International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 124
Underestimating the Political Dimension in Urban and Geopolitical Violence
for his holidays. And he got it the wrong way round, he thought I was
asking if he would return to France when he was over there ... He got
the suggestion the wrong way around ... he was ‘Tunisian’ in France,
and ‘home’ was over there! It wasn’t here! That’s the myth of return ...
The problem is rather that they’re passing through here, that they will
return ‘to the country.’ They are from there, and emigrated here. So
they can’t build things since they’re from there and everything is over
there’ (Dugué and Rist 2005, 4).
We can see that this very ambivalence, which eludes any social causality—
particularly in terms of determinist conditions—first and foremost considers the
political dimension as a feeling of belonging. This explains how, on the one hand,
mistakes in the teaching of history can exacerbate this ambivalence to the point of
hardening identities, which I will discuss in detail in the following example. 24 On
the other hand, the ambivalence can also be explained by the political significance
assigned to arrival in France. This will be our focus here: I will thus argue that the
arrival of many immigrants in France turned out not to be merely economic, but
also political, in the sense that their relocation was motivated not only by the issue
of living standards, but also of atmosphere (Zeitgeist), i.e. of freedom in its most
qualitatively political sense, that of feeling oneself not only to exist but also to be
able to influence one’s own life and that of one’s family, at least much more than in
the country of origin, whose circumstances cannot be separated from the damage
of colonialism. Thus many Kabyle people came to France to improve their living
conditions and provide for their family back in the “village,” and chose to remain
there after 1962 to escape Arabization via Islamization (under Boumediene’s ten
thousand mosques program) during the 1970s and 80s. 25 Yet a common opinion
is, “France invited them to come over during the interwar period to take up unskilled
jobs in industry and construction that native French people no longer wanted. They
were thus the first sacrifices on the altar of deindustrialization, and their children
were deprived, in turn, of the positive bearings required to integrate into society”
(Donzelot 2008, 11). This reduces the process of immigration to a single cause,
by underestimating the specifically political dimension of the desire for a better
life together. For example, in the country known as “Algeria”—assigned this name
during French colonization in the 1830s—this political dimension was overlooked
by those who came to power after 1962 and was strongly influenced by both Arab
nationalism and communism (the Pabloists, as represented by Mohamed Harbi,
24 A number of academic works thus go too far in the opposite direction, for example by omitting the
Arab-Muslim colonization of Berber North Africa, and concealing its pre-Roman Christian roots,
not to mention the often biased analysis of the Arab-Jewish conflict, in which Israel is often seen as
the sole cause of this country’s misfortunes. These various aspects of scholarly works are discussed
in the books by Barbara Lefevbre and Eve Bonnivard (2005) and Emmanuel Brenner (2004), an
analysis somewhat underestimated in the work by Michel Wieviorka (2005, 37).
25 Oulahbib 2007.
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