The PS is way too bourgeois and power oriented to successfully cater to the banlieues.
Universality is indeed a specific vantage point, but it seems required if societies are to last ; Canada, the poster child for multiculturalism, still has Quebec not that far from voting for independence ; and I won't get into Lebanon, which is an example of what happens when community bonds become stronger than the bonds to the State.
As for the geographical limits of the French universalism, weren't the limits of Europe supposed to be the Urals and Tamanrasset, according to De Gaulle ?
I don't have particular ethnic statistics on imprisonment rate, but it would require way more people in jails to reach the statistic that between a third and half of adult African American will end up in jail at some point - I suppose drug trafficking, etc... may indeed be run partly by the thirty something, but I bet many more have found some kind of place in French society - they are not rioting...
Also, yes, the pied noir and Algerian soldiers are moving into retirement, which should diminish their contribution to institutional racism. They'll still vote for Sarkozy for quite some time though. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
The state appears after the group, not before: so in the case of Lebanon, we see the story of a state which fails for whatever reason to break down communal and religious bonds. This is why I'm slightly worried about the US. Bonds to a state can be of different natures, but in practice two are really important. Either one identifies with it, and sees no difference between the nation and himself, or one sees the state as a provider of goods and services, with a feeling of belonging to a subgroup of the citizenry. In the US -- I don't know about canada -- Multiculturalism does smoothen integration, but whether it breaks down communal bonds is doubtful. A lot of the success in American integration might be due to the state's success in providing job and social climbing. The main consequence, in that light, of an economic crisis becomes an ethnic crisis... with, say, latinos and blacks competing for the same jobs.
All I mean with the limits to universalism was that it required a bigger group which has already internalized these values -- not to say that all french think like that -- and that group is in france, no? Rien n'est gratuit en ce bas monde. Tout s'expie, le bien comme le mal, se paie tot ou tard. Le bien c'est beaucoup plus cher, forcement. Celine
