When I was taking French in college, I remember a heated discussion about what it meant to be French. Something I learned is that French nationalism has a much narrower definition of what constitutes a "true citizen" than the American concept of identity that is built on a creed. Even with France's talk about "liberté, égalité, fraternité," a "true Frenchman" apparently is a Christian person whose lineage traces back centuries.
This goes beyond an academic debate in college because that societal definition has caused consternation with the huge influx of Muslim immigrants that have moved into France in recent years. If you are not convinced, look at the recent riots in France. What started off as student protests about overflowing classrooms, teacher shortages, and decaying buildings morphed into something much larger. There are those on the Right who believe that it is mass migration of Muslim immigrants that explains why French riots have reached a whole new level.
I think the story is more complicated. France's expansive welfare state has failed the social harmony its proponents promise. Meanwhile, failure to integrate immigrants who reject the country's secular, liberal norms has created a different social fracture. The combination of these two is more combustible than either one of these on its own.
If you're someone on the Far Left in the United States trying to design your ideal society, you would think that France would be a good place to start. The government spends lavishly on things like healthcare, education, and housing. The pension system is quite generous. France has some of the highest taxes in the developed world. France even has a 35-hour workweek. And where has that gotten them? With high public debt, economic stagnation, and rioting in the street. France's government largesse cannot get rid of economic scarcity or the notion that tradeoffs exist. It is a reminder that government cannot spend its way to better essential services, prosperity, or social harmony.
Economics are only half the story. What makes this powder keg more explosive is what happens when a country fails to integrate a large cohort of its citizens. As I argued last December, immigration is not merely about letting people into a country. It is ensuring that they are integrated into its economic, civic, and legal institutions. This is especially important in a place like France where laïcité reflects a strong commitment to secular government and the supremacy of civil law over a religious authority like sharia law.
It is not simply the fact that Muslim-majority countries throughout the world have a penchant for things like making women second class citizens, criminally punishing homosexuals, and imposing strict blasphemy, apostasy, and anti-defamation laws against Islam or their prophet Muhammad. As the polling I went through last year illustrates, a significant number of these Muslim immigrants would like to do things like declaring Islam as the official religion, imposing sharia law, making it illegal to show a picture of Mohammad, outlawing homosexuality, and making compulsory halal food in schools and hospitals.
As I explained in 2015, my religious freedom ends where another person's religious freedom begins. There is a fine line between allowing all citizens, including Muslims, to freely practice their religion and imposing one's religion on others. It looks like a fair number of Muslim immigrants have no objection to imposing Islam onto the rest of Europe that would override secular, civil laws. A commitment to tolerance should not be so blind to ignore when individual liberties are being eroded by illiberal forces, even if it is coming from Muslims. A society that is incapable of distinguishing between religious freedom and the impulse to impose religious authority has signed its own death warrant.
The economic and cultural problems are distinct, but they feed off one another. Rigid labor laws and barriers to employment make upward more difficult, while the bloated welfare state can leave people dependent on it. When immigrants fail to integrate into society, the shared commitment to the country's laws and civic principles weakens. France has tried to engineer prosperity through government intervention and largesse, but failed in that endeavor. As a result, it continues to erode the liberal society that the French revolutionaries over two centuries ago were aspiring towards. If France can't get its act together, it will end up a decline that could make the fall of the Roman Empire look like a cakewalk in comparison.
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