LIKE NO OTHER CITY.
I spent the following day at the National Police Equipment Convention of France. Some thousand-odd police officers had arrived for the outdoor event, held in a leafy Ma.r.s.eille suburb under a bright Mediterranean sky. Street cops in sharp blue uniforms milled about the convention grounds, mingling with captains sporting embroidered military insignia and epaulettes, hostage-rescue specialists in camouflage gear, riot police in flak jackets. More cops were serving up espresso and croissants at the refreshment stand. After lunch, they began pa.s.sing out shots of whiskey.
White tents had been set up over booths displaying police gear. Attendees could examine the new SIG Sauer semiautomatic and a snaking coil hose with an eye at the tip, designed to provide visibility around corners. Delegates from the former French colonies had flown in for the event: a bald man in mirrored sungla.s.ses, his military uniform sagging with medals, displayed an odd, solemn interest in a tripod-mounted automatic weapon the size of a small motorcycle and useful, according to the manufacturers, for crowd control. It was something like a French Amway convention sponsored by Soldier of Fortune, the surreal effect amplified by the Brazilian lounge music piped in all day over the loudspeakers-syncopated accordion renditions of "The Girl from Ipanema," "Mucha Muchacha."
A team of hostesses in identical filmy tan dresses, their shoes and necklaces perfectly matched, handed out programs. At nine o"clock the drug-sniffing Labradors would be taken through their paces, then an officer would shoot his partner in the chest a la William Tell, displaying his marksmanship and the efficacy of the force"s bulletproof vests. I was told I shouldn"t miss the fashion show: the Interior Ministry had recently commissioned the design of a new national police uniform, a gesture said to have considerably improved morale.
I wandered over to the outdoor auditorium to watch the hostage rescue. A team of sinewy, iron-jawed men in flame-resistant black coveralls was limbering up at the edge of the crowd, pulling on gloves and balaclavas, adjusting their knee pads, strapping pistols to their legs. A bus had been positioned on the staging ground. The master of ceremonies called for volunteers to play the hostages. The women in the crowd volunteered frantically.
The hostages were escorted onto the bus. We were told that negotiations had broken down. The situation was very grave. At the signal, the team streaked in and took cover behind a car. Shots were heard, then screams. The pyrotechnicians set off a gigantic purple flare as a distraction. Half the team stormed the bus, smashing in the windows, clambering through, and pumping the terrorists full of bullets. The other half spirited the hostages away, protecting them with their bodies. Everyone applauded.
Afterward, I asked one of the rescuers why they wore the black balaclavas.
"Because they"re so scary-looking," he said, dabbing the sweat from his brow.
Between the demonstrations, I sat at a lawn table shaded by a parasol, amid big bushes of pink flowers, and spoke to the cops who patrol Ma.r.s.eille"s streets. I started by speaking to two of them, but soon others, overhearing our discussion, sat down: They all wanted their say. Before long, a dozen cops were sitting at the table. Ma.r.s.eille, they agreed, was different; it was cosmopolitan; it was a port; ethnic conflict was not as much of a problem as it was in other cities. But that didn"t mean the place wasn"t a mess. "There are neighborhoods we can"t even enter," one told me.
"There"s no respect for the police anymore," another added.
"Kids these days don"t have a good upbringing. They don"t respect anything."
"It used to be that everyone respected the police. Now they know we"re not allowed to do anything. If you give someone a smack, it"s on the front page the next day. They never show what happened before that smack, though-just the smack."
"We don"t have enough money. We need more money."
"Are you going to talk to Sarkozy? Tell him we need more money."
Cops, everywhere-always the same complaints.
I asked them why they"d gone into police work.
"Idealism," said one.
"Job security," said four more.
Of the cops at the table, about half were white. There was one black man, and the rest looked as if they might be of North African origin. There were two women. I asked whether the police force made an effort to hire ethnic minorities, as they did in the United States.
"Oh yes, of course."
"But not officially. You can"t do that officially. That"s against republicanism."
"But unofficially-of course!"
Everyone in official France, from top to bottom, knows the party line: We are a republic. There are no ethnic groups. But everyone, I discovered, also knows that this is a fraud.
I spent the rest of the day looking for Ma.r.s.eille"s police chief, Pierre Carton. I spotted him just as a gigantic, flame-red police helicopter swooped down from the sky: The special forces had arrived to rappel down the side of a four-story building. I had to shout to make myself heard, because the loudspeakers were now blasting the theme from The Ride of the Valkyries. The chief was beaming: he was proud of his men. He kindly suggested that we might be able to talk more comfortably in his office, and invited me to join him there later in the afternoon.
