Background, Significance, and Aims of the Study
On the 7th January 2015, Said and Charif Kouachi opened fire in the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo , killing twelve of its employees. So began three days of terror, which left a total of eighteen dead, and during which Franceās security services, as well its population, were on high alert. Two other French citizensāAmedy Coulibaly and Hayat Boumedienneāwere later revealed to be involved. Coulibaly took hostages in the kosher supermarket HyperCacher and claimed four victims in what appears to have been a racially motivated attack (see BBC 2015; Chrisafis 2015).
The attacks caused shockwaves that reverberated beyond France, and anxieties that transcended the immediate security risk. The four perpetrators were the children of immigrants from Mali and Algeria, but had grown up and been educated in deprived banlieues (suburbs) to the north of Paris. For large numbers of French people, Charlie Hebdo represents a French tradition of freedom of speech and irreverence towards religion. Some felt it was these traditions, as well as Franceās capital city, that were under attack. The anti-Semitic dimension of the HyperCacher attacks rightly provoked concern in a country with the worldās third largest Jewish population. There was a sense that the perpetrators of the attacks did not share the values of libertĆ©, Ć©galitĆ©, and fraternitĆ© that underpin Franceās constitution, as well as its understanding of itself.
This sense of āfailed integrationā only deepened in the days following the attacks, as it became clear that the international outpouring of grief and solidarity manifested in the Je suis Charlie movement was not shared by large numbers of young French people. In schools across France, there were confrontations between students and teachers as some students refused to join in the minuteās silence in honour of the victims, and others appeared to qualify or justify the attacks. Many more were affronted by the magazineās publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohamed and its often stereotyped and provocative portrayals of Islam (see PĆ©labay 2017; Moran 2017; Wesselhoeft 2017; Durpaire and Mabilon-Bonfils 2016; Lorcerie and Moignard 2017). Others suggested the attacks were the result of a Jewish conspiracy (Battaglia and Floch 2015). This raised concerns that it was not only the four attackers who had ambivalent feelings about what Charlie Hebdo represented.
These attacks and the debates they engendered point to bigger questions about social cohesion and national identity in multi-ethnic societies. When the children of immigrants commit acts of terrorism against the nations in which they were born and raised, their loyalty, and the loyalty of other second and third-generation immigrants, is often called into question. This is particularly true in the case of Muslims in Europe, where belonging to the transnational Islamic umma is seen by some to conflict with the idea of loyalty to the nation (Archer 2009). More than this, the confrontations taking place in classrooms in the days following the attacks seemed to speak to an unbridgeable divide between working class minority ethnic students and their largely white and middle class teachers (see Banks 2015; Lorcerie and Moignard 2017; Wesselhoeft 2017; Orange 2017). This seemed to suggest that France had failed to meet the challenges of promoting solidarity and a sense of belonging in the context of cultural diversity (see Dahl 1967; Lipset 1994; Rose 1969; Green and Janmaat 2011).
Questions of this nature are often particularly salient in times of crisis such as the occurrences of civil disorder and domestic terrorism that are the focus of this study. In the English case, riots in 2001, terrorist attacks in 2005, and further urban riots in 2011 raised concerns about the identities and loyalties of young people from immigrant backgrounds, and their adherence to āBritishā values and norms. These concerns were mirrored in France after riots in deprived urban areas in 2005, and after more recent terrorist attacks in January and November 2015. In both cases, such concerns have fed into the debate on immigration, integration, and citizenship.
Public institutions such as schools have historically played a key role in integrating immigrants and their children. Schools in particular play an important role in acculturating young people into the values of the wider society. At the same time, the knowledge, skills, and qualifications young people gain in compulsory education condition their point of entry into the labour market and should facilitate economic integration (see Hochschild and Cropper 2010; Schnepf 2007). As was the case in January 2015, schools often feature in public debates in the wake of riots or terrorist attacks arising either as the solution toāor even the cause ofāthe crisis that has arisen.
France and the United Kingdom stand out as two countries that, in spite of their close proximity and similar immigration histories, appear to have taken historically different approaches to the schooling of the children of immigrants, and to the question of immigrant integration in general. While the British approach has been broadly described as āliberalā or āmulticulturalā, the French ārepublicanā model has often been characterised as more prescriptive and assimilationist (see Favell 2001; Qureshi and Janmaat 2014; Koopmans et al. 2005; Bleich 1998; Olser and Starkey 2009; Meer et al. 2009). In sharp contrast to these scholars, Joppke (2004, 2007) has argued that there is policy convergence among Western states towards civic integration, which he defines as policies that encourage the full participation of immigrants but that pose greater requirements on them in terms of mastering the host country language and embracing civic values than previous policies. This view is echoed by Tonkens and Duyvendak (2016), who discern an increasing āculturalisationā of citizenship policies and public debates on immigration. They use this term to refer to ever more cultural demands placed on immigrants with regards to their identification with, expressions of loyalty towards, and knowledge of the host country, its institutions and its values.
It is interesting to see whether the response of the two states to the occurrences of civil disorder and domestic terrorism reflects a continuation of these historically different approaches or a drawing closer along the lines suggested above. This, in a nutshell, is the key question this book seeks to answer. It will trace the impact of these occurrencesāand the subsequent debate on immigration, integration, and nationalityāon education policy in England and France in the period after 2001. It will consider the extent to which perceived weaknesses of the British and the French models of integration have led to their breakdown. It also aims to identify the ways in which commonalities in the challenges faced by the two nation-states has led to convergence in their approaches, and to assess to what extent this convergence is towards a civic integration approach.
The broader relevance of this question is that it can shed light on how changeable policy frameworks are and, more particularly, how conditioned and confined they are by national traditions. Only a comparison of polic...