Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  There was, however, opposition in some circles to the new thinking on multiculturalism. The old woollen town of Bradford had been defined by the Industrial Revolution, the birthplace of the Independent Labour Party, the proximity of the Brontë’s Parsonage at Haworth, and the 1970 filming of The Railway Children. From the 1960s an immigrant population came to work in the textile mills, transport services and catering from Mirpur in Azad Kashmir, conquered by the British in the 1840s and part of Pakistan since 1947. Mohammed Ajeed, who came to Britain from Mirpur in 1957 with a degree from Karachi University, became lord mayor of Bradford in 1985, the first Asian mayor in Britain, but as the textile industry declined and unemployment increased, so racial tensions worsened.

  Raymond Honeyford, the headteacher of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, where most children were of Muslim origin, was of Manchester working-class origin, his father wounded in the First World War and his mother from a family of Irish immigrants. Early in 1984 he complained in the right-wing Salisbury Review that he had had enough of a multiculturalism that required halal meat to be served in the canteen, separate swimming and PE lessons for Muslim girls and permitted non-participation in sex education lessons. He also argued that black pupils performed worse in school because of family breakdown and ‘lefty teachers’. This provoked a ‘Honeyford out!’ campaign in 1984 by parents and the Muslim community, but Honeyford was defended by the white population of Bradford, Conservative MPs and the Daily Mail and he was even received in Downing Street by Mrs Thatcher in October 1985. His reinstatement provoked a boycott of the school by Muslim parents and the Bradford Council of Mosques. Mayor Ajeed, who supported them, received hate mail, his house was stoned and his wife and daughter received obscene telephone calls.72

  In France, under a socialist president and government, things seemed to go in a different direction. A majority of the population, immigrants included, looked forward to a new era, defined by the egalitarian and universalist principles of the French Revolution. From housing estates like Les Minguettes, groups of Beurs descended into Lyon town centre to take expensive cars and indulge in an orgy of joy-riding. The party did not last. On 21 March the police had their revenge, chasing a gang into a block of flats at Les Minguettes and using extreme violence to arrest them. For once the youths did not reply with violence. They organised a sit-in at the Vénissieux town hall to protest at police violence and then began a hunger strike, visited by the archbishop of Lyon. On 20 June 1983, however, attempting to free a child from the jaws of a police dog, Toumi Djaïdja was shot in the stomach by an officer. Later he understood that he was being treated like ‘residue of the Algerian War’ by officers many of whom had fought in it.73 Having recovered, he visited the Larzac plateau to learn about non-violent protest from former gauchistes and sheep-farmers who were resisting the extension of a military base.74 He, his comrades and the local clergy organised a March for Equality, also known as the Marche des Beurs, which began in Marseille with twelve ‘disciples’ on 15 October 1983 (Figure 5.2). Along the way the van accompanying them played Bob Marley’s 1975 ‘Get up, stand up’. In Paris on 3 December they were greeted by a crowd of 100,000, to whom Djaïdja replied, ‘Bonjour à la France de tous les couleurs’. He was whisked off to the Élysée for an audience with President Mitterrand, who announced that the position of immigrants would now be regularised by a ten-year joint residency and work permit.75

  Figure 5.2 The March for Equality from Marseille to Paris, 1983.

  Getty Images / Jean MUSCAT / Gamma-Rapho / 847658590

  The story did not end altogether happily, however. The police were keen to exact revenge and Toumi Djaïdja was arrested in October 1984, spending three months in prison. The cause of the Beurs was taken up by an organisation called SOS-Racisme, which distributed badges with the slogan ‘Touche pas à mon pote’ (‘Hands off my buddy’) and held a rock concert on the Place de la Concorde on 15 June 1985. It soon transpired, however, that SOS-Racisme was operated by the Socialist Party, and the Beurs withdrew their support.76

