The official French response to repeated terrorist attacks in recent years continues to focus myopically on symbolic measures, embodied in a broadening sartorial crackdown on devout Muslim women. But France doesn’t need fewer burkinis; it needs more jobs and better domestic intelligence.
PARIS – France has become accustomed to terrorist outrages in the name of Islam, be it the murderous attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January 2015 or this summer’s mass slaughter by a “jihadi” driving a truck through the Bastille Day festivities along Nice’s Promenade des Anglais. The question for France – and for Project Syndicate commentators – is what explains these assaults and what can end them.
Inevitably, the question has led to fierce debate among France’s “public intellectuals.” For one of the best known, Bernard-Henri Lévy, what is at stake is “the danger of an ideological victory for Salafism, the doctrine underlying jihadism, which views Europe (and, within Europe, France) as prime ground for proselytization.” In this respect, BHL, as he is widely known, echoes the view of French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. But he goes on to castigate successive governments for refusing “to recognize that militant Islamic fundamentalism was actually Islamo-fascism, the third global variant of totalitarianism that diehard critics had been decrying for a quarter-century.”
Sciences Po’s Dominique Moisi makes the same comparison: today’s jihadist threat, he argues, targets “Western civilization itself,” just as fascism and communism did during the twentieth century. But he also highlights what may be at the root of France’s peculiar vulnerability: “The scars of colonialism are fresher in France than anywhere else in Europe; the country has Europe’s largest Muslim minority.”
True enough, and Fawaz Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, reflects on the experiences of those immigrants from the Maghreb and their descendants. “One reason for France suffering more casualties than all its neighbors put together,” he points out, “is that the sense of exclusion and alienation felt by a large segment of France’s Muslim community has made it easier for ISIS to recruit in the country.” Nor is that sentiment groundless: a 2015 study on diversity in France revealed rampant discrimination in the labor market against people with Arabic-sounding names.
Noëlle Lenoir, a former French minister for European affairs, has no doubt that many young French Muslims feel deeply alienated from the Republic, even though the majority are third-generation Frenchmen and women, not new immigrants. The adoption of Islamic mores by a small minority, however, combined with the horrific terror attacks, has left many believing “that what is at stake is the survival of the Republic itself,” and that “France’s characteristic pluralism and tolerance” must not “become the means of its destruction.”
But identifying the deep problems that are bedeviling France, and the even deeper emotions that they evoke, is not the same as finding solutions. “However we got to where we are,” Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, pithily notes of the Middle East turmoil that is contributing to France’s problems, “we are where we are, and where we are is a very bad place to be.”
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The Blindness of Égalité
The same could be said of France, where the “bad place” is made worse by self-imposed impediments. For example, a key obstacle to understanding the scope of the problem – which could be removed by the stroke of a pen – is the official ban on inclusion of ethnic and religious data in national population statistics. Building an accurate official picture of France’s diversity (as has long been routine in America and Britain) is rejected as contrary to the republican value of “égalité” – that is, a homogeneous society where everyone is supposed to have the same rights. This is a triumph of ideology over common sense – a point well captured by Steven Hill of New America: “As any pilot knows, flying without radar or accurate weather forecasts is likely to end in a crash.”
A less ideological rationale for policymakers’ self-inflicted blindness is their fear that data highlighting ethnic diversity might actually fuel racial tensions. But the absence of data does not stop ethnic profiling. James Goldston, the head the Open Society Justice Initiative (and a former official of the International Criminal Court) quotes a French policeman: “If you are on the road and see a black man or a man with Arabic features, you say to yourself, ‘He doesn’t look French,’ and then you might stop him to see if he has papers.”
As Angéline Escafré-Dublet, a researcher for the Migration Policy Institute, has argued, good data on the ethnic and religious composition of French society would help identify patterns of discrimination and aid in the design and implementation of policies to support the integration of immigrants. More important, accurate statistics would throw a spotlight on the unemployment and discrimination affecting Muslim youth – and block the French state’s ability to deny the scale of the problem.
