WORLDVIEW Paul GillespieOn holiday with French friends in Brittany I was struck by their bleak view of France's changing place in Europe and the world and how this could affect its political and social life. Those who follow French affairs are familiar with such periodic soul-searching; on this occasion it wraps up several major inter-related concerns which do not have an obvious solution.
Turkey's prospective membership of the EU looms large in conversation and in the media. How can it be considered a European state? Is its Muslim culture not incompatible with European civilisation? Is Turkey not too large for an already too-rapidly expanded EU to absorb? What precedents would this set for Moroccan or Algerian EU membership? Is it not significant that Bush and Blair are such strong advocates of Turkish membership - precisely to ensure a weak EU in a world dominated by the US?
The role of Islam feeds into this debate. Next month the new law banning the wearing of Muslim headscarves (and obtrusive Christian crosses and Jewish yarmulkas) in schools comes into force.
The debate on the measure has crystallised French attitudes to the large Muslim minority, drawing on republican values of laïcité and on deep reservoirs of post-colonial racism in equal measure.
Are not headscarves symbols of female oppression by domineering fathers who force their daughters to wear them? How can an exception be made for them in the secular school system? Does not the assertion of Islamic culture signify a refusal to assimilate in
French society and a rejection of its republican values by organised fundamentalist groups? Are they not a menace, as Le Pen's National Front party asserts, which has to be tackled head on?
The third concern is with France's changing position in the EU. A chorus of complaint has built up about the lowly transport portfolio given to the French Commissioner, Jacques Barrot, compared to those secured by "ultra-liberals" such as Charlie McCreevy.
Does this not demonstrate that France is being punished by the Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, for opposing the Iraq war and insisting on maintaining standards of social protection in the face of Anglo-American anti-statism? Does it not signal the end of the Franco-German axis that has driven the EU for the last generation? How can they recover their influence in an EU with such a decisive majority of small states?
The mindset and preoccupations contained in such questions reveal much that is intolerant of and even impervious to criticism.
Such arrogance can reinforce hostility at home and abroad, especially when it is shown that special interests are being served by ideological posturing out of touch with contemporary realities. But such an impression must be countered by a rising tide of self-criticism and an openness to alternative ideas which can renew France's political traditions and international influence.
The concept of laïcité, for example, has been deeply ingrained in French political culture since the conflicts in the Third Republic between Catholic clericalism and the secular and liberal left were resolved by the 1905 law separating church and state. It means more than a passive secularism, since it affirms a civic bond of fraternity and community between citizens delivered largely through the public educational system, the armed forces, cultural assimilation and social mobility. It has become a potent symbol of French political identity - especially for teachers who make up a large cohort of the republican and feminist left who have vociferously supported the headscarf ban.
You can imagine the anger which initially greeted my observation that the French debate on the subject is "under- developed". Official republicanism refuses to countenance the notion that laïcité fails to treat Muslims and non-Muslims equally. But the 1905 law says the state must "guarantee the exercise of religious freedoms", which justifies providing religious facilities in enclosed institutions and state subsidies to Catholic, Protestant and Jewish schools. Islam has not benefited from such subsidies.
Many religious Muslims have gravitated to Catholic schools in which their distinctiveness is more tolerated than in the secular ones - in Marseille there are nine Catholic schools where up to 90 per cent of the pupils are Muslim.
And how can these values be reconciled with the vast suburbs outside major French cities where second and third generation immigrant families live in dreadful housing conditions and with high levels of unemployment that mock official republican equality?
Some of the assertive Islamism is a protest against inequality and a demand that France broadens the story of its own past to include a more balanced account of colonial occupation, the Algerian war and the taken-for-granted everyday Islamophobia, or blindness to different cultures, characteristic of French official republicanism.
I reminded our host that Ernest Renan, the great French historian, was born in nearby Tréguier. In his famous lecture on nationalism at the Sorbonne in 1882 he defined the nation as a "daily plebiscite" to reproduce solidarity and consent. Another central feature was forgetting: "I would even go so far as to say historical error is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation . . . No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alain, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint-Bartholomew" when French Huguenot leaders were murdered on August 23rd, 1572. That is a plea for inclusion as well as exclusion; but our host quickly pointed out that her mother's family is Calvinist and has certainly not forgotten the massacre.
This opened up space to discuss a more critical republicanism. In the same way Chirac is criticised for his treatment of an old French ally, Poland, during the Iraq war. Cultivating Turkish membership would provide the EU with a unique access to the Middle East to counter US hegemony there. And what is one to make of the ultra-liberalism of Nicholas Sarkozy, the likely next president and current finance minister? We will hear much more of these arguments during France's referendum campaign on the EU constitutional treaty next year.
pgillespie@irish-times.ie