15.01.2004
Unsure what to think
Alliance for Workers' Liberty sits on the fence
"Tous ensemble" (all together). French president Jacques Chirac appropriated the slogan of the trade union movement to end his speech about the Stasi commission on the separation of church and state. He has taken to using that slogan. The commission of 20 'wise men' headed by former minister Bernard Stasi was appointed in July 2003 and reported just before Christmas. Chirac pronounced himself in favour of the commission's main proposal: to ban the wearing in schools and colleges of conspicuous symbols of religious or political allegiance.
Ostensibly this measure aims at ending confusion about the existing legal situation: currently schools can choose whether they interpret a law of 1905 separating state education from the church to support exclusions of pupils from school who persist in wearing religious symbols. In recent years, this has affected only a handful of young women wearing the muslim headscarf.
The original law might have been intended to apply only to the providers of education, not its consumers. Of course, the 1905 law and other legislation was passed to separate the state from a catholic church, then very powerful. Chirac claims that the new law is about no privileges for - or, he says, discrimination against - any one religion in a society where there are many faiths and many people of no faith. Different also from 1905, women and men are equal in the republic. Chirac's speech hinted - and only hinted, not said explicitly - that the aim of a proposed ban is to help liberate muslim women from restrictions on their dress and movements.
Will the legislation help to forge the harmony that Chirac claimed it is for? That looks unlikely. The proposed law is seen by many - and by most French muslims - as a piece of discriminatory legislation adversely affecting their faith before all the others, and moreover is intended as such.
Why this now? Chirac's speech was heavy with praise for French republican traditions, and warned darkly but vaguely of tensions created by globalisation and the rise of fundamentalisms throughout the world that are forcing different cultural groups in on themselves. "Communalism is not an option for France," he said.
He promised at the same time to combat the racism and discrimination, the social deprivation that might (he was vague here too) cause young people of immigrant communities to pooh-pooh the idea of their great common French heritage and the 'republican pact'.
Does he mean it? Of course he does not! And in his speech there was no acknowledgement of the republic's less than glorious heritage of oppressing colonies.
Leftwingers in France are divided about the issue of a ban on religious symbols. You will hardly find anyone to defend the idea that the headscarf is somehow liberating for young women. One of the main far-left groups, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has supported the few exclusions of muslim girls from schools for wearing a headscarf where negotiation and compromise have failed. But it opposes the law.
The other main far-left group, Lutte Ouvrière, is more cautious - not supporting the proposed law but saying it could be "a point of support for all those girls who want to resist the sexist pressures they suffer".
Many groups central to the fight against the headscarf and for the rights of women, especially in muslim communities - groups such as Ni Putes Ni Soumises - support a headscarf ban.
The main federation of teachers' unions is against. Gerard Aschieri, general secretary of the Fédération Syndicale Unitaire, which organises teachers at all levels, said that such legislation would not get to the bottom of the problem: "It is manifestly a political manoeuvre to show the government doing something. It's easier to produce a text than carry out a real policy against exclusion and an education policy that carries on the struggle for secularism."
It is indeed hard to take seriously the government's claim to be the champions of secularism. This is a government that subsidises the pupils of private, including faith, schools; they receive more public money per head than state school pupils. Will that anomaly be tackled in legislation?
Whatever we think of the possible law, it will be once more one law for the rich and another for the rest. Those are the limits of Chirac's "tous ensemble".
Vicki Morris (from Solidarity January 9)