Before the simultaneous appearance of nation-states and identity claims in the wake of the Romantic movements at the end of the eighteenth century, ethnicity played a secondary role within states founded on the principle of monarchical legitimacy or of religious belonging. The question of national and ethnic minorities is, in fact, the result of the identity awakenings of the peoples of central Europe in the nineteenth century, and it is directly bound up with the birth of the concept of the nation-state — that is, of a state supposed to coincide with its eponymous nation. The twentieth century knew, with the League of Nations, a brief golden period for minorities, but very soon, after the Second World War, the nation-state, naturally assimilationist, reoccupied the terrain. Today, in a world where ethnic, cultural, and regional identities of all kinds are making a thunderous comeback, the old certainties concerning the role and function of the nation-state — notably in its French version — are sorely tested. How, under these conditions, do nation-state and minorities articulate with one another today?
I — NATION-STATE / MINORITIES: A COMPLEX DIALECTIC.
We are here in a domain where the concepts are blurred, the objects of interminable controversy, and where, what is more, a great many individuals either belong to several categories at once (identities are porous) or change posture and positioning over the course of their existence. The brevity of this contribution often constrains us to the use of abrupt, even reductive formulas.
A — ORIGIN OF THE NATION-STATE.
At the base of every national construction one encounters an ethnic group whose identity arsenal (language, symbols…) serves as catalyst for the whole of the populations concerned within the framework of the process of collective awakening. If the evolution is carried to its term, the ethnic group will gradually transform into a nation which, if it manages to provide itself with state structures, will in turn eventually form a State1. In Europe, the ethnic group of origin is always central in relation to the reference group, and one arrives at the birth of a national State (as in the case of Germany2).
Nations all pass through a series of distinct stages in the course of their process of formation, which may be summarized as follows.
The first phase, that of ethnic origins, sees the union of clans, tribes, and village groups into a certain number of networks, of a cultural or political nature. This phase will later remain associated with the founding ancestral myths — of migration, liberation, and other epic episodes. For the Jews, it is the era of the Patriarchs or of the Exodus from Egypt; for Rome, the story of Romulus and Remus; for Russia, the Varangian Rus’; or, for Brittany, the epic of Nominoë.
The second period, later known as the golden age, corresponds to a phase of ethnic consolidation. It is generally characterized by the presence (real or mythical) of heroes, saints, and sages who will win military victories and make ethnic culture flourish. The Jewish kingdoms of David and Solomon, the Ireland of Saint Patrick, or the Lithuania of Gediminas offer good illustrations of this.
The period that follows corresponds to a phase of maturity but also frequently of division and decline. The ruling classes lock down their privileges. The structures, as they ossify, become an obstacle to development. The expiring French Ancien Régime thus dreamed of the barbarous times of the monarchy’s beginnings, and the Russian nobility of the late nineteenth century liked to disguise itself in fifteenth-century costumes.
A fourth phase sees the appearance of a desire for “national awakening,” for the regeneration of the nation, within a part of the country’s upper classes. Intellectuals, often called “awakeners,” then reconstruct, on the basis of a scattered history, an epic national past stripped of “pernicious” foreign influences. This past, founded on a glorious vision of the future (destiny, mission…), is selective and prunes from the new vulgate the awkward, embarrassing, or useless moments of national history. The invention of apocryphal episodes or the discovery of false ancient narratives is not uncommon3.
The fifth phase is that of the contemporary nation, in the course of which interest concentrates on the functioning of the constitutional system, the economy, order, and public liberties. Such a society tends toward juridical equality among the components of society. One then has to do with a “mass nation” in the modern sense of the term.
At the end of the process of construction, the collective identity of a nation is founded on a certain number of elements which, very schematically, may be synthesized as follows.
A sense of permanence and of rootedness within at least a part of the group in question,
An impression of difference, even of uniqueness, on the part of that group,
A sense of continuity with respect to past generations, conveyed by collective memory (myths, traditions, symbols),
A sense of destiny, of a mission, symbolized by common hopes, a certain will to live together.
In every case the dominant ethnic group will be surrounded by minorities more or less dissatisfied with their lot. In ethno-cultural matters, these are today of two types4: the autochthonous, territorial groups (Alsatians, Frisians…) or non-territorial ones (Jews, Roma…) and the minorities issuing from recent immigration, or new minorities. Each of these two categories includes a good number of exceptions and is naturally porous and labile.
The State: Tyrant or bulwark against tribalism.
