I hear three theories being offered for ‘why’ 20,000 cars, or
whatever the actual number is, were burned in the recent riots in
France. I speak of a number because presumbably the cars are
counted and its indisputable that this actually occurred and from
that however indirectly we can get some grasp of the dimensions
of the real problem, which isn’t the cars burned, but the
hearts and minds of the people that did it.

One theory, popular with the american left and popular with
the american media, is that this wouldn’t have happened if
France had affirmative action, aka racial quotas, and in practice
meaning that some 20 percent of french private sector jobs would
be reserved for ? (actually that’s a problem right there — how
do we even legally define this group?) and some 30 percent of
government sector jobs. Now I believe there are a lot of
unacknowledged problems with this approach and further think
that it’s morally wrong to turn a person away from a job
because of the color of their skin. But if it really would
prevent situations such as seem to have developed in France,
well then of course that would the strongest argument for
affirmative action.

On the other hand proponents of affirmative action only take
account of the positive impact on those discriminated for
and give no attention to those discriminated against.

Another theory, readily found on the internet, is that the
riots in France have their origin in the islamic character
of many of the participitants and that muslim culture is
the heart of the problem. Without going into the reasons why,
I’ll just say that I doubt this is the ‘why’ of these riots.

The third theory, the theory that I favor, is that this
is another practical example of the arc of destruction
left by the welfare state. Human needs are more complicated
than simply food to eat, a place to stay and entertainment.
You can give people all this and all may seem to be well,
but it’s a holding action at best.

People need a story to their life, a drama, where they are
heroes and strive and overcome obstacles. Without this,
to put it simply, they get sick.

I think you are the one Mark who is being rather naieve here. I have extracted two quotes. If you don’t think he is reffering to the children of muslim migrants (whether from the Maghreb or the Sahel) to France, then I don’t really know who he is referring to. I think he is exaggerating the problem, and after today’s sketces in Le Soir it seems we are about to find out.

And why this: “the terrible canker in its midst”. What the hell is this. I live about 100 Km away from Frnace, I visit it regularly. I haven’t noticed any ‘canker’. And I can think of a number of football stadiums across Europe where the official national anthem of the State (Try Scotland or Flanders) cannot possibly be played without a lot of problems, yet no-one seems to speak of canker. Incidentally, if he doesn’t like France’s HLM he’d better not visit Scotland’s slums, and, as I say, he’d definitely better stay away from the less salubrious parts of the US. Didn’t we just see a shoot-out during an evacuation rescue operation?

Now this isn’t to score points in some clever game, but to say that this sort of simplistic article definitely IMHO does more harm than good.

As for the general issue of social alientation, I’m afraid I don’t feel I have much more to offer as an explanation than anyone else. I mean I think its a pretty big topic, maybe too big for me right now, but obviously details like the housing units and inclusivity and exclusivity in the labour market matter.

Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants and a smattering of the least successful members of the French working class.

I watched their proceedings in the company of old immigrants from Algeria and Morocco, who had come to France in the early 1960s. They too lived in Les Tarterets and had witnessed its descent into a state of low-level insurgency. They were so horrified by daily life that they were trying to leave, to escape their own children and grandchildren: but once having fallen into the clutches of the system of public housing, they were trapped. They wanted to transfer to a cité, if such existed, where the new generation did not rule: but they were without leverage—or piston—in the giant system of patronage that is the French state. And so they had to stay put, puzzled, alarmed, incredulous, and bitter at what their own offspring had become, so very different from what they had hoped and expected. They were better Frenchmen than either their children or grandchildren: they would never have whistled and booed at the Marseillaise, as their descendants did before the soccer match between France and Algeria in 2001, alerting the rest of France to the terrible canker in its midst.

Thank you for your comments and quick response.

Yes, Theodore Dalrymple’s assertion that the atmosphere is worse
than in the black townships in apartheid South Africa does sound
hyperbolic, and I’m not sure I believe it, but then I’ve never been
either of these places.

On the other hand most of my neighbors are from El Salvador; if
I walk through the neighborhood the majority of the faces I’ll
see will be immigrant. I’ve heard of M15. There are lots of
children around. There are probably are some real, brewing problems
in the neighborhood, and in fact I know about some. But here’s
the thing: It would be difficult for someone to walk in and see
anything wrong or any evidence of gangs or drug-dealing.

For things to be as in your face and dramatically wrong as
Dalrymple is describing, then things have to have been decaying
and ignored for a long time.

