A friend, a prominent French left-of-centre political philosopher who is deeply concerned by the popularity of “multiculturalist ideology” within some circles of the ruling class and among intellectuals in France, once told me that France had an “elite problem” and a “disadvantaged people problem” and a “healthy and wealthy middle class” that is under severe pressure and faces a slow decline. Consider this example. One of the elite French higher-education schools was reconsidering its strategy. It wanted to become more “international,” to bring in more foreign students, and to start teaching in English. It decided to raise its fees considerably, very much higher than the usual French standards, but far less than its British and American counterparts. In order to balance this, it also decided to offer grants to poorer students in a kind of “positive discrimination policy” favouring young people from the country's poor suburbs. Another friend, while not hostile to the principle of “internationalisation” and who spoke fluent English – I say this to show he was not especially threatened by the transition to English – pointed out that the losers in this new formula were the sons and daughters of the French middle class. They would face more difficulties paying the fees, and nothing was being done to address their concerns. There is a similar and much older phenomenon. When the French state funds social policies for the country's poor suburbs, its first reflex is to raise taxes on the country's middle-ranking managerial staff and other middle-class segments that are less able than others to organise collective dissent. Rightly or wrongly, these middle-class segments think such social policies achieve no results. I cannot assess this claim, but the current state of affairs seems to show it may be true. Some may say that this pattern has nothing to do with globalisation and that it is as old as other social policies in France. But this does not mean it is accepted, let alone popular, and the fact is that the poor suburbs contain a majority of French Arabs – in other words, the “other”. There are other examples. My point is the following: the conventional wisdom says that globalisation is terrible for low-skilled western workers who are no longer competitive. These workers are now voting for the extreme right in France. The French left, especially the Socialist Party, has lost the support of the working class, which tends more are more to vote for the extreme-right Front National. This is logical, as these poorly educated white people are looking for scapegoats, and workers from North Africa are easy targets. All this is nasty, but more or less unavoidable. The solution would be more training and so on to help workers to improve their skills, plus, of course, more flexibility. Of course all this is true, even if it overestimates the impact of such training and neglects the fact that people need some stability and that psychological stress has an impact on productivity. But low-skilled workers are not the only losers from globalisation. Many segments of the French middle classes also face tremendous difficulties. Even if the middle classes may be on balance on the winning side, they tend to see the costs of the new situation and forget about the plusses. In France, many, including the winners, do not like the world that is unfolding. The explanation that says that the decline of the low-skilled white worker has given a second life to racism, Islamophobia, anti-Arab feelings, fascism and the radical right in France is of course relevant, but it is also too simplistic. The picture is much more complex. The French philosopher Pierre André Taguieff once wrote that this diagnosis and other similar ones were convenient for many reasons. First, it enabled the left to claim that the mainstream right, if left unchecked, had a natural tendency to become extreme and therefore required considerable vigilance. It unsettled the right in political and cultural battles, and the right, he said, thanks to its extremes is always suspect in France. Moreover, there are different brands of radical right, and many have tried to prove that their own brand was moderate and the others were dangerous, a claim that could prove useful if you tried to play the elections game. Another French philosopher, Mathieu Bock Côté, has said that a fundamental distinction should be drawn between the horrible things extreme rightists think and write in their books or in the internal documents of their movements and what they say during electoral campaigns intended to target a wider public. The latter expresses deep concerns and addresses pertinent grievances in a more or less decent terminology. Bock Côté adds that in order to understand the rise of the extreme right in France, public electoral discourse is more relevant, not what extreme-right activists say in private discussions or in pamphlets. I do not want to bring up the debate on the differences between the European fascisms and Nazism of the 1920s and 30s and the contemporary extreme right. Neither do I want to describe the multiple varieties of the extreme right, or to assess whether these new extreme rights are really fascist and longing for authoritarian and possibly totalitarian regimes. Suffice it to say here that you can find very nasty people in the extreme right's ranks in France, who by almost any standard represent a serious threat to democracy and decency. But then it is necessary to explain why so many people, and not only workers with few skills, vote for parties with such awful people in them. The answer I propose is that the French mainstream parties, who have not forgotten, and rightly so, the terrible events of the 20th century, are keen on avoiding a remake of the past and so misread the situation. They fail to realise that a great part of French public opinion has considerable reasons to dislike what they see as the French elite's ideology and policies. The writer is a professor of international relations at the Collège de France in Paris and a visiting professor at Cairo University.
