Community and Communitarianism

Communitarianism — the word and what it designates — frightens people in France because of what, spontaneously, it evokes for us: identity-based assignment and communal confinement within ethnic and/or religious borders, the tyranny of the group, the denial of individual liberties, obscurantism, the calling into question or even the refusal of laïcité (the French principle of secularism). In its current usage, indeed, the word “communitarianism” is less apt to describe a particular type of social bond than to stigmatise the actors engaged in it: one does not lay claim to communitarianism oneself, one is taxed with communitarianism by others.

Thus communitarianism would be but a degenerate derivative of “community,” a notion forged by the sociologists Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber and raised by them to the rank of an operative concept, coupled with — and in opposition to — that of “society.” Yet, unlike community, communitarianism could not be considered an operative concept; the word finds its place more often in ideological controversies, in debates about society, in political discourse, where it functions as an “operator of de-legitimation,”¹ than in the scientific lexicon of the specialists of the social sciences. Like nationalism, with which it shares its suffix “-ism” and certain other traits, communitarianism would be, far more than a concept or a notion, an ideology developed in reaction to the formation or the transformations of the modern State. Like fundamentalism, with which it shares this same suffix and certain other traits, communitarianism would be an ideology developed in reaction to secularisation and to the rise of modern individualism.

This negative connotation and this polemical usage find their source in the political thought issued from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution — enamoured of humanist and universalist ideals, advocating the direct face-to-face encounter between the individual-citizen and the State, without the institutionalised mediation of intermediary bodies. According to this acceptation, one speaks of communitarianism when one ascribes to a specific group, defined by national, regional, cultural, ethnic, or religious origin, the design of making its particularism, its values, or its own interests prevail over those of society; when the claims of a particular group seem incompatible with the double separation of the political and the religious, of the ethnic and the civic, which are at the very foundation of the principle of citizenship.² For the proponents of the modern and secular nation-state, communitarian claims constitute a threat, both to the unity of the country and the integrity of its territory (Basque separatists, Corsican nationalists) and to the durability of its cultural identity (linguistic unity, regionalist claims) and the respect of laïcité (religious claims).

“Communitarianism,” writes Ch. Jaffrelot, “is characterised first of all by its pretension to oppose to the civic relation another allegiance that wishes to take priority. It thereby calls into question the construction of a public space and the very principle of a political society transcending cultural specificities.”³ This vision, negative to say the least, still remains the norm today in a France whose Jacobin secular heritage too often serves as a justification and a pretext for withdrawal;⁴ whose all-too-abstract and frozen conception of the universal screens off the just perception of today’s demographic and sociocultural reality — a dynamic and changing reality, quite different from the ideal, homogeneous, and consensual representation that some form of it and that they obstinately hold up as a reference. Victim of a univocal and caricatural vision as much as of an intellectual and ideological blindness, both of which prevent, or even forbid, thinking of the social bond as arising from multiple logics that may be contradictory and conflictual among themselves, this term, and what it underpins, deserves reflection and discernment — in any case, a balanced approach, so diverse are the contexts, the types of sociability, the realities it covers, the questions it raises. To be convinced of this, it suffices to take some distance from the French case and to see what communitarianism designates in other national or regional contexts.

Communitarianism and its avatars

In fact, the controversy around communitarianism is not peculiar to France. The debate on multiculturalism engaged across the Atlantic following the publication of John Rawls’s work A Theory of Justice⁵ tends to confirm this. There it divides intellectual circles and the relays of opinion, even though the North American model of integration recognises specific ethnic, confessional, and sexual groups in so far as their values and their practices are compatible with the juridical and constitutional principles of society. This same model accepts the principle of the multiple belonging of individuals — hyphenated identities — in so far as the particular allegiances do not call into question the bedrock of common values. In other words, this system intends to make the civic-mindedness required of each coexist with the ethnic, cultural, and religious sensibilities of the individuals and the groups that compose the nation.

Beyond what separates them, the North American “communitarians” — among whom Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer — agree, against Rawls, on the fact that the abstract individual does not exist, that the political subject cannot be apprehended by abstracting from his social and cultural determinations, that individuals can affirm themselves only in concrete forms of socialisation, personal identity being made of an interlocking of belongings — to the family, the city, the tribe, the nation, the Church, etc. — but also of diverse affiliations: political, sporting, charitable.

Concerning the specific groups (ethnic, religious, sexual), including immigrants — individual integration appearing improbable, to say the least, in a society where citizenship has lost its power to transcend particularisms and where civic-mindedness is not exclusive of particular belongings — the communitarians privilege the model of communal insertion, on the grounds that the community is “protective, and all the more so in that it extracts its members from the uncertainty and the undifferentiation of modern society,” that it is “a means of individual affirmation for citizens unable to express themselves in the political society as a whole.”⁶ Finally, in a society of deficient values, the community can “represent a moral order bringing to its members a personal discipline in their most intimate life.”