You did notice the date on that essay — 2002. Yet it reads like
it was written after the recent riots. When I first read that
essay, in 2002, I was shocked. I looked around and it seemed that
no one else was addressing this topic. Which seemed strange in context.
I wasn’t sure it was real.

But I think he’s been rather dramatically vindicated.

Edward, you state that you only browsed through the essay, and
yes I agree it’s long. Also I think you came with certain
pre-expectations. One being that this was about the muslims.
Actually Dalrymple barely mentions that angle. A good part
of the essay is an hypothesizing about why things are like this.
I particularly liked this paragraphs and feel it accurately
describes an aspect of the human condition:

“But this is not a cause of gratitude — on the contrary: they
feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted
as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect
and approval of others, even — or rather especially — of the
people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity.
Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence
is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants
of the cités. They therefore come to believe in the malevolence
of those who maintain them in their limbo: and they want to keep
alive the belief in this perfect malevolence, for it gives
meaning — the only possible meaning — to their stunted lives.
It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in
meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose
to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.”

And this:

“Everyone acknowledges that unemployment, particularly of the
permanent kind, is deeply destructive, and that the devil really
does find work for idle hands; but the higher up the social
scale you ascend, the more firmly fixed is the idea that the
labor-market rigidities that encourage unemployment are essential
both to distinguish France from the supposed savagery of the
Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal model (one soon learns from reading
the French newspapers what anglo-saxon connotes in this context),
and to protect the downtrodden from exploitation. But the
labor-market rigidities protect those who least need protection,
while condemning the most vulnerable to utter hopelessness:
and if sexual hypocrisy is the vice of the Anglo-Saxons,
economic hypocrisy is the vice of the French.”

Ok, I have browsed through it. It is very long .

“There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités:”

As an anti-romantic image this is neither new, nor original. It’s a pity that people no longer read Sartre’s Nausea, written when? In the 1960s? Set in Bidon-ville.

The general picture described has an element of truth to it, but it is more than a little one-sided. I am sure the reality described here exists in places, and indeed only a couple of weeks ago there was a horrific incident on a train to or from a Marseille where the passengers were effectively held hostage for a period before the police dared to enter the train.

There are various issues involved here, but most of them relate to youth cultures and violence. I am not saying that this isn’t a problem, simply that it isn’t new and it is hard, from an empirical point of view to tie this down in any ethnic or religious sense. In fact the article was written about France, but it could well be describing things which go on in every modern society, I don’t think there is too much French exceptionalism here.

My father was raised in a pretty rough part of Liverpool at the start of the twentieth century and I will always remember how he explained to me that they used to lock the door and bar the windows when the orange lodges marched, and he was a protestant!

The thing is obviously all this has deteriorated much further in recent years, and I don’t regard myself as having any special capacity for explaining why this should be.

Obviously you in the US often get a one-sided view of Europe, and we in Europe get a one sided view of the US. eg we get advised not to go off the beaten-path in Miami, or in New Orleans (when it existed). We were shown photos of Afro_Americans shooting it out with Korean shopkeepers. I have no idea at all what the religions involved were. Maybe they were followers of Elihah Mohammed, I couldn’t tell you. All I can tell you is that I didn’t imagine that all US muslims behaved like this.

On the London underground there used to be a zone called bandit territory, where it was notoriously unsafe to travel on the Northern Line after 9:00 at night. I don’t think any of the assailants were thought to be muslims.

Also, I wouldn’t advise you to go to a football match in the UK by train, since you might – or might not – meet some very ugly people indeed.

Talking of which, Spain generally doesn’t have these kind of problems at all. The issue is coming with the arrival of the Latin Kings. My impression is that the Moroccans are a bit like the Pakistanis in the UK in the 70s and 80s, pretty passive and they don’t get involved in too much of this kind of thing. But look what happened to the Pakistanis in the UK in the 90s. After being systematically attacked by racist white yobs for 20 years, they finally formed gangs and started to respond. Basically the Afro-Caribbean migrants were normally bigger and tougher, so they were never intimidated like the Pakistanis were. I just hope the Latin Kings don’t start causing problems with the Moroccans. At the moment they don’t, most of the violence seems to be internal to the rival gangs.

Funnily enough, and getting back just one more time to the Catalan Statute, there was a well-publicised incident where a few US tourists were badly attacked at a football match here. We have two teams, Barça and Espanyol. Historically Espanyol was pretty much a team of the ‘regime’ in the Franco years, being a pole of Spain in the Catalan outpost. Nowadays this is pretty much finished as an issue, but there are still some right wing groups who are called ultras who support them in this ‘old’ way. This ultra phenomenon is pretty extensive across Spanish football, and leads to racist booing and hissing at rival black players.