Jobs or Jihad
Ideas for getting France to a better place tend to fall into two categories: job creation and localized domestic intelligence operations.
Following the November 2015 bloodbath in Paris (in which coordinated terrorist attacks caused 137 deaths), President François Hollande declared a state of emergency and proposed depriving terrorists with dual nationality of their French citizenship. Hollande’s idea was eventually abandoned, but, as Raphaël Hadas-Lebel, formerly of France’s Conseil d’Etat, points out, such debates come at a cost. As he put it at the time, “vehement disagreements over that issue continue to drown out discussion of far more consequential topics, like anemic economic growth and high unemployment.”
Sadly, he is right. Unemployment in France has averaged 9.2% for a generation (and has edged into double digits since 2012). Not surprisingly, young people and ethnic minorities are the worst affected, with French youth unemployment now officially estimated at about 23%. Hill cautions that standard measures exaggerate the problem by counting students and trainees as unemployed. Arguably so, but in the banlieues – the public-housing estates, dominated by ethnic minorities, surrounding many French cities – the young may be unimpressed by such methodological rigor.
Perhaps we all should be. As Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former foreign minister of Israel, notes: “Devastatingly high unemployment rates among European Muslims (three times higher than the national average in most countries) aggravate their social marginalization and cultural self-segregation.” He characterizes the French banlieues as “isolated, destitute, and in a state of permanent rage.”
Ben-Ami is at least partly right. A study of France’s 100 biggest cities in 2014 showed that those with large immigrant populations had higher rates of poverty than those with smaller numbers of new arrivals. Joblessness is the main cause of poverty, and even France’s generous unemployment benefits and other welfare payments are an inadequate substitute for income from a job.
In the wooden language of French bureaucracy, the banlieues, where around a quarter of all Algerian immigrants and their descendants live, are described as “sensitive urban zones.” Of the 751 urban areas thus designated, 64 are listed by law enforcement agencies as dangerous “ghettos” where immigrants can account for up to half the population, and the unemployment rate is 23% (45% among young people).
The French Exception
But what if France is structurally incapable of addressing unemployment among its Muslim citizens? Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff worries that “it is not clear how well France’s culture of inclusiveness can ever extend to immigrants.” Indeed, the paradox of the French system, Rogoff says, is that “the same strict firing laws and high levels of minimum wages that are intended to protect native French workers from globalization make it much more difficult for newcomers to land jobs.” That approach, he argues, is penny wise and pound foolish, because “virtually every study of global inequality suggests that gains from allowing greater labor mobility dwarf gains from redistributing income among natives.”
Another key French mistake, says the Ifo Institute’s Hans-Werner Sinn, has been “to neglect its small and medium-size firms and specialize too much on state-controlled mega-companies.” In the US and Great Britain, small and medium-size firms have been the key engines of new employment in recent decades; this is also true in Germany, with its Mittelstand firms picking up the employment slack. But in France, Sinn argues, “Airbus, Renault, Crédit Lyonnais, and Alstom are well-known examples of a mistaken industrial policy that has wasted French taxpayers’ money.”
Hadas-Lebel would agree. Like Rogoff, he believes that “France has found it difficult to adjust to the demands of globalization,” which is why it sticks doggedly to tried and failed policies. “While the economic rules of the game have changed throughout Europe” in the face of globalization, he notes, “the need for greater labor-market flexibility seems to have been accepted more easily in most other countries.”
Given “the obvious failures of the French social model” (including high unemployment, “huge public deficits,” and the “blockage of social mobility”), Hadas-Lebel advocates “the Scandinavian model of ‘flexisecurity,’ which combines employment flexibility and social security.” But that is unlikely to happen without a revolution in how the French think about their relationship to the state, to their jobs, and to one another.
The logic is clear: unless and until the French labor market demands more workers, job applicants from the “ghettos” will continue to face discrimination – and the result will be alienation, delinquency, and fertile ground for radicalization. The University of Luxembourg’s Alexander Lee points to the example of Mohammed Merah (whose killing spree in southwestern France in May 2012 left seven people dead). “The poverty and crime that form the prelude to his descent into self-radicalization,” Lee argues, “are also typical of the lives of hundreds of thousands of other young men and women in the banlieues.”
