ABSTRACT
In the modern world, the most potent forms of ethnic identifi cation have generally been those associated with nationhood. So powerful and omnipresent are the signs of national belonging that majority populations seldom refer to themselves as ethnic groups at all. National identity is apt to be seen as the ‘natural’ condition of the majority, while ethnic belonging is regarded as an exceptional condition ascribed only to minorities. When this assumption is made, as is commonly the case among policy-makers and social scientists in France, it tends to posit an opposition between ethnicity and national identity (see, for example, Héran 2004: 11). In reality, nations are simply ethnocultural groups which acquire or aspire to the legitimacy associated with statehood, i.e. political sovereignty over a territory whose boundaries are recognized in international law. The extent to which immigrants and their descendants are incorporated into nation-states depends not only on socio-economic processes of the kind examined in Chapter 2 together with the values and aspirations of minority ethnic groups, considered in Chapter 3, but also on the attitudes and behavior of the majority population both in civil society and at the level of the state. This chapter considers how far immigrants and their descendants are accepted, both formally and informally, as part of the French national community.