Anyway our innocent US tourists unknowingly went with Barça flags into the ultra Espanyol part of the stadium during the derby game Barça-Espanyol, and they got a pretty good beating for their pains.

This is a very sad story, but it is the kind of thing that happens.

Coming back to the text:

“They too lived in Les Tarterets and had
witnessed its descent into a state of low-level insurgency.”

This is the kind of thing you need to watch for. I don’t think there is any kind of ‘insurgency’ in France, unless, of course, you call what was happening in the back streets of New Orleans insurgency: then we have insurgency everywhere. It’s the big modern problem after terrorism.

or this:

“This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years”

Simply put: I don’t think people who are trying to push a political agenda are the best sources of information.

Would you read and comment on this essay?

http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_the_barbarians.html

It was written in 2002 and the context is
France and hopefully has not much relevance to
Spain.

Still, is this a gross exaggeration or is it basically
accurate as far as it goes?

The author’s account seems to be based on experiences
in two of the 800 “zones sensibles” in France: Les
Tarterets and Les Musiciens. Are Les Tarterets and
Les Musiciens a special case or is there a similar
atmosphere in a good part of the others?

Is it it true that, quote:

“The local police chiefs were paid by results — by
the crime rates in their areas of jurisdiction. The
last thing they wanted was for policemen to go around
finding and recording crime.”

It seems to me that such a rule would, all by
itself, create any number of effective no-go zones
and would, not so incidently, make french crime statistics
a gross fiction and make it hard to track the situation.

Does the description, see below, seem accurate?
Or is it profoundly misleading?

“But human society, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and
so authority of a kind, with its own set of values,
occupies the space where law and order should be — the
authority and brutal values of psychopathic criminals
and drug dealers. The absence of a real economy and of
law means, in practice, an economy and an informal legal
system based on theft and drug-trafficking. In Les Tarterets,
for example, I observed two dealers openly distributing
drugs and collecting money while driving around in their
highly conspicuous BMW convertible, clearly the monarchs
of all they surveyed. Both of northwest African descent,
one wore a scarlet baseball cap backward, while the other
had dyed blond hair, contrasting dramatically with his
complexion. Their faces were as immobile as those of
potentates receiving tribute from conquered tribes. They
drove everywhere at maximum speed in low gear and high
noise: they could hardly have drawn more attention to
themselves if they tried. They didn’t fear the law:
rather, the law feared them.”

“I watched their proceedings in the company of old immigrants
from Algeria and Morocco, who had come to France in the
early 1960s. They too lived in Les Tarterets and had
witnessed its descent into a state of low-level insurgency.
They were so horrified by daily life that they were trying
to leave, to escape their own children and grandchildren:
but once having fallen into the clutches of the system of
public housing, they were trapped. They wanted to transfer
to a cité, if such existed, where the new generation did
not rule: but they were without leverage — or piston — in
the giant system of patronage that is the French state.
And so they had to stay put, puzzled, alarmed, incredulous,
and bitter at what their own offspring had become, so very
different from what they had hoped and expected.”

The president of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, Industry, and Navigation, Miquel Valls, has announced that more than 50 Spanish companies have expressed their desire to invest in Tangier’s future Maghreb-Catalan industrial zone, reported MAP news agency.

The cooperation project between the Moroccan northern region and the autonomous region of Catalonia constituted the centre of the letter of intent signed Tuesday on the fringes of the Business Forum that was held on Jan. 17-18 in Casablanca and Tangier.

Valls said that in order to prepare the industrial zone to host the increasing number of Spanish businesses willing to invest in the area, it initially will be constructed on an area of 150 ha, but will be doubled in the second phase of the cooperation project.

Speaking during the second day of the forum, Valls insisted that Spanish businesses are increasingly attracted to invest in Morocco. He noted that between 1995 and 2004, trade exchange between Morocco and Spain recorded an increase of 250%.

He also stated that among the Spanish trade partners of Morocco, Catalonia comes in the first position with 20%.

Concerning investment, statistics show that between 1996 and 2003, Spanish companies have invested some 2.4 billion € in Morocco.

This tendency is going crescendo, added Valls, as during the last two years, 1,400 Spanish companies have settled in Morocco, 34% of which are Catalan.

Expressing his support to trade cooperation with Morocco, Valls also announced that the Chamber has elaborated a “Strategic Plan for Moroccan Business Internationalisation”.