The good news, says Jean-Paul Fitoussi of Sciences-Po, is that most “French understand that their public spaces – the labor market, the workplace, housing, and educational institutions – are corroded by discrimination,” making “the ideal of ‘fraternité’ sound like an insult on top of an injury.” Now if the French state could only achieve the same level of understanding, and its leaders the courage to act upon it.
Homeland Security
Political courage should not, however, be required to plug what Gerges calls the “serious gaps in France’s domestic security arrangements.” Sami Mahroum of INSEAD delivers a scathing verdict on the shortcomings that were so apparent in the January 2015 Paris attacks. “Here was a case of a catastrophic intelligence and security failure,” Mahroum says, “that allowed a group of four who were known to the police to be members of a globally active terrorist organization to operate with relative ease in the French capital.”
A year and a half later, the same could be said about the slaying of a Catholic priest at the altar of his village church in July 2016. Incredibly, one of the suspects, Adel Kermiche, was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet as a condition of his probation as a would-be jihadi.
Beefing up domestic security must surely include running more undercover networks in immigrant communities to detect what Gerges calls “lone wolves and stay-at-home groupies or tight-knit local cells” inspired by the Islamic State “to launch attacks in distant, unpredictable locations.” Sadly, the lack of progress here stems not just from the ideological shibboleths that hamper the collection of crucial statistics, but also from another characteristically French problem: bureaucratic stiffness.
A major reform of the intelligence services by former President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 merged some national-level agencies while outsourcing the vital work of ground-level monitoring of “sensitive” immigrant communities to a police sub-department – which, however, was under-funded and under-staffed. The outrage perpetrated by Merah in 2012 revealed the failings of the new system – hence a further re-organization under Hollande, with joint teams set up to coordinate work at the center and in the field. This whole construction was then put under the supervision of the Interior Minister to facilitate contacts with the gendarmes (who also have their own services). The result? There are now 19 services involved in counterterrorism.
Will anything change? The 434-page report of a French parliamentary inquiry into the failure to prevent terror attacks – published two days before the Bastille Day massacre in Nice – called for a network of field agents under the auspices of a new National Counterterrorism Center. A database would be created along the lines of the US Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) – and would be available to all anti-terrorist units in France.
The French report places heavy blame on France’s bureaucratic culture of complexity, secrecy, and rigidity. As a consequence, the intelligence services lack the flexibility, experience, and instinctive “feel” that agents need in evaluating and countering terrorist risks. As a remedy, the parliamentarians suggest coopting outsiders on fixed-term assignments.
The same spirit of pragmatism underlies another of the report’s recommendations: use 2,000 police officers, trained for operations in an urban environment, rather than the 11,000 army personnel sent onto the streets as part of “Opération Sentinel,” which followed the Charlie Hebdo killings. As subsequent events have bloodily proved, both Opération Sentinel and the current state of emergency (in place since the November 2015 attacks) have singularly failed to deter the jihadis.
What will not work, says Brahma Chellaney of the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is a sartorial clampdown. Measures like “bans on face-covering veils” or prohibition of “the burkini, the full-body swimsuit some Muslim women wear to the beach” – a step several French coastal towns have taken recently – bear no relation to the problem. Instead, Chellaney argues, “[t]he only way to address the threat of terrorism effectively is to tackle the radical Islamist ideology that underpins it.” And that calls for a concerted effort “to stop the religious-industrial complexes in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and elsewhere in the Gulf from using their abundant petrodollars to fund the spread of extremist ideology.”
Exit Hollande
Focusing on the ideological front and the Middle East, however, does not let domestic policymakers off the hook. The floundering Hollande administration could and should launch effective employment and security policies without delay. Rogoff sees Hollande as having given Minister of the Economy Emmanuel Macron “wide berth to try to implement desperately needed structural reforms of labor and product markets.” But “it remains to be seen just how much political support such market-oriented policies can sustain.” In any case, Macron’s efforts are too little and come too late. So any effort at real reform will probably have to wait until next year’s election of a new president and government.