The police station was ma.s.sive, with the atmosphere and architecture of a Saracen fort, and the chief"s office was s.p.a.cious and sunny. He invited his deputy to join us. The secretary brought in cups of strong espresso. "There"s been tension since the beginning of the Second Intifada in Israel, yes," said Carton in response to my question, "but not a debordement -an overflow. It"s not like other cities." He was modest about this achievement: "If we"ve had any success, it"s very relative. It"s owed, in part, to the geography and sociology of the city. Ma.r.s.eille is a city with s.p.a.ce. It"s an agglomeration of what we call village nuclei, small neighborhoods that form a complete fabric. What"s particularly important is that the banlieue is in the city itself." In every other sizeable French city, the banlieues-the suburbs-form menacing rings of criminality and unemployment around the city. This was a common theme of my conversations in Ma.r.s.eille: The city owes its peace, in part, to the fact that immigrants have not been shunted off into suburban slums as they have been in other large French cities.
Ma.r.s.eille is particularly spread out: its 800,000 inhabitants enjoy a city twice the size of Paris, with a coastline that spans more than thirtyfive miles. The population of greater Paris, by contrast, is 10.5 million. During the 1960s and 1970s, when France launched huge collective housing projects, Ma.r.s.eille benefited from its low population density. Immigrant neighborhoods are now distributed evenly throughout the city, and young people, whatever their ethnic origin, congregate in the same neighborhoods: the Vieux Port, the Canebiere, St. Ferreol Street, the beaches of the Prado, the Velodrome. This use of urban s.p.a.ce is uniquely Ma.r.s.eillais. In Nice, Montpellier, Bordeaux, Paris, and other major cities, youths of foreign origin and the native-born do not socialize in the same places. This, clearly, is an important reason for Ma.r.s.eille"s comparative calm.
His deputy agreed: "This is important: The projects aren"t detached from the rest of the city or from its traditional structures. The fact that the projects are sprinkled through the city means the inhabitants don"t feel cut off from civic life or the traditional life of the city. If they use public transportation, kids from the projects can be in the center of town within five minutes."
I asked the chief whether Ma.r.s.eille"s policing tactics, at the street level, had changed significantly under Chirac. Absolutely, he said; under the Socialists they had been crippled, but now the power of the police had been unleashed. Encouraged by signals from the Chirac government, he now responded to minor anti-Semitic crimes with a "furious" display of force-something he had felt unable to do in the political climate of the Jospin era. "During the Socialist era, between 1981 and 1995, the organization of the police was a bit different. We had less power at our disposal for a strong reaction-police power was spread out. Now it"s been regrouped. Now we have forces that can respond quickly and forcefully. This was a national initiative, but it suits us well here.
"The mentality is different now. We try to be visible. We try to be very present in difficult areas. That frightens the delinquents and rea.s.sures the honest people. That"s been our policy for the past few years. Now even small aggression, verbal aggression, is punished. Because that"s where it starts. We try to react quickly. If you leave it, if you don"t react, it degenerates rapidly. We want to avoid having others get the same idea, because here you have young people watching things on television, images of the Intifada. . . . We make arrests to show it won"t be tolerated." He was quick, however, to specify that these were republican arrests, not communitarian arrests: "In France we arrest individuals-it"s you who threw a stone at me, not the group to which you belong."
"Our model here isn"t repression, though," he added. "It"s permanent contacts among groups, in the schools, among a.s.sociations. The police have a permanent dialogue with neighborhood a.s.sociations- when there"s a problem, we go directly to the source. We have personal relationships with the Jewish community, with the Islamic community. We have personal contacts at many levels: Not only the chiefs but the cops on patrol have regular meetings with community representatives. Not only with religious leaders but with ethnic leaders." He caught himself: "But we keep this within the republican framework, not the communitarian one."
His deputy interrupted; he wanted to be sure I understood this: "It"s not the French tradition to be communitarian. It"s the inverse. It"s not like Britain, for example. We have very different traditions-we support integration. We strenuously avoid communitarianism."
It was not at all clear to me what this might mean: How can you have relations with the Islamic community without acknowledging that there is such a thing as an Islamic community? As I was later to conclude, the remarkable thing about Ma.r.s.eille is that its politics are in fact highly communitarian. Everyone simply insists vocally that they aren"t, as if this made it so.
