Raise your hand if you feel French

Posted on October 20, 2008 in: Current Affairs|Post Comment

At an October 14 friendly football match between France and Tunisia, some spectators at the Stade de France booed and whistled when the Marseillaise (the French national anthem) was sung. The jeering was loud and boorish, and French authorities were right to react. But it the wasn't the first time the Marseillaise was booed at a football match –it has happened before, at a friendly match pitting the French team against a former North African colony with which France has a complicated history– but the reaction from French officialdom was completely over-the-top. If such an incident were to occur again, the response prescribed by French officials would be to call off the match and evacuate the stadium.

Gabriele Marcotti wrote a column in The Times that sums up the incident and the French response, in all its majestic absurdity.

But what really caught my eye and my attention was a follow-up article in Le Monde. Jean-Claude Tchicaya is a middle-school civics teacher in Epinay-sur-Seine, near the Stade de France. According to Le Monde's account, nearly all his students are minorities, mostly of African or North African descent.

Tchicaya asked his class a simple question: if you feel French, raise your hand. Of the thirty students in the class, only four raised their hand.

Are the others immigrants, transients, or undocumented aliens? No, the article, Tchicaya, and the middle-schoolers all assume that all the students enjoy French citizenship.

The problem, underscored by the article, is that the young people don't seem to enjoy being French at all. Many seem to have family abroad, especially in North Africa, and express a romanticized proximity with their kin. When discussing why they don't feel French, others seem to voice fundamentally adolescent insecurities.

Tchicaya's take-away point is that "questions of identity are complex". I wish he'd asked his class some follow-up questions:
  • Can you renounce or surrender French citizenship? (I don't know the answer, but assume that there is a procedure to relinquish French citizenship.) 
  • If renunciation or surrender of French citizenship is  possible, how many members of the class are prepared to do so? Tchicaya and Le Monde's journalist seem to consider the students as dual nationals, with several passports in a drawer at home, not as prospectively stateless. Maybe Tchicaya could have prefaced this question with the assumption that legal residency in France would still be possible for those who'd give up French citizenship.
  • To what extent is citizenship like an affinity group, like support for a football team? Can you opt out of it? Why would you?

Making sense of the American elections

Posted on October 17, 2008 in: Current Affairs|Post Comment

There's a remarkably high level of knowledgeable interest in the American presidential election … in Europe, where I live. This week's presidential debate was carried live on radio and television –live being very early in the morning in Europe– but also was rebroadcast during more normal viewing or listening hours. The French media –newspapers, magazine, web sites, radio, television– puts out a steady flow of news and analysis.

The red state/blue state dichotomy still has currency in the United States; in France, it's an article of faith. In France, most people accept that America is divided between red states that vote republican and blue states that vote democratic. From travel or personal affinities, many French observers are most comfortable with the coasts and democratic-leaning policies and politics. The red middle of the United States, viewed from France, is more of a terra incognita, rarely visited and believed to be peopled by rural folk who lack schooling but are exuberantly religious yet prone to violence.

I've been fishing for a more nuanced view of America to share with my European friends. I'm interested in connections between demographics and voting, so I was drawn to the Patchwork Nation project on the web site of the Christian Science Monitor (secular French readers, don't be alarmed: this is a reputable and nonpartisan newspaper, put out in the blue state of Massachusetts). I recommend the Patchwork Nation site for those who want to see beyond the red/blue dichotomy.

The Patchwork Nation project looks at the United States by county –the basic administrative building block– and assigns each county one of eleven different types. The types are colored by economics (monied 'burbs vs. service worker centers) but not wholly determined by wealth: university towns (camps & careers) differ from military centers (military bastions).

The resulting presentation of America as a patchwork is supported by some good journalism –each of the eleven types has been assigned a representative town or city– and commentary. There are also some interactive tests, so that a curious French visitor, armed with US zip codes, could compare her politics with residents in Omaha, Miami Beach, Las Vegas, Baltimore, or a small town in upstate New York.

