What's the matter with (French) kids these days?

As the riots in France have begun to fade (though perhaps not for long), questions surrounding their origins have been pressed to the fore. Why did French-born children of Arab and African immigrants “rampage” nightly for over two weeks through suburban streets illuminated largely by burning vehicles? What does this unrest tell us about the clash between European and Muslim cultures? Could it happen elsewhere in Europe – or across the Atlantic?

In a Boston Globe op-ed, Jason Lim compares the United States’ relation to its immigrants with the situation in France. Lim identifies the American “melting pot” metaphor as little more than a façade: “when you look beneath the surface, you will see that most minorities have built separate ethnic enclaves that are reproductions of their respective homelands, often catering exclusively to their own groups and beholden to their traditional prejudices and cultural chauvinism.” Lim suggests that these differences, which have the potential to transform a "happy melting pot into one boiling with blood," exist in America just as they do in France, which has historically had more trouble than the US in incorporating "outsider" cultures into its own social fabric.

In spite of the potential for immigrant-instigated turmoil in the US, Americans have yet to experience anything resembling the riots in France. There is, according to Lim, a common principle the keeps both new Americans and their more "native" neighbors on the same page:

Despite our cultural differences, we all buy into the noble principle enshrined in the following immortal words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." This is the glue that binds us all together. This is the overriding common belief that allows us to overcome our significant cultural differences and call ourselves Americans.

First, I’m not sure that one can argue that all Americans, regardless of their country of origin, are united by the “noble principle” outlined in the Declaration of Independence. It is difficult to believe that this phrase even holds the same meaning for each and every American who was born in this country; one need only note that the meaning of “all men” - in the eyes of the law alone - has been altered significantly and repeatedly over the past 229 years.

Lim continues:

This is successful assimilation. Successful assimilation means that you share that one greater, overriding belief that overcomes the inevitable friction that comes from looking and thinking differently from one another. Therefore, successful assimilation requires a central core belief that can unite people in spite of their ingrained cultural differences. Without such a center, what are you being assimilated into?

There is something a bit ... I don't want to say arrogant ... but perhaps naïve about the idea that "successful" assimilation relies upon the conveyance of a "central core" - I might add, European - belief. To Lim, the riots "represent a failure to teach these misguided children the basic nobility of the liberal societies they were born into." But I'm reluctant to agree that, when push comes to shove, frustrated immigrant youth would be pacified by their ability to participate in something as nebulous as enlightened French civic nationalism or the above-cited nascent formulation of the American dream. Lim orients himself toward nationalism itself somewhat ambivalently, but it seems that if a nation is to hold a number of disparate peoples together, it must ask of its members (and offer a means through which they could achieve) some sort of investment of identity in a consolidated whole. This is perhaps the type of "center" that Lim and others on the left have been hinting at. Yet nationalism tends to thrive on the exclusion of outsiders (here France is certainly no exception); and where feelings of nationalism are powerful, they come with a whole host of psychodynamic baggage, not least of which is an impulse toward violence.

In Lim's critique, immigrant communities in America tend to remain in their own separate enclaves, integrated to some extent underneath the umbrella of common American ideals. Perhaps this rings true among first-generation immigrants like Lim’s parents, who are cited as exemplars of the “buy-in” mentality. But their children are the ones who, in France today (and perhaps in the US tomorrow), are behind the riots. And immigrant youth live in a more complicated relation to their parents' adopted homelands than Lim lets on.

Immigrants to any land have long been forced to negotiate between two often-conflicting selves. Yet rather than merely being caught between two monolithic identities, immigrant youth, especially of the second and third generation, have been known to create vibrant "hybrid cultures" through which the individual's relation to host and homeland is negotiated. Sunaina Marr Maira's "To Be Young, Brown, and Hip" (chapter two of Desis in the House), for example, explores bhangra culture to explain how, owing to their unique structural positioning, urban Indian-American youth have crafted a third culture drawing from both the traditions of their parents' homelands and the demands and institutions of their adopted homes, but ultimately beholden to neither.

The case of Germany is particularly instructive in this respect. Though it borders France and is home to nearly 4 million Muslims, most of them of Turkish descent, few have speculated that the rioting might spread eastward to Germany. The New York Times quotes Norbert Seitz, director of the German Forum for Crime Prevention, who explains that Germany's state and local governments have a history of undertaking efforts to support immigrant youth.

Germany's transnational Turkish youth culture, like France's North African and Arab Beur culture, often defines itself in opposition to state policies and prevailing public attitudes toward immigrants. In fact, such cultures often arise precisely because they are a means through which marginalized communities can express their opposition to dominant social and political powers, as well as their pride in their marginalized identities.

Whether Germany's institutional support of Turkish youth cultural forms - including traditionally oppositional modes of representation and performance such as hip-hop - represents a true desire on the part of the state to "support" such activities or is merely a self-interested effort to "center" immigrant youth by incorporating and commodifying their critique into institutional channels remains to be seen (see Caglar in Volume 10:3, November). I don't wish to assume that the state is committed to anything more than co-opting and diffusing a potentially powerful source of conflict and unrest, nor that Turkish youth are better off in Germany because of this type of state sponsorship. The violent riots in France certainly have the potential to bring about fundamental changes in the ways in which the French government treats its immigrant population - and, perhaps more importantly, in how immigrants conceptualize their own power to have their demands met.

What is clear, however, is that Germany seems to have recognized that, in the words of Barbara Weber, "[i]ntegration is not a one-way street"; that the task of the state extends far beyond (to paraphrase Lim) the need to teach their misguided Turkish/Muslim children the basic nobility of the liberal society they were born into. Germany's is an approach that, rather than overtly promoting an official "German" set of ideals, inevitably injects a bit of Turkish youth culture into "official" Germany. One must admit that, even if concocted out of a shrewd sense of the threat posed to the established order by an incipient Turkish youth movement, Germany's policies contrast significantly with those of France, with its longstanding official policy of ignoring cultural differences. Regardless of its motives, the state seems to be providing resources through which Turkish youth can negotiate their relation to Turkey, Germany, and what's in between the two.

It is, at the very least, a notable reversal of an older form of one-sided cultural imperialism. It is not a demonization of immigrant culture, nor an imposition of "core beliefs." Germany's is a strategy that acknowledges that when immigrant communities, because of their attachment to the traditions of their homelands and the ways in which they are marginalized by their host country, perceive themselves as being automatically excluded from the nation's "center" or "core values" (and especially in the case of France, from "Frenchness" itself), that a certain amount of intercultural flexibility can go a long way - toward a kinder, more subtle cultural conquest, perhaps, but one in which the center becomes blurred and the possibilities for acceptable identities is broadened.

If it wishes to head off further unrest, the French government will have to move beyond teaching youth what it means to be French. It will have to be open to expanding the definition of Frenchness; any attempts to "center" immigrant youth may only hasten the reigniting of intercultural conflict, as it is perhaps the impossibility (or undesirability) of being "French," however it may be defined, that some youth are intent on rebelling against. Perhaps the German model will be tested: a stance receptive to fostering something that does not fully belong to the host country. Such a decentered, hybrid national culture might make claims on individuals arising from both homeland and adopted country, and perhaps eventually the mixture that they create.