By Arsalan Iftikhar
Date Posted: March 20, 2008
When anyone walks into the main foyer of the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., they will be greeted by an enormous 5-foot-tall world globe beautifully mounted to the floor that once belonged to former French President Francois Mitterand.
Many French diplomats in Washington will happily tell you that the globe is in pristine shape except for a piece of chipped paint in the region of the globe, near the Pyrenees in southern France, where President Mitterand was born. Although not a major flaw in the globe itself, that chipped paint on Mitterand’s globe in the lobby of the French Embassy shows the great pride that French people have in their national identity.
Any true Washington political insider will tell you that the esteemed position of French ambassador to the United States is one of the most important gigs in town. As a key Western ally with great international respect and strong ties to key regional players in Africa and the Middle East, any French ambassador has an added gravitas in the international political arena. For example, Jean-David Levitte, the previous ambassador to Washington, has now returned home to Quai d’Orsay and the French Foreign Ministry and is currently the French version of national security adviser for recently elected French President Nicholas Sarkozy.
Replacing Monsieur Levitte at the Reservoir Road residence of the French Embassy is the current French ambassador to the United States, His Excellency Pierre Vimont. A lifelong French public diplomat and civil servant, Ambassador Vimont previously served as chief-of-staff for the French foreign minister, and his most notable diplomatic posting was his tenure as French ambassador to the European Union (EU) from 1999 to 2002.
With French society making the transition from President Jacques Chirac to the newly elected conservative-right candidate, Nicholas Sarkozy, it was clear that France was going to enter into a new phase of French-identity politics. With his defeat of the juggernaut French socialist candidate, Segolene Royal, many international observers viewed this as a societal mandate for the anti-immigrant platform of Monsieur Sarkozy, the son of Hungarian immigrants himself.
Because of its admittedly conservative and slightly jingoistic history on defining what it means to be French, with the rise of immigration from North Africa and the Muslim world in the last 60 years, France finds itself trying to balance its historically proud French constitutional traditions of liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality and fraternity) with the influx of migrant guest workers coming to their shores. This national fraternity has come slightly undone in the last few years, marred most notably by late 2005 civil unrest in the banlieue (suburbs) of Paris by disenfranchised French youth of North African and Muslim origin.
According to public reports, the 2005 civil unrest in the Parisian suburbs was a series of street riots and violent clashes against French police in response to an accidental and suspicious murder of two young French Muslim teenagers by policemen.
Coupled with former President Jacques Chirac’s 2004 legislative ban on the hijab (headscarf) in public schools, for many French Muslims (and Muslims worldwide), these phenomena were not viewed in a vacuum, and many international observers are now concerned about the future of French-Muslim relations and French-identity politics in general.
For people who know about French geopolitics, these trends were especially disconcerting because of France’s historically strong and respected stature in the global community. As a Western NATO superpower, Paris has always been seen as a beacon of diplomatic nuance and mutual coexistence to the sometimes unilateral and hegemonic image of Western nations in certain less-than-friendly nations.
If you hear the term “diplomatic back-channels” in Washington, there is a good chance that the French ambassador to the United States will be on that short list of people. Because of this international gravitas, it becomes essential to understand internal French politics and how that understanding will define how France will be viewed by the rest of the world for the remainder of our century.
In order to understand how France will deal with its new generation of international and domestic-identity politics, Ambassador Pierre Vimont welcomed us into his office living room to discuss French-identity politics, relations with the Muslim world and French soccer superstar Zinedine Zidane’s infamous head-butt “heard around the world,” costing France the 2006 World Cup trophy. “France is a rather conservative country,” begins Ambassador Pierre Vimont as he pensively taps his chin on his black leather couch in the French Embassy. “France has always found it rather difficult to reform itself in a peaceful and progressive way. [As a nation], they would rather go for big changes like revolutions.”
Monsieur Vimont also says that French politicians only began to revisit the core of French-identity politics with the major influx of immigrant guest workers from foreign lands. At the time, he says the French societal response was to deny any free public discourse because they didn’t “want to get into this issue.”
“[The French society was] having great social problems, but we didn’t want to look too much at it. Sarkozy has had this political courage of just saying, ‘Let’s be honest. Let’s be candid.’ We are losing sight sometimes of those French principles and have to go back to them in a more modern way.”
He concedes that Sarkozy may have done this stratagem “for tactical reasons” to pacify the political needs of the far-right nationalist party, headed by right-wing (and anti-immigrant) politician, Jean-Marie Le Pen. “What has been interesting has been that Sarkozy has put all these questions on the table,” continues Ambassador Vimont. He says that while most of French society wanted to sweep these sociopolitical debates under the carpet, Sarkozy has helped to bring some of these previously taboo political issues of diversity and religion right into the middle of the French public arena.
He describes Sarkozy’s political approach as “the moderate course,” which would not go back on core French principles but would “try to adapt them to our new reality here.”
His anti-immigrant platform aside, Nicholas Sarkozy began to show his keen political acuity when he named Rachida Dati to become the French Minister of Justice (our version of Attorney General) on May 18, 2007. With this appointment, Rachida Dati became the first woman having a non-European background and the first Arab to ever serve on the French Cabinet.
According to Ambassador Vimont, Sarkozy’s political genius is also highlighted by the fact that his political pragmatism has helped marginalize the influence of right-wingers like Le Pen and his National Front party. The Ambassador noted that Le Pen previously had 15 percent to 20 percent of French voters, and that number is currently hovering near only five percent.
