DIFFERENCE.(The Talk of the Town)(immigrants, France)

Eight days ago, when the violence that had erupted in three hundred of the immigrant housing projects that circle France's big cities spread, briefly, to Belgium and Germany, the sigh of relief among French politicians could be heard from Lille to Marseilles. "Voila! It isn't us," they seemed to be saying. "It's everywhere." And, in a way, they were right. The immigrant poor are everywhere in Europe now, and what the French novelist Antoine Audouard, writing in the Times a few days later, aptly called France--"a society that no longer knows how to enforce its own rules or how to create the dream of a better life for its new generations"--describes more countries than his own. Since the end of the Second World War, Western Europe has been at the center of a labor migration that, in its proportions, rivals the great forced migrations of the Roman Empire; and since the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when Europe's own empires unravelled, the strains of that demographic shock have been compounded by what could be called an implosion of difference, as the colonized fled the chaos--economic, tribal, political--that the colonizers left behind. It is easier to manage difference at a safe colonial remove than it is at home. To say that Europe was unaware of this is an understatement.

Every country with an influx of migrant workers had to scramble toward some sort of social formula to absorb them (or, as often as not, pretend that they weren't there). And before long those formulas had frozen into easy, and, not surprisingly, competing, certainties--all of which have turned out to be as shortsighted as the government-sponsored agents who first combed Africa and Asia and the Indian subcontinent recruiting labor for Europe's postwar factories. There was the British "multicultural" model--or, to put it perhaps more accurately, the "You will never be us" model. There was the "We'll support you, but please be invisible until you are us" Scandinavian model. There was the "integrated but not assimilated" oxymoron called the Dutch model. There was the "You're guest workers, so you'll be going home" German model--which, until the late nineties, put off even the possibility of citizenship for most immigrants and their children. Everyone had something to contribute to this debate: the social theorists and social planners and social workers and politicians and, of course, the people who hated immigrants--everyone but the immigrants themselves, who were rarely consulted. The only thing most Europeans agreed on was that the "American model" was wrong, although the American model wasn't really a model at all but a kind of success ethic--the Europeans said "dollar ethic"--in which making money and moving up in the world was what made Americans out of strangers. It was, for better or for worse, the one model that seemed to work.

The French model could be called the "You will be us" imperative. All children born in France are citizens at birth, and citizenship, it was believed, confers an instant, almost mystical "Frenchness" on them. But the cites, as the immigrants call their projects, belied that fantasy. They were social planning at its most earnest and its worst--the glitch in the French republican case for assimilation. Back in the early fifties, when Le Corbusier designed the first of these projects--Unite d'Habitation, on the outskirts of Marseilles--they were called villes nouvelles and declared to be the last word in progressive urban thinking. The idea at first was that soon the middle classes, fleeing their crowded cities, would arrive, and merchants would open stores ...