a holiday in France that straddled their World Cup victory, the Quatorze and the euphoria with which they were celebrated this year.

A collective convulsion of identity-examination, restored hope and self-esteem embraced its peoples and seemed to change its political as well as its sporting persona.

As a school teacher acquaintance put it, "everything is political in France". This certainly gave free rein to a fascinating debate on the implications of the Mondiale victory for the country's mixture of peoples and its place in the world.

Its ethnic and cultural melange were fully represented in the team that won on July 12th, including those of Algerian, Senegalese, Ghanaian, Armenian, Guadeloupe and French Polynesian extraction or birth, and, within France, a Breton and a Basque.

The National Front leader, Jean Marie Le Pen, is in the habit of calling many of them Francais de souche recente, meaning that they and their parents had arrived so recently that they could not be considered as "real" Frenchmen.

It seemed as if the whole episode represented a giant refutation of him and his politics. It will be intriguing to see whether this is sustained in practice.

As for France's place in the world, it is instructive to put the Mondiale in the context of its fevered debate on mondialisation (globalisation), since the one is a "symbol, a product, a springboard" of the other, as Jean d'Ormesson put it in Le Figaro.

According to another distinguished commentator, Dominique Moisi, the World Cup is a "bridge between our past and our future, demonstrating the vitality of the former - that is, nationalism - and the inescapable nature of the second - that is, globalisation in its new capitalist form".

Watching the final with a Parisian family on holiday in Brittany it seemed natural to reflect on the political as well as the sporting spectacle - and gratifying to discover that the same thoughts struck many others caught up in the soccer tournament who might normally have been expected to dismiss it as a matter of bread and circuses.

Our host and her two young daughters contradicted the stereotype that women are not interested in it, and were clear converts.

But her mother, although she detested le foot, was drawn to watch the match's closing stages and extraordinarily moving aftermath on the grounds that it was historique.

The team's marvellous cameraderie and spontaneous photographic tableaux on the pitch; the exuberant figures of President Chirac and the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, welcoming the result; and the developing television reportage of the 1.5 million throng on the Champs-Elysees all bore out the description.

So did the celebrations and fireworks that continued for days on end in Brittany and throughout France.

They seemed to dispel the mood of grumbling and grousing - la grogne - that had been so characteristic of the country's mood through the early summer, following the National Front's strong showing in regional elections, the disintegration of centre-right parties in face of this result, corruption scandals, the stubborn persistence of high unemployment and the running dissatisfaction over France's proper place in the world.

Here, encapsulated in a sporting spectacle, were the ingredients to move beyond that mood. The team's performance and esprit contradicts Le Pen's pur et dur nationalism, as did the exuberant outburst of multiracial and multicultural street celebrations.

Again and again this came up in conversation; though another member of this family, a young lawyer working on immigrant housing in Paris, was very sceptical as to whether it would make much material difference in practice to the horribly impoverished circumstances of the people he deals with. His sister spoke with feeling of the huge gulf between them and normal French bourgeois society.

The debate on diversity now assumes such a central role in France that one is tempted to suggest it should be added as a fourth category to the liberty, equality and fraternity which grace its coins and hotels de ville.

But there are tensions, of course - and not only between recent immigrants and established French citizens or National Front supporters and anti-racist activists.

Another commentator, Alain Finkielkraut, points out that the "formula black-blanc-beur replaces the old model of integration, diversity that of culture".

The French model of citizenship and nationality is very much on the assimilationist end of a spectrum which puts multiculturalism at the other.

This whole episode will deepen the French debate on how best to accommodate these differences. It serves as a sharp reminder that matters of national identity are subject to historical change and contingent definition and are not engraved in some timeless essence.

Hybridity and melange have been characteristic features of French society for many generations, defining its peoples by their routes rather than their roots, by assimilation to its republican demos rather than providing for continuing ethnic difference, as the multicultural model would suggest. But these are artificial distinctions, which need continuing scrutiny and revision.

From here it looks as if the new hope and self-confidence in dealing with these issues will be sustained. It has already led to a remarkable change of attitude by Mr Charles Pasqua, the former Gaullist Minister for Justice, who now supports an amnesty for some 70,000 illegal immigrants who were left without papers in the latest round of regulation.

As for France's place in the world, it was intriguing to look at the advertisements around the pitch, only one of which, so far as I could see, was French - for La Poste, the national postal service - a suitable symbol for a statified economy, one might assume.

All the most prominent multinationals were represented, many of them from the Anglo-American world so often vilified by French intellectuals as the source and primary beneficiary of la mondialisation.

But could one not interpret this outburst of enthusiasm as France embracing globalisation, if one accepts d'Orm esson's point? It was easier to do so given the Mondiale's political correctness in conventional French eyes. Iran beat the US, which played a minimal role in the event, as did China.

France put Europe back to centre-stage, Serge July wrote in Liberation, in that so many of the team play for German, English or Italian teams; the tricolours represent "a nationalism without chauvinism and exclusion".

Given that France's encounter with globalisation comes so much through its (partly protective) encounter with Europe the World Cup victory may come to be seen as the moment at which a more outgoing attitude towards the world was established.

The latest economic upturn there lends some credibility to the idea that this could be the case and serves as a reminder that France, for all its occasional truculence on the international scene, is the fourth largest trading country in the world.