Pollitics: France & North America: France's Autumn Riots - reverberations for USA, Canada, and Quebec

France's refusal to support the US/British strategy to overthrow Saddam Hussein, its games at the UN, its involvement in the UN Oil-for-Food scam, the hauteur of Jacques Chirac, President of the Republic and of his current dandy Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, his imposition of the secularist headscarf rule on young female Muslims in French schools, and the present riots thru-out France - with Chirac/de Villepin at loggerheads with Nicolas Sarkozy: American foreign relations with France have taken a beating, but not so in Canada. Apparently, the Autumn Riots 2005 caused the postponement of a state visit of de Villepin to Ottawa (and incidentlaly, the Gomery revelations and election scare caused a cancellation of the visit to Ottawa of the Heir Apparent to the Dominion's Throne, but the Royal Couple went right ahead with their tour de farce thru the former Colonies across from Canada's southern border).
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BACKGROUNDER: refWrite, France: Riots: Villepin pirouettes while Paris burns, Sarkozy deploys forces of law and order, Saturday, Nov5,2k5.
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Autumn Riots 2005: This protracted event of three weeks of car-burnings (not escalated to car-bombings or suicide-attacks, but certainly carrying the threat) was France's 9/11 (however nearly deathless it was, still it packed an analogous psychologie politique, the Riots were at one and the same time France's Sit-In Movement (but with no Rosa Parks and no Martin Luther King), and its Twin Towers / WTO (wrought, not with explosives and airplanes, but with cell phones and other hand-helds, including cigarette lighters, and gas cans) - the Riots were all these things condensed into one. And then some. Something unique, something way beyond France's student riots of May 1968 - which inevitably got a lot of citation in the media and blogosphere (including here at refWrite, as the Rejectionist Movement progressed, never clarifying its aim either as a Muslim Islamofascist movement (which some of the press tried to construct it as being), but neither as a poor peoples' incipiently neo-Marxist rebellion with clear class strategy and intent. No manifesto of socio-economic demands was produced; nothing was demanded around which the government could negotiate, as far as I am aware.

The Autumn 2005 Riots in France have shaken the French state, indeed the order of the entirety of the Fifth Republic and the man who heads the neo-Gaullist "conservative" party l'Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Populaire Movement - take a look at France's political spectrum), Jacques Chirac the head of state who went silent and couldn't be found for days on end.

Meanwhile his minions, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, stuttered and ahem-ed. The clearest voice was that of the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who had been the leading contender along with de Villepin to replace Chirac in the new election cycle next year. Sarkozy has made himself well-known for his break with the abject secularism which unites the French conservatives (neo-Gaullists) and the French Left (a fractious assortment of Socialists, Communists, and Left-tongued special interest groups). Sarkozy had positioned himself as himself secular-minded but not anti-religion in regard to state policy. This meant he had dropped the rabid anti-clericalism that took offense at anything Catholic (but the literate Catholics in France are often socialist, divided on abortion, and deeply anti-American as in the case of the main Catholic newspaper LaCroix). Sarkozy seemed to want to avoid the demonization and restriction of non-traditional Protestants in France, a demonization which sees little difference between a Pentecostal and a Scientologist, or a Raellian - they're all just brainwashing cultists. Sarkozy, without taking a fully libertarian position, wanted to make careful, case by case, analyses to determine which practices of which groups precisely crossed over the line to violate the mental decision-making capacities of that group's adherents.

But the implications of Sarkozy's position, the wideness of his desire to accomaodate an orderly Muslim presence in French society and its public institutions, had yet to be worked out - the upcoming campaign was to have been the occasion to do so. Obviously part of his agenda was to build alliances with pro-France Muslim leaders, intellectuals, and opinion-makers - to win them and those whose votes they could carry with them into the neo-Gaullist force against both the fractious Left and the ultra-nationalist anti-immigrant (and, therefore, anti-Muslim) Right led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

So, when in the early days of the Autumn Riots, Sarkozy made his widely-quoted characterization of the car-burners as "scum," "rabble," and whatnot, the automatic reflex of the Left calling for his resignation fell mostly on deaf ears within the mainstream public. And among the neo-Gaullists, whether they sided more with Chirac/deVillipin or with the Interior Minister who employed the epithets on the rebels, they were secretly happy that Sarkozy (alone) had held the line against mass desertions from the neo-Gaullists to Le Pen's Nationalists with their obdurate racism.