Ma.r.s.eille"s success in avoiding the extremes of ethnic tension seen in other French cities was not, Carton freely offered, entirely attributable to his aggressive police work. "There"s the climate. There are lots of leisure activities. The beach is free. Hiking is free. You don"t have to spend money to enjoy yourself. If you"re in Paris and you don"t have money to go to restaurants, you"re excluded. We"re unique here. We have youth centers for kids from difficult neighborhoods- sports, boating. And then there"s the football team: that really unites people. All colors, they call out, "We"re Ma.r.s.eillais." It crosses all borders. They don"t say, "We"re beurs"; they say, "We"re Ma.r.s.eillais.""
Quite a few people mentioned this to me. Ma.r.s.eille has many free leisure activities, particularly sporting clubs for youths-boxing, judo, gymnastics, football. After hearing this over and over, I began to wonder whether the skepticism I"d felt about Midnight Basketball in America was warranted. Maybe these programs work?
"We have normal delinquency," the chief reflected, "but yes, ideological crime is marginal. We have traditional crime- French Connection crime."
I was later to realize that Ma.r.s.eille"s tradition of French Connection crime had more relevance to its present calm than one might suspect.
There are some untraditional problems in Ma.r.s.eille as well. Like the panther. That is how the police in Ma.r.s.eille spent the summer: hunting a panther. The chief deployed dozens of officers after residents reported spotting the animal. "For fifteen days we looked for the panther, but he turned out to be just a big fat cat. Here, we have a tradition of exaggeration. It"s prettier to say "a panther" than "a big fat cat." You know, there are lots of stories about people who find these animals when they"re young, and then when they grow up they don"t know what to do with them. So we took it seriously. We applied a lot of police power to that."
"It"s what we call the principle of precaution," his deputy added gravely, a finger resting against his nose. "You just can"t be too careful."
Ma.r.s.eILLE"S GIFT.
There is strong law enforcement, the wide geographic distribution of housing projects, activities for the young, the sun, the port, and the soccer team. But the remaining key to Ma.r.s.eille"s civility is the most interesting.
A historical interlude. Ma.r.s.eille is a merchant port, northern Europe"s natural outlet to the Mediterranean and the Suez Ca.n.a.l, a corridor between Orient and Occident. Its ident.i.ty is and has always been intimately bound with immigration. In the seventh century B.C., the chief of the landing Phoenician galleys-a man said to be as handsome as a G.o.d-married the daughter of the king of the local Ligurian tribe. The city"s origins are thus with a mixed couple, one native, one foreign.
According to Herodotus, Phoenician inhabitants took refuge in Ma.r.s.eille, then Ma.s.silia, when the Persians destroyed Phocaea. Then as now, the city was a haven for immigrants. Greeks, Romans, Genoans, Spaniards, Levantines, Venetians-all have come to Ma.r.s.eille and stayed. Each decade since the beginning of the twentieth century has seen the arrival of tens of thousands of new immigrants, most of them refugees: Armenian survivors of the Turkish genocide, German and Polish Jews, Republicans escaping the civil war in Spain, Vietnamese, Cambodians. The decolonization of the Maghreb brought a ma.s.sive influx of North Africans to the city, giving it its nickname: the capital of Africa.
The exact religious composition of Ma.r.s.eille is unknown, for French law prohibits census taking; the very act is considered ant.i.thetical to republicanism. By informal estimates, there are 190,000 Muslims, divided among 70,000 Algerians, 30,000 Tunisians, and 15,000 Moroccans. There are nearly 70,000 Comorians, making Ma.r.s.eille the second-largest Comorian city in the world. Muslims from black Africa number between 5,000 and 7,000. There are at least 65,000 Armenian churchgoers, 20,000 Buddhists, and tens of thousands of Orthodox Greeks.
Ma.r.s.eille"s 80,000 Jews const.i.tute 10 percent of the total population, their ranks swollen by Algerian repatriation. The presence of Jews in Ma.r.s.eille can be traced at least to the sixth century: Jews arrived in 574, fleeing forced conversion in Clermont-Ferrand. In 1484 and early 1485, shortly after the incorporation of Provence into France, the Jewish quarter of Ma.r.s.eille was plundered. Jews were murdered and the survivors fled, only to return again after the expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492. In the seventeenth century, Jews were expelled. They returned in 1760.
