Terrorism and Islamophobia in France

Author: Dr. Ayse Tecmen, ERC PRIME Youth Project Post-doc Researcher, European Institute, İstanbul Bilgi University

Editor’s note: This blog entry is based on the review of the literature on migration, integration, and citizenship in Germany, which is a part of the country-reports that will be published on https://bpy.bilgi.edu.tr/en/ . Unlike conventional blog entries, these posts aim to inform our readers of the current state of affairs in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands while conveying how the PRIME Youth project will contribute to the extant literature. Ayhan Kaya  

After the 9/11 attacks, concerns about rising immigration, terrorist attacks, and radicalization have dominated many European countries’ political and public discourses. France has been particularly vulnerable in these discussions due to the high number of terrorist attacks in the recent decade. This was complemented by the rise of populist discourse, which articulated Islam and the Muslim way of life as the source of terrorist activities. In terms of both radicalisation among Muslim youth in Europe and the rise of populism, scholars have noted that Muslim immigrants have increasingly been perceived as less desirable than other cultural and religious groups (Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner 2016), challenging to assimilate (Bisin et al. 2008; Bisin and Verdier, 2008), a threat to Western values and way of life (Sniderman, Hagendoorn, and Prior, 2004).[i] 

Nonetheless, despite the centrality of migration to French political and public discourse, ‘calls for more restrictive measures appeared to have died down by the end of the 1990s; migration and asylum were no longer a central topic of party political debate’ (Boswell 2003: 21). Starting in 2002, French immigration policy was driven by Nicolas Sarkozy (2002-2007 Minister of the Interior, leader of the center-right UMP and, from 2007-2012, President of the Republic) whose discourse and action on immigration control and integration have diverged in significant respects from earlier center-right handling of these issues, which have been a response to political competition and public opinion (Marthaler, 2008). Nicolas Sarkozy’s Presidency (2007–2012) was marked by the emotional salience of immigration on the domestic agenda. He became deeply associated with this issue throughout his former tenures as the French Interior Minister (2002–2004; 2005–2007) (Marthaler, 2008; Schain, 2008).  

The negative perceptions of Muslims, a central issue in French politics, became widely discussed in the 2000s but they became prominent when Marine Le Pen assumed leadership of the Front National (FN) from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen. In 2011, Marine Le Pen distanced herself from the extreme views traditionally associated the FN. However, she continued to present immigration, particularly from Islamic countries as a threat to France. Le Pen’s approach was not necessarily a novelty, in fact as Ineke Van Der Valk (2003: 326) study of the discursive properties of French parliamentary discourse of the mainstream Right parties Union for French Democracy (UDF) and Rally for the Republic (RPR) between 1996 and 1997 showed that the right-wing debate was structured by a global negative representations of the "other," including derogations, allegations of abuse and criminality. This was complemented by negative representations of their supposed allies, including left-wing parties (ibid: 341; for a discussion of politics and discourse; see Blommaert and Bulcaen, 1997; Chilton and Schäffner, 1997). Furthermore, in the first round of the 2012 presidential elections, Le Pen finished third behind Sarkozy and Socialist candidate François Hollande (for a comprehensive discussion on the populist nature of the FN, see Davies, 2002, Mayer, 2013; Kaya, 2019; Kriesi and Pappas, 2015; Rydgren, 2008). The election results proved the rising significance of populism in French politics, and the growing appeal of the FN’s Islamophobic discourse for its electorate.

