Citizenship, Republicanism and Multiculturalism in France
587
to difference’ (as in the wearing of the foulard) as part of ‘l’illusion
multiculturaliste’.
It is this latter theme that has continued to grow in prominence during the
1990s. For the defenders of traditional republicanism, multiculturalism features
as nothing less than a new form of tribalism.46 Speaking before the Commission
de la Nationalite´, eminent philosopher Alain Finkielkraut remarked: ‘I believe
that the fanatics of cultural identity, those who raise collective difference to the
level of an absolute, do not proceed differently from racists, even if to be
accurate the determinism within which they enclose individuals is not genetic
but rather historical or traditional’.47 Multiculturalism thus becomes associated
with the ideology of the extreme Right. Finkielkraut, for example, does not
hesitate to draw the comparison with the ideas of nationalist Maurice Barre`s.48
Todd sees it as a ‘reincarnation’ of ‘the Maurrasian thematic’. Tzvetan Todorov
makes the link with anti-semitism. ‘It is’, he writes, ‘truly depressing, one
hundred years after the Dreyfus Affair, to see that it is again the anti-Dreyfusards
who are winning; those who think that the identity of an individual is entirely
determined by the ethnic or biological group to which he (sic) belongs.’49 Jelen
simply aligns multiculturalism with the ideology of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the
Front National.50
The tribalization associated with multiculturalism also entails ‘Balkaniza-
tion’ or ‘Lebanization’, the inevitable descent into fratricidal civil war. ‘Those
who doubt this’, Jelen writes, ‘should reflect upon the conflagration that
occurred in the Lebanon, upon the ethnic, religious and racial fanaticisms that
have ravaged or are ravaging Algeria, Rwanda, Za¨ıre, the Congo, the former
YugoslaviaandtheformerSovietUnion.’51 Each, onthisview, isasocietybased
upon ‘particularisms’ rather than ‘universalisms’.
The latter is a remarkably common theme, and one, as we shall see, that is
not limited to the defenders of traditional republicanism. It feeds off traditional
French fears about the fragility of their own nation. More remarkable is that
national disintegration is also associated with the ‘spectre of American
multiculturalism’. In this discourse, Lebanization, Balkanization and Ameri-
canization have the same rhetorical force.
There are, of course, misconceptions here: only rarely, for example, is there
recognition that affirmative action policies, when conceived and implemented
in accordance with liberal values, might unify rather than divide America.
Moreover, much use is made of America’s own critics of multiculturalism (such
46
See Robert Delie`ge, ‘Vers un nouveau tribalisme? Du relativisme au politiquement correct’,
in Gilles Ferre´ol, ed., Inte´gration, lien social et citoyennete´ (Lille: Septentrion, 1998), pp. 165–95.
47
ˆ
Long, Etre Franc¸ais, I, p. 597.
48
See, for example, Alain Finkielkraut, La De´faite de la pense´e (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) and ‘La
nation disparaˆıt au profit des tribus’, Le Monde, 13 July 1989.
49
Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Du culte de la diffe´rence a` la sacrilisation de la victime’, Esprit, 212 (1996),
90–102, p. 96.
50
Christian Jelen, ‘La re´gression multiculturaliste’, Le De´bat, 97 (1997), pp. 137–43, p. 143.
Jelen, ‘La re´gression multiculturaliste’, p. 138.
51