Between 1940 and 1942, Europe"s Jews again sought sanctuary in Ma.r.s.eille, then in the Free Zone. My grandparents were among them. Under the Occupation, the Jews were viciously hunted, arrested, and deported; my grandparents escaped with the help of their relatives in America. The dapper New York intellectual Varian Fry came to Ma.r.s.eille to lead the most successful private rescue operation of the Second World War, saving as many as 2,000 Jews, among them Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, and Alma Mahler Werfel. Of course, he could not save them all. The synagogue on the rue de Breteuil was pillaged and its facade destroyed, the prayer books and the Torah scrolls burned. When the Germans left the city, perhaps 5,000 Jews remained. They rebuilt the community and the synagogue.
Observers have long found Ma.r.s.eille"s flamboyantly diverse population alarming: In 1936, the violently anti-Semitic journalist Henri Beraud remarked in La Gerbe that inroads to the city had been transformed into giant sewers, a growing, crawling, fetid bog running over our land. It is this immense flood of Neapolitan filth, of Levantine rags, of sad, stinking Slavs, of dreadful, miserable Andalusians, the seed of Abraham and the asphalt of Judaea . . . doctrinaire ragheads, moth-eaten Polacks, b.a.s.t.a.r.ds of the ghettos, smugglers of weapons, desultory pistoleros, spies, usurers, gangsters, merchants of women and cocaine, they arrive preceded by their odor and escorted by their germs.2 But the inhabitants of Ma.r.s.eille have historically taken pride in the city"s vulgar cosmopolitanism, and its immigrants have always been politically powerful. The city has 2,600 years of experience with ethnic diversity, and it has developed strategies to cope with it. These strategies have not always been pretty, but they have worked.
The strategies have not conformed to any legal doctrine of republican France. Far from it. Ma.r.s.eille, autonomous until conquered by Charles of Anjou in the thirteenth century, was not bequeathed to the French crown until 1481 and has in some ways never become a fully a.s.similated French city. It is no great secret that its central political tradition, the one that sets it apart from the rest of France, is its exceptional corruption. Particularly, Ma.r.s.eille has notoriously tolerated crooked alliances between its city officials and its ethnic community leaders. Immigrant groups have flourished under this system of patronage and clientelism, one that has sh.o.r.ed up rigged electoral agreements while governing the distribution of subsidies and favors.
Local politicians have traditionally cultivated strong personal relationships with the leaders of Ma.r.s.eille"s various ethnic groups. During the Depression, for example, the mobsters Paul Bonnaventure Carbone and Francois Spirito-a Corsican and a Sicilian-achieved an understanding with Ma.r.s.eille"s fascist deputy mayor, Simon Sabiani. By making Carbone"s brother the director of the munic.i.p.al stadium, Sabiani opened munic.i.p.al employment to Ma.r.s.eille"s Corsicans and Sicilians. In return, the enterprising mobsters organized a shock corps to lead Fascist street demonstrations and, when asked, to publicly pummel leftist dockworkers and union members. Curiously, this corrupt and personal political tradition appears to have evolved into a mechanism for managing contemporary ethnic conflict. It is called Ma.r.s.eille Esperance.
Ma.r.s.eille Esperance-the Hope of Ma.r.s.eille-was inaugurated in 1990 by former mayor Robert Vigouroux and formally inst.i.tutionalized by the current mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin. Funded by City Hall, Ma.r.s.eille Esperance unites the city"s religious leaders around the mayor in a regular discussion group. Everyone I spoke with in Ma.r.s.eille, unanimously, pointed to the organization as key to the city"s social harmony. "Ma.r.s.eille Esperance is very important," the police chief said. "For unity. As soon as there"s a crisis, they calm things, they issue communiques-they are seen together. It"s symbolic, seeing them together, the rabbi, the preacher, the mufti."
Vigouroux created the group in 1990 specifically to stave off ethnoreligious conflict between Jews and Muslims. The extreme Right had recently placed strongly in the polls. Conflict was mounting over the construction of a central mosque in the city. Pa.s.sions were inflamed by the crisis in the Persian Gulf. The idea behind Ma.r.s.eille Esperance was simple: Each of the city"s religious communities would send a delegate to the group, which would meet regularly to discuss civic problems, to "combat intolerance, ignorance, and incomprehension," and to "promote respect for one another."
