ABSTRACT
After being one of the archetypical “assimilationist” countries (Favell, 1998), France has recently seen rapid change in its framing of the incorporation of “migrants” and “ethnic and racial minorities.” Not only have the concepts and theories used to describe the processes behind the “remaking of the French mainstream” dramatically changed,2 but the categories of those targeted by these processes are also being reconsidered. Foreigners, immigrants, young people with an immigrant background, second-generation Muslims, and even “visible minorities”: the grammar of integration has developed a new vocabulary. While the 1980s were a short period of a sort of multiculturalism, an initial backlash occurred at the end of the decade with the invention of the “French model of integration” (Lorcerie, 1994). Integration was no longer only a philosophy or a conceptual tool designed in social science,3 but was anchored in policies and public discourse. The integrationist hegemony was then contested by a rising concern about discrimination (Fassin, 2002). The current framing may be described as a strange mix of oldschool integration and new European-style anti-discrimination. Despite these shifts in political paradigms, French society has never considered itself to be a multicultural society. The very notion of multiculturalism remains, in France, strongly associated
with international experience, especially the British, Dutch, and US models, and negatively perceived as the opposite of the French republican “model of integration.” Conceived as a political model relying on the recognition and positive representation of ethnic communities and their cultural differences, multiculturalism is above all pictured as what French society has never been and should not become (Amselle, 1996). The reason multiculturalism is a bugbear in the French debate is that it is seen as a threat to national identity and republican values. Multiculturalism in the French context sounds like culturalism. The fear of the “balkanization” of French society and the rise of “communitarianism,”4 i.e. the danger of the political mobilization of ethnic, racial or sexual minorities, provides the background for discrediting claims for recognition and the denunciation of discrimination and racial domination. This specific context has to be understood as a long-lasting consequence of the spread and implementation of the integration paradigm (Wieviorka, 1996).