And at the same time, I think currently that the Left just lost the upcoming 2006 elections in France. Sarkozy is the leading candidate for the leadership of the neo-Gaullists, the Chirac phase in party and nation is over, and Sarkozy has the best chance of becoming the next Monsieur le Président de la République de France

Sarkozy, if he comes to power, will speed-up the rappochement with the USA, and that will reflect the attitudes of a great current in post-Riots France, where the link between the car-burners and the worlwide Terrorist movement will relentlessly assert itself in the collective political unconscious. And, at the same time, pave the way for considerable reforms of ghettoized Muslim-descended youths in the country. The Bush administration, and its successor (whether Republican or Democrat, as now seems likely) will thereby have found a new opening in France to American foreign policy in general.

The one zone of North American orientation toward the coming changes in France that will be the most fascinating, will of course be the French-speaking zone of Québec. I think the separatist parties - the Parti Québecois on the provincial level, and the Bloc Québecois in the Federal House of Commons - will in part try to isolate their constitutencies from the developments in France. This stands to reason, because the overlayering of an already-complex independentist political milieu, where many indigenous policies must be decided simultaneously, becomes exceedingly unoptimal when criss-crossed by the causes of France's fractious Left, its shocked and divided neo-Gaullists in the course of their greatest transition since the end of the Algerian Colonialist War - all the while confronting a Rejectionist Movememnt of great strength within the Muslim and African immigrant population - how can the Quebec sovereigntists take all that on when they have sofficient quarrels among themselves already?

Yet, they must take it on because, the dream of a French-speaking separate, independent, sovereign state between Canada's Atlanatic provinces and the provinces from Ontario westward, cannot take on foreign policy quarrels of its own in relation to post-Riots France. Again, yet, such a French-speaking North American state would have to have a definite foreign policy of its own, ready at hand, on the first day of independence, a foreign policy toward France.

I think the developments in riotous France have been a setback to francophone separatism in Canada. I'd think Québec's best chance internationally at this point would be to work within the continental Canadian framework of an emergent new foreign policy toward France. Unless I am just too over-impressed with the importance of participation in an effective policy in that regard, influencing the Federal Canadian policy, one at once beneficial toward Quebec and the French cultural homeland, as well as in Canada's larger national interest, Quebec needs to draw closer to Canada, in the best interests of a strong and supportive policy to help France stabilize itself over the next decades. This stance does not preclude continuous separatist agitation and manoeuvering. Despite any contradctory elements, the two approaches could be maintained by separatists at one and the same time.

As to the separatists in Québec, I strongly object to Liberal leader Paul Martin's attempts to demonize them, especially now at election time. These independentist parties and groups and language-protection movements are themselves as Canadian as maple syrup. I've lived in this country too long and had too many friends among Québecois of all persuasions vis à vis their most divisive and passionate political issues, to join in marching out counter-eptithets like "Canada wreckers" and "traitors" either in regard to separtist thawt in Québec - or, for that matter Western Canada. It's how to live with them and all the Canadian people, in the everlasting interim that's important. Politically, we must learn to be be good neighbours, come what may in regard to how boundaries and status are determined, set, and reset. Nothing is absolute in this sphere except God's call to us to be good neighbours and practice justice for all.

This is also France's dilemma at the present moment, after all the decades of denial and hauteur from the Left and neo-Gaullists alike. - Politicarp

Background URLs [in ruffly reverse chronological order]:

1.) • Anti-riots emergency rules extended by 3 months
2.) • Riots drive recruits into arms of LePen
3.) • Next French revolution: a less colorblind society
4.) • French leaders tilt right
5.) • France on riot alert for holiday
6.) • French Police step up secuirity after tip
7.) • What makes someone French?
8.) • Riots ebb as citizens take stand
9.) • France to impose curfews, rioting spreads
10.) • Shots fired at police in France, says AlJazeeera (Eng ed)
11.) • France: Riots reach new peak, spread to other cities [Radio Free Europe / RadioLiberty]
12.) • Crisis talks over French riots [Nov5,2k5]
13.) • Vehicles torched in spreading French riots
14.) • Fiery riots spread beyond Paris [Nov4,2k5]
15.) • France's riots ... more
16.) • Paris in flames: the limits of repression
17.) • More unrest hits Paris streets [Nov3,2k5]
18.) • Shots fired as French riots esacalate
19) • Deep roots of Paris riots
20.) • Chirac appeals for calm
21.) • France struggles as unrest spreads
21.) • Chirac and Socialists reel after debate on Europe