“New” is virtually certain. Looking forward optimistically to the Hollande presidency in the aftermath of the 2012 Merah killings, Lee cautioned that “it is now up to Hollande to seize the opportunity before la crise des banlieues becomes worse. Should he fail,” Lee warned, “Merah could be a precursor of much worse things to come.”
That warning has proved horrifically prophetic. The problem, as Hans-Olaf Henkel, a member of the European Parliament, and I have argued, is that, “Hollande appears to have an advanced case of Tartuffe’s malady, repeatedly making political pledges that he cannot honor.” French voters might otherwise have overlooked the indignity of their president being transported to a nocturnal tryst on the back of a scooter. They might also overlook the scandal of his personal hairdresser’s €120,000 ($135,000) annual salary. But they will not forgive Hollande’s failure to protect them from terrorism. Nor will they be appeased, let alone consoled, by his prime minister’s declaration, after the horror in Nice, that France must be prepared for more deadly attacks and will have to “learn to live with the threat.”
Submission or Integration?
If the French want an example of what greater integration of Muslims can achieve, they need only look across the English Channel to London, where the son of a Pakistani bus driver, Sadiq Khan, was elected Mayor earlier this year. “Of course,” says Moisi, “Muslim success stories like Khan’s remain too few and far between. But there is much to be gained from recognizing, publicizing, and multiplying them.”
For Levy, “Michel Houellebecq’s prediction in his most recent novel, Submission, that France would elect a president from an Islamic party in 2022 has been inverted” by Khan’s victory. “What we are witnessing with the election of Khan is the submission not of democracy to Islam, but of Islam to democracy.” If France hopes to achieve something like this same democratic submission, and begin to end the alienation of too many of its young Muslim citizens, the French state will need to submit to the most far-reaching reforms of the economy seen since the end of World War II.
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PARIS – France has become accustomed to terrorist outrages in the name of Islam, be it the murderous attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January 2015 or this summer’s mass slaughter by a “jihadi” driving a truck through the Bastille Day festivities along Nice’s Promenade des Anglais. The question for France – and for Project Syndicate commentators – is what explains these assaults and what can end them.
Inevitably, the question has led to fierce debate among France’s “public intellectuals.” For one of the best known, Bernard-Henri Lévy, what is at stake is “the danger of an ideological victory for Salafism, the doctrine underlying jihadism, which views Europe (and, within Europe, France) as prime ground for proselytization.” In this respect, BHL, as he is widely known, echoes the view of French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. But he goes on to castigate successive governments for refusing “to recognize that militant Islamic fundamentalism was actually Islamo-fascism, the third global variant of totalitarianism that diehard critics had been decrying for a quarter-century.”
Sciences Po’s Dominique Moisi makes the same comparison: today’s jihadist threat, he argues, targets “Western civilization itself,” just as fascism and communism did during the twentieth century. But he also highlights what may be at the root of France’s peculiar vulnerability: “The scars of colonialism are fresher in France than anywhere else in Europe; the country has Europe’s largest Muslim minority.”
True enough, and Fawaz Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, reflects on the experiences of those immigrants from the Maghreb and their descendants. “One reason for France suffering more casualties than all its neighbors put together,” he points out, “is that the sense of exclusion and alienation felt by a large segment of France’s Muslim community has made it easier for ISIS to recruit in the country.” Nor is that sentiment groundless: a 2015 study on diversity in France revealed rampant discrimination in the labor market against people with Arabic-sounding names.
Noëlle Lenoir, a former French minister for European affairs, has no doubt that many young French Muslims feel deeply alienated from the Republic, even though the majority are third-generation Frenchmen and women, not new immigrants. The adoption of Islamic mores by a small minority, however, combined with the horrific terror attacks, has left many believing “that what is at stake is the survival of the Republic itself,” and that “France’s characteristic pluralism and tolerance” must not “become the means of its destruction.”
