This summer, many coastal municipalities in France adopted bylaws banning a particular piece of swimwear that some Muslim women wear at the beach: the burkini. An amalgam of the Islamic outfit “burka” (a full veil that covers all but a woman’s eyes) and the bikini, the “burkini” was supposedly created in order to allow women to cover up as advocated by religion while at the same time enjoying the beach.
The Anglo-Saxon press has been almost unanimous in condemning French municipalities and politicians for implementing and supporting such a policy. Many media outlets argued that the French authorities, xenophobic, racist and paranoid, breached the sacred personal freedoms by telling women what not to wear in public. Social media has also heavily echoed these criticisms.
But those who lambast France and the French people for being intolerant and racist overlook the fact that France was actually the first country in Europe to grant full citizenship rights to its Jewish citizens. As early as 1806, the French emperor Napoleon I convened a Jewish Assembly of Notables that was to answer twelve questions essentially asking if Jews could assimilate to the French jurisdiction, values and ways of life. Then Napoleon convened “The Grand Sanhedrin,” a Jewish high court referring to the Sanhedrin of the Antiquity, which ruled in favor of Jewish assimilation. This episode laid the foundation of the French integration model that became the norm in the following roughly 150 years: immigrants were to be granted full citizenship rights and equal treatment, but in exchange, they had to adopt the French ideals, way of life and culture. In other words, immigrants were integrated as individuals, but not as communities; France could be a multiracial country, but it could not be a multicultural one.
In addition to assimilation, immigrants had soon to adopt another peculiarity of French public life: secularism, also known as laïcité in French. In fact, in 1905, the State and the Catholic Church were officially separated. According to French economist Jacques Sapir, what constitutes the basis of secularism is the need to get themes or issues that are not based on reason—something we could all agree on, regardless of religion—out of public forums or spaces.
But the arrival of masses of Muslim immigrants from North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s and their settlement in French banlieues or suburbs apart from the rest of the population seriously shook up the French assimilation model. In fact, Islam, the religion brought to the country, consists not only of spiritual teachings, but also of social and political rules that the Muslim community applies to itself. These social and political rules, which only rose in importance with the spread of fundamentalist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Salafism, are in total contradiction with both French secularism, because they are given by God and cannot be discussed on purely rational grounds, and the French assimilation model, because many of them are inconsistent with French values and ideals. Islam in France, as opposed to Judaism, never had its “Grand Sanhedrin” reconciling Islam with French values and ideals rooted in Christianity and the Enlightenment.
Therefore, in light of the recent wave of terrorist attacks targeting France and the spread of Islamic fundamentalist ideologies, the burkini ban must be understood not as a sign of a “fascist upsurge” in the country as many have noted, but as an attempt by French people to re-embrace their assimilationist model that was the key of the country’s cohesion prior to the recent immigration waves of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the burkini is seen in France as a provocation, a violent symbolic assault on the space that best represents the liberalism of French society: the beach and its near-complete nudity.
One could argue that trying to reimpose an assimilationist model would simply be inefficient, and would only worsen the cohesion problem of society by dividing it and creating tensions between groups. Therefore, instead of the French integration model, Western societies welcoming immigrants should adopt the more liberal Anglo-Saxon integration model, which allows immigrants to keep their ethnic culture of origin while they integrate to the host country’s society. This results in a de facto multicultural society where, for example, people have the freedom to dress and live as they please.
But does a multicultural society really work? Does it bring about cohesion in society by offering freedom? Or does it instead foster segregation, division and violence?
To answer this fundamental question, Harvard professor and political scientist Robert Putnam, conducted a decade-long study to understand how diversity affects social trust, surveying 26,200 people in 40 United States communities.
He said, “In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”
Difference can can create conflicts and can foster lack of trust. Because two people have different points of view on how a problem needs to be solved, they often fight to determine whose point of view will prevail. They might not trust the other who, in the first place, would try to impose their view.
The backlash against multiculturalism in the West seems to be well established by now, regardless of integration models. All throughout Europe and even in the United States, populist movements rejecting multiculturalism and mass immigration are gaining momentum. The burkini ban is not a non-issue as some people have said, but crystallizes the dilemma of Western societies as we get deeper into this globalized century.
Should we impose our culture on newly-arrived immigrants and their descendants, in order to maintain the soul and cohesion of our nation, but at the risk of crystallizing tensions, or should we be resigned to live in multicultural societies in which we feel alienated but avoid conflict?
I believe that Western societies should assimilate those who decide to live in their territory. Because multiculturalism creates divisions, tolerating this model of society would not avoid conflicts, but merely postpone them.
Emile Riachi is a Trinity sophomore. His column, “a political night vision,” runs on alternate Thursdays.
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