For more than a century (approximately from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s), minorities, whether autochthonous or new, were regarded in our country in very different, if not diametrically opposed, ways, depending on the observer.
The great mass of the French (and to a certain extent the same is true of many Western European states), minorities and majority alike, had hardly any opinion on a question whose stakes they did not perceive. At most they saw — without reflecting further — in the patois (Breton or Yiddish) an awkward archaism of which it was advisable to rid oneself as quickly as possible.
A narrow stratum of autochthonous minorities (Basques, Bretons, Provençals, or Lorrainers), recruited essentially from the regionalist intelligentsia, regarded the Jacobin republican State as a destroyer of regional liberties and naturally an oppressor. For the regionalists, and later for the autonomists, republican identity, conflated with Jacobin uniformity, represented absolute evil5.
The new minorities (at the beginning these were the Belgians, the Italians, the Jews, then came the Africans, the Asians…) were often seen by the regionalists as a factor dissolving identity and, as such, suspect6.
In the eyes of the recently arrived immigrants (and notably the Jews of Central Europe, often fleeing the pogroms), by contrast, regional nationalism, with its assertive and sometimes excessive character, could only be assimilated to all the ethnic nationalisms (Hungarian, Polish, Romanian…) from which they had suffered. As such, it appeared as a potential threat against which the French nation-state — blind to ethnic or regional differences and naturally a factor of unity — constituted an effective shield7. Assimilation, by erasing differences, made stigmatization impossible.
Between the two groups, dialogue was long nonexistent, despite the fact that, when it came to their own group identity, there were many in both camps who were attached to it.
B — IS THE MELTING POT NOW BROKEN DOWN?
These two currents of opinion naturally still have their defenders. Yet the situation has, objectively, radically evolved. Since the 1960s, these changes may be schematized in the following manner.
The end of the colonial wars and the economic expansion of the “thirty glorious years” not only finished depopulating our countryside, but also drew into our country millions of workers originating from our former overseas territories. For a time acculturated and disoriented by this new context, a significant part of them formed cultural associations and set out to reconquer, at least symbolically, their roots. They thus joined the metropolitan “originals” in their search for greater recognition and freedom for their culture of origin.
At the beginning of this new millennium, the republican melting pot has practically attained its assimilationist goal as regards the autochthonous minorities. Today, the regional languages (Breton, Flemish…) or minority languages (Romani, Yiddish…) are residual and, at best, in a state of precarious survival, and one may travel throughout the country (except in Alsace and Corsica) without hearing a word of “patois.” Paradoxically, the identity diversity of our country is currently represented by the diasporic linguistic survival of extra-European societies (Kurds, Berbers…) or, on the contrary, by the ethnogenesis in exile (Beurs, Rastas, etc.) of cultures not native to our countries (immigrant cultures).
Neo-ethnicities in the making.
This transplantation has unfortunately not always taken place without damage, and today the great peri-urban concentrations of Europe are increasingly afflicted by waves of violence provoked by groups of idle young people confronted with situations of academic failure, poverty, uprooting, and acculturation.
Having turned their backs on the rootedness of their parents (often of rural and geographically distant origin), they are in search of their “bearings” in their new universe of concrete. Sharing as references only techno, house, or “tags” and “hate” (academic failure is itself sometimes experienced as a manifestation of refusal of society), the members of these gangs feel themselves foreign to the dominant society and often see no outlet for their boredom but drugs and the gratuitous, destructive violence aimed at the objects that adults value. They naturally reject national identity and assimilationist citizenship (in France, they often attack the “institutions supposed to symbolize the republican idea”8), in which they see only the source of the humiliation suffered by their parents (the unemployed of the 1980s)9.
Contrary to the forms of communitarian ethnicization of youth gangs, frequent in the Anglo-Saxon countries (Pakistanis in the United Kingdom, for example), this neo-ethnicization still most often takes place among us on the basis of “artificial” communities with a territorial base (neighbourhood, department). The refusal of integration and the desire for symbolic consumption — the instrument of a “neo-tribalism” — has given birth to a new “culture” organized around devices and rites of internal cohesion.
As, over the past thirty years or so, the population of the housing projects has noticeably grown more “coloured” and often “Third-Worldized,” over the years one has naturally witnessed, in certain sectors of the second generation of immigration, an ethnicization of social relations. One now commonly speaks, indeed, in the press, of gangs of Blacks, Asians, or Beurs. In these milieus, an anti-French, anti-English, etc. racism — a by-product of a self-ethnicization — is gradually being institutionalized.