In the tradition of the city, the mayor maintains strong personal relationships with each member of the group. Whenever tension threatens to rise-for example, after the burning of the Or Aviv Synagogue in 2002, and at the beginning of hostilities in Iraq in 2003-the group meets and at the mayor"s urging makes some kind of very public display of solidarity. Islamic leaders were present for the burial of the charred Torah scrolls; they were photographed comforting Jewish religious leaders, standing with them arm in arm. This occurred in no other French city. Members of Ma.r.s.eille Esperance have taken trips to the Wailing Wall. They have hosted conferences and visits from such figures as the Dalai Lama, Elie Wiesel, and the Patriarch of Constantinople. An intercommunity gala is held annually. The organization is so widely held to be effective that government delegations from Brussels, Antwerp, Sarajevo, Barcelona, Naples, Turin, and Montreal have come to study it.
It is entirely counterintuitive that Ma.r.s.eille Esperance should work at all. I would never expect a symbolic and powerless group dedicated to "combating intolerance and ignorance" to be so effective, or, if not effective, to be perceived as so effective. But the faith placed in this group by everyone in Ma.r.s.eille was surprising and touching. It was the first thing everyone mentioned to me in our discussions, held out as a model for other cities, offered as proof that if only people would just get together and listen to one another respectfully, strife and violence around the world could be resolved.
I am chary of bodies that, like the League of Nations, appeal to n.o.ble principles with no will or mechanism to impose their fine ideals at the barrel of a gun, and refused at first to believe that this group could truly be any kind of key to the city"s comparative exemption from ethnic tension. But presented with example after example of Ma.r.s.eille Esperance"s civilizing influence, I was forced to conclude there must be something to it. When Ibrahim Ali, a young Comorian, was killed by neo-n.a.z.is, the mayor gathered the delegates of Ma.r.s.eille Esperance and enjoined them to pacify the community. They did so. They did so again when a young Frenchman, Nicolas Bourgat, was stabbed to death by a Moroccan immigrant. Ma.r.s.eille Esperance convened at City Hall after September 11. Standing by the mayor and the chief of police, the group issued a pa.s.sionate communique denouncing religious fanaticism; again, tensions in the city subsided. They convened at the commencement of recent hostilities in Iraq; afterward, at the urging of the mayor, the Muslim delegates returned to their mosques and called for calm. Other Muslim clerics throughout France used this occasion to incite a frenzy of anti-American and anti-Semitic bloodl.u.s.t.
The crucial point is not whether it works-it does seem to-but why it works. Although no one will admit it, Ma.r.s.eille Esperance is a political sleight of hand. It is, in effect, an end run around the government"s anticommunitarian principles. The violence now emerging from Islamic immigrants and directed toward Jews represents a breakdown in the republican scheme: certain Muslim immigrants are proving una.s.similable; ethnic ident.i.ty politics are proving stronger than the republican ideal. Of course, only a fraction of France"s Muslims are committing these crimes; most are peaceful citizens, prepared and even eager to be a.s.similated. But a stubbornly una.s.similable rump remains, and it is causing a great deal of grief. Part of the problem, certainly, is that Islam"s teachings const.i.tute a political program as well as a religious one: secularism and laicite are not readily reconciled with Islam"s insistence on the convergence-the ident.i.ty, even-of the political and devotional realms.21 The French government has no real idea what to do about this; no one in Europe does. There is no tradition, in France as a whole, of managing immigrants who cannot or will not a.s.similate. But in Ma.r.s.eille, there is.
Since the law forbids the recognition of ethnicity, the city recognizes religions-ethnicity by proxy. Ma.r.s.eille Esperance facilitates the emergence of personalities who represent whole ethnic groups and who forge links between their communities and the rest of the city. It affords Arabs-as Muslims-representation as a group in city politics. By means of their strong connection to the mayor"s office, community leaders have been able to promote an Islamic agenda effectively. They have secured, for example, elaborate slaughter facilities for the ritual animal sacrifice of Eid-el-Kebir and grave sites for Muslims in the Aygalades Cemetery. Negotiations for the construction of a central mosque and an Islamic cultural center in Ma.r.s.eille are under way. In return, the mayor demands that Islamic leaders keep the extremists in their community in check. Here we see the old Ma.r.s.eille tradition: One hand washes the other.
Nothing like Ma.r.s.eille Esperance exists in other French cities. Whatever community leaders and politicians may say-and all will deny it; it is heresy to endorse communitarianism in France-Ma.r.s.eille Esperance inst.i.tutionalizes and strengthens communitarian politics, and by bringing religion to the forefront of the political sphere, directly contravenes the ideal of laicite. It affords official recognition to personalities who act publicly in the name of their cultural and ethnic communities and who have the power to bring the members of those communities into line. In other words, a system born of Ma.r.s.eille"s traditions of patronage and corruption-a tradition entirely ant.i.thetical to France"s republican ideals-now helps to keep the peace.