But identifying the deep problems that are bedeviling France, and the even deeper emotions that they evoke, is not the same as finding solutions. “However we got to where we are,” Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, pithily notes of the Middle East turmoil that is contributing to France’s problems, “we are where we are, and where we are is a very bad place to be.”
Secure your copy of PS Quarterly: Age of Extremes
The newest issue of our magazine, PS Quarterly: Age of Extremes, is here. To gain digital access to all of the magazine’s content, and receive your print copy, subscribe to PS Premium now.
Subscribe Now
The Blindness of Égalité
The same could be said of France, where the “bad place” is made worse by self-imposed impediments. For example, a key obstacle to understanding the scope of the problem – which could be removed by the stroke of a pen – is the official ban on inclusion of ethnic and religious data in national population statistics. Building an accurate official picture of France’s diversity (as has long been routine in America and Britain) is rejected as contrary to the republican value of “égalité” – that is, a homogeneous society where everyone is supposed to have the same rights. This is a triumph of ideology over common sense – a point well captured by Steven Hill of New America: “As any pilot knows, flying without radar or accurate weather forecasts is likely to end in a crash.”
A less ideological rationale for policymakers’ self-inflicted blindness is their fear that data highlighting ethnic diversity might actually fuel racial tensions. But the absence of data does not stop ethnic profiling. James Goldston, the head the Open Society Justice Initiative (and a former official of the International Criminal Court) quotes a French policeman: “If you are on the road and see a black man or a man with Arabic features, you say to yourself, ‘He doesn’t look French,’ and then you might stop him to see if he has papers.”
As Angéline Escafré-Dublet, a researcher for the Migration Policy Institute, has argued, good data on the ethnic and religious composition of French society would help identify patterns of discrimination and aid in the design and implementation of policies to support the integration of immigrants. More important, accurate statistics would throw a spotlight on the unemployment and discrimination affecting Muslim youth – and block the French state’s ability to deny the scale of the problem.
Jobs or Jihad
Ideas for getting France to a better place tend to fall into two categories: job creation and localized domestic intelligence operations.
Following the November 2015 bloodbath in Paris (in which coordinated terrorist attacks caused 137 deaths), President François Hollande declared a state of emergency and proposed depriving terrorists with dual nationality of their French citizenship. Hollande’s idea was eventually abandoned, but, as Raphaël Hadas-Lebel, formerly of France’s Conseil d’Etat, points out, such debates come at a cost. As he put it at the time, “vehement disagreements over that issue continue to drown out discussion of far more consequential topics, like anemic economic growth and high unemployment.”
Sadly, he is right. Unemployment in France has averaged 9.2% for a generation (and has edged into double digits since 2012). Not surprisingly, young people and ethnic minorities are the worst affected, with French youth unemployment now officially estimated at about 23%. Hill cautions that standard measures exaggerate the problem by counting students and trainees as unemployed. Arguably so, but in the banlieues – the public-housing estates, dominated by ethnic minorities, surrounding many French cities – the young may be unimpressed by such methodological rigor.
Perhaps we all should be. As Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former foreign minister of Israel, notes: “Devastatingly high unemployment rates among European Muslims (three times higher than the national average in most countries) aggravate their social marginalization and cultural self-segregation.” He characterizes the French banlieues as “isolated, destitute, and in a state of permanent rage.”
Ben-Ami is at least partly right. A study of France’s 100 biggest cities in 2014 showed that those with large immigrant populations had higher rates of poverty than those with smaller numbers of new arrivals. Joblessness is the main cause of poverty, and even France’s generous unemployment benefits and other welfare payments are an inadequate substitute for income from a job.
In the wooden language of French bureaucracy, the banlieues, where around a quarter of all Algerian immigrants and their descendants live, are described as “sensitive urban zones.” Of the 751 urban areas thus designated, 64 are listed by law enforcement agencies as dangerous “ghettos” where immigrants can account for up to half the population, and the unemployment rate is 23% (45% among young people).