  At precisely this time the Front National which had been formed in 1972 but to date had made little impact, made its first big electoral breakthrough. This may be explained by the defeat of the mainstream Right in 1981 and the victory of socialism. It may also be seen as a push-back by French people who had fought Algerian rebels in Algeria now having to deal with the increasing presence and profile of immigrant Algerians in metropolitan France. In the municipal elections of March 1983, Le Pen won 12 per cent of the vote in the populous Parisian 20th arrondissement. In the bleak town of Dreux, west of Paris, which had a large immigrant population, his closest ally, Jean-Pierre Stirbois, secured 17 per cent and, in a rerun of the election because of irregularities, formed a coalition with other right-wing parties and became one of three Front National assistant mayors of the town. This breakthrough was France’s Smethwick election, but nearly twenty years later. On 13 February 1984 Le Pen was able for the first time to demonstrate his rhetorical skills and down-to-earth arguments to a national audience on the popular TV programme, L’Heure de Vérité. He explained simply that

  I apply a sort of hierarchy of sentiments and preferences. I prefer my daughters to my cousins, my cousins to my neighbours, those I don’t know to my enemies. Consequently I prefer French people, and have every right to do so. After that I prefer Europeans, then Westerners and as far as other countries in the world are concerned I prefer France’s allies and those who like her. That seems a good rule to me.77

  This gave rise to a book, Les Français d’abord, in which his analysis was more historical. ‘In the second half of the twentieth century’, he explained, ‘the population explosion in underdeveloped countries, especially African and Asian countries, has driven Europe back to its frontiers of the Year 1000’. This linked a demographic phenomenon ‘out there’ to fears – as a result of government weakness – that decolonisation resulted in waves of immigrants ‘over here’. In his own 20th arrondissement, he clarified, there were schools which had only 20 per cent French children. The result was a dramatic reversal of hierarchies: ‘We are fighting an immigration policy’, he concluded, ‘that will make us, French people, enslaved foreigners in our own country’.78 The Front National went on to win 11 per cent of the vote in the 1984 European elections and secured ten seats, including ones for Le Pen and Stirbois.79

  Threatened by the rise of the Front National, the mainstream right-wing parties moved further to the right to retain a hold on its electorate. Charles Pasqua, the hard-line minister of the interior in the Chirac government of 1986, sponsored a law on the conditions of entry and residence of foreigners in France that made it possible to expel non-nationals by administrative order. The case was made that this was also an anti-terrorist measure. In October that year the press and television carried pictures of a hundred handcuffed Malians being manhandled onto a plane at Orly airport.80 The rising panic about immigration translated into a debate about national identity. Alain Griotteray of Figaro Magazine argued that France was going the same way as Lebanon and even Great Britain, with its ‘Pakistanis, Indians and Jamaicans’. They had triggered race riots across the country in 1981, he argued, which ‘broke completely with the basic principles of British civil order’. ‘A France with a substantial black or North African population’, he concluded, ‘would no longer be France. It would be something else: a European Brazil, an Arabia of the North or an Islam of the West.’81

  Particular concern was felt about the children born to immigrants in France who, according to the current rules, would automatically become French nationals on their eighteenth birthday, whether they requested it or not. These children were felt to be as attached to their place of origin as to France and would become only ‘French on paper’. It was argued that a quarter of young Algerians opted to do their military service in Algeria rather than France, although the call-up was for two years rather than one.82 In 1988 a Nationality Commission was set up to look in particular at whether the French-bo
rn children should be required to opt for French nationality and demonstrate a sufficient degree of assimilation to things French. Giving testimony to it, Henry de Lesquen, president of the right-wing think tank the Club de l’Horloge, asked, ‘Do we want a multi-cultural society or do we want to preserve our cultural identity? We will see France explode. There are too many historical precedents: Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, India.’83 The Commission concluded that young people born in France of foreign parents should indeed be required to opt for French nationality, altough doing French military service should carry with it French nationality.

