French urban policy: watch the feet, not the hands
Watch the feet, not the hands, coaches intone when they teach basketball defense, because while the hands are where the opponent wants you to look, the body goes where the feet go.
The French riots are a catastrophe, but does the French government see the catastrophe as mainly political (optical) or policy (substantive)? Or, said more properly, since all government is comprised of self-interested individuals, do French elected officials see the catastrophe in policy terms — the essential precondition of fundamental reform, which in this case means tearing down the hideous high-rises — or merely political ones?
They’re saying the right things:
[French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin] said the government was launching a “very intensive” program to help deprived neighborhoods, including tripling the scholarships to boarding schools given to children from these areas.
Is this political commitment, or political vaporware?
The next few weeks will tell us. As I wrote last summer, government is a factory …
… that manufactures only two products:
· Laws. Rules, regulations, boundaries, and typically variations of thou shalt not.
· Money. Programs, subsidies, incentives, variations of we will pay you if.
(Hot air, which government produces in bulk, is merely an accidental byproduct.)
If you have only two tools in your toolbox, then no matter the problem, by definition they are the only solutions you can offer:
· “Let’s make the problem illegal.”
· “Let’s give somebody a lot of money to make the problem go away.”
Of these two, from the perspective of an elected official, one is much more appealing. Money is finite; spend it on one thing and it is unavailable for another. But laws are open-ended; you can always make more.
Does the French government tackle its massive problem just with laws, or with money also? One can go either way, either an Augustinian pessimist or Pelagian optimist:
French politicians have split their responses between calling for improvements in the living conditions in those neighborhoods, populated mainly by immigrants and their French-born offspring, and blaming the residents there for bringing social problems on themselves by refusing to integrate into French society.
“We are well known for our cheerful accommodating attitude to people who pronounce French badly.”
And what is the French government doing? Here’s what the hands are doing:
He said the government wanted to create more tax-free zones in deprived areas, but also wanted people in these areas to accept jobs outside these neighborhoods.
“We need a social mix in order to have a real equilibrium now in our society,” he said.
De Villepin said the government intended to do away with high-rise housing estates, replacing them quickly with smaller scale buildings.
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
This might make me more optimistic if I were amnesiac. Here is French President Jacques Chirac, three months ago, long before the riots started:
Police, meanwhile, were preparing to evacuate the capital’s most dilapidated apartment buildings and havens for squatters this week.
At a Cabinet meeting, Chirac told Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to draw up plans to renovate run-down apartment buildings — a response to the blazes that killed a total of 48 people since spring, most of them African immigrants.
“You can see how substantial is my commitment to this issue …”
Promises, promises, wave the hands, but what are the feet doing?
What action is the French government taking?
At the same time, the lower house of Parliament overwhelmingly approved new anti-terrorism laws that would allow increased video surveillance in public places and tougher monitoring of international travel by French citizens.
So the first responses are two laws, one on the books to be more enforced this time, the other about to be:
[1] The government’s proposed law, which de Villepin said would be submitted to Parliament next year, would make it more difficult for French residents and citizens to bring foreign spouses into the country and require longer waiting periods for legal immigrants to apply for visas for their spouses and children. Legal immigrants would be required to be able to speak French before family members could join them in
[2] The new anti-terrorism measure, strengthening laws that are already among the toughest in
Under the draft law, certain buildings, including department stores, mosques and synagogues, could be equipped with surveillance cameras. Aides to Sarkozy say he embraced the measure after seeing how effective video recordings had been in helping British authorities identify the subway bombers.
Laws are essential; anarchic violence and gratuitous vandalism cannot be tolerated. But if all you do is call out the riot cops, impose the state of emergency, and pepper the concrete canyons with surveillance, you have made of a neighborhood a prison without law, without justice, without sentence, without parole.
Without hope.
Let’s leave with some unintentionally damning words:
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told Parliament on Tuesday that
If you see the riots as the fault of ‘those people’, you will never see it as your responsibility to help them.
And they will never see it as their responsibility to be citizens.
