Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  On 5 March 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, Philippe Douste-Blazy, deputy and mayor of Toulouse, tabled a bill which eventually became law on 23 February 2005. Its key clauses were:

  Art. 1: The Nation expresses its thanks to the women and men who took part in the work undertaken by France in its former French departments of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Indochina.

  Art. 4: University research programmes will give the place it deserves to the history of the French presence overseas, especially in North Africa. School syllabuses will recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa, and give the eminent place they deserve in history to the sacrifices of the soldiers in the French army that originated from these territories.54

  Following a concerted campaign by intellectuals and academics, who refused to be dictated to about what they taught, the part of Article 4 concerning school syllabuses was withdrawn in February 2006, but the damage was already done.

  There was a clear link between law on the veil and the law on colonial history which was provocative to young people of North African origin. Houria Bouteldja, born in Algeria in 1973 but studying in Lyon, was politicised by the 2003–4 debacle over the banning of the veil. She was keen to found a new organisation to articulate the views of young Muslims. Initially she thought of linking the new organisation to the twentieth anniversary of the Marche des Beurs in December 1983, but 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had brought home that ‘we are the children of colonisation’ and that ‘France is still a colonial state’. Her organisation was called Les Indigènes de la République, the Natives of the Republic. Its members identified with Algerians of Muslim faith who had been denied citizenship and refused independence without long and bloody wars. The date chosen to launch the movement was 8 May 2008, the anniversary of both VE Day and the Sétif massacre in Algeria. This was designed to expose ‘the contradiction between the end of the [German] occupation and the rebirth of the Republic in the metropolis and the fact that, on the same day, a massacre was being committed in one of the French colonies. It was very important to us to mark the contradictions of the Republic then and now, a racial and inegalitarian Republic.’55 The manifesto of the movement developed this theme, claiming that they, not those who went on to torture Algerians, were the true heirs of the French Resistance:

  Our agenda is the decolonisation of the Republic! The egalitarian Republic is a myth. State and society must undertake a radical reassessment of their colonial past-present […] Our parents and grandparents were enslaved, colonised, animalised. But they were not crushed. They preserved their human dignity by the heroic resistance they undertook to shake off the colonial yoke. WE are their heirs, as we are the heirs of all those French people who resisted Nazi barbarism and joined the oppressed, demonstrating that the anti-colonial struggle cannot be divided from the fight for social equality, justice and citizenship. Dien Bien Phu was their victory. Dien Bien Phu was not a defeat but a victory for liberty, equality and fraternity.56

  At the same time an alternative history of French colonialism was being pioneered by a research group called ACHAC (Colonisation, Immigration, Postcolonialism). This did not enjoy the legitimacy conferred by the French academy, which by and large defended the French colonial enterprise. ACHAC, on the other hand, argued that France needed to take critical responsibility for its colonial past, which had often been brutal and exploitative and the legacies of which were felt today, above all through the presence of immigrant populations whose family histories were marked by colonialism. They used the term ‘colonial fracture’ to argue that memories of the Algerian War were divided by the colonial experience – constructed in one way by the so-called Français de souche, but totally differently by the children of immigrants. The survey they undertook in Toulouse in 2003 demonstrated that the latter saw colonisation as ‘a metaphor for oppression endured today’: they feel like a ‘child of the indigène or a child of colonisation’, a way of thinking very like that of ‘children of slaves’ in France’s overseas territories. Like the descendants of slaves, they did not see French national history as their own. For most ‘Français de souche’, the problem of the Algerian Muslim was seen as proof that ex-indigènes from North Africa and their descendants could never be fully integrated into France.57