  In both France and Britain ‘colonisation in reverse’ thus provoked a colonialist backlash. In an early phase this took the form of spontaneous racial prejudice and racial violence and the imposition of ‘colour bars’ that reproduced colonial hierarchies. These feelings were then exploited by politicians who linked loss of empire to immigration from former colonies and sought a populist base against what it saw as a weak-kneed establishment. That establishment responded by raising barriers to immigration and beginning to develop British and French identities that cast aside experiments in multiculturalism. Although the Labour government of 1964 also tried to limit immigration from the former colonies, its presence was a red rag to emerging populists. The survival of right-wing governments in France until 1981 kept the extreme Right longer at bay but, even though twenty years after Enoch Powell, the breakthrough of Jean-Marie Le Pen caused no less of a political earthquake.

  6

  Europe: In or Out?

  In the second half of the twentieth century both France and Britain were in search of reconciling the reinvention of empire with the development of an economic and political Europe. An observer in the 1960s might have thought it logical for both powers to move from historic empire to the modern European project. As the sun set on empires which reached their peak in the Victorian era or Third Republic so in the postwar world Europe held out new hopes for peace and prosperity. Things were not, of course, as simple as that. Ideas of empire never vanished but were constantly reinvented to deal both with challenges of international reach and of immigration from formerly colonised countries. Moreover, empire and Europe were for a long time seen not as ‘either or’ choices but as ‘both and’. This juggling act was kept up longer by France than by Britain, which came to consider entry into Europe as a defeat of its imperial ambitions.

  ‘The England of Kipling is Dead’

  Harold Macmillan’s wind of change speech, delivered in Cape Town on 3 February 1960, makes sense only if it is understood in connection with his thinking on Europe. The Empire was fast disappearing and, to his mind, the Commonwealth was no longer strong enough or united enough to sustain her world influence. Britannic nationalism was a thing of the past. ‘You and I were born into a very different world’, he told Robert Menzies in February 1962, ‘Queen Victoria, the Jubilee, Kipling’. ‘And now here we are, my dear Bob, two old gentlemen, prime ministers of our respective countries, sixty years on, rubbing our eyes and wondering what has happened.’ The old Commonwealth, he continued, was ‘like a small intimate house party. Now it is becoming a sort of miniature United Nations, with various groups; the Afro-Asian strength strongly organised.’1 The time had come to catch up with the European Economic Community, which had already been in existence for five years.

  De Gaulle had for a long time been hostile to Europe. He had opposed the proposed European Defence Community in 1952–4 on the grounds that the French army would fall under the command of the United States and revive German militarism.2 When he returned to power in 1958, however, he realised that a Europe composed of France, the Benelux countries, the Federal Republic of Germany and Italy, could in fact be a vehicle for French domination of Western Europe. To some, the EEC looked surprisingly like Napoleon’s domination of Europe which included the Low Countries, the Rhineland, the Confederation of the Rhine and Italy. He saw no contradiction between France’s role in Europe and France’s role in its former empire, which in its African heartland was now branded Françafrique. Having imposed peace brutally on Cameroon, de Gaulle symbolically used its capital Yaoundé in July 1963 as the venue where the European Community signed a convention with the Associated African States.3

  Negotiations between France and Britain were opened, despite the divergence of their goals. De Gaulle came to Britain on a state visit in April 1960 and Macmillan went to Paris on 27 January 1961, ahead of a meeting of foreign ministers of the Six. The Daily Mail explained very succinctly what was at stake in the dance between empire and Europe:

  At any time in the postwar decade Britain could have had the leadership of Europe. She rejected it, because she continued to regard herself as an imperial and oceanic power. Now, the empire has almost gone and Britain is one among a number of equal, sovereign Commonwealth states. In the meantime Europe has forged ahead.4