It"s a gift to Ma.r.s.eille from the mob.
A DELICATE BALANCE.
The mayor, as a personality, is central to this delicately balanced communitarian ecosystem. In an adroit piece of political jujitsu, Jean-Claude Gaudin defeated the National Front in 1995 while simultaneously putting the Left out of power for the first time since 1953. He is notably one of the most philo-Semitic politicians in France, and a committed Zionist. His official visit to Israel in early 2004 took him to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Maale Adumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank. There he declared that "Israeli land must not be given to others." "Speak not of colonies," he added, "but of constructions." On the same trip, he remarked that he had come to appreciate the strategic significance of the Golan Heights. Later, on French radio, he insisted that the settlements were "villas, not shantytowns." He stressed to a.s.sembled Israeli reporters that he favored the transfer of the French emba.s.sy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. His philo-Semitism has carried over to the city"s politics: He is known for his alacrity in responding to anti-Semitic incidents; when hostile graffiti is reported, for example, he sends his own services to remove it, usually within the hour. This is not the case in other French cities; recently, for example, in Perpignan, I found fading anti-Semitic graffiti-Juden raus!- scrawled on the walls of a children"s playground; it had clearly been there for quite some time. I have seen many similar messages in Paris.
Was the mayor a sincere Zionist, I wondered, or was this mere posturing, a quid pro quo in exchange for the electoral support of Ma.r.s.eille"s Jews? I put this question to his adjunct mayor, Daniel Sperling, who is also a prominent member of Ma.r.s.eille"s Jewish community. "When a mayor takes an interest in Israel," he replied, "of course it"s because he"s interested in Jews in France. But the mayor is sincere. First of all, he"s a practicing Catholic; he comes from the Christian Democratic tradition. . . . The mayor, like Chirac and other members of the Right, has always sincerely admired Israel, the way it was created, the way it works, as a political project, how they transformed the land given them after the Balfour Declaration by means of a strong ideology. . . . The mayor has always been, how to say it, more than respectful. Impressed by the way the Jews have always conducted themselves."
A sincere Zionist, then.
"But until a certain time, he confused Israel and the Jews. Up to a point. It"s okay, he understands now. He"s an old politician; he"s seventy-five years old, he"s been in politics for twenty-five years, and for him, Israel was the Jews. A few times, talking to Jews of Ma.r.s.eille, he called Israel "your country.""
This is quite a fundamental error. To suggest that French Jews are not fully French is not republican at all. Even the mayor of Ma.r.s.eille-and perhaps especially the mayor of Ma.r.s.eille-seems something less than completely committed to this principle.
I wondered to what extent the mayor"s public kinship with Israel and Jews was related to Ma.r.s.eille"s comparative calm. Had he set the tone for the city? Had he obliquely sent a message to its Arab population that violence against Jews would not be tolerated? "Of course," Sperling said. "The mayor is impressed by zero tolerance, by the example of New York." But he seemed to think the key point was not so much that the mayor had reached out to Ma.r.s.eille"s Jews, but that the Jews had reached out to the mayor. "I organized the mayor"s last trip to Israel. I"m a member of the many Jewish a.s.sociations here. For more than thirty years I"ve been part of the community. I know it by heart.
"But," he quickly added, "my power isn"t about lobbying, like in the United States. We don"t have anything like AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee]. That doesn"t exist here; it"s not organized like that. It"s more effective here because it"s more discreet, and secret." Sperling presents himself as a superbly articulate, polished politician, so I was surprised that he was willing so freely to admit that Jews exercise covert control over Ma.r.s.eille"s politics. The claim seemed both indiscreet and inconsistent with the principle of republicanism- although consistent with everything else I was learning about Ma.r.s.eille. "There are many people here who want to kill me for it, of course." I chuckled politely, then realized he wasn"t joking.
Sperling held that despite the way it sounded, the fashion in which he represented his community to the mayor was not a form of communitarianism. "Jews aren"t a lobby group here the way they are in the United States. That"s not in the statutory law of France, of the republic. I am against communitarianism. I am a French elected official who happens to be Jewish. But I fight communitarianism. I am part of the French republic. I am elected for all the citizens. That"s my personal path. When there are Jewish demonstrations in Ma.r.s.eille, I send a non-Jew to talk to them. Always. So that non-Jews see." What Sperling seemed to be saying, then, was that community politics are only community politics if they take place in public. In private, obviously, it"s another story.