  In Britain too there was redefinition of national identity which likewise proved divisive. Laïcité itself was not a consideration in British schools, where the teaching of religion was compulsory under the 1944 Education Act. The Labour government included citizenship education on the national curriculum in 2002, in response to the Crick Report on Education for Citizenship (1998). This encouraged socially responsible behaviour, service in the community and informed engagement with public life. However, after the 2001 Bradford riots and 9/11, fears increased that immigrant communities were not integrating sufficiently and living ‘parallel lives’. The new mantra became ‘community cohesion’, in the words of Ted Cantle, who produced a report on this question, ‘to create shared experiences and values, rather than continuing to entrench separatism and to recognise and reinforce differences’.58

  Britain, like France, also developed its own version of the roman national, ‘Our Island Story’, which preached an unbroken history of strong government and national greatness. It emphasised the benefits brought to the world by the Empire, informed by a strong sense of British superiority to people in other parts of the world, and discarding its negative side of exploitation and violence. In 2003 historian Niall Ferguson presented a Channel 4 documentary on Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and published a book with the same title. ‘There has never been a better time to understand how Britain made the modern world’, through ‘the biggest empire ever, bar none’, he asserted from a boat on the Port of London. In his view the Empire brought global trade and finance, white settlement, law, order and good governance. It was a vehicle of both globalisation and ‘Anglobalization’.59 Ferguson went on to write Colossus, in which he argued that the United States not only was an empire but must extend its imperium for the greater good of mankind.60 In the same year American businessman James C. Bennett argued that the Anglosphere, as a network of countries sharing an English culture – in effect the British Commonwealth and the United States – should join together for the robust defence of Western values such as individual freedom, democracy and the rule of law.61 British historian Andrew Roberts offered a demonstration from the past, arguing that ‘the long hegemony of the English-speaking peoples’ had seen off Prussian militarism, German Nazism, Soviet-led communism and was battling Islamic fundamentalism. Britain had passed the flame to the United States during the Second World War but ‘working together for the good of Civilisation’ they were ‘the last, best hope for mankind’.62

  This was not a narrative with which former colonial peoples in Britain could identify. ‘Civilisation’ had largely been on their backs, if not built with their bodies. Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic, warned in 2004 that ‘the quality of the country’s multicultural frame depends on what is now done with the hidden shameful store of imperial horrors’.63 The brutalities committed by the British in Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s were now substantiated by historians of Africa. Caroline Elkins revealed that between 160,000 and 320,000 of the African population of 1.5 million in Kenya were held in the internment camps of ‘Britain’s Gulag’, and most of the rest held in 800 enclosed villages, surrounded by spiked trenches, barbed wire and watchtowers, with the loss of ‘tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands’.64 David Anderson explained that while Mau Mau killed 32 European settlers and 1,800 African loyalists they lost 20,000 of their own in combat while 1,090 were hanged by the British. ‘In no other place, and at no other time in the history of British imperialism’, he said, ‘was state execution used on such a scale as this, double that in Algeria’.65 Such revelations powerfully undermined the narrative of peaceful British decolonisation and the benevolent Anglosphere.


  Tighter security and remastered national identities did not help to assimilate young immigrant populations. Instead, they were radicalised by the renewed colonial wars of America, Britain and France. On 7 July 2005 three British-born Pakistanis and a Jamaican, who had converted to Islam after the atrocities in Iraq, blew themselves up on London’s transport system, killing fifty-six people including themselves. Their leader, Mohammed Sidique Khan, aged 30, was the son of a foundry worker and had not practised Islam as he grew up in the Leeds suburb of Beeston. He called himself ‘Sid’, campaigned to get Pakistani children off drugs and worked as a teaching assistant in a local primary school. Things changed when a radical preacher, Abdullah el-Faisal, came to Beeston in 1999 and then 9/11 provoked the British invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Sidique Khan married a young Indian woman of the fundamentalist Deobandi tradition, against the will of his parents, and went with Shehzad Tanweer, whose family kept a fish and chip shop in Beeston, to Pakistan in order to contact jihadist groups.66

  In a video released by al-Jazeera on 1 September 2005, nearly two months after his death, Sidique Khan explained the link between British wars and their own actions. First, he declared his friends’ dedication to Islam. Second, he explained the unity of the ummah and the solidarity they felt with the global Muslim community. Third, he criticised the British government which was occupying Muslim lands and inflicting atrocities and the British people for condoning this:

  I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe. Our driving motivation doesn’t come from tangible commodities that this world has to offer. Our religion is Islam – obedience to the one true God, Allah, and following the footsteps of the final prophet and messenger, Mohammed. This is how our ethical stances are dictated.

