Diversity in Local Political Practice
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Diversity in Local Political Practice

Karen Schönwälder, Karen Schönwälder

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eBook - ePub

Diversity in Local Political Practice

Karen Schönwälder, Karen Schönwälder

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About This Book

In what ways do local authorities respond to the increasing socio-cultural heterogeneity of urban populations? While other studies have often focused on policy declarations, the eight chapters in this book provide rich evidence on the content and implementation of local policies. Furthermore, several chapters offer theoretical insights into the factors driving or hindering policies that acknowledge socio-cultural heterogeneity andensure more equality and inclusive public services.

The general focus of the book is on cities in France and Germany, that is, two major immigration countries in Europe - countriesin whichlocal authorities have a relatively strong position within the state structure. The contributions analyze how local actors use their powers to ensure more equal public employment, adapt cultural offers and recreational facilities to the demands of a diverse population, and/or to fight discrimination. Further chapters investigate who takes part in formulating policies and seek to explain why cities take different decisions about strategies and practices. As a whole, the book contributes to the comparative study of societal diversity and local politics in France and Germany, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of Sociology, Public Policy, Law, and Political Science.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2021
ISBN
9781000352153

Colour-blind diversity: how the “Diversity Label” reshaped anti-discrimination policies in three French local governments

Laure Bereni, Renaud Epstein and Manon Torres
ABSTRACT
Drawing on the qualitative study of three French local governments (Paris, Nantes and the Seine-Saint-Denis department), this article examines the implementation of local anti-discrimination policy during the 2010s. To what extent have these local governments, particularly eager to assert “diversity” values, renegotiated the dominant, colour-blind perspective prevailing at the national level? To address this question, we examined how they used a policy instrument called the “Diversity Label”. We found that in the three cases, the commitment to the label reinforced both the institutionalization and the managerialization of anti-discrimination policy. Yet, in Nantes and Paris, it also led to a deracialization of anti-discrimination policy – i.e. to the obliteration of its ethno-racial dimension. The Seine-Saint-Denis department, where the majority group tends to become a minority, appears as a contrasting case, as ethno-racial concerns have remained central. This study reveals the unlikely conditions under which French local governments differ from national colour-blindness.
Compared to other countries of immigration that have embraced multiculturalism and/or race-conscious anti-discrimination policies, France has been studied as an emblematic case of colour-blindness (Favell 1998; Bleich 2000; Sala Pala 2010; Mazouz 2017).1 This perspective, strongly ingrained in the ideology of “republican universalism”, finds its legal roots in Article 1 of the 1958 French Constitution: the Republic “guarantees equality before the law for all citizens, regardless of descent, race, or religion”, and has been endorsed by the leading anti-racist organizations since the early 1970s (Bleich 2000; Lamont, Morning, and Mooney 2002). Colour-blindness informs four dimensions of French public discourse and public policy toward ethno-racial minorities. Firstly, it pervades an assimilationist perspective on immigration, in which immigrants and their descendants are expected to integrate into the cultural values and behaviours of the majority, or at least to confine their cultural specificities to the private sphere (Schnapper 1998). Secondly, colour-blindness manifests itself in the reluctance to recognize ethno-racial discrimination as a distinct social problem –what Fassin and Fassin (2006) refer to as a “denial”. Since the end of the 1970s, postcolonial immigrants and their descendants have remained mostly addressed through the well-established paradigms of integration, social insertion and urban cohesion (Kirszbaum 2004; Dikec 2007; Mazouz 2017; Cerrato Debenedetti 2018; Escafré-Dublet and Lelévrier 2019). Thirdly, colour-blindness translates into the legal restrictions on the collection of ethnic and racial statistics, a subject that has repeatedly triggered heated controversies since the late 1990s (Peer and Sabbagh 2008; Simon 2008). Finally, the republican ideology of colour-blindness results in the absence of any form of positive action explicitly based on ethno-racial grounds, although preferential treatments based on other grounds, notably gender and place of residence, have gained legitimacy since the yearly 2000s in the political and employment fields (Calvès 2016).