An interesting aspect of the literature on France’s Muslim-origin immigrants is that the rise of Islamophobic discourse in France in the face of terrorism is often contrasted with the case of the United Kingdom (see, for example, Haubrich, 2003; Khosrokhavar, 2004; Brown 2006; Peter, 2008; Foley 2013). The reason for such comparisons is the fact that European Islamist terrorism recruits youth whose parents or grandparents came from the former European colonies, which made France and the UK particularly important. As such, these studies illustrate that Pakistanis or “Arabs” from North Africa in the UK, and individuals from Algeria, Morocco or Tunisia in France have played a significant role in the jihadist activities. The colonial ties created a hierarchy on an ethnocultural and racial basis, and the discriminatory measures against the integration of these Muslim communities are identified as the leading causes of radicalisation among these communities (Khosrokhavar, 2004: 1). As Marret (2010) notes French Muslims, who have been involved in terrorist attacks, are usually from immigrant communities, predominantly Algerian, having suffered from long periods of unemployment, displaying various forms of delinquency and often undergoing radicalisation process in prisons (for terrorism in France, see also Laurence and Vaisse, 2007: 246-270).

This is also an important point in showing the persistence of colonial ties for France. To that end, while 11 September 2001 attacks mark a sharp break in how Western states viewed Islam, the responses were shaped by their specific experiences with Islam (ie. Muslim-origin migrants, refugees etc.) and with terrorism. For instance, the build-up of internal security, and efforts to create an Islamic national institution began in the 1990s when violence spilled over from Algeria (Bowen, 2009) which linked Algeria’s political state with that of France. In turn, the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire), and the RG (Renseignements Generaux), among others, were established to investigate security threats, but politicians did not refrain from deploying a politics of fear by evoking security concerns. For example, “Jean-Marie Le Pen argued that ‘colonization’ had ‘cultural and religious’ dimensions and that, ‘When you go to someone else’s place, you conform to their mores” (Thomas, 2000: 177; see also Thomas, 2011). This also raised questions about integration and cultural conformity in the laws of the 1990s, which have been revived in the context of the numerous terrorist attacks in France in the 2010s.

One of the most notable and discussed attacks in France was perhaps attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. Didier Fassin (2015) asserts that this attack led to an unprecedented national mobilization that took place in France in defense of the endangered ‘values of the Republic’: liberty, equality, fraternity, to which had been added laïcité, the French version of secularism. This attack received a significant level of media attention, which increasingly linked terrorism with Islam and Muslims, thereby using a “narrow” definition of terrorism. This definition placed the responsibility on external sources, foreign extremist organisations, Islamist ideologues and overseas training, rather than looking into the internal issues such as discrimination, youth marginalisation, lack of educational and work opportunities, which may have contributed to the rise of radicalisation within the French Muslim community (Połońska-Kimunguyi and Gillespie, 2016). In turn, this has been one of the many attacks which illustrated the relations between emotional public responses to terrorist attacks and the call for more authoritarian policies toward minority groups, particularly Muslims (Vasilopoulos, Marcus, Foucault, 2018).

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As the extant literature on the integration of Muslim-origin immigrants and the public perception of Muslims in Europe indicates, Islam has been increasingly constructed as a threat to Western values and way of life. Islam and Muslim-origin immigrants, both settled and newcomers, have been discursively associated with extremist or terrorist activities. In this sense, France has been particularly vulnerable to such a discourse due to the attitudes and statements of key political figures, including Jean-Marie Le Pen, Nicolas Sarkozy, and recently Marine Le Pen. A key source of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views is the terrorist attacks that took place in various cities in France. Also, the country’s colonial ties have led to the formation of a sizeable North African (Maghrebi) immigrant community who have become identified with their Muslim identity. Negative public and political perceptions of Maghrebis vis-à-vis their religious identity were combined with a narrow definition of terrorism. This definition emphasised the community’s ties with the country of origin rather than their socio-economic and political deprivations in France. In recent decades, this has become commonplace in the articulation of the terrorism discourse in European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands. As the ERC-funded PRIME Youth project will explore further, this biased articulation poses a challenge to the integration of Muslim-origin communities in European communities. It omits the shortcomings of successive administrations, both on the national and EU levels, in constructing successful integration policies that would facilitate dialogue among the native and migrant-origin communities. As a consequence, emphasis is narrowly placed on the migrant-origin communities rather than the society in general.     

[i] Nonetheless, studies have contested these perceptions as well, see Laurence and Vaisse, 2006; and Joppke, 2009: 124–125.

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