“Now, the whole issue is: Can Sarkozy deliver?” continues Ambassador Vimont. “In terms of immigration, integration and the questions in the suburbs. We have, at the moment, in France, a Muslim community that amounts to eight percent of the population. They bring with them a lot of issues that we have to face … The question of jobs, discrimination in terms of housing and poor education … In terms of integration, you have to look at all those issues.”
With nearly 4.8 million Muslims in a land of more than 60 million, Ambassador Vimont highlighted the French government’s “full integrated global program for those suburbs that will deal with all those issues” which will include “putting some public money into that and try to solve that … Whether it will succeed, that’s another problem. At least, the government is trying to do something.”
In terms of jobs and the work force, Ambassador Vimont points to the creation of a National Ombudsman who can address specific claims of job discrimination “in order to protect diversity in our country.”
“If anybody has the impression that he’s being discriminated for race, sex or religion … he has the right to go that Ombudsman,” and file an official complaint. He mentions that this ombudsman is not within any of the Ministries; it is actually an independent body and is currently chaired by Louis Schweitzer, a former chairman and CEO of Renault automobiles. The discrimination debate within French society was most notably brought to international light by the 2004 presidential ban on hijabs by former President Chirac.
As a lawyer himself, Ambassador Vimont offered some insight into the internal societal debate during the aftermath of the headscarf ban. “This was a bone of contention in many of our schools,” says the ambassador, trying to paint a visual picture of French public debate at the time. “Some of the heads of our schools wanted to prevent children from getting in with their hijabs and therefore forbidding it. Others wanted to accept it.”
He said that the one thing that all French people agreed on was that there should be one uniform rule which should apply to everyone. Since there was so much tension, people did not want to give individual schools the power to decide whether to allow hijab or not. Ambassador Vimont concedes about the hijab ban: “I, myself, had my doubts … If you try to look at it from a very pragmatic way, then you have a lot of wise men who worked together and came out with this proposal that they thought hijab should be forbidden in the schools.”
“We all thought there would be terrible turmoil in schools in France” after the hijab ban, but Monsieur Vimont explains that it has been a successful social experiment thus far. Using historical precedent, he explains that since the beginning of the 18th century, French schools have been “the education of The Republic.” He said that the hijab controversy was primarily against old-school French hyper-secularists and more modern diversity-oriented generations who are open to more traditions and ways of life.
He says that religious liberty is being upheld in France with mosques being built “in more or less every city” using public monies. In France, religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam can get federal and/or municipal funds to build local churches, synagogues and mosques.
“This is one of the points that Sarkozy is precisely putting forward,” the ambassador continues. “As we are going on in France, we are still being very tolerant with freedom of religion and the right for every person to practice their religion in total freedom.”
In the last few years, to the credit of French society, there have been some high-profile attempts at furthering the diversity debate within their country. In July 2006, French bank Societe Generale created a Council on Diversity, with a goal of increasing the representation of women in executive levels from 35 percent to 40 percent by 2009. Additionally, during his presidential candidacy in 2007, Sarkozy appointed Basile Boli (a Black French soccer player who was born in Cote d’Ivoire) to lead a task force on diversity.
On diversity issues in America, Ambassador Vimont mentioned that most French people are surprised to hear so many languages being spoken in the United States. “Never forget that France is a country where, in our constitution, we have the rule that French is the only and official language of the French Republic,” he says. “Once again, we are talking about a country [France] that has always been very eager to keep its unity and protect it as much as possible. And I think maybe it’s gone a bit too far.”
The ambassador further highlighted the fact that “it is a misdemeanor or infraction” for French census officials to keep official figures about discrimination or ethnicity. Realizing that empirical data is necessary in order to gauge whether racism or discrimination is growing, the Sarkozy government is seeking to explore how France may be able to break decades-long traditions of not keeping statistics on race or discrimination issues.
“[Sarkozy] said maybe we should go for statistics on diversity. Maybe we should go for ‘positive discrimination’ and maybe we should accept the idea that we must accept a certain identity for certain communities, which will be protected by law,” he says. “What has been interesting is that he has been careful not to go too far.”
No conversation about current French-identity politics would be complete without a discussion of French soccer’s Zidane’s head-butt against Marco Materazzi of Italy. As the most famous French Muslim in recent history, soccer star “Zizou” (as Zidane is nicknamed around the world) was seen as a hero and role model for the thousands of poor Muslim-Arab youths in France. As an avid soccer fan himself, the ambassador weighed in on his thoughts on the head-butt heard around the world. He chuckles and says, “Well, we were all devastated … First of all, because we knew that we would not win … We all had the impression that what Zidane did was the frustration at the fact that France was not going to win the World Cup. It was the sheer frustration of a man who knew he was at the end of his career and that he would not win that match because there were very few minutes left.”
And then the ambassador smiled. “But, at the same time, I liked it too,” he laughs. “Because I thought that the man showed he was human.”
He concludes by noting the following about the status of French-identity politics: “What I think has been interesting with Nicolas Sarkozy is that he is trying to modernize and to adapt French principles [of liberty, equality and fraternity] to today’s reality in France.”
Understanding the nuance and complexity of human and societal paradigms is something that a global diplomat must deal with on a daily basis. Like President Mitterand’s massive globe in the foyer of the French Embassy in Washington, it is clear that French-identity politics is evolving but also remains similar in some ways to Mitterand’s marvelous globe: proud, rooted in history, and like the rest of us, slightly imperfect.
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This opinion column was written by Arsalan Iftikhar, contributing editor for Islamica Magazine. www.diversityinc.com/members/3240.cfm
