Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
It is human nature to press events into your existing assumptions. Sure enough, most leftists see the événements in France as being provoked by racism and deprivation; most rightists see them as a cautionary tale about immigration happening too quickly, without proper assimilation.
American conservatives throw in some observations about Islam. British Tories harrumph that France is being France – a nation periodically wracked by revolutionary spasms.
Of course, it is usually possible to find at least some evidence that supports your preconceptions. It is true, for example, that French people, taught to venerate 1789 as their country’s foundational moment, are generally more relaxed about physical-force protests than we are. And I am not just talking about nineteenth-century barricades.
In 2005, Jacques Chirac declared a state of emergency when widespread rioting followed the electrocution of two boys, one of Mauritanian and one of Tunisian origin, who had hidden in a high-voltage power substation while fleeing the police.
Over the next three weeks, some 9,000 cars were set on fire. Then, as now, newspapers spoke of civil war. There was a widespread sense that things would never be the same afterwards.
But the disturbances died down, and the banlieus settled back into their high-rise listlessness.
You can likewise, if you want to, stand up the “dangerous jihadis” or “victims of racism” narratives. Some videos are circulating where show-offs with silly headgear proclaim that the black flags of Islam will fly over Paris.
Others, often white lefties, delight in describing the unrest as payback for colonialism. (A highly dangerous argument from their own perspective, I’d have thought, since it defines immigration as a kind of punishment.)
And France has seen some terrifying episodes of religious violence, including the Charlie Hebdo abomination, attacks on synagogues, the murder of a Christian priest and the beheading of a schoolmaster who had been teaching about free speech. But does that explain what is going on now? Do these teenage vandals look to you like observant Muslims?
As for racism, there is no question that black and brown French kids can experience rough treatment at the hands of gendarmes. There is, without doubt, a sense that immigrant communities, confined to the cités that ring France’s big towns, don’t get a fair shot. While there are examples of minority French citizens who have risen high, it is hard to imagine a French equivalent of the recent Tory leadership contest, in which six of the eleven initial candidates were not white.
Then again, is racism in France worse than it was in, say, the 1990s, or the 1960s?
My own sense is that the most useful framework to make sense of what is going on is not discrimination or Islamism, but American grievance culture.
If you’re British, you’ll know what I mean. We nowadays see almost all racial questions through the prism of slavery, segregation, and Selma. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King are more familiar names in our primary schools than John Locke or the Horatio Nelson. Race is understood, American-style, as a black-and-white issue, though there are more than twice as many people of South Asian as of black descent in the UK.
Even our insults are imported from the US: white conservatives are called Klansmen, black conservatives Uncle Toms. Our cosplaying reached its imbecilic height in the summer of 2020 when, in response to a police killing in Minneapolis, white British protesters shouted “hands up don’t shoot” at unarmed London coppers.
France has been spared the worst of this nonsense by its prickly resistance to English-language media. But, this time, the parallels with the US are so strong that even the French cannot isolate themselves from the associated cultural assumptions.
Consider the similarities. In Britain, a police officer is a citizen in uniform, with no more powers than you or me except insofar as they are temporarily and contingently bestowed by a magistrate. But in France, as in the US, the police are armed agents of the state, enjoying a measure of qualified immunity.
In both countries, this has led to instances of abuse, including excessive force. In both countries, non-white citizens are often on the receiving end. It used to be legitimate to debate whether this was because of police racism, or whether the figures reflected differences in crime rates, or witness descriptions of suspects.
But, in the summer of 2020, debate became impossible, as governments, corporations, and media bent the knee (often literally) to BLM. Now, every police action is seen as, by definition, racist. The idea that there might be a more general problem with trigger-happy cops is impermissible, as is the notion that not every abuse by an individual officer is evidence of systemic discrimination.
For three years, ethnic minority kids, in France as elsewhere, have been told that society is rigged against them, that any failures in their lives are products of institutional racism, and that they might be shot with impunity by bigots in police uniforms. No one dares to challenge the narrative, and plenty of people accept it uncritically.
How might such people react when an Arab kid is shot by a policeman for driving in a bus lane without a licence? Will they see it as a terrible but isolated tragedy? Or will they believe what they have been taught about oppression and white supremacy?
Oh, and why assume that things would be any different in this country?