Many people think the tradition of assimilating immigrants into society is solely an American thing, something not practiced in “blood and soil” Europe. But one European nation used to take immigrants from around the world and turn them into fervent patriots.
Then, just as it happened here, that country’s elites decided to indulge in self-defeating ennui and gave up on assimilation. That country was France.
Reports that some of the Paris terrorists last week were French-born and raised show the high price the nation has paid for abandoning assimilation.
France’s assimilation was so thorough that many around the world did not even know it was happening. A generation of Americans and Europeans reared in the 20th century on seeing France in such icons as Yves Montand, Charles Aznavour, and Louis de Funes had no idea that they were Italian, Armenian, and Spanish.
Even as totemic a figure as Edith Piaf was part Italian and part Berber.
France’s assimilationist ethos was even tried on colonial subjects, striking a major difference with France’s rival Britain.
While London demanded only that Indians, Jamaicans, and Kenyans submit to British rule, France carried to the jungles of Indochina and Africa a deeply felt “mission civilisatrice.” Vietnamese, Cambodians, Senegalese, and Algerians were to become French through education in the language of Molière and the belief system of the philosophes.
In fact, it was decolonization and the devastation of World War II that had just preceded it—visited on most of Europe by German National-Socialism—that led many intellectuals in Europe and the West in general to reject, demean, and ridicule patriotism in all its forms.
That such a self-defeating guilt trip was taken just as the West was facing an expansive communist crusade led by Moscow was not just self-indulgent then; it has had consequences that are having effects today.
“Confidence in one’s own people is an essential condition for the assimilation of immigrants and it is no longer sufficiently strong,” writes the demographer Guillaume Marois. “Why would anyone want to become French when the intellectual elites and the media ceaselessly denigrate France? Some immigrants want the material comfort and the security that the West provides, but not necessarily its way of life.”
This last part is important. Just as our purported “intellectual betters” here in the West were forsaking national culture, they were also abandoning traditional concepts of the family and religion. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism, both in its Shiite and Sunni forms, made assimilation into what many of them saw as a hedonistic West all the harder.
“If a good chance of middle-aged childlessness and elderly solitude is the price of assimilation, it is for many Turks an exorbitant one,” wrote Christopher Caldwell about Turks in Germany in his 2009 book, “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.”
It did not help that socialist economic policies that produce 2 percent economic growth in a good year do not create enough employment for all.
But in the end, it was “la trahison des clercs”—the treason of the intellectuals—that dealt assimilation a hard blow. “We no longer offer to others a model sufficiently desirable so that they can make the effort to adapt their ways of life when it’s necessary,” writes another French demographer, Michèle Tribalat.
Recent French governments have tried to right this ship and return to assimilation, especially that of the last conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy (part Hungarian, part Jewish). Such efforts, alas, have fallen short. It is to be hoped that, following the massacre last week, they get it right.
But we here can draw important lessons. Americans did not succumb to Fascism, but defeated it, and are more often than not able to make the all-important distinction between patriotism—necessary for our national cohesion and common purpose—and virulent xenophobia.
Moreover, America benefits from centuries of assimilating people from all over the world. The model is there.
As the presidential candidates debate over the next few months how they propose to fix the global mess they will inherit from an increasingly petulant and detached President Obama, they should also look at fixing domestic problems. Returning to an assimilationist policy should be at the top of that list.