C — THE SPECTRE OF MUSLIM FUNDAMENTALISM
An equally widespread alternative to the phenomenon of gangs, among those of North African origin, militant Islamic fundamentalism gives birth, among us, to a hexagonal version of British-style communitarianism.
That said, these young Beurs who frighten the “average Frenchman” by playing at fundamentalist Islamists are generally far removed from what one thinks of them. If one questions them, one finds that they rarely have any genuine religious feeling and even less knowledge of the matter. What these young people seek is, by incantatory references to Islam, to construct an outward personality that differentiates them and, incidentally, frightens the bourgeois. The same is true of the antisemitism on the sharp rise of late — a form of absolute provocation, with reference to the Shoah but also, of course, to Israel and the Palestinian question10. Under these conditions, the more one marginalizes them (for example by making the construction of places of prayer difficult or by stigmatizing to excess the wearing of the headscarf at school), the more one gives importance to a posture that initially often had an ephemeral and contingent, if not provocative, character. In other words, by preventing traditional rootedness, one risks indirectly favouring the birth of a violent and uncontrolled neo-rootedness.
It is in fact often a matter, among these young people, of egalitarian demands formulated in the name of difference. Today, the quest for recognition, equality, and dignity is effected among us by way of a “cultural shaping of social conflicts” and of what one calls today incivilities.11 The apparent communitarian withdrawal may conceal a demand for integration and, by a classic process of the reversal of stigma (the disparaging epithet “Arab” becomes an emblem), the assertion of difference may transform into a means of integration.
It goes without saying that undifferentiated social-insertion measures (largely rejected, moreover) have, under these conditions, little chance of succeeding. It appears in this regard that, by its Jacobin rigidity, the French philosophy of power is ill-equipped to face this new challenge. As Robert Muchembled says, “To reinvent citizenship on such bases demands treading the narrow path of the secular contradictions between the centre and the peripheries, ever closer to the latter, while distrusting the tyrannies of the local and an excessive multicultural choice that would sound the death knell of a French identity that is tolerant, open to the world, but strong.”
II — THE CONCEIVABLE SOLUTIONS
We will distinguish the case of the autochthonous minorities from that, very different, of the new minorities.
A — THE HISTORICAL MINORITIES.
By their very nature, the collective life of minorities, in matters of politico-administrative organization, concentrates at the sub-state level. In this context, it organizes around two axes: their degree of communitarian autonomy (most often territorial in character) and the importance of their representation within the central organs of the State, and notably in Parliament. That said, since the modalities of practical arrangement fall under the sovereignty of the states and the balance of the economic (notably fiscal) and political forces present, the result is a great diversity of situations. Even if, confronted with the minority question, the European states have all, at one moment or another, yielded to the Jacobin temptation, none (save Greece and Turkey) has, however, in this domain equalled France. The international context, and notably the European construction, have for some time now come to modify the situation appreciably.
The rights of minorities: A Human Right.
Despite the “stammerings” on the matter at the close of the nineteenth century, it was only in the course of the First World War that the modern conception of minorities and of their protection truly came into being. Two principal factors concurred to bring this about.
The first is bound up with the fact that, while most European peoples had known a “national renaissance” in the course of the nineteenth century, few had then obtained their self-determination or at least a real recognition. At the close of the war, which had aroused great hopes, a good number of them found themselves in the situation of a “national minority,” more or less fractured and of course dissatisfied12. The second factor results from the will of the victorious powers to see President Wilson’s “war aims” — and notably the right of peoples to self-disposition — inscribed in fact. In 1918, the Covenant of the League of Nations gave body to these principles. The subsequent peace treaties — Saint-Germain (Austria 1919), Neuilly-sur-Seine (Bulgaria 1919), and Trianon (Hungary 1920) — imposed them on the “vanquished” states or on their successors. None of these texts, however, contained provisions on minorities, the latter being referred to subsequent bilateral treaties. Later, the treaties of Sèvres and of Lausanne in 1923, concluded with Turkey, would on the contrary contain specific provisions concerning ethnic and religious minorities.
With the end of the Cold War and the advent of an international society, the rights of minorities made a spectacular return to the international scene. The intergovernmental organizations, whether of universal vocation (UN, UNESCO) or regional (Council of Europe, OSCE), undertook the elaboration of conventions and other treaties aimed at the protection of ethnic, cultural, or religious minorities13. The humanitarian NGOs14, aware that ethnic conflicts were responsible for the largest contingents of deportees, refugees, and victims of massacre, applied themselves, for their part, to developing prevention in the matter.