He noted that the document, entitled “Morocco 2006/2010”, is “the first business action plan of its kind carried out for Morocco by a European institution.”

For his part, Catalan Minister of Trade, Tourism and Consumer Affairs Josep Huguet praised the advantages and development prospects Moroccan northern region offers to Catalan businessmen.

He insisted on Morocco’s logistic advantages, especially proximity to the European market, and qualified local labour hands, especially in the fields of textile and clothes industry.

On the same occasion, the general director of the Agency for the Economic and Social Development of the Northern Region (APDN), Driss Benhima, presented the investment opportunities offered by the Tangier-Tetouan region. He also stressed the Kingdom’s will to set up “a zone of rapid development” in the region by launching major projects there.

http://www.moroccotimes.com/Paper/article.asp?idr=5&id=12276

“Far be it for me to deny that a large Latin American underclass can be a major problem on many levels.”

Just to be clear. I am not in any way against Latin American or any other immigrants coming to Spain. Spain, like the United States, and all the other modern growing economies (we’ll get round to what to do when there are non left to come another day) needs immigrants. One of my criticisisms of successive German (and Japanese) administrations is that they have failed to explicity address this, and indeed, in the German case, a huge opportunity was missed when they effectively turned their backs on potential migrants from the new East European member states.

But I don’t think we need to romanticise immigration either. Large scale immigration presents a major policy challenge for any society, and there are always plusses and minuses. We just need to treat all this without racism, and without recourse to stereotypes.

I mean I could tell you the story about the groups of Romanian Gypsies who go round Barcelona swiping peoples handbags, more or less with impunity. But then I could mention that not all Romanians are Gypsies, and that not all Gypsies are thieves. And I could further mention that those Romanians who died in Atotcha station of March 11 2004 were on there way to work. So this is a complex situation.

My response was simply to your initial statement:

“Spain is fortunate in that a substantial percentage of its immigrants are Latin Americans, who can be assimilated, as opposed to Muslims”

Now the disadvantages of having muslim migrants are, you suggest.

1/ rising levels of fundamentalism
2/ forced veiling of women
3/ honor killings
4/ demands for the recognition of Sharia,
5/ urban “no go” zones,
6/ rioting
7/ terrorism

Now going through the list (1) is hard to determine. Obviously, since before the arrival of muslim migrants there were no islamic fundamentalists, there must now be more. The interesting question is whether it is rising as a % of the muslim immigrant population, or whether this population – like its Christian counterpart from Latin America – gradually becomes more secular and less religious with the passage of time. The evidence from France seems to suggest it does.

2/ Well I imagine that there are odd cases, but I see no evidence in Europe generally that this happens. Women coming from Morocco gradually drop the head-scarfe. I haven’t seen any veils here in Barcelona. Incidentally, the headscarfe was also a custom among older women in southern Spain until quite recently. Obviously it was a cultural and not a religious symbol.

3/. Well as I say, there are about 70 women a year who die from these in Spain. One technique is to pour petrol over the woman concerned and set light to her. But I’m afraid this doesn’t confirm your thesis, since the principal pertpetrators are Spanish nationals, closely followed by Latino migrants. There may have been a case of a muslim doing this, but I haven’t noticed it.

4/. Again, have you any specific information on any single case in the EU of where someone has demanded that this be implemented in a member state? The most likely place for this to arise would be Londistan, but London’s radical mullahs seem to have adopted a live and let live attitude to the UK legal system, in particular since they benefit from it so much. Let me re-assure you, this isn’t a problem.

5/ Well again, where exactly are these? Sarkozy seems to have been quite clear that he wasn’t going to permit this, and he didn’t. The last case I can remember was in Northern Ireland, and the perpetrators this time were of a different faith, and oh yes, the Rastaman ‘front line’ in Brixton, again, a pot-smoking offshoot of Christianity.

6/ Rioting? Oh, I suppose you’re referring to what happened recently in France. But again, aren’t you conveniently forgetting that the most serious and sustained ‘intifada’ on European soil took place in the North of Ireland, and that the most serious riots outside of Northern Ireland may well have been those in Toxteth Liverpool involving the children of Afro-Carribean migrants (and yes, there were also riots from the children of Pakistani – muslim – migrants in the North of England an few years back).

But doesn’t this suggest that the issue is more migrant-related in a general sense. Can you seriously keep a straight face and tell me there are no problems like this in the US?