In any event, the mayor"s determination to stamp out anti-Semitism-whether motivated by his sincere idealism or by the Jews" persistent but officially nonexistent lobbying-is clearly relevant to his interest in and commitment to Ma.r.s.eille Esperance.
Of late, Sperling allowed, there has been a bit of a problem. Local Muslims recently elected the radical cleric Mourad Zerfaoui to the presidency of the Regional Muslim Council, and Zerfaoui is not much of a team player. In fact, Zerfaoui is such an extremist-he has condemned Ma.r.s.eille"s other Muslim leaders as "puppets who move in the hands of the West and America"-that the mayor"s office has no idea how to deal with him, and thus does not. I seized upon this tidbit with interest, wondering if it suggested the limits to the mayor"s patience with community politics. I asked Sperling if I might be permitted to speak to the mayor himself. He told me that I could submit my questions to the mayor in writing. I did so, asking-innocently enough, I thought-whether the mayor"s refusal to engage with Zerfaoui contravened the spirit of Ma.r.s.eille Esperance.
After several days I had received no answer. I called Sperling to ask whether the mayor had ever received my questions. To my astonishment, I received a ferocious scolding: My question had been, he said, impertinent and inappropriate, and particularly offensive given the time he had generously devoted to discussing Ma.r.s.eille"s political life with me. To propose that the mayor was snubbing Zerfaoui, he said, amounted to a declaration of war, suggesting as it did that the mayor might be un raciste. I am not exaggerating here. He really said this.
I was flummoxed: What on earth was he talking about? At last, after discharging a great deal more spleen, he suffered himself to pa.s.s me to the mayor"s spokeswoman, Marie-Noelle Mivielle. She, too, was in a lather about my impertinent question. "It"s not the mayor who refuses to speak to Zerfaoui!" she insisted, hysteria creeping into her voice. "It"s Zerfaoui who will not return his calls!" She stressed to me that the mayor had done so much for Ma.r.s.eille"s Islamic community, had made such efforts to organize planning for the construction of a central mosque, had lent such support to the enlargement of existing mosques, had even made available a multipurpose room for Muslim cultural activities! Of course, I said soothingly, of course. Of course he cares. I would never dream of suggesting otherwise.
At that point, I just wanted to get off the phone alive.
This bizarre incident, I suspect, signifies the degree to which communitarian politics have come to dominate Ma.r.s.eille"s civic life. The mayor so fears the appearance of excluding anyone that I managed to violate six thousand kinds of protocol just by suggesting that he might be. I have never before witnessed such defensiveness about an official"s commitment to ethnic outreach-not even on an American university campus. And that"s saying something.
CO-OPTING THE MODERATES: EUROPE"S ONLY HOPE.
I stopped in the Internet cafe below my hotel each morning to check my e-mail. Ads in the window advertised cheap long-distance rates to Algeria, Morocco, the Comoros. When I entered the address of my e-mail server, I looked at the sites checked by patrons before me: www.aljazeera.com. The home page of the Islamic a.s.sociation for Palestine. These addresses were intermingled with p.o.r.nography: www.swapyourwife.com. No one looked at anything else. This vivid ill.u.s.tration of the chief concerns of Ma.r.s.eille"s exogenous population made the city"s harmony seem all the more striking to me. It could so easily be otherwise.
Of course, Ma.r.s.eille is not some kind of pluralistic utopia. While there is less anti-Semitic tension in Ma.r.s.eille than in comparable French cities, there is tension nonetheless. Yet the fact remains that in Ma.r.s.eille, unlike other French cities, the worst of the tension has been dampened. A show of force from the cops, a few calming words from the local mufti, a symbolic meeting of the local religious leaders, and Ma.r.s.eille returned to its usual preoccupations-the football team, the sun, the sea, panthers on the loose. However tempting it is to ridicule the exaggerated political correctness emanating from the mayor"s office, it is only honest to concede that they are doing something right, at least for now.