Today a substantial corpus imposes itself, at least morally (many are the states, France among them, that have still not ratified a text as essential as the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on national minorities), on all the European states in matters of minority protection. Most have integrated all or part of the international regulations into their positive law and have taken the ethno-cultural factor into account in their constitutional organization.
European practices.
Western Europe has long known genuine federal states (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), but until recently this system seemed destined to remain confined to the Germanic world. The French model of the state, Jacobin and centralizing, often stood as a paradigm. From the 1970s onward, however, pressure from the base for a real decentralization, as well as the rupture of the age-old correspondence between the demands of the market and the preserve of the national state (globalization), modified the situation and led a number of nation-states to revise their system.
Thus the Kingdom of Spain, since the entry into force of the constitution of 1978, grants very broad autonomy to its “historical nationalities” (Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia) and a less complete, so-called ordinary autonomy to those whose particularism is less affirmed (Andalusia, Aragon, Castile, Extremadura, Valencia…). Since no community has renounced availing itself of the autonomy regime, the kingdom today comprises seventeen autonomous communities. Despite the weight of the centralist-authoritarian heritage of Francoism, this system functions in a satisfactory manner.
Belgium, at the end of a process begun in 1970, has recently become a federation on a territorial and linguistic basis comprising three communities — French, Dutch-speaking, and German-speaking — and three regions: the Walloon region, the Flemish region, and the Brussels region. Like that of Spain, Belgian federalism is asymmetrical. In the North (Flanders) and in the East (German-speaking region), in conformity with local cultural traditions, the emphasis is placed on the communitarian aspect; at the centre (Brussels), it is the regional logic that prevails; whereas in the South (Wallonia), where communitarian identity is less affirmed, regional authorities and community authorities coexist. Although in Wallonia the Region has preference over the Community, the latter plays an important role in maintaining ties with the Brussels Francophones.
For a long time, under the influence of the base, the United Kingdom and Italy have granted a certain autonomy to a few regions of marked particularism15. In recent years, the pressure for a more pronounced decentralization has intensified, and these two countries have recently conceded very extensive powers to certain of their provinces. The United Kingdom thus accepted, following the referendums of 11 and 18 September 1997, Scottish and Welsh “devolution.” At the end of the new organization (1999), the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments having elected their members, the United Kingdom has committed itself seriously to the path of federalization.
Other states, unitary in their territorial organization (Estonia, Hungary), have chosen to put in place for their minorities a system of extraterritorial cultural autonomy inspired by the Austro-Marxist projects.
Nearly all the states of Western Europe and a number of states of central Europe thus possess, in fact, today a strongly decentralized territorial organization, and federalism does indeed seem to have become the standard political model of Europe. If Germany, Austria, and to a certain extent Switzerland (the linguistic frontier runs through certain cantons) rest on traditions of autonomy inherited from a former fragmentation of sovereignties, the Belgian and Spanish examples are particularly pertinent to our subject inasmuch as the autonomous entities correspond roughly to homogeneous linguistic areas.
The French exception.
In our country, republican citizenship, the reflection of a universalist conception of society, is traditionally the foundation of a firm denial of the very existence of minorities. Yet most of these minorities ask only for the right to a certain autonomy, even the simple official recognition of their language (Alsatians and Lorrainers, Basques, Bretons, Catalans, Corsicans, Flemings, and Occitans, etc.).
The logic underlying the attitude of the authorities is the following: all citizens are equal before the republican law, which guarantees them the free exercise of their fundamental rights. Cultural identities are merely individual characteristics whose full exercise is ensured by respect for public liberties16. A contrario, to recognize for certain categories of citizens collective rights derogating from the general rule would run counter to the principles of republican equality. Some go further and affirm that such a policy, by introducing among us the germ of “communitarianism,” would risk setting the communities against one another17. This reasoning, under forms adapted to the spirit of the times, has, since the French Revolution, always been articulated to refuse the “particularist” demands of differentiated groups. It is this same reasoning that the Constitutional Council followed in 1991 in rejecting the concept of a “Corsican people” proposed by the government, and this same reasoning, again, that explains the intensity that the so-called “Islamic headscarf” school quarrel has taken on among us, around the wearing at school of ostentatious symbols of religious belonging.