Yet, the principles of republican universalism have encountered numerous challenges in the last twenty years. Firstly, in France like in other European countries, under the pressure of EU 2000 anti-discrimination directives, a more extensive and protective legal anti-discrimination framework has been established since the early 2000s. Secondly, by the second half of the decade, France has witnessed the development of a discourse celebrating the benefits of diversity, especially in the workforce, echoing a globalized diversity discourse born in the US in the 1980s (Kelly and Dobbin 1998; Bereni 2009). The “promotion of diversity” was initially brought to the public agenda by business elites, through the introduction of a “Diversity Charter” (Charte de la diversité) (2004) asserting a corporate commitment “in favour of ethnic, cultural, and social diversity within [their] organization”.2 This diversity framing was quickly adopted by the national government, as illustrated by the creation in 2008 of the state-monitored “Diversity Label” (label diversité), a public award granted to private and public employers that develop “good practices” with regard to “the prevention of discrimination and the promotion of diversity”, primarily in their management of human resources (HR). Thirdly, policy orientations and instruments set up at the national level within the framework of the republican principles have not systematically been replicated identically at the local level. Studies conducted in various European countries found that national frames of reference regarding diversity and equality of treatment can be reshaped by urban governments (Poppelaars and Scholten 2008; Dekker et al. 2015; Schiller 2015), and this was the case in France (Flamant 2017; Meziani-Remichi and Maussen 2017; Cerrato Debenedetti 2018; Martínez-Ariño et al. 2018). In particular, while the issue of combating ethno-racial discrimination faded away from the national agenda in the late 2000s, the picture was different at the local level. Against a background of hardening public attitudes towards immigrants and their descendants under the right-wing presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–2012), this issue gained some prominence on the local political agendas especially in large cities governed by centre-left coalitions (Martínez-Ariño et al. 2018).
This article examines the implementation of anti-discrimination policy by French local governments during the 2010s. In a country dominated by a colour-blind doctrine and in the context of the weakening of this policy at the national level, to what extent have local governments, and more particularly those eager to assert “diversity” values, renegotiated the dominant national perspective on ethnic and racial issues?
To address this question, we explored how three local governments used a specific public policy instrument, the Diversity Label. Launched in 2008 by the French government, the label quickly became a pillar of the national anti-discrimination policy in employment, albeit of modest scope. At the end of 2019, more than a decade after its creation, 108 large organizations were label holders, including 33 public bodies. At this date, the label covered around 500,000 public sector employees.3 Seeking to boost the diffusion of the label in the public sector from the start of the 2010s, the French state encouraged local government bodies4 to adopt it, with relatively little success. By the end of 2019, only 6 local governments (5 cities and 1 department) had received the Diversity Label– including Nantes (2012), Conseil départemental de Seine-Saint-Denis (2016) and Paris (2019)5– while a few others were considering applying for it.
The article investigates three cases of local governments, which were considered, when fieldwork was conducted (2013–2019), as particularly advanced in terms of anti-discrimination policies: Nantes and the Seine-Saint-Denis department, both label holders, and Paris, which was in the last stages of the label application process in 2018–2019. Did the Diversity Label act as a lever for addressing ethno-racial discrimination and shifting away from the national colour-blind framework at the local government scale?
In the three cases, we found that the Diversity Label led to the institutionalization of anti-discrimination policies, and simultaneously reinforced the managerialization of these policies (Dobbin 2009; Edelman 2016): while local anti-discrimination programmes had been so far directed towards external targets (local communities, civic organizations and firms), the label led to an increasing focus on internal, organizational processes, with a growing influence of HR management ideas. Yet, the cases differ in terms of how race and ethnicity were addressed. In Nantes and Paris, the commitment to the Diversity Label led to a deracialization of anti-discrimination and diversity policies – that is, to the obliteration of their specifically ethno-racial dimension (Doytcheva 2015) –, in line with a broader national pattern. The Seine-Saint-Denis department appears as a contrasting, exceptional case. In this highly segregated suburban space, where the majority group tends to become a minority – 50 per cent of minors are of foreign descent (Beauchemin, Hamel, and Simon 2018) – ethno-racial concerns remained at the core of anti-discrimination policy. Studying this contrasting case reveals the unlikely conditions for French local governments to address straightforwardly ethno-racial issues in their diversity policies.