  Your democratically elected governments continually perpetrate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be our targets. And until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of the situation.67

  A Daily Telegraph poll published that day found that two-thirds of Muslim students in Britain agreed that British foreign policy had contributed to the 7/7 bombings. A Guardian poll nationally gave a figure of 64 per cent while a Daily Mirror poll put this as high as 85 per cent.68

  The British government, however, was loath to make a connection between its foreign policy and the suicide attacks. The first response was to step up arrests of British nationals who had gone to fight in Afghanistan and authorise torture, usually carried out in Pakistan. David Miliband, who became Foreign Secretary in 2007, was frequently asked by MI6 whether a person could be tortured: according to journalist Ian Cobain, sometimes he said ‘no’ but often he said ‘yes’.69 At the end of his premiership Tony Blair concluded that it was time to halt progress towards a multicultural society and assert staunchly British values. In a speech on 8 December 2006 on ‘the duty to integrate’ he argued that ‘when it comes to our essential values – belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage – then that is where we come together, it is what we hold in common; it is what gives us the right to call ourselves British’. He blamed the attacks on what he called ‘a warped distortion of the faith of Islam’ and ‘a new and virulent form of ideology associated with a minority of our Muslim community’.70 Sayeeda Warsi, who knew the Khan family and had unsuccessfully contested Dewsbury as a Conservative, explained that Blair’s message of integration was once again a diktat of exclusion. ‘The duty to integrate was firmly aimed at the non-white folk’, she observed, the ‘adopt our values or stay away’ was aimed at the foreigner, the outsider. In reality it was a speech in response to 7/7 delivered with menace towards the Muslim community.71

  In France also rising tensions were observed through a colonial lens and handled as such. Immigrant communities were consigned to the banlieues, the outer suburbs of major cities, without transport, services or ambitions. They were excluded from mainstream society, kept under a constant police surveillance and greeted by force if they protested.72 On 19 June 2005, Sid-Ahmed Hammache, aged 11, was shot in a fight between two gangs in the Paris banlieue Courneuve. Interior Minister Sarkozy said ‘tomorrow we will take a Kärcher to clean up the estate. We will use the forces and the time we need, but it will be done.’ Under cover of the ‘war against crime’, the police entered these banlieues as if they were internal colonies. They undertook ratonnades, a term used for dealing violently with Algerians during the Algerian War, both in Algeria and Paris. Youths of immigrant origin were insulted as ‘bastards’ or ‘scum’, intimidated, searched, beaten up and arrested.73 On 27 October two youths chased by the police in Clichy-sous-Bois fled and hid in a transformer, where they were electrocuted. Their comrades and neighbours claimed that their memory was insulted by Sarkozy who alleged that they were criminals. Three days later police fired a tear-gas canister into a local mosque where women were marking Ramadan, which was seen as sacrilege by the Muslim community. Youths took to the streets in a chain of riots.74 Tunisian-born Dhaaou Meskine, the imam of Clichy since 1984, said that they were ‘not part of anything. They were without hope. They came knocking, a little too hard, true, at the door of the Republic, asking “Where is Equality? Where is Fraternity?”’75

