Exposing the nation-state's true colours

As Britons express shock over the success of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France's presidential election, Adrian Favell argues that we should examine our own xenophobic tendencies.

Republicans versus monarchists, revolutionary idealism versus pragmatism, state intervention versus free-market liberalism. France and Britain have a long mutual history of caricaturing each other in order to bolster their own national distinctiveness. Today, one of the most dramatic distinctions lies in the opposed philosophies that supposedly characterise each country's approach to post-war immigration and ethnic diversity. Britain imagines itself, with pride, as an integrated, multicultural, multiracial society, across the sea from a neighbour that seems to promote an intolerant, homogenising, colour-blind republicanism. And, as if to prove this point, Jean-Marie Le Pen, infamous leader of the French National Front, has secured himself a place in Sunday's second round of the presidential elections.

Last week's result, rather than representing a definitive vote against immigration or ethnic diversity and for an exclusive French nationalism, in fact shows the perversity of an electoral system that could produce such a distorted, unrepresentative run-off. Le Pen's breakthrough might inspire a backlash and new thinking about his staple concerns of urban degradation, crime and insecurity and cross-ethnic conflict, issues he crudely and with wayward facts blames on immigrants and immigration.

Say what he might, France is a multicultural, multiracial society. Most so-called immigrés are long-term, settled French citizens with declining connections to their countries of origin. Paris is an extraordinary multicultural and global mix. A few other cities across France share this diverse profile. As in Britain, peer beyond a handful of major cities and the multiculturalism of the nation runs shallow. The French provinces are, indeed, white, intolerant and reactionary, but no more or less than rural Gloucestershire. Multiculturalism is a uniquely urban phenomenon, a property of global cities such as London and Paris, not of the nation that surrounds them.

The British idea of France as an intolerant, homogenising republic lies in its acceptance of the arch, elitist political rhetoric that emanates from the French media and political classes. Much of this bears little resemblance to pragmatic local policies. France's local authorities routinely work with immigrant-origin communities to channel funds to encourage cultural expression of all kinds, such as the building of mosques.

Critics often point to the intolerant attitudes found in the centralised French education system, but on the ground, as in Britain, it is adapted to its diverse populations: central curricula have softened with the exigencies of teaching religiously and culturally diverse pupils. Even the infamous cases in which schoolgirls have been barred from schools for wearing Islamic headscarves are exceptions to the usual pragmatic tolerance shown by most local authorities.

The real problem lies in the political rhetoric, not what is happening on the streets. Promoted by the media philosophers, the left and the right have, since the 1980s, elaborated an increasingly hollow republican discourse that allows little room for addressing the realities of a multiracial society. Even at its most idealistic, this centrist French republican philosophy is not a homogenising discourse about unchanging French national culture, but something rather more like the traditional American melting-pot idea. The French republican model is thus a cultural pluralist one that recognises France as a country of distinct religions, distinct cultural regions and, crucially, of immigrants. France, more than the rest of Europe, was deeply marked by immigration in the late 19th century. The nation is unified, not around an ethnic form of life, but around a set of nationally specific political ideas. Chirac invoked these ideals in his call for unity against Le Pen: it is a rhetoric that substantially unifies left and right.

But republican political language has been found wanting in its recognition of the genuinely deeper forms of ethnic diversity that characterise contemporary France, and, even more crucially, in how it has dealt with the intense degradation of the outer-city banlieues . Politicians and intellectuals are to blame for explaining the dramatic disenfranchisement of urban youth by pointing to cultural differences, the temptations of militant Islam, or the failure of the traditional institutions of integration, such as public schools. This ignores the basic fact that on all indicators of integration - language use, attitudes to modernity, intermarriage, social networks - North Africans are much better integrated, much more "French", than their much less "problematic" Chinese or Turkish counterparts. The sources of social breakdown in fact lie totally outside the idealised French republican vision. France, the great interventionist state, has, like elsewhere in Europe, embraced a savage, socially divisive, neo-liberal capitalism in recent years, with the same vehemence that produced similar social breakdowns in Thatcherite Britain. The result is a deeply polarised society, nowhere seen better than in the dramatic separation of inner Paris within the ring road from the rest of the city, a gentrifying, bourgeois island in a sea of dramatic urban poverty. It is little wonder that these are such fertile grounds for urban conflict and aggression. Outside observers, who view these social problems as the product of French assimilationism, are guilty of reading France by its own republican self-image. It is akin to the spiteful glee that French observers muster every time there is a race riot on the streets of an English city.

The truth is that Britain and France have a lot more in common than mainstream commentators in either country would admit. Both have distinctly nationalistic, postcolonial visions of multiculturalism, curiously bounded by an idea of the nation as a self-contained unity. As such, they often express a deep-rooted xenophobia in their exceptionalism. The shifting mix of anti-European, anti-American and anti-global ideas that come with this are the best weather vane for the limitations of British and French ideas of multiculturalism.

In October 2000, the report Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain was attacked for suggesting that the colonial idea of British history was tainted in some ways by its racial conceptions of the nation. Multiculturalism and multiracial diversity is OK for left and right in Britain as long as it can be branded "British". Any suggestion that the limits to British tolerance lie in its xenophobic inability - on matters of race - to see itself as anything other than a model for the rest of Europe is met with hostility and scorn.

Le Pen's minority vision of France helps cement the cosy homegrown celebration of British multicultural race relations that overlooks its own downsides - racist attitudes on asylum seeking, non-recognition of immigrants who do not fall into the postcolonial mould and the obstructive role Britain has played in European initiatives on migration, anti-racism and xenophobia.

We should certainly fear the signs that Le Pen's success denotes: the cynicism of voters, the exhaustion of corrupt incumbent elites, the ease with which a nonsensical rhetoric of national self-sufficiency can fly in the face of international economic integration. But Le Pen is right about one thing. Immigrant diversity is indeed a threat to the old nation-state. Above all, it exposes just how particularistic, xenophobic and narrow-minded most nations really are. Postwar European nations have reasserted their national prerogative by turning culturally and racially distinct immigrants into nationals and citizens: black Britons and French beurs . This was a remarkable achievement; but continued global social change is likely to render such exclusively national solutions harder to achieve. Progressive-minded British observers should not use the Le Pen breakthrough to score points in favour of the British way; they should rather look to the pathologies that beset their own postcolonial philosophy. We can but hope that Le Pen's success will shock French citizens and opinion-makers into doing the same.

Adrian Favell is associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author of Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain , Palgrave 2001.