Genesis and development of a multilevel anti-discrimination policy

National level

Despite the rising presence of postcolonial immigrants and their descendants since the 1960s,6 the existence of ethno-racial discrimination was recognized belatedly and precariously in France (Heargraves 2015; Mazouz 2017). In the aftermath of the 2000 EU anti-discrimination directives, the rules on the burden of proof were adjusted to be more favourable to plaintiffs, the list of legal discrimination grounds was progressively expanded (to 25 at the time of writing), and an independent agency7 was created to facilitate the enforcement of anti-discrimination rights (Chappe 2011). The EQUAL Program, launched by the EU in 2000, provided a framework and financial support for the emergence of “experimental” anti-discrimination initiatives. involving public and private, local and national actors. Several of these plans targeted ethno-racial discrimination specifically (Cerrato Debenedetti 2018).
At the same time, the diversity discourse, introduced by business circles, gained prominence in the public debate. It initially appeared as an attempt to shift away from the colour-blind republican paradigm, and to put the issue of ethno-racial minorities (called “visible minorities”) at the core of public attention (Bereni 2009; Doytcheva 2015).
The riots that engulfed hundreds of relegated suburban neighbourhoods in November 2005 completed the process of bringing the issue of ethno-racial discrimination on to the national agenda. In March 2006, the “Equal opportunity” law (Egalité des chances) was presented as a response to the discriminations that affected the people living in those neighbourhoods and implicitly targeted young people of postcolonial descent.
Yet, by the end of the 2000s, the issue of ethno-racial discrimination lost importance on the national agenda (Simon 2015). The traditional paradigms of integration, social insertion and urban cohesion regained the upper hand (Safi 2017; Cerrato Debenedetti 2018). In the workplace, “anti-discrimination” and “diversity” policies became increasingly detached from the ethno-racial significations that pervaded their initial formulations (Doytcheva 2015; Mazouz 2017). On the one hand, these policies referred to an individual-approach to equal treatment – a “liberal” (as opposed to structural) conception of anti-discrimination (Stryker 2001). On the other hand, they increasingly targeted other disadvantaged groups, such as women, disabled or senior workers, rather than ethnic and racial minorities.

Local level

The decline of national policies targeting ethno-racial minorities at the turn of the 2010s was partly counterbalanced by the development of such policies at the local level, especially in the largest and most diverse cities (Cerrato Debenedetti 2018). Local governments’ attention to immigrants and their descendants was hardly new. A number of initiatives had been carried out by municipalities during the 1980s and 1990s to manage the “reception” and “integration” of immigrants, promote “intercultural dialogue”, or support area-based “social development programmes” in deprived neighbourhoods, where post-colonial immigrants and their descendants were concentrated (Kirszbaum 2004; Dikec 2007; Downing 2016). By the early 2000s, the local implementers of these policies were increasingly encouraged by the French government and European institutions to take the anti-discrimination legal framework into account, which they did by integrating it into existing urban policy and integration programmes (Kirszbaum 2004; Flamant 2017). The 2008 municipal election campaign witnessed an unprecedented politicization of the issue of the “diversity” of the lists of candidates (Avanza 2010). In many big cities and suburban municipalities, socialist party candidates highlighted the issues of discrimination and diversity to show their opposition to Nicolas Sarkozy, who had adopted the National Front’s themes during the 2007 presidential campaign and, once elected, gave priority to asserting “national identity” that was deemed to be threatened by immigration.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 municipal elections, which saw centre-left coalitions triumph in more than two-thirds of municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, deputy mayors and policy officers were appointed to “fight against discrimination” in many of these cities.8 By 2008, anti-discrimination officers in several municipalities held training sessions on discrimination for a variety of local professionals, launched awareness-raising campaigns, put structures to provide legal support in place, and so forth.
All of these local policies targeting ethno-racial minorities shared some common features with the national, republican framing: they addressed their targets only implicitly and indirectly, relying on proxies such as place of residence, immigrant background, social deprivation. Besides, officers in charge of anti-discrimination policies remained relatively marginal within the local administrations, their initiatives remaining mainly symbolic and decoupled from organizational routines. Yet, at the turn of the 2010s, in the context of a declining concern for ethno-racial issues at the national level, local governments – more particularly large cities – asserted themselves as major promoters of antidiscrimination policies, primarily focusing on post-colonial immigrants and their descendants. Against a background of cities acquiring increasing autonomy from the state (Le Ga...

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