Regulatory supervision of financial markets

Posted on October 16, 2008 in: Current Affairs, Europe|Post Comment

The European Council, which groups heads of state or government of the 27 European Union member states (and, technically, the president of the European Commission), began yesterday and continues today in Brussels, under French presidency. The French –or possibly the Council's permanent staff– put together a nifty facebook of the participants.

European Council meetings tend to be photo ops. Usually, leaders announce what has already been agreed. Sometimes they have nothing substantive to announce, in which case the press can still report on the gathering of 27 European leaders, which is newsworthy in itself.

Tumult in the financial markets set the stage for this European Council meeting. French President Sarkozy did some preparatory work over the weekend with key players, Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Brown.

There seems to be some friendly competition between Brown and Sarkozy for top-of-the-marquee billing, but European leaders have in a short time built up considerable momentum for a global meeting to agree on a new architecture to regulate global financial markets.

At a minimum, European leaders demand intergovernmental cooperation, with a coordinated regulatory scheme and, as the case may be, coordinated assistance to troubled institutions. But Brown and Sarkozy, seconded by Merkel, also have been clamoring for a new Bretton Woods (the 1944 conference led by FDR that led to the IMF, the World Bank, and the postwar economic regulatory framework in general).

I'm an interested observer, but find this news has been dramatically under-reported in American media. From my vantage point in Europe, the three points that make the strongest impression on me are:
  1. On the subject of financial market regulation, European leaders want change. They want a lot of change, real soon. They've shown initiative and have acquired momentum towards action.
  2. European leaders are calling a conference, probably in New York in one month's time, to set up a new regulatory architecture. There's no shortage of ambition: more than incremental change-makers, they see themselves in a position comparable to FDR's in 1944. 
  3. The United States will have a role in this, but not top billing. Initiative is coming from Europe, where leaders are projecting confidence (in the ability of government to straighten out problems) and responsibility (in a willingness to take on problems in a muscular, energetic way). Talk from Europe schedules serious-making just after the American Presiential election, during a sort of interregnum. This is probably a coincidence of the calendar but allows European leaders to appear center-stage.

A good read

Posted on October 15, 2008 in: Books|Post Comment

Junko Kakakami is a Japanese mangaka who lives in Paris. She came out with a manga, It’s Your World, that’s good, light reading on a plane or train trip.

It’s Your World tells the story of a Japanese family that moves to Paris. It’s a fish-out-of-water genre piece. I enjoy this genre, because it speaks both to what’s specific to French culture (in this case, Parisian subculture) and to the background and expectations of the Japanese protagonists. So the reader can indulge in casual sociology and reflect on living in Paris, or in Japan.
Despite its title, It’s Your World is in French. This is odd, and I’m not sure there’s really much of a readership in France for a graphic novel about a Japanese family (it’s small-scale, without have the depth or broad appeal of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis). I encourage French readers looking for light reading to give the book a try, but I imagine that It’s Your World would attract more readers in an English or Japanese edition.

Bailouts and crises

Posted on October 14, 2008 in: Business|Post Comment

I run a master class for French law students who want to learn how to practice law in English. My students have been tested and found proficient in English before they set foot in my class; basically, they are a group of A students.

As we do exercises together, my students raise points and ask questions that I can't answer. A selection:
  • What's the etymology of the bailouts that have been in the news so often lately? Is the idea that banks and other troubled businesses would be, through government intervention, bailed out in the fashion of a criminal defendant awaiting trial? Or are government efforts akin to scooping water from a canoe or fishing boat, the better to keep it afloat and running smoothly? Or is the rescue package comparable to what parachutists do, especially over enemy territory, when they jump from an airplane, usually heading into danger rather than away from it? Do all of these expressions share a common etymological ancestor?
  • English-language media have been writing for the past few weeks about a precipitating crisis. But French-language media have been pointing out a crisis –la crise– for deacades. Are the French predisposed towards pessimism (or clairvoyance)? Are Anglo-Americans inclined to manic optimism (or willful blindness), except when in dire situations? I sense and suspect a more prosaic explanation: those who taught the current generation of journalists were steeped in Marxism. References to class struggle and contradictions have ebbed, but crisis remains a catchy tag.

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