The French Exception
But what if France is structurally incapable of addressing unemployment among its Muslim citizens? Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff worries that “it is not clear how well France’s culture of inclusiveness can ever extend to immigrants.” Indeed, the paradox of the French system, Rogoff says, is that “the same strict firing laws and high levels of minimum wages that are intended to protect native French workers from globalization make it much more difficult for newcomers to land jobs.” That approach, he argues, is penny wise and pound foolish, because “virtually every study of global inequality suggests that gains from allowing greater labor mobility dwarf gains from redistributing income among natives.”
Another key French mistake, says the Ifo Institute’s Hans-Werner Sinn, has been “to neglect its small and medium-size firms and specialize too much on state-controlled mega-companies.” In the US and Great Britain, small and medium-size firms have been the key engines of new employment in recent decades; this is also true in Germany, with its Mittelstand firms picking up the employment slack. But in France, Sinn argues, “Airbus, Renault, Crédit Lyonnais, and Alstom are well-known examples of a mistaken industrial policy that has wasted French taxpayers’ money.”
Hadas-Lebel would agree. Like Rogoff, he believes that “France has found it difficult to adjust to the demands of globalization,” which is why it sticks doggedly to tried and failed policies. “While the economic rules of the game have changed throughout Europe” in the face of globalization, he notes, “the need for greater labor-market flexibility seems to have been accepted more easily in most other countries.”
Given “the obvious failures of the French social model” (including high unemployment, “huge public deficits,” and the “blockage of social mobility”), Hadas-Lebel advocates “the Scandinavian model of ‘flexisecurity,’ which combines employment flexibility and social security.” But that is unlikely to happen without a revolution in how the French think about their relationship to the state, to their jobs, and to one another.
The logic is clear: unless and until the French labor market demands more workers, job applicants from the “ghettos” will continue to face discrimination – and the result will be alienation, delinquency, and fertile ground for radicalization. The University of Luxembourg’s Alexander Lee points to the example of Mohammed Merah (whose killing spree in southwestern France in May 2012 left seven people dead). “The poverty and crime that form the prelude to his descent into self-radicalization,” Lee argues, “are also typical of the lives of hundreds of thousands of other young men and women in the banlieues.”
The good news, says Jean-Paul Fitoussi of Sciences-Po, is that most “French understand that their public spaces – the labor market, the workplace, housing, and educational institutions – are corroded by discrimination,” making “the ideal of ‘fraternité’ sound like an insult on top of an injury.” Now if the French state could only achieve the same level of understanding, and its leaders the courage to act upon it.
Homeland Security
Political courage should not, however, be required to plug what Gerges calls the “serious gaps in France’s domestic security arrangements.” Sami Mahroum of INSEAD delivers a scathing verdict on the shortcomings that were so apparent in the January 2015 Paris attacks. “Here was a case of a catastrophic intelligence and security failure,” Mahroum says, “that allowed a group of four who were known to the police to be members of a globally active terrorist organization to operate with relative ease in the French capital.”
A year and a half later, the same could be said about the slaying of a Catholic priest at the altar of his village church in July 2016. Incredibly, one of the suspects, Adel Kermiche, was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet as a condition of his probation as a would-be jihadi.
Beefing up domestic security must surely include running more undercover networks in immigrant communities to detect what Gerges calls “lone wolves and stay-at-home groupies or tight-knit local cells” inspired by the Islamic State “to launch attacks in distant, unpredictable locations.” Sadly, the lack of progress here stems not just from the ideological shibboleths that hamper the collection of crucial statistics, but also from another characteristically French problem: bureaucratic stiffness.
A major reform of the intelligence services by former President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 merged some national-level agencies while outsourcing the vital work of ground-level monitoring of “sensitive” immigrant communities to a police sub-department – which, however, was under-funded and under-staffed. The outrage perpetrated by Merah in 2012 revealed the failings of the new system – hence a further re-organization under Hollande, with joint teams set up to coordinate work at the center and in the field. This whole construction was then put under the supervision of the Interior Minister to facilitate contacts with the gendarmes (who also have their own services). The result? There are now 19 services involved in counterterrorism.
