ABSTRACT
For the past twenty years, the social sciences in Britain and the United States have made use of the concept of ethnicity in analysing cultural processes that help to define and organise social relations, when such relations are based on assumed cultural differences. In France, the word ethnicite is viewed with great suspicion. It is associated with the so-called 'British Model', which acknowledges the existence of ethnic groups and promotes their emergence as political forces within the nation. For the critics, this raises the spectre of 'ethnic communities’, an idea that runs counter to French national tradition and its republican conception of democracy. This posits a direct link between citizens and the state, unmediated by group processes. Many French researchers and policymakers are convinced that the ‘typically Anglo-Saxon' notion of ethnicity is not relevant to the French situation. Although recent work by Michele Tribalat (1999) does apply concepts such as ‘ethnicity' and ‘socioethnic fragmentation’, her approach has been heavily criticised in France, notably by Herve le Bras (1998). Contrary to the British and American societies, which accord some official status to ethnic and racial differences, the French tradition follows the republican constitution in not distinguishing citizens by race, religion or ethnic origin.