In recent years, however, a certain weakening of the State, associated with a resurgence of demands from the base and with a delicate pressure from the European organizations, has led to an inflection of Paris’s position — an evolution to which today bear witness, notably, the special status of the Corsican territorial collectivity and the timid progress in matters of teaching the “regional languages”18. This evolution has naturally aroused sharp reactions from “republicanist” circles, which see in it the beginning of capitulation in the face of the “enemies of France.”
B — THE NEW MINORITIES.
We must now rapidly examine the situation of the minorities issuing from emigration. The question that poses itself here, notably around the question of the “housing projects,” is above all that of social violence. Faced with these evolutions, our Western societies are all in quest of solutions.
“How will we be able to live together if our world is divided into at least two continents, ever more distant from one another — that of the communities that defend themselves against the penetration of individuals, ideas, and mores coming from outside, and that whose globalization has as its counterpart a weak hold over personal or collective conduct?19”
Among the four policies theoretically conceivable for a State between democratic universalism and cultural relativism — assimilation, communitarianism, tolerance, and multiculturalism — only the last two retain any meaning in practice today. Indeed, whatever their point of departure, all European societies have now found themselves in a policy of partial, case-by-case recognition of identities.
The idea most frequently advanced is founded on the foregrounding of the notion of tolerance and of acceptance of cultural differences. This conception, born in Canada20 in the 1960s, is represented by the partisans of multiculturalism and the “liberal communitarians”: Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and in France, to a certain extent, Alain Touraine and Michel Wieviorka. Founding themselves on a critical approach to traditional liberal citizenship and on the fact that the universalism claimed by the assimilationist doctrines is too often only a masked Western ethnocentrism, these authors advocate in principle, with nuances, the establishment of a multicultural citizenship.
The foundation of the multicultural option rests on two principal axioms:
The citizen of the Western democracies, suffering from a “citizenship deficit,” aspires above all to equality of rights (dignity).
The group constitutes a natural and legitimate mediator between the individual and society.
Without abolishing the distinction between public sphere and private sphere, dear to the liberals, multiculturalism establishes a central monocultural zone, in which all communities participate, and a series of differentiated zones where the autonomy of the groups is exercised. Known in the Anglo-Saxon countries by the name of Identity Politics, this public recognition of otherness results in the granting of certain specific rights to long-oppressed communities.
Foreign experiences.
Confronted with the problems of integrating immigrant communities, certain European states have, over the past twenty years or so, adopted an attitude inspired by multiculturalism. Some (Sweden, Great Britain, the Netherlands) have experimented with “collective integration.” The latter, who toward the end of the seventies had put in place a very liberal multicultural policy of respect for immigrant groups, had to backtrack toward the end of the eighties after observing that, despite the successes often vaunted abroad, it entailed an economic and social marginalization of the mass of immigrants.
The causes of what must therefore be called a semi-failure may be of several orders:
The official taking-into-account of identities tends either to fix them (the culturalist danger) or, on the contrary, to “folklorize” them. Moreover, individual rights are sometimes too little taken into account in societies dominated by groups.
Too broad a multiculturalism may result, for individuals, in a cultural, communitarian, and identity confinement that may be such as to block an individual integration desired by the subject within the host society.
An obscuring, even an indirect perpetuation, of inter-community economic inequalities.
An instrumentalization of citizenship in the absence of a genuine civic identity around citizen values (absence of any code of living together).
These difficulties are, however, according to good observers (D. Lacorne and C. Taylor notably), more imputable to a certain clumsiness in the implementation of the corresponding policies than to an intrinsic insufficiency of the system. A certain assimilationist will has consequently reappeared within the framework of a policy nonetheless remaining clearly multicultural in orientation.
French Jacobinism in question.
In France, the republican tradition holds, as we have seen, that the foreign immigrant gradually assimilates. If one were to draw a line through the process, as the most radical associations in matters of identity affirmation demand, some fear the destabilization of society. This risk, probably overestimated, is not, it must be acknowledged, pure fantasy. Indeed, the politics of identity may entail risks and notably bring about the emergence of community leaders who, having acquired the monopoly of the representations of “their” group, allow themselves to abuse it and to take into account only their communitarian (if not private) interest, and finally to reject multiculturalism, as was seen in Sweden (immigrants).
It must nonetheless be admitted, as the authorities already do without saying so, that, in certain neighbourhoods, the communitarian evolution is largely under way, and this independently of any official control (since it is outside the field of our juridical order) and that it must, in one way or another, be taken into account. Would it not be better, under these conditions, to cut one’s losses to a certain extent and, accepting reality, to integrate it into our administrative rules by enlarging the field of public space, as Élise Marienstras and Philippe Lazar advocate21?
