can the left change europe? – pages 2-5
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fter the paris killings
The guys from the ghetto
After the mass show of solidarity that followed the Paris killings, people are divided over what to do next: increase security at home and intervene abroad, or try to understand social breakdown and international blowback
AMADOU SANOGO – ‘A votre avis’ (In Your View), 2014
A modest and crazy dream Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain offer a chance at change in Europe’s politics, possibly the only escape from a despair which is inflaming the nihilism and extremism that led to the events in Paris
BY SERGE HALIMI
The French left declared a political truce – the Union Sacrée – in August 1914, agreeing not to oppose the government during the war. In France and Germany, the workers’ movement faltered, trade union and other leftwing leaders rallied to the “national defence” and progressive battles were put aside. It would have been hard to do otherwise when, from the start of the conflict, the death toll was in the tens of thousands. Who would have been able to hear talk of peace above the fighting and nationalist rhetoric? Yet up until that June, perhaps even July, it was still possible to challenge them.
A century later, we are at another critical moment. The “clash of civilisations” is only one of many scenarios. The struggle that seems to have begun in Europe, and the way events unfold in Greece and Spain, may make it possible to stop that scenario becoming reality: but jihadist attacks, war on terror strategies and the curtailment of public freedoms make it more likely. They risk worsening all the crises that need to be resolved. That is the threat. The pressing challenge is responding to it.
Is a cartoonist free to caricature the prophet Muhammad? Can a Muslim woman wear a burqa in France? Will the number of French Jews emigrating to Israel increase? Welcome to 2015. France is wrestling with a social and democratic crisis made worse by the economic decisions of its governments and those of the European Union. The public consciousness is, at last, aware of the issues
Serge Halimi is president of Le Monde diplomatique of financial regulation, wealth distribution and the means of production. But questions relating to religion regularly push these into the background (1). For over 20 years, “Islam in the banlieues”, “cultural insecurities” and “communautarisme” (ethnic separation) have panicked the media and some of the French public, to the delight of demagogues, ready to emphasise these highly emotional subjects so they can continue to set the agenda. For as long as they do, none of the fundamental problems will be debated seriously, even though so much depends on their resolution.
The murder of 12 journalists on 7 January at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and then the killing of four people, all Jewish, in a kosher supermarket, has created a climate of fear. Islam was invoked in these crimes, but so far
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Inside this issue Spain: is Podemos next? renaud lambert Pages 4-5 After Charlie: with us or against us? pierre rimbert Page 7 After Charlie: defining descrimination benoît bréville Pages 8-9 The Arab Spring turns to winter h ben abdallah el alaoui Pages 10-11
BY LAURENT BONELLI
Once people are over the shock of the killings, once the feelings of indignation and powerlessness have dissipated and the only people still hurting are the victims’ immediate circle, the question remains – how, in a time of peace, can young Frenchmen have carried out such violent acts, choosing targets for their opinions, presumed religion or uniform? From the murders by Mohamed Merah in 2012 and the attack by Mehdi Nemmouche on the Jewish museum in Brussels last May, to the killings this January by Said and Cherif Kouachi, and Amedy Coulibaly, 28 people have been shot dead.
The sketchy information the press has gleaned about the killers gives some idea of lives in which social services and the juvenile justice system intervened early on, when family environments were judged inappropriate or inadequate; most spent time in hostels and foster families. Their education was of a pattern common among the least skilled of the working class: they gravitated towards technical courses (CAP, BEP, vocational baccalaureate) – which they did not always complete – though the general baccalaureate is now recognised as a minimum qualification.
To compensate for this educational relegation, some joined street gangs and got involved in their petty disorder. Stealing cars or scooters, driving without a licence, physical assault, verbal abuse, burglary and robbery with violence drew the attention of the police and courts, and Merah, Coulibaly and Nemmouche all went to prison for the first time when they were 19. Fresh offences after release led to the revocation of suspended sentences
Laurent Bonelli is an associate professor in political science at the Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique, University of Paris West-Nanterre
Energy: deep waters of the China Seas michael klare Pages 12-13 Will Japan open its doors? marc humbert Pages 12-13 Building a reputation in Turkmenistan david garcia Pages 14-15 Why life isn’t private any more jérôme thorel Page 16
and longer prison terms; they spent a good part of their twenties in jail. The Kouachi brothers, who grew up in a village in the department of Corrèze, seem to have come only later to delinquency (receiving stolen goods or selling drugs, combined with precarious or blackmarket employment), when they moved to the Paris area in the early 2000s. Cherif went to prison in 2005-06 at the age of 23 for his involvement in an organisation sending volunteers to fight in Iraq.
All five espoused a vision of an Islam of heroic warriors (mujahideen), grand exploits and distant theatres of war. Some travelled to Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Yemen. Propaganda, preaching and initiation camps gave them a relatively simple worldview that made a coherent whole of their own experience of subjugation and that of other peoples (in Mali, Chechnya, Palestine), and a civilisational narrative blaming Jews and unbelievers for these ills. This idea of religion was attractive because it both made them aware of their situation and offered liberation from it, giving their lives a “higher” purpose.
The similarity of the killers’ lives has already prompted experts to try to classify their actions as “lumpen-terrorism” and “gangsterterrorism”. But the characteristics of those lives do not seem unusual, corresponding to those of the “suburban ghetto generation” to which the killers belong (they were all born in the 1980s), marked by exclusion, harder access to unskilled jobs, spatial segregation and police checks, social relations limited to their own ethnic group and diminishing interest in the political commitments of their elders.
What surprises is not so much the decision to commit such acts of violence as its rarity. “If radicalisation is a process,” write political sociologist Annie Collovald and political scientist Brigitte Gaïti, “we must trace it before we can explain it. That means moving away from why and asking how” (1). The exhortations of jihadist leaders to strike at France, the West or the Jewish community may have inspired those aspiring to rebellion, but did
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