  The response of the authorities was once again that of a colonial power, this time explicitly. On 8 November 2005 Prime Minister Villepin invoked emergency powers going back to 1955, as the Algerian War escalated.76 An individual named Hamza, of Turkish Muslim origin, reported that ‘seeing helicopters over the HLM automatically reminds you of Pakistan. The comment you hear most often is, “Look, that’s what our Palestinian brothers must experience”.’77 Not surprisingly, many of the young people became even more radicalised. Their manifesto, which they drew from the Internet, was the Appeal to World Islamic Resistance by Abu Musab al-Suri, who had gravitated around the Finsbury Park mosque in the 1990s, gone to Kandahar in 1997 and was widely regarded as Osama bin Laden’s PR man. His message, which was perfectly designed for the banlieues, was that the new phase of the jihad should not be top-down and highly organised, like 9/11, but bottom-up and decentred, passing under the radar of the colonial power and turning its immigrant children against it.78

  Nemesis 3: The Rejection of the European Constitution

  While colonial war was unfolding in Paris and London, crisis was engulfing the European Union. In 2004 the EU was enlarged to include ten new states – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia from the former communist bloc – together with Cyprus and Malta. Bulgaria and Romania were due to join in 2007. There was also talk of including Turkey in the not too distant future, although its Muslim identity and threat of immigration from Turkey provoked resistance. The difficulty of organising a Union of twenty-five states gave rise to a new European constitution, which would include a president of the Council, a president of the Commission, a foreign minister and a Supreme Court. This was adopted in June 2004 but had to be ratified by the member states. The spectre of referendums across Europe loomed.

  France and Britain were both divided about the European project and how it was being broadened and deepened, but France held a referendum on the constitution while Britain avoided it. For Jacques Delors this was simply ‘the logical result of the fall of the Berlin wall’. Most political leaders saw that the diplomatic influence of their countries depended on being part of the Union. Even Tony Negri and Michael Hardt saw Europe as a ‘barrier against capitalist, conservative and reactionary economic unilateralism’.79 There were, however, deep cultural and economic fears that national influence and national identities might be diluted in such a large and unwieldy Europe, that competition would increase from low
-wage economies in the east to which corporations would move their plants, and that immigration would increase to high-wage economies in the west. Behind these concerns was a fear that Turkey might join Europe and that Europe was becoming less protective of social rights and more the vehicle of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ neo-liberal project.

  In France, opposition to the new constitution and the enlargement came from two sides. On the Left, an alliance of socialists moving to the left since electoral defeat in 2002, residual communists, Greens and anti-globalisers around ATTAC and peasants led by José Bové came together to fight the neo-liberal project that was blamed for dumping, low wages and reduced welfare and pensions. They were joined, decisively, by Laurent Fabius, who had been economics minister under Mitterrand and Jospin, and close to Blair as a moderniser, but was now battling with Jospin for control of the Socialist Party. He argued the changes would result in ‘a real social fracturing, in two Frances’.80 On the Right were those concerned about French sovereignty and identity, the ‘delocalisation’ of businesses to Eastern Europe, the possible inclusion of a Muslim Turkey in the Union and a wave of migrants from Turkey.81 They included the Movement for France, founded in 1994 by Philippe de Villiers, a Catholic conservative politician from the Vendée region and promoter of the Puy du Fou show which recreated counter-revolutionary fantasies of French history.

  On 29 May 2005, the French electorate voted against the European constitution by 55 per cent to 45 per cent. As with the Maastricht referendum, ‘left-behind’ France in the deindustrialsed north and west and along the Mediterranean, voted against, but this time they won. Communists claimed that it was a victory of ‘the people’, Philippe de Villiers that it came from ‘the depths of the country’.82 Tony Blair was on holiday in Tuscany when news of the French vote came through. He had announced in 2001 that Britain needed to be at the heart of Europe but he was exercised by the fact that the tabloid press was overwhelmingly Eurosceptic and he had never put his heart into making the case for the Union. ‘I knew at once that was off the hook’, he declared. ‘It was true that that I fancied the fight, but it was also true that had I lost, it would have been au revoir. You could almost feel the waves of relief coming over the English Channel and making their way down to Italy.’83