Comments Elsewhere

Brian,

I think you’re oversimplifying the causes of the riots in France (the relationship of the police to residents of the immigrant ghettoes, just to take one example, seems to have been pretty important). But even if the riots were purely about “violent rejection of French culture,” there’s two different elements that you have to look at in that formula: (1) the rejection of French culture (whatever that comes to concretely), and (2) the violent expression of that rejection. I’d like to suggest that (1) is not a sufficient condition for (2), and Belgium and Switzerland are good examples of why.

It’s true that Belgium, like many of its neighbors, has problems with bristling, sometimes-violent relationships between the white population and the residents of immigrant ghettoes. What I was referring to, though, was the prickly but notably nonviolent relationship between Flemings and Walloons (as well as the small German-speaking minority), not the relationship between the white ethnic groups and the population in immigrant ghettoes. The fact that these two kinds of relationships across inter-ethnic divides are so different might tell you something about the underlying causes. Perhaps it has more to do with the way that immigrants and their descendents are treated by the government than it does with whether or not any particular national group is “assimilating” to, selectively incorporating elements of, rejecting, or simply ignoring the culture of other national groups within the country?

The point here is that people very often cite countries that have suffered ethnic bloodbaths within living memory (the Balkans in the past decade, for example) in order to “demonstrate” the need for unitary, homogenous national cultures within the borders of a given state. I find this frankly ridiculous. Quebec is not descending into civil war; Czechoslovakia existed and then disappeared without bloodshed; and Switzerland has remained as peaceful, prosperous, and free as any country in Europe for several centuries. There’s precious little evidence to suggest that “balkanized silos” of people who aren’t substantially alike in their language, religion, literature, etiquette, habits, leisure activities, dress, or other elements of culture, are a sufficient condition for making inter-ethnic relationships particularly hostile, let alone openly violent. What does tend to reliably produce inter-ethnic hostility and violence are political arrangements in which some national groups are ghettoized and politically and culturally subordinated to other national groups. In other words, the issue here is political domination vs. political equality, not cultural melting pots vs. cultural salad bowls.