CONCLUSION
Whatever its appointed eulogists may say, the French-style nation-state appears today to have exhausted a good part of its traditional advantages. The solution to come is not yet very clear, but it seems today accepted that it will be advisable, in the rearrangements to come concerning the immigrant communities, to make a greater place for cultural identities and to admit a certain dose of “official” multiculturalism in everyday life.
Concerning the autochthonous communities (essentially territorial, as we have seen), it is more than likely that granting them a cultural autonomy, according to the norms commonly used within the European Union, would have the effect of easing the situation rather than exacerbating tensions. Moreover, a France fully recognizing its diversity and giving their autonomy to its constituted human collectivities would surely be better able to play a positive and credible role within the Western community than a state officially tensed up over a Jacobin doctrine according to which there exist no communities in France… since all citizens there enjoy the same rights.
Notes
For certain authors such as E. Morin, or C. de Gaulle, the State always, on the contrary, precedes the nation; see: Formation et composantes du sentiment national (Formation and Components of National Feeling), in: L’Europe dans le tourbillon des nationalités (Europe in the Whirlwind of Nationalities), Cosmopolitiques, May 1990.↩︎
But this may also, according to the terminology of the British Professor Anthony D. Smith, be “lateral,” that is, issue from a minority group having taken precedence over the majority ethnic group (like the Alawites in Syria); one will then have a nation-state, and the situation will be more complex and sometimes unstable.↩︎
The most interesting thing on this subject is that the invention of nations was often the work of visionary expatriate intellectuals. It was in Vienna that the Hellenic press was born, and in Odessa that the secret society (Philiki Etaireia) arose which organized the anti-Ottoman uprising of 1814; it was in Greece that the Bulgarian idea was conceptualized, in Saint Petersburg that Latvian national feeling crystallized, in Königsberg that Lithuanian national consciousness was born, in London and in South Africa that Indian national feeling arose, etc.↩︎
We will here consider only the case of ethnic, cultural, or religious minorities.↩︎
The books of Robert Lafont are representative in this regard.↩︎
See notably the books of Bernard-Henri Lévy and of Guy Scarpetta.↩︎
In France, urban violence (notably the burning of cars and the throwing of Molotov cocktails) more than quadrupled between 1993 and 1997.↩︎
Michel Wieviorka, in Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 February–3 March 1999.↩︎
Some, like Élisabeth Badinter, oppose the “universal sovereignty” that would found the French Republic to the “democracy of communities.”↩︎
As among certain groups of far-right youth, for whom Hitler, Hess, Barbie, or Michael Kühnen are models.↩︎
Qui sont les incivils? (Who Are the Uncivil?), Sociétal, June 1998.↩︎
Aulneau J. et al., Les aspirations autonomistes en Europe (Autonomist Aspirations in Europe), Paris, F. Lacan, 1913, and Boehm M. H., Europa irredenta, Eine Einführung in das Nationalitätenproblem der Gegenwart, Verlag von Reimar Hobbing, Berlin, 1923.↩︎
Cf. Alain Fenet et al., Le droit et les minorités, analyses et textes (Law and Minorities: Analyses and Texts), Bruylant, Brussels, 2001.↩︎
Amnesty International, Survival International, MRG International, etc.↩︎
The regions with “special status” are: Friuli, Sardinia, the Aosta Valley, Venezia Giulia, and Trentino–Alto Adige.↩︎
See for example: Sophie Duchesne, Citoyenneté à la française (Citizenship the French Way), Presses de Sciences Po, 1997.↩︎
Christian Jelen, La guerre des rues (The War of the Streets), and Périls géopolitiques en France (Geopolitical Perils in France), Hérodote, No. 80, 1st quarter 1996.↩︎
The recent declarations of the Minister of Education, Lang (Le Monde, 27 April 2001), could herald a certain evolution.↩︎
A. Touraine, Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble? Égaux et différents (Can We Live Together? Equal and Different), Fayard, 1997, p. 16.↩︎
For a presentation of the historical debate between liberals and communitarians: A. Berten, P. Da Silveira & H. Pourtois, Libéraux et communautariens (Liberals and Communitarians), PUF, 1997.↩︎
Lettre du cercle Condorcet de Paris, Sept.–Oct. 1999.↩︎