  Macmillan told the House of Commons on 31 July 1961 that the government had decided to seek entry into the European Community. The Commons endorsed this on 4 August by 313 votes to 5, with Labour abstaining. At no stage did Britain envisage exchanging the Commonwealth for Europe: the vision was to keep both. Lord Privy Seal Edward Heath announced in Paris on 10 October 1961 that he was seeking special provisions for the Commonwealth in relation to Europe. It would not do that an excluded Commonwealth drifted towards communism and in any case, he pointed out, French, Dutch, Belgian and Italian colonies had become Associated Overseas Territories with access to the Common Market.5

  When Macmillan met de Gaulle at Château de Champs-sur-Marne on 2 June 1962, he began by saying, as he had said to Menzies, that ‘the England of Kipling is dead’. The old British Empire was no more. De Gaulle was concerned about Britain coming in with its Commonwealth, while Algeria had just become independent. It was not, however, on the question of relations with its former empire that de Gaulle built his main objections to British membership of the EEC. He argued that Britain was ‘too intimately tied up with the Americans’ and would act as a Trojan horse for American influence in Europe. There was a history of humiliation here which de Gaulle wished to reverse. He had been summoned by Churchill on 4 June 1944 and told that no French forces would take part in the D-Day landings, which would be a purely ‘Anglo-Saxon affair’. When he protested, Churchill had replied that ‘if I had to choose between you and Roosevelt, I would always choose Roosevelt. When we have to choose between the French and the Americans, we always prefer the Americans.’ D-Day was less about liberation than about the Americans coming to France as ‘a conquered land’, ‘a second occupation’.6

  De Gaulle’s second concern was that while France could dominate the Europe of the Six, this would be changed if Britain came in. ‘In the Six as they existed’, he told Macmillan when they met again at Rambouillet in December 1962, ‘France had some weight and could say no, even to the Germans. Once the United Kingdom and the Scandinavians entered the organisation things would be different. The result would be a sort of free trade area which might be desirable in itself, but would not be European.’7 Not only did the Europe of the Six closely resemble the core of the Napoleonic Empire, but Napoleon tried to defeat Britain by corralling European countries into a Continental System to prevent the British trading with Europe. Macmillan saw this as well, and told President Kennedy that ‘De Gaulle is trying to dominate Europe. His idea is not a partnership, but a Napoleonic or Louis XIV hegemony.’8

  De Gaulle formally vetoed Britain’s application to join the European Community on 14 January 1963. He called Britain an ‘insular and maritime power’, which would drag the United States into Europe and make it into a ‘huge Atlantic community’.9 The Labour government of Harold Wilson renewed the British application in May 1967, but France was then redefining its grandeur by scorning the United States. On 21 February 1966 de Gaulle announced that France was withdrawing from the integrated command structure of NATO and required the Americans to remove their thirty bases and 26,000 soldiers from French soil. Speak
ing in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh on 1 September 1966, as the Vietnam War escalated, he passed over France’s colonial past in the region and denounced the militarism and imperialism of the United States in the name of the self-determination of peoples. The failure of Britain’s second application was a fall-out of this anti-Americanism. De Gaulle simply repeated the point that British access would transform the EEC into ‘an Atlantic zone that would deprive our continent of any real personality’.10

  The success of the British application had to await de Gaulle’s resignation in 1969 and Edward Heath’s election in 1970. Georges Pompidou, the new French president, reflected that ‘England could no longer put up with the Europe of the Six, which must have reminded her of Napoleonic Europe and the Continental Blockade.’11 The place of the Commonwealth was perfunctorily assured by special provisions for New Zealand’s butter and lamb exports and the Daily Mail declared on 24 July 1971, ‘Britain’s future lies inside the family of Europe.’12 The House of Commons passed the EEC bill on 28 October 1971, opposed by a fifth of Conservative MPs and a minority of anti-European Labour MPs. Enoch Powell called the terms ‘a humiliating surrender. Wilhelm II could not have demanded so much. I doubt if Hitler would have demanded more. I can still only half believe that I was myself an unwilling witness to my country’s abnegation of its own national independence.’13 Once again, Europe was portrayed as an empire seeking to control them, but this time it was seen as German rather than French.