6/. Well this is the big one. Obviously this is an issue. And an important area of concern. A large – and particularly an undocumented – migrant community can provide a habitat for would-be terrorists, and integration issues, like we’ve just seen in France, can provide new recruits (this may be part of the significance of the fact that the core of the July 7th network in the UK came from Leeds).

But does not having muslim migrants offer any better strategy. The US has few enough. Does this make you any safer? I hope you are safe, and that we don’t see more terrorism in the US, but if this is so, would it be because of the migrant issue, or because of heightened and more efficient security?

I think in Spain we have no choice, and it isn’t an issue for me. Morocco is our neighbour, and we need to have closer and not more distant relations with the Moroccan people. In the US you have increased your distance from the Muslim world, unfortunately, in the longer term, I am not clear that this will prove to have been the best way to guarantee your safety.

Thanks for this information. Obviously we make a great team .

“As for interest rates, I think that a rise in Euribor rates (at least 95% of all mortgages are variable-rate based on the Euribor) to 3.5 percent,….will be enough.”

You may be right. On this one I really wouldn’t like to stick my neck out too far. As it happens it will become clear.

Keynes ridiculed the ‘fine weather economists’ who were only able to tell you there had been bad weather when the storm was over. Clearly we can see and identify that the storm is coming, we just can’t say on what day Katrina will arrive, what the wind velocity will be, and which will be the trajectory of the eye of the storm.

That being said, what is incredible is that in some quatrers the Spanish economy is being treated as the ‘poster boy’ of the eurozone economies, and yet all the Spanish authorities – like Caruana – can do is sit back and watch, they have been left with absolutely no policy instruments. And no one in high places seems to think that this is an important issue.

Two points seem to be being made by the commentators here in Barcelona. Firstly that since people have such incredibly low rates on their mortgages, even a small rise in the Euribor (your point) may be enough to make the monthly payments rise sufficiently to end it. Secondly, there is a very speciall attachment – via the euribor – of Spanish mortgages rates to short term rates, at 1% or so above them. This is really incredible, and may even be unique in Europe (anyone know anywhere else where this is the case?).

Certainly in the Uk and the US this isn’t like this. Even at the lowest of low rates in the US Fannie May and Freddie Mc seem to have been lending at about 2% over long term rates.

So I ask myself (now that Mr Bush is finally saying that he thinks the US should get off oil), have the interests of the construction industry been at work here? We all know that the construction industry is one of the principal drivers of the Spanish economy, so have the representatives of this industry been unduly influential in allowing the low interest dependency to develop in this way?

“The smartest thing for these people to do would be to sell early, take their capital gains and savings and invest in their home countries (talk about “home bias”!).”

Obviously. This is why I mentioned to lenox that after a 150% rise in 8 years I didn’t see how anyone could consider that Spanish property was a good investment. Clearly it is now more interesting to sell your second home in Spain (if you have one that is), and invest in a developing country that is on the ramp for a good series of underying asset and relative currency value increases. I would certainly go for Turkey, and Morocco is looking better and better. Of course, if you are Peter, then you might prefer Argentina or Chile, since they speak Spanish and are also looking better every day. The question is whether you are thinking long or short term. Short term the Turkish property market can have a crash just like anyone else, or like the UK in the early 90s or Spain in 1992, but long term these values will recover, so you can just sit it out. This is not necessarily true of where Spain is now.

If you look at the chart in this Economist link:

http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5283797

you will see that German property prices have – on aggregate – been stationary since 1997, and Japanese ones have dropped 30%. This may be much nearer the current Spanish reality, once they drop they may not recover current values for a generation.

I think the ‘intelligent buyers’ have already seen this, and have been quietly moving. I know a Basque guy here in Barcelona who understand something of economics, he writes from time to time in national newspapers on economic themes. He had 2 or 3 flats as investments here in Barcelona. He sold them a year ago, and bought in Peru!

Incidentally, do you know Fabian Estape (by name I mean)? He is highly respected here in Barcelona, particularly since everyone who is anyone seemed to have studied economics with him. He is old and more-or-less toothless now, but he has been saying loud and clear what I keep saying about the eurosystem for as long as I can remember.

Incidentally, talking of Morocco, did you know that the generalitat has just set up an industrial zone near Tetouan? I know I promised not to mention the Catalan Statute so I won’t, but this is an intriguing move, and highlights just how much “hollowing out” is quietly taking place in the background while the more publicised bonfire blazes away (I will post an article about this below).

Anyway, stick around Pepe, since at some stage all of this is going to get ‘interesting’, in the Chinese sense, of course.