Faced with the observation of the plural, multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious character of contemporary Western societies, and faced with the deviations that result from it — ghettoisation, competition, intercommunal confrontations — the communitarians intend to bring their contribution to the invention of new modalities of living-together, associating recognition and respect of differences on the one hand, recognition of the equal dignity of persons on the other. Sensitive to injustices and to racial or sexist discriminations, they inspired the “politically correct” and “positive discrimination” (Affirmative Action); we also owe to one of them the idea of a politics of “complex equality” capable of integrating the notions of justice, equality, and difference: there would be not one justice but “spheres of justice” governed by principles of distribution proper to each group.⁷ Finally, the communitarians exclude from their analysis the authoritarian or liberticidal communities that shut individuals up in an exclusive belonging, in rupture with the social, legal, and political order, and they maintain that it falls to the State to defend individuals against the tyranny of the group.

Thus, in our liberal democracies, the question of communitarianism intersects the debate on multiculturalism. The comparison between France and the United States brings to light two radically different conceptions of the social bond. This is the product of singular histories and specific modes of national construction. What brings these two models of societies closer, however, is the bedrock of common values on which the national consensus is supposed to rest: individualism, universalism, the existence of a public space that transcends particular belongings.

We encounter this same question of communitarianism at the heart of multiethnic societies where the difficulties of coexistence among “communities” sometimes find their outlet in explosions of intercommunal violence. Quite different, indeed, are the forms communitarianism takes in the multiethnic States where the communities (ethnic, religious, territorial) are institutionalised and constitute the substructure of the social and political organisation. There, well before becoming a term and an object of polemic, communitarianism presents itself as a concrete juridico-political and cultural reality, solidly implanted: the traditional system of the millets (religious communities enjoying broad internal autonomy) inherited from the Ottoman empire, the federal system of the former Yugoslavia, the system of electoral representation in Lebanon. There the individual-citizen effaces himself behind the collective to which he belongs, and, owing as much to the law as to the weight of tradition or social pressure, it is most often impossible for him to emancipate himself from it. If the rules of good neighbourliness are recommended in the daily relations among communities so as to limit the risks of slippage and clashes, the belongings, the communal codes, the primacy of the group are permanently reaffirmed. As long as it remains master of the political game, has the authority for it, and gives itself the means, the State must secure allegiance to the central power: it then plays on the rivalries, the competitions among communities and instrumentalises them to its profit (former Yugoslavia, former Iraq).⁸ On the other hand, as soon as it shows signs of weakness, it runs the risk of becoming the hostage of the intercommunal balances of power and of seeing its functioning paralysed. So it is no accident that one of the priority stakes of these balances of power is precisely the control of the State apparatus. The case of Lebanon seems exemplary of this resistance of the communities and of the weakness of the State: there, economic growth, urbanisation, and social change had been accompanied by the adoption of Western models; the increase in the number of mixed marriages and the extension of zones of mixed habitation augured the possibility of seeing a confessionally neutral public space constituted, of a nature to appease the intercommunal tensions; war, external pressures, the return of insecurity, of social and political instability got the better of this logic and marked, at the same time as the return of internal tensions, that of “the religious community as the ultimate marker of identities.”⁹ This type of reaction is verified elsewhere, in sub-Saharan Africa in particular. It is linked to the disillusionments born of the failure of a poorly mastered secularisation and a poorly mastered Western model (persistence or even deepening of social inequalities, absence of real democracy).

Quite different again appears the debate on communitarianism seen from India, where specialists do not hesitate to employ this term to designate Hindu nationalism — that is, a form of political mobilisation using Hindu symbols, as opposed to Indian nationalism, incarnated by the Indian National Congress, a secular political formation. According to certain specialists, Hindu nationalism would be the antithesis of Indian nationalism, the only “true” nationalism¹⁰ in their eyes. According to them, it would be an anti-national ideology that has appropriated the term “nationalism” for propaganda ends but that, in fact, would be but a form of communitarianism (communalism) — that is, the greatest threat to the idea of the Indian nation, the claims of the militant religious groups being taxed as traditionalist and anti-national since opposed to the modern and secular State. An alternative thesis invites us, however, to recognise the existence of a form of nationalism constructed on religious identification, and criticises the use of the term “communitarianism,” preferring to it that of “religious nationalism.” According to this analysis, religious nationalism (communitarianism) and “secular nationalism” would represent two tendencies of nationalism.

