Time to say 'au revoir' to 'Francophonyland'

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

The temptation to express sarcastic satisfaction in the current collapse of civil order in France is overwhelming. Every gratuitous remark — by the highest Paris officials as well as their minions overseas — of recent vintage has now come home to roost.

Such usually thoughtful observers as Bernard-Henri Levy may be right when they say the rioting — continuing as this is written — is not “intifada”, warfare by an organized Islamicist insurgency against a state. Yet the long term import cannot be overestimated.

Reporting, whether from generally not very well informed foreign media or from French sources, appears to agree Islamicists are not in command although surely contributing mightily to the alienation of these young hoodlums. L’Humanite, the organ of the defunct Communist Party, made the most cogent argument for whatever direction the rioting has, by describing it as coming from the “stageaires”, the interns, young Afro-Francais and Arab-Francais, native-born youngsters, who have tried to work within the system.

Despite their pursuit of integration they cannot find jobs because “the French social model” has such high unemployment, and because they face discrimination from “francais de source” — Caucasian French with their visceral hatred of “les etrangers” only foreigners who have lived in France would know. Just as in 1940, when Paris collapsed in the face not only of the Nazi blitzkrieg but because of a temporary victory of all the forces of French social and political reaction, current events are going to have a monumental impact on the rest of the world. France, alas! not least because of its romantization among the hated “Anglo-Saxons” whom the French have turned into a “bete noire”, still has a disproportionate call on intellectuals worldwide.

Nowhere is that more true than in Asia.

“Francophonyland” is an artificial world of the elite, particularly in the Mideast [curiously even in Israel], where chic French ideas and ways have a disprortionate influence. Anyone who has served time around the UN knows how it haunts those corridors. That snide and arrogant expression of the last dregs of a France now being eclipsed, Dominque de Villepin, then France’s ambassador and now prime minister — ministering a crisis despite his never having been elected to anything including dog catcher — owed his success in defeating the Anglo-American efforts at a UN consensus on Iraq in no small part to an expression of this phenomenon. [The loaded galleries of UN “civil servants” during the Security Council debate cheering him on were, as it turned out, like a Greek chorus.]

Just as miscreants have told reporters they model their attacks on recollections from TV coverage of American ghetto rioting, the worldwide media distribution will feed the nihilism always just beneath the surface not only in Near East but in the rest of Asia. And it is likely to be far more violent there than just the burning of automobiles and public institutions, again ironically, a part of the French welfare state, nonexistent in poverty-stricken South Asia.

German, Belgian, Dutch and other governments with large “undigested” Moslem minorities may not — as their officials kept wishfully saying — see the same kind of campaigns. But the impetus is there. And the feedback to their countries of origin will be no less than to North and Equatorial Africa from whence come the French communities now engaged. The Turks, for example, balancng on the edge of the knife with a government majority of nominally Moslem-religiously oriented and amateurish parliamentarians fighting to get into the EU, need nothing as little as more feedback of recrimination from their huge émigré population in Western Europe.

The impact will be less in other parts of Asia, but of great significance. Japan, for example, although forced onto a path of economic reform by the collapse of its economy more than a decade ago, has always flirted with French “dirigisme”, state-dictated targets. It is no accident, as the Communists used to say, French companies like Renault were more readily accepted into the post-Bubble economy when the Japanese had to finally let down the bars to direct foreign management. And it was to Paris Chinese Communist leadership looked for breaking the embargo on transfer of weapons technology, blocked only by the ugly Americans pointing out it would mean the end of lucrative trans-Atlantic sales and technology transfer for the West Europeans.

Ironically, with relatively small loss of life, France — again as in 1940 — exposes the whole tragedy of the postwar immigration of millions who have not been absorbed into post-World War II wealthy European societies for vast economic, social and political causes. With burgeoning populations, unsolved economic, social and political problems, the French alternative to imitating the American [and British] model is now a thing of the past for Asia’s modernization. Will they recognize it, and say “au revoir” to so much of the French cant?