On the way to an early job on Friday, I always look forward to what’s going to be on the front of the political magazines, the New Statesman and the Spectator, associated with the left and right respectively. I’d sort…

The consensus was usually that it actually more like a fruit salad — lots of great tastes that taste great together, mmmm, good.

I’m surprised I don’t see anybody making the point that this could ever be possible in France. Many are in fact making the opposite point.

To answer your question, Rupert, I suppose a multiculturalist attitude was not in fact a key component of the civil rights movement, but I think it sure helped.

To suggest that blacks and whites have somehow blended into one homogenous American culture (or, even more naive, that there was never much difference to being with) suggests we didn’t eat lunch in the same cafeteria.

While cars have been torched in France, in South Africa commuters fed up with delays in public transport have started burning trains. On Tuesday four train carriages were burned in Vereeniging to protest against delays that had apparently been caused by cable theft. Last night angry commuters in Soweto, also fed up with delays, burned four trains at three different stations. A total of 27 carriages were damaged. This will cost Metro Rail over R200 million. Commuters have warned Metro Rail that more coaches will be burnt if the delays aren’t addressed.

Furthermore, the US is not an ethnically defined nation like west European states but an ideologically defined state. Loyalty to nation and ‘American values’ are the conditions for inclusion and citizenship. Native american refusal to accept this contributed to their ethnic cleansing.

Examples of other ‘ideological’ states are the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Both were built around an ideology which transcended ethnicity. However, the ethnic groups still constituted the ‘nations’, often with specific group rights, …or punishments.

This is why I believe that those who say that Europe should learn from the US when it comes to integration and immigration policy have got it wrong. West European states are ‘nation’ states in that they are based on a shared language, culture and ‘ethnicity’. This is one reason why they have managed to build up welfare states, which assume a high level of group solidarity. Minorities within these nation states have always had problems. These have been solved either through assimilation or through some kind of minority rights.

This makes it difficult to include large muslim immigrant groups. For them to become accepted members of the ‘nation’ it’s not enough for them to simply “pledge aliegence to the flag” like in the US, but they also need to adopt the culture and, by extension, the religion (to the extent that the culture is based on the religion), of their new countries.

Funilly enough, Republican France is probably the country in Europe which most closely resembles the US in being an ideological nation. In principle, accepting French culture means you’re French.

1. increasing efforts at integrating the immigrants who are already in Europe, while also taking a harder stance on the need for Islam and Muslims to adapt to the societies they’ve chosen to live in

2. increasing efforts at limiting new immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. Perhaps immigration policy will be more like they have in Canada or Australia.

That’s part of it, but I wanted to get at something more, too: Explicit recognition that the receiving country is changed by the new arrivals and their descendants, and that this is a good thing. How did chicken tikka masala become Britain’s national dish? How is it that salsa has outsold ketchup in the US for something like a decade now?

(I avoided the US/UK comparison because the classic Continental rejoinder is that those countries have long traditions of immigrations, whereas the Continental countries supposedly do not. Which is bunkum, as, for instance, a glance at German MPs from Wieczorek to De Maziere will quickly show.)

When I wrote that the protesting youths are every bit as French as M. Bové, I meant that quite directly. Not only have they absorbed much of the French culture around them, they have influenced it as well; what it means to be French (or German or Danish or Hungarian…) is a moving target. Acknowledging that — in word and in deed — is an important task for leaders of democratic countries. Perhaps it should be taught at ENA.