Could these solutions be applied elsewhere? The curious case of Ma.r.s.eille raises important questions for the rest of France, and indeed for much of Europe. As Europe"s demography changes, ethnic conflict in its cities will continue to grow. What can be done? Ma.r.s.eille"s success in coping with such conflict is, obviously, an advertis.e.m.e.nt for strong police work-a strategy combining New Yorkstyle zero tolerance with personal relationships between police and ethnic community leaders. Ma.r.s.eille is a rebuke to a housing policy that in the rest of France has shunted immigrants to the city periphery. It is an endors.e.m.e.nt of social programs that give kids something benign and inexpensive to do.
But most significant, Ma.r.s.eille suggests that the French republican ideal is dying. It was a n.o.ble experiment. But its days are over. Ma.r.s.eille functions in large part because its const.i.tuent ethnicities, particularly its Arab immigrants, are recognized, organized, courted, and given voice in a formal system. Although everyone in France extols the principle of republicanism, Ma.r.s.eille, by compromising that principle, is the only city in France that has kept the French Intifada at bay.
Now let me make one thing clear: In admiring this achievement, I am in no way endorsing the kind of freewheeling multiculturalism that is, in effect, a moral relativism that often shades into nihilism. Nor am I applauding the self-extinguishing form of tolerance that results in state sponsorship of radical mosques. There is a difference between observing that it is good idea to give ethnic groups a vehicle by which to express themselves politically and declaring that anything these ethnic groups want or do is acceptable. But perhaps there is a compromise- one rooted in pragmatism, not ideology. An absolutely uncompromising att.i.tude toward ethnicity, it would seem, disheartens moderates and encourages extremists. When certain groups are given a formal means to express a reasonable and moderate ethnic agenda, the violent and immoderate elements of that group may more readily be contained by the moderate ones, who have been co-opted into the system.
Indeed, France"s innovative interior minister has already happened upon this idea: Sarkozy has negotiated with France"s moderate Muslim leaders to create the French Muslim Council, the first representative body of French Muslims to be formally recognized by the government. The council will, among other things, secure chaplaincies in the army and prisons, acquire Muslim burial sites, deliver halal meat certificates and build-with the government"s financial support-new mosques and prayer halls. "What we should be afraid of," Sarkozy has said, "is Islam gone astray, garage Islam, bas.e.m.e.nt Islam, underground Islam." His implication, obviously, is that there is another kind of Islam, one that can be domesticated, Westernized, co-opted. I hope he is right.
A tradition of corrupt politics is certainly not a necessary precondition for the establishment of systems like Ma.r.s.eille"s in other cities. All that is required is civic leaders committed to creating and strengthening the city"s relationships with ethnic community leaders. Organizations modeled on Ma.r.s.eille Esperance could be created and maintained, with relatively small investment, in any European city. They might work. They might not. They are certainly worth trying.
Anything is worth trying. If immigrants cannot be a.s.similated and they cannot be sent back-and they can"t-Europe must find some way to make its peace with them. If not, as Villepin remarked, the worst is not behind them. It is ahead of them.
CHAPTER 5.
WE SURRENDER!.
THE REJECTION OF ALL MORAL ABSOLUTES, Chantal Delsol argues, is the source of the profound risk aversion of the modern European. "In general," she writes, "our contemporary cannot imagine for what cause he would sacrifice his life because he does not know what his life means." 1 Though Delsol does not explicitly say so, this is as good an explanation as we are apt to find for the willingness of the Spanish people instantly and obediently to capitulate to the demands of the terrorists who last year slaughtered some 200 of their countrymen.
On March 11, 2004, three days before Spain"s legislative elections-exactly six months after the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon-terrorists linked to al Qaeda bombed four commuter trains in Madrid, killing nearly 200 men, women, and children and injuring 1,600 more. The bombs had been timed to detonate during the morning rush hour. They exploded with such force that severed limbs were thrown through the windows of nearby apartment buildings.
On the following day, authorities retrieved a videotape from a trash basket near a Madrid mosque. "We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid," said the man on the video, who claimed to be issuing a statement from the military spokesman for al Qaeda in Europe. "This is a response to the crimes that you caused in the world, and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there will be more if G.o.d wills it." He added the obvious: "You love life, and we love death."
Hours before the polls opened on Sunday, demonstrators filled the streets of Spain. The focus of their outrage was not al Qaeda but Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, who had committed Spanish troops to Iraq and had, the demonstrators believed, obfuscated evidence that the bombings had been committed by Islamic radicals, not Basque terrorists. The prime minister had been expected to win reelection with a large majority, but the voters responded to the ma.s.sacre by voting into office the opposition candidate, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who pledged to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq immediately.