When your sweet home turns sour:

National identity and Sarkozian politics

An alien: 1) Someone from an other family, race or nation; 2) a foreign born resident who has not been naturalized and is still a subject or citizen of a foreign country; 3) someone originating, existing or occurring outside the earth or its atmosphere; 4) exotic, introduced from another country, not native to the place where found. Comments: there is a tendency to look upon the alien as an enemy and to treat her or him as a criminal or an outlaw. See Metic : Somebody who does not owe allegiance to your country.

A concept familiar to both France and Switzerland but foreign, if I dare say so to the US mentality. When you live, as I did, most of your adulthood, as an alien, the question of national identity comes rapidly. First in the United States, then in Switzerland, I was asked where I was from and what were my reasons for leaving France which most people assumed to be economical or political when it was neither. How can you be French? When there is a war in Algeria, when the French government is pulling out of NATO, when they are testing nuclear weapons, when they are not supporting the Iraq wars ?É It was easy for me to define myself first as an outsider, then as French. I did not feel the need to define myself as a French woman nor as a French person or citizen. I was just of French origin. In fact, I saw the difference between my three countries this way, both the United States and Switzerland ask that you pledge allegiance to their way of life and thinking and politics, France did not. You had to Çlove or leaveÈ America, to agree on the fact it is the best government, the most powerful country in the world. To critize the war in Vietnam or in Iraq was to be un-American, an expression that does not exist in French. To become Swiss you also have to take an exam. You need to know the names of your town streets, why and for whom they were named and a commission of Swiss citizens decides if you are worth it. There is a Swiss Makers police who reassure the States that you can make fondue, love the mountains and the Swiss army. It used to be a male only privilege as a woman marrying a foreigner lost her Swiss citizenship; a foreign woman would become Swiss. In fact, Swiss women lost their birthplace, their name when they married till 1986. Today in certain towns or villages where the UDC is the strongest party a referendum is required on every person, female or male, asking for a Swiss passport and if your name sounds Arabic or eastern European you do not get elected to citizenship. But as I am fluent in French (as a federal politician complemented me on that fact a few years ago), as I am blonde I can pass for a real Swiss person and am allowed to be politically active. I can even vote on the local level but the Swiss people turned down the referendum giving foreigners the right vote in cantonal and federal elections. So in 1999, I was asked by a group of women to go thought the naturalizing process in order to vote and be able to be a candidate to federal and cantonal elections in Switzerland. I refused and wrote an essay Home Swiss Home to explain myself. In it I said: ÇTo be French for me is only to have been born there and to speak French. I do not feel obliged to love the so-called French virtues or characteristics. I do not have to claim that Paris is the capital of the world. I can be for or against the atomic tests in Muruora; I can go and demonstrate in favor or against without being anti French, without being seen as a traitor or a person unworthy of her citizenship.È If I did not question my national identity neither did I think of France as a model, with universal aims, for the rest of the world. I was, am well aware of its colonial past and present, of its totalitarian temptations, of its state's and political violence. It was, I repeat, only the country where I was born, where most of my family lived, and whose language I was fluent in. Today I am unable and unwilling to say the same. The French government, if not the French people, is asking all its citizens to love and honor a new idea of France. We have entered an era of nationalism defined by hostility to everything that is culturally non Christian . The Front National, the extreme right, might have lost the elections but it did win the minds of people and more important it has forced each and every party to redefine its politics in an exclusionary way . In France, Nicolas Zarkozy has promised to clean with a ÇkarscherÈ (to blast out of existence) the young delinquents from the Çout of the lawÈ banlieux while Segol�ne Royal had a program to send the same youth to reform and humanitarian camps. The winning president has created a Ministere de l'Immigration et de l'IdentitŽ nationale (Immigration and national identity) as if immigration was a threat to the French identity. The current government has ordered that 250000 illegals be arrested, detained and re-conducted in their countries before the end of the year 2007 : this means the police is waiting for parents or grandparents to pick up the children at school and arresting the whole family including infants, going into Chinese supermarket and checking the customers' ID, asking the clerks and owners to police their store themselves if they do not want to end in jail. It also means arresting school personnel who contest the legality of arrest on school grounds or surroundings. In such a French state the question of the meaning of nationality is again a crucial one. Can we as French citizens accept that our government acts as Vichy did ? If so how can we teach in the history programs that Vichy was not the true French government but only a straw government for the Nazis and, that the real French government was in London? What about the 47% that voted against Sarkozy? Will we too become bad citizens, un-welcomed one? This neither would be new in history, remember that the French nobility, the ÇCi-devantÈ left somewhat forced into exile. France is also, according to the president, through with repentance and apologies. Are we to take it as a command to assume, be proud of our colonial past? Our oppression of others? Are we to accept and promote this colonial ideology and see the second, third, even fourth French bornÇArabsÈ as inferior, lazy, less intelligent, etc? Will we too have to love France or leave it? Right or wrong should our governments always be right? In Switzerland, Blocher and his party are campaigning to deport delinquents back to their country of origin (even if they where born and raised in Switzerland as unlike the United States or France, Switzerland is a ÇbloodÈ citizenship). The French government, to score against minorities, promotes women rights. For example, the veil issue is not so much about liberating young women, as it is an ideological statement on what role religion is to play in the laic society. An organization known as ÇNi Putes ni soumiseÈ (neither bitches nor carpets) is see by many as a totally artificial organization created by the political and media powers and cut from the same people it is supposed to represent. It is seen as anti Moslem. The government named its former president, Fadela Amara , Secretary to the towns, under the State Secretary