Will anything change? The 434-page report of a French parliamentary inquiry into the failure to prevent terror attacks – published two days before the Bastille Day massacre in Nice – called for a network of field agents under the auspices of a new National Counterterrorism Center. A database would be created along the lines of the US Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) – and would be available to all anti-terrorist units in France.
The French report places heavy blame on France’s bureaucratic culture of complexity, secrecy, and rigidity. As a consequence, the intelligence services lack the flexibility, experience, and instinctive “feel” that agents need in evaluating and countering terrorist risks. As a remedy, the parliamentarians suggest coopting outsiders on fixed-term assignments.
The same spirit of pragmatism underlies another of the report’s recommendations: use 2,000 police officers, trained for operations in an urban environment, rather than the 11,000 army personnel sent onto the streets as part of “Opération Sentinel,” which followed the Charlie Hebdo killings. As subsequent events have bloodily proved, both Opération Sentinel and the current state of emergency (in place since the November 2015 attacks) have singularly failed to deter the jihadis.
What will not work, says Brahma Chellaney of the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is a sartorial clampdown. Measures like “bans on face-covering veils” or prohibition of “the burkini, the full-body swimsuit some Muslim women wear to the beach” – a step several French coastal towns have taken recently – bear no relation to the problem. Instead, Chellaney argues, “[t]he only way to address the threat of terrorism effectively is to tackle the radical Islamist ideology that underpins it.” And that calls for a concerted effort “to stop the religious-industrial complexes in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and elsewhere in the Gulf from using their abundant petrodollars to fund the spread of extremist ideology.”
Exit Hollande
Focusing on the ideological front and the Middle East, however, does not let domestic policymakers off the hook. The floundering Hollande administration could and should launch effective employment and security policies without delay. Rogoff sees Hollande as having given Minister of the Economy Emmanuel Macron “wide berth to try to implement desperately needed structural reforms of labor and product markets.” But “it remains to be seen just how much political support such market-oriented policies can sustain.” In any case, Macron’s efforts are too little and come too late. So any effort at real reform will probably have to wait until next year’s election of a new president and government.
“New” is virtually certain. Looking forward optimistically to the Hollande presidency in the aftermath of the 2012 Merah killings, Lee cautioned that “it is now up to Hollande to seize the opportunity before la crise des banlieues becomes worse. Should he fail,” Lee warned, “Merah could be a precursor of much worse things to come.”
That warning has proved horrifically prophetic. The problem, as Hans-Olaf Henkel, a member of the European Parliament, and I have argued, is that, “Hollande appears to have an advanced case of Tartuffe’s malady, repeatedly making political pledges that he cannot honor.” French voters might otherwise have overlooked the indignity of their president being transported to a nocturnal tryst on the back of a scooter. They might also overlook the scandal of his personal hairdresser’s €120,000 ($135,000) annual salary. But they will not forgive Hollande’s failure to protect them from terrorism. Nor will they be appeased, let alone consoled, by his prime minister’s declaration, after the horror in Nice, that France must be prepared for more deadly attacks and will have to “learn to live with the threat.”
Submission or Integration?
If the French want an example of what greater integration of Muslims can achieve, they need only look across the English Channel to London, where the son of a Pakistani bus driver, Sadiq Khan, was elected Mayor earlier this year. “Of course,” says Moisi, “Muslim success stories like Khan’s remain too few and far between. But there is much to be gained from recognizing, publicizing, and multiplying them.”
For Levy, “Michel Houellebecq’s prediction in his most recent novel, Submission, that France would elect a president from an Islamic party in 2022 has been inverted” by Khan’s victory. “What we are witnessing with the election of Khan is the submission not of democracy to Islam, but of Islam to democracy.” If France hopes to achieve something like this same democratic submission, and begin to end the alienation of too many of its young Muslim citizens, the French state will need to submit to the most far-reaching reforms of the economy seen since the end of World War II.