Back to France

As it is posed in France, and in light of what happens elsewhere, the debate around communitarianism appears at times caricatural through excess of simplification, abstract through excess of generalisation, often disconnected from concrete and complex situations that are difficult to decipher. The identity claim there coincides with the aggravation, from the 1970s on, of what is called “the crisis” — a social crisis manifested by the rise of unemployment and the spread of poverty as much as a crisis of the French model of integration, attested by a high rate of school failure, the breakdown of the social elevator, the appearance of zones of relegation and of lawlessness. So many ills that strike head-on the most vulnerable populations, immigrants or those of immigrant background, often of North African and sub-Saharan origin, concentrated in the urban peripheries. As a response to an objective situation of exclusion as well as to the feeling of abandonment on the part of the State and the public authorities, it is in these “lost territories of the republic” that, according to some, communitarianism would find the matter to flourish.

If communitarianism is certainly bound up with the social question, the weight of France’s colonial and Vichy past, and the confrontation of the memories that relate to it, must not be underestimated either, nor the international context (globalisation, terrorism, Islamism), nor the possible pressures and interventions of external actors upon the diasporas concerned: States and/or governments of the countries of origin, political parties, dissident movements, personalities, or religious groups.

Moreover, new solidarities, linked to the evolution of mores, have emerged over the last decades. They are founded less on origin and the will to perpetuate inheritances than on identity affinities knotted around questions of society (AIDS, the pacs civil-union law), such as gender or sexual orientation. Such is the case of the feminist movements or of the collectives of homosexuals that some, actors and/or observers, tend to include in the communitarian problematic.

In France more than elsewhere, perhaps, communitarianism poses the question of laïcité and of the place of religion in the public space. The voluntary visibility that, in certain neighbourhoods, Jews claiming strict observance give themselves, just like the presence of an Islam that asserts itself and intends to assert its collective rights (construction of mosques, wearing of the veil, Muslim meals in canteens, confessional plots in cemeteries) — to cite only these two examples — arouse questions as to the validity of the French secular model in a society where change takes different, even opposite, directions: a society more and more diverse and open to the world for some, more and more fragmented and on the defensive for others. More broadly, it is the republican model itself that seems to show its limits and its incapacity to bring appropriate responses in the face of the tendencies toward identity withdrawals that one observes, the competition of memories, the weakening of the symbolic and institutional foundations of democratic living-together.

If the question of the Islamic veil continues to divide public opinion (notably during the debate around the Stasi commission¹¹ on religious signs), and if that of forced marriages has not yet found its juridical solution, the responses brought to certain particular demands have, by contrast, been able to contribute to the appeasement of certain intercommunal tensions and to the reinforcement of the social bond, even to the integration of persons. Such is the case in particular of the demands concerning food in the public canteens, the constructions of places of prayer, or again the demands concerning examinations on the Sabbath. These questions are most often settled discreetly, case by case. Thus the public canteens now offer alternative meat-free menus, vegetarian or fish-based, more in conformity with the ritual requirements. Anxious to make up for the deficit of Muslim places of worship in regard to the demography and the gap relative to the other great religions present on the national territory (a concern to catch up), the State and the local authorities indirectly contribute to the construction of mosques by granting long-term (emphyteutic) leases or by going through the intermediary of associations with a cultural vocation, which, unlike the religious (cultuelles) associations (the 1905 law obliges!), open the right to public subsidies.¹² Finally, to limit the risk of examinations on the Sabbath or on feast days, the Jewish consistory sends, before each school year, the calendar of the Jewish feasts to the Ministry of National Education so that the latter can schedule the examinations taking into account, as far as possible, the religious constraints to which practising pupils or students are bound. Without calling into question the secular pact, these measures, which resemble what the Canadians call “reasonable accommodations,”¹³ consist in finding, by way of consultation, pragmatic solutions to practical questions involving beliefs, thereby avoiding needless tensions and confrontations. Does this constitute a risk for the equilibrium of our societies? The answer is not simple, for, more than a matter of secular and republican orthodoxy, it is a matter of sensibility and discernment, on both sides, as to the limits not to be crossed.

Finally, Dominique Schnapper opportunely recalls that on which it appears essential to insist: “[…] one observes the persistence of identifications within the best-established democratic societies. It is clear that ideal citizenship is never realised. The concrete nation is a particularism. Participation in a national society is concretely founded on all sorts of particular and particularising elements, which may be qualified as ethnic: the practice of a same language (save in exceptional cases), the sharing by all the nationals of a same culture and a singular historical memory, the participation in the same institutions, whether the school or the enterprise, by way of the whole of strictly political practices. Democratic societies cannot be only civic; they are inevitably at once ethnic — in so far as they share a history, real or invented, a culture, and a common project — and civic. The singularity of the society organised by the principle, the values, and the institutions of citizenship, relative to other modes of political organisation, lies in the fact that the civic idea and the principle of citizenship must, in the last analysis, have pre-eminence over ethnic or religious particularisms, over domestic or clannish solidarities.”¹⁴

Notes