Political liberalism and French national identity in the wake of the face-veiling law

Abstract

Political liberalism suggests state power must be exercised and justified on terms all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse, independently of their comprehensive identities or worldviews. For Rawls, a democratic community cannot be united by any shared ends or identities other than those connected with the political conception of justice itself. Republican political thought often seems to undermine this ‘liberal principle of legitimacy’ through its stronger demands of social cohesion and participative civic virtue. Conversely, however, it generally seeks to define citizenship independently of any non-political commonalities citizens might be assumed to share. This theoretical tension was reflected in recent French republican discourses on Islam, gender and national identity. France's recent prohibition on public face-veiling coincided with an officially orchestrated debate on national identity which seemed to challenge the traditional republican conception of national identity as a purely civic and political construct. While couched in republican terminologies, these recent discourses seemed to understand the principle of laïcité, or constitutional secularism, as a bulwark for the pre-political dimensions of national identity. Accordingly, this article outlines how these discourses on religion and gender illuminated tensions and contradictions within the prevailing republican account of national identity.

Overcoming essentialisation: a comparative study of ‘living-together’ conceptions

“…19–20). Accordingly, the simplistic ‘Jacobin’ image of France represents only one side of the coin (Birnbaum, 1998; Daly, 2013, p. 373). In the later part of the nineteenth century, a strong conservative current emerged that stressed the cultural and historic unity of France both against internal minorities and Enlightenment ideas and also external pressures (notably the Prussian annexation of Alsace-Lorraine).…”

“…It is against this historical background that the recent refurbishment of ‘national identity’ has to be read. Starting from the electoral campaign in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy resorted to arguments about the majority's identity as opposed to the presence of Muslims on the national territory (Noiriel, 2007, p. 112; Daly, 2013, p. 378). Moreover, he established the connection between immigration and national identity, as ‘immigration politics’ would ‘determine the identity of France in 30 years’ (Noiriel, 2007, pp.…”

“…The contemporary revival of laïcité is oriented to questioning the compatibility of immigrants’ religion with it. Actually, laïcité is today mainly invoked to ostracise ostensible Muslim practices from the landscape of public visibility (Daly, 2013, pp. 379–380).…”

The indivisibility of the French republic as political theory and constitutional doctrine

“…Perhaps it was no coincidence that the centre-right government launched a public debate on 'national identity', implicitly problematising immigrant identities, soon after the onset of the economic crisis in 2008. 103 This crisis of universalism is reflected, of course, in the incremental dilution of the indivisibility doctrine, as described in the first section. The Rousseauian heritage of the indivisibility doctrine is undermined not by the asymmetrical or decentralised nature of the republican state, but only by the abandonment of legislative universality and uniformity.…”

Reframing the Universalist Republic

“…7 Despite a general tendency towards official recognition of legal pluralism during the Fifth Republic, the Mayotte example demonstrates a countervailing tendency towards greater problematization and regulation of personal law in the name of ‘republican’ principles, including gender equality and secularism in particular. Broadly speaking, this tracks wider metropolitan discourses – particularly the controversies concerning laïcité and Islam – in which republican citizenship is understood as being inconsistent with ways of life centred on traditional cultural and religious identities (Daly, 2013b). For example, one senator pondered whether, given the Mahorais attachment to its legal tradition, ‘the strong Islamic presence [on the island] might render départmentalisation impossible’, whilst others emphasized, in positive terms, the ‘moderate’ character of Mayotte’s Islamic practices, along with the matrilineal customary rules – stemming from a customary Malagasy law – that were framed as a counterfoil to a problematized Islamic influence (Senate report, 2008: 14).…”