Christine Boutin who is one of the most bigoted Catholics in France and who fight against reproduction rights, gay weddings and PACS. The reasoning behind such a choice is that equality has been acquired by native French women who do not suffer from discrimination, who are protected by laws and live happily with their male partners. Women from the untamed suburbs are victims of violence, sexism and machismo, they do not know their rights and are oppressed by their husbands and or brothers. The choice of a younger woman from their community is bound to help them become the equals of native French women. The Republic cannot tolerate a differential treatment for the same class of citizens. Mothers of first and second generation are especially targeted since if they are educated they will be able to tame those young savages. At the same time they are stigmatized as the ones responsible for the French deficit: the French social state is being bankrupted by all those people attracted by an easy life, the Swiss liberal system being also under attack from the same people who want to make as much money as possible. Too many wives, too many children and not all of them legally bound hence the DNA test that are for the time being voluntary but we all know that people refusing those tests will be considered as cheaters. The poor and destitute invading those countries are destroying the native cultures so both France and Switzerland have changed their immigration laws. Countries that were known to welcome political refugees, to view the flow of immigration as normal have turned sour on both the immigrants and the local organizations that support them. Humanitarian, pacifist, feminist organizations have been turned into social workers or legal advisors. Grants have been cut off and we are spending our time trying to save that person, this family, petitioning on this and that, seeing that official. We have no more time left for thinking of the future or of the political. It has become difficult in Switzerland to organize a public demonstration, except for the extreme right and left. We are all running to build a counter fire and leaving the ideological arena to the right wing: an example of this is the campaign poster of the white sheep throwing the black one out of Switzerland. We were unable to think of a demonstration that would be nonviolent and educationally constructive. Only the autonome went to demonstrate and to destruct. We stayed silent or so it seemed. This is not new. We saw it coming in Switzerland at the time of the Yugoslavian war. If the first refugees were welcome, soon people, helped by the UDC, began to feel that there were too many. True it was a different type of refugees; there were many women, children, older men and a few young war dissidents. Most of them were of Muslim background if not religion. At that time a few of us - about a dozen - created a new group of men and women called Les Femmes de la Palud (the Women of the Palud, the town square in front of the city council and in honor of the Women of the May Square). One of our aims was to make everyone aware, we wanted to be the small people that stalls the machine. So we staged funeral wakes of women and their children, we held memorials, staged pro and anti war demonstrations. We did that every Thursday for almost three years but after two years or so, we were well aware that most people did not care anymore. Less and less stopped to talk to us or to get our brochures. We felt we were not anymore the pebble but everybody's good conscience. As long as we were there, the public felt someone was caring so no one else needed to get involved. Since, we have been trying to find other ways of expressing our ideas. I still sign petitions but at the rhythm of one or two a week one has to wonder what good it does. I still write for the feminist press and do articles for organizations that ask me, but I am too aware that I write only for people who think and feel as I do, people who are already convinced. What is more the media tend to give only excerpts of writings and either dilute our say or find the most controversial theme and present it as our unique thought. How does one express her or his dissent with an ideology that is never presented as such? How do you let people know that those ideas have already been in action and that it is going back in the future to a past who all swore would never be again. If one tries telling that Sarkozy's or Blocher's ideas are at best very conservative, pre-1968, pre-second world war, one is told that one is extremist, seeing fascism everywhere except where it really is. But if one turns the table around one might get better results . This is not a new tactic, not one without danger. It is the one used, for example, by Swift in his Modest proposal, one used by Virginia Woolf in the Three Guineas when she tells us we should burn all the books or by Christine de Pizan in her Book of the Three Virtues when she describes what a good chaperon should do to prevent her charge from being caught with her lover, the one used in certain plays and movies, in social jokes. The trouble is that sometimes people do not think it is second or third degree and take it at face value. It has happened with the Fausse manif de droite as the first time I encountered them was after an irate e-mail from a feminist who could not express enough indignation at seeing a group of people shouting among other thing ÇMen first, Women behindÈ. She did not see that the motto was contrary to the fact: a mixed group. What you are going to see now is the staging of Zarkozy's politics to the letter and it illustrate all its unsaid and contradictions. The Çwake up policeÈ brigade is marching in a chic section of Paris the 16th la Muette (the Mute) where nobody but the maids and servants are up at 6 am. You see that the France that gets up early is in fact the one that is called lazy and profiteering by the government. Such demonstrations illustrate that the political system sold to us today is akin to that of the Vichy government: it aims at a society where all social benefit from the Front populaire and the post second world war are erased as mistakes, where classes are redefined and the working class is again seen as dangerous and unworthy. Where work, family and Fatherland is again the national motto. In fact in some aspects it is going back to a pre revolution state where the new kings and nobility are the moneymakers. I am saying kings and not queens as the last presidential elections proved the silica law to be still very effective in France. That such demonstration can be very effective is also proven by the fact that Greenpeace staged last month a pro pollution march just before the negotiations with all the ecological organizations, the unions and the government. Such events demonstrate also that while we might not know what is our national identity, we do know what it is not, what we do not want it to be. And while I am tempted to say that Ças a Woman I have no nationalityÈ, I do feel the need to be involved in the politics of both my birth country and the one in which I live. If I did not, I would have to share the responsibility of their politics.

Therese Moreau, Purdue University, November 16th 2007