National puzzles

The point of a scarecrow is to scare feathered foes away from the fields ploughed by farmers. This is obviously not the point of “national identity”, much as the subject does frighten many of us off. For no good reason and without any guiding vision, the debate has just resurfaced in France, though already flogged to death elsewhere in Europe. Trying to define one’s national identity is a requisite, albeit implicit, task for EU candidates, like a supplementary and unwritten acquis communautaire they have to absorb. Once they are admitted into the EU, these countries find out a European identity doesn’t exist yet, that the day when we’ll be able to stand up and say “I’m a European from Prague!” is still far off.

After having viewed national identity as a species of economic patriotism that sets in when a national enterprise is “in danger of being sold off to foreigners”, France is asking a simple question today: how to convince its immigrants from abroad that France really does have a national identity. Something that gets them to stop booing the Marseillaise? But in the European puzzle, the multiethnic and multilingual souls in our midst don’t exactly know what a national identity is – and they’re waiting for the majority of their neighbours to quit rejecting “the Other” out of hand.

To be sure, France does indeed have a language, a culture and an image that is familiar to the world. But today, 50 years after the creation of the European Community, to brandish this form of conservatism is a bit hypocritical. France does not need to define a pre-existing identity, which, incidentally, works like the sirens’ song on those who dream of emigrating to France. What it needs is to adapt the way it sees the Other to a European framework. However, as one columnist observes in Le Monde, national identity is not a concept you can inject like a vaccine. “I love Paris” won’t do the trick. It’s time to add: “I love Europe.”

I.B.G.