Universalism, Nationalism, and the Burqa

Michelle Goldberg has a really nice piece, relying heavily on the views of Joan W. Scott, of the origins of the debate on the burqa in France. She notes the prevailing view that Sarkozy’s big push on this was, in part at least, in response to the moment in Obama’s Cairo speech where he critiqued “the view of the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.” I certainly read that as a shot at France, certainly many French people did as well. I’ve spoken with two about the speech, both of whom noted a, relatively justifiable, annoyance at Americans trying to tell the world what to do, how to act, etc.

It’s a fair enough point, but it also underlines an important aspect missing from discussions of these issues, which Goldberg’s otherwise nicely balanced piece serves as an example. Her subtitle poses the question: “What happens when feminism and sexual liberation become tools for nationalism?” By this she means Sarkozy’s attempts to curry favor with the French far-right, represented by Jean-Marie le Pen’s National Front, while not alienating the “Left,” who would hesitate to attack Sarkozy for moves made in the name of feminism and women’s equality. In this sense, Sarkozy plays to an entire political spectrum, solidifying his electoral base — which doesn’t seem to have anywhere else to go, by the way — in the name of French values, but a type of French values carefully presented as egalitarian, rather than chauvinist.

But what’s missing in this analysis, and this is where pointing at America becomes problematic, is an emphasis on the fact that French nationalism, since the French Revolution, has been tinged with a universalism that does not only encompass its own citizens and immigrants, but the world over. When the Revolution began marching through Europe it did so, not only in the interests of self-preservation, but in the belief that the principals it was still in the process of laying down — a process never fully complete — could apply the world over. That is one type, the maintstream type, of nationalism one sees in France to this day. The effort to ban the burqa in the name of women’s rights, therefore, is not just an assertion of French values, but of universal human rights, never mind the incredibly problematic, and fairly condescending, attitude it shows to those women who wear the burqa whose rights don’t seem to matter. The French debate, in other words, is also a mode of exerting France’s own applicability to other countries. It is, in other words, a way of telling the world what to do, how to act. It’s just done with a whole lot more subtlety than Americans usually manage.

P.S.  I got the link to Goldberg’s piece from Matt Yglesias, who rightly highlights some of the potentially negative effects of a burqa ban.  Where I think some naunce should be added is in his assertion that “The French have a strong tradition not just of secularism, but of a kind of illiberal egalitarianism that holds that everyone should really be the same…”  Not exactly, at least from my point of view.  The French have a tradition that everyone should be both treated as and act the same in their relation to the public sphere.  In other words, French tradition does not reject difference; rather it rejects the notion that such difference is fundamental to one’s personhood and relation to state authority.  The French citizen is abstract, not homogeneous.  See, of course, Joan Scott’s Parite!for the best introduction to the French principal of the abstract citizen.