Making Racism Respectable: Islamophobia in Sarkozy's France

TY - JOUR

T1 - Making Racism Respectable

T2 - Islamophobia in Sarkozy's France

AU - Wolfreys, Jim

PY - 2013/6

Y1 - 2013/6

N2 - This article charts the increasing legitimacy of populist racism in mainstream French politics, manifested in the adoption of intolerant rhetoric, the preoccupation with ‘national identity’, the concomitant rehabilitation of colonial values, the introduction of Islamophobic legislation and the emergence of Nicolas Sarkozy as the first mainstream politician successfully to emulate the Front National’s anti-immigrant and Islamophobic demagoguery. Fault-lines in the Republican tradition of ‘integration’ are being exposed as the cultural practices of those who do not conform to French ‘norms’ are stigmatised and the notion of integration invested with colonial assumptions about France’s ‘civilising mission’. Ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims, are castigated for alleged ‘communitarian’ impulses and held responsible for their own discrimination, producing a stigmatisation along ethnic and racial lines of the victims of social inequality and contributing to an ‘ethnicisation of social relations’. Such developments cannot simply be explained by the role of the Front National in setting the terms of public debate. They also derive from the entrenchment of neo-liberal economic management across mainstream parties and its role in exacerbating social divisions. This article identifies racist populism as a means of obfuscating the causes of social inequality and of compensating for the lack of widespread positive affiliation to neo-liberal values. Its pervasiveness may be understood in part as a consequence of the failure of alternative political projects to challenge prevailing ideas about the relationship between the state, the market and the individual.

AB - This article charts the increasing legitimacy of populist racism in mainstream French politics, manifested in the adoption of intolerant rhetoric, the preoccupation with ‘national identity’, the concomitant rehabilitation of colonial values, the introduction of Islamophobic legislation and the emergence of Nicolas Sarkozy as the first mainstream politician successfully to emulate the Front National’s anti-immigrant and Islamophobic demagoguery. Fault-lines in the Republican tradition of ‘integration’ are being exposed as the cultural practices of those who do not conform to French ‘norms’ are stigmatised and the notion of integration invested with colonial assumptions about France’s ‘civilising mission’. Ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims, are castigated for alleged ‘communitarian’ impulses and held responsible for their own discrimination, producing a stigmatisation along ethnic and racial lines of the victims of social inequality and contributing to an ‘ethnicisation of social relations’. Such developments cannot simply be explained by the role of the Front National in setting the terms of public debate. They also derive from the entrenchment of neo-liberal economic management across mainstream parties and its role in exacerbating social divisions. This article identifies racist populism as a means of obfuscating the causes of social inequality and of compensating for the lack of widespread positive affiliation to neo-liberal values. Its pervasiveness may be understood in part as a consequence of the failure of alternative political projects to challenge prevailing ideas about the relationship between the state, the market and the individual.

M3 - Article

SN - N/A

VL - 1

JO - Global Social Justice Journal

JF - Global Social Justice Journal

IS - 1

ER -