M y reaction to John Borneman's thoughtprovoking and analytically acute article was one of ethnographic depaysement, of a certain confusion as to what place Borneman might be describing. Hence, as I was about to leave for Paris for a week when I received it, I thought I would test my reaction to piece there. A week later, my sense of unfamiliarity persisted. Thinking of Japan that Roland Barthes self-consciously depicted in his Empire of Signs (1982) as an imaginary semiotic space not to be confused with anything empirical, I admired Borneman's construction but doubted existence of its referent. The week of May 12,2003, was a week of strikes in France; large numbers of members protested proposed changes in pension system, which everyone agrees needs restructuring, and also manifested solidarity with strong negative reaction of teaching corps, as French call them, to proposed school reforms that would further decentralize both administration and finances. The articulated motive driving protests was fear that government was secretly introducing a form of neoliberalism. As France is indeed an advanced capitalist country, this fear was no doubt well-founded. Another key problem remained in background, however, a problem that lies behind issues of pension and schools: France's resolute and sustained unwillingness or inability to deal in a frontal and consistent manner with immigration. One can deploy many euphemisms for this phenomenon, but ultimately it amounts to racism; pension system requires either higher taxes and more years of worker contribution or more immigration of young workers, who would in their majority be North African. The U.S. model of large-scale immigration, exploitation, and hope of upward mobility is simply not on agenda in France (or anywhere else in Europe). Additionally, many of problems in schools stem from failure to integrate by now third-generation children of North African descent. Both right and left agree that France should be a secular state and that all signs of Muslim identity—most famously head scarf—run counter to France's basic values. At its recent convention, devastated Socialist Party stopped hedging and affirmed its undying commitment to la'iciti (secularism). This has been right-wing position all along. Thus, one remains confused as to what Borneman is referring when he calls career of far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen stunted (this issue). Le Pen came in second to Chirac in last elections, ahead of socialists. Both right and left are implementing his programs. The present government, taking another of Le Pen's favorite issues, was elected on a platform of security and has spent massive sums on police. That money has come from research budgets that are currently being cut by as much as one-third, from large cuts in state support for arts, from school budgets, and from health care system. A national commission is establishing new standards to deny health care to immigrants. One could characterize these changes as contributing to a vision of egalitarian, cosmopolitan democracies in an economic and legal union (this issue), but in so doing one would be involved much more in producing an imaginary semiotic space than in practicing anthropology. The core issue confronting world, Borneman contends, is politics of Middle East. He contrasts aggressive imperialism of United States with more internationalist stance of Europe. He mentions the exhaustion of Europe's moral (this issue) after World War II but seems to assume that Europe's moral authority has been reestablished since. There are many reasons to doubt such a claim. I recently raised this issue with Etienne Balibar, who has been writingaboutpossiblenew paths for European politics; when I asked him about what I took to be selfevident collapse of Europe's moral authority (we had been discussing genocide in former Yugoslavia, ongoing massacres in Algeria, and silence around Chechnya), he looked momentarily surprised—this was clearly a U.S. question—and then agreed with a resigned chuckle that of course such moral authority had long since collapsed, although there were political domains in which one could imagine European strategic interventions. We went on to explore these possibilities. On plane home 1 read a moving book by Benjamin Stora, Le Gangrene et l'Oubli{\99\), about historiography in both Algeria and France of war of decolonization, its antecedents, and its aftermath; Stora's thesis, which he demonstrates at length, is stunning failure on both sides of Mediterranean to accept core historical facts into popular (and to a lesser extent, scholarly) understandings. Stora underscores an unwillingness, an incapacity, to talk frankly about many elements of an intertwined history,
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Jan 1, 2016
Yeşim Sevinç 
Open Access
