Charlie Hebdo and the
end of the French exception
The National Interest in Question: Foreign Policy
in Multicultural Societies
- By Christopher Hill
- January 12th 2015
Today
many are asking why Parisians have been attacked in their own city, and by
their own people. But for many years the question for those following the issues
of foreign policy and religion was why France had suffered so little terrorism
in comparison to other European states. After the bombs on the Paris Metro and
a TGV line in 1995, there were no significant Islamist attacks until the
fire-bombing of the Charlie Hebdo office in November 2011, and the
killings of three French soldiers (all of North African origin) and three
Jewish children (and one teacher) by Mohamed Merah in Toulouse four months
later. These attacks turn out to have been a warning of things to come.
But why
was France free of such attacks for over fifteen years, when Madrid and London
suffered endless plots and some major atrocities? Given the restrictions placed
by successive governments on the foulard (headscarf) and
the burka, together with the large French Muslim population (around 10% of the
64 million total), the country would seem to have been fertile ground for
fundamentalist anger and terrorist outrages.
One view
is that the French authorities were tougher and more effective than, say, the
British who allowed Algerian extremists fleeing France after 1995 to find
shelter in the Finsbury Park Mosque — to the fury of French officials. Another
line is that the French secular model of integration, with no recognition of
minorities or enthusiasm for multiculturalism, did actually work. Thus when
riots took place in 2005 the alienated youth of the banlieues demanded
jobs, fairness, and decent housing — not respect for Islam or Palestinian
rights.
A third
possible explanation of the long lull before this week’s storm is that French
foreign policy had not provoked the kind of anger felt in Spain and Britain by
their countries’ roles in the Iraq war, which France, Germany, and some other
European states had clearly opposed. Although France had an important role in
the allied operations in Afghanistan, its profile was not especially high.
Given the slow-changing nature of international reputations the image of France
as a friend of Arab states and of the Palestinians endured, while Britain drew
hostile attention as the leading ally of the United States in the ‘war against
terror’. France, again unlike Britain and the United States, has tended to be
pragmatic in negotiations with those who have taken its citizens hostage
abroad, facilitating the payment of ransoms and getting them home safely. Its
policy was that payments, and the risk of encouraging further captures, were
preferable to providing the Islamists with global publicity.
Naturally
no single explanation can account for the French exception, which has now come
to such a dramatic end. It was a combination of factors that kept the domestic
peace. Strong security measures put many jihadists in gaol, or forced them
abroad. Civic nationalism emphasising Frenchness and discouraging the overt
celebration of different languages and ways of life meant that unrest over
deprivation never morphed into what Olivier Roy called an intifada. An adroit foreign
policy emphasising distance from the United States despite quiet cooperation on
many issues kept France out of the front line of Islamist anger. If any one of
these three factors had been absent, things could have been very different.
So what
has changed now? It may be that the security services simply got complacent.
This seems unlikely given that when French counter-terror sources have always
talked of an attack they have said ‘it is not a question of if, but when’. They
are aware that the nature of jihadism is to plant operators wherever they can
be hidden, without discriminating between good and bad societies – although it
is notable that there have been relatively few attacks in Scandinavia, or in
countries like Ireland, Italy, or Portugal.
France
must expect more plots, of which some will probably come to fruition. The
threats may be increasing because of the lagged effects of alienation among
those second and third generation young people, French by nationality but North
African by family origin, who feel that the country has not lived up to the
ideals of fraternity and equality, thus depriving them of the opportunity to
get jobs, decent housing – and respect. A significant proportion of these
youngsters, living well away from the stylish ‘centre villes’ admired by
foreign tourists, have come to find their identity not in French secularism, as
the official theory runs, but in Islam. And some, especially those with few
personal or family strengths to hold on to, have found self-validation in
radical, even violent, fundamentalism. It requires very few to take this path,
in a Muslim community of around six million, to represent a serious threat.
But whom
would they wish to attack, and why? It is to be doubted that they are like the
Red Army Faction in Germany forty years ago, aiming to overthrow a whole
decadent society and replace it with something radically different – even if
they probably would like to live under Sharia law. However horrifying they seem
they are not, with isolated exceptions, mad or merely criminal. To be sure they
are capable of acts of violence against unarmed people, which most regard as
psychotic, and they have to be dealt with under the criminal law – unless
killing them is the only way to save other lives. But they are, in their own
terms, rational actors. The Kouachi brothers said during their flight from the
police that ‘we do not kill civilians’, despite having murdered twelve people
working in the Charlie Hebdo offices, among them a maintenance man and a
visitor. This was disingenuous and self-serving, but it revealed not only the
familiar trope of the disaffected young that the police are their enemy, but
also a consistent world view in which Charlie Hebdo had declared war on
Muslims, and had to be ‘neutralisé’, in the euphemism employed by French
ministers during the crisis.
This is
where foreign policy comes in. Many Muslim citizens of European states are
deeply offended, not only by what they see as the insulting blasphemy of Salman
Rushdie or Charlie Hebdo, but also by the actions of Western governments
in the Middle East. It is bad enough (in this view) that they effectively take
Israel’s side against the Palestinians, but the launch of military attacks in
Muslim countries that inevitably kill civilians, often in large numbers and
with powerful images disseminated rapidly around the world, requires a
response.
Most
people, of course, of any religion and none, do nothing about the foreign
policy events they see on television. A minority will engage in passionate but
legal protest. A very small minority takes matters into its own hands,
travelling to battlefields, receiving training in the use of arms or terrorism,
and sometimes acting as sleepers in Western societies until they or some
controller judges the moment to be right. By this point the values behind their
view are beside the point; they see themselves as at war.
For some
years France did not attract this kind of hostility, or if it did, the
reactions took time to mature, and have only come to light since 2011. But in
recent years both Sarkozy and Hollande have pursued a more ‘forward’ foreign
policy, intervening first in Libya, then against Jihadists in Mali (after which
one Malian jihadist said that ‘blood will run on the streets of Paris’), and in
2014 becoming involved in the bloody conflict which has engulfed Syria and
parts of Iraq. This, perhaps together with the way the Arab Spring exposed
France’s ties to autocratic Arab regimes, has predictably attracted attention
from those whose targets had previously been other western states. France was
the first US ally to join in air strikes against ISIL in September 2014, when
Interior Minister Cazeneuve responded to threats to kill French citizens in
retaliation by saying that the government was ‘not afraid’ and would protect
its citizens.
Unfortunately
no government can protect all its citizens all of the time. Furthermore the
existence of a diverse, mobile, and fragmented society, containing groups
sufficiently alienated to find identity in religion and a global movement of
resistance rather than in the culture of their land of birth, represents a
major source of vulnerability for France, as it does for Britain and others.
When we add to the mix the seemingly endless wars in Muslim countries in which
our governments are intervening, it becomes less strange that turbulence should
boil over into tragedy.
Christopher
Hill is the
Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations and Head of the Department
of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, where he
has taught since 2004. Before that he served for 30 years in the Department of
International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political
Science, where from 1991 he was the Montague Burton Professor. He has published
widely on aspects of Foreign Policy Analysis, with an empirical focus on the
European Union and its Member States. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and
the author of The National Interest in Question:
Foreign Policy in Multicultural Societies.
