European Populism As Seen From New York Part II

The Rights of Woman?

I don’t mean for this to become a regular feature and I don’t want to do any free publicity for the New York Times (though they need all the help they can get these days), but I have been trying to follow this story and the way that it is presented in the Anglo-American “Liberal” (in both senses) media. The Guardian ran a comment piece earlier this week against the proposed limited ban of the full length Muslim veil in France that I didn’t think was great or even comprehensible at points. The NY Times’ piece is more direct and to the point in accusing the UMP of cynical populist electioneering tactics and trying to engineer diversions from France’s continuing high unemployment by making a national issue over the fewer than 2000 women (NYT’s figure) in France opting to wear the full length veil, Burqa, or Niqab.

The NYT also takes a strong and simple liberal line that people must be left to make these sorts of decisions about what to wear or not to wear by themselves. This of course cuts to the heart of the issue; those in favour of the ban will try to argue that women are in fact coerced, either literally or in a more subtle manner by way of abiding cultural norms, into wearing the veil. This is something of a liberal retort to a liberal objection. Faced with the question of what if such women still chose to wear the full veil, this argument seems powerless.  I am not sure if the coercion argument is true or not, both sides of the debate point to anecdotal and empirical evidence to argue their case. Of course France is not a liberal country in the same way that Britain or even to some extent the US is (though often in an odd way). I wonder however if it is not incompatible with French republicanism to argue that it is the state’s responsibility as the guarantor of individual rights and freedoms to ensure that France’s Muslim women are delivered from the oppression and social exclusion from the public sphere that the ban’s proponents think the veil creates. In other words, from this view, the false or poor choice of these veiled women – granting that it is a choice – becomes the responsibility of the state to correct through various institutional mechanisms, civil education being the preferred manner, but that failing a ban on the veil in certain public places becomes acceptable.

In other words, contrary to the NY Times’ assertion that French politicians have no understanding or respect for individual liberties, from the “French liberal” perspective there is nothing illiberal about the use of state power to break arguably retrograde forms of domination and work towards the creation of liberal emancipated citizens even if these forms of “domination” are the free choice of the citizen. Obviously this model of Franco-republican-liberalism does not share the same strong aversion to state power and paternalism as the typical Anglo-American version.

This may all be to over-intellectualize the debate and the NY Times’s point. Within the current debate and context it may indeed be the case that the UMP is not terribly interested in creating “emancipated” citizens out of these veiled women thereby ushering them into the public sphere to help debate and shape the future of France, rather more in scoring cheap electoral points by stirring an already heated pot of racial tension in France and Europe and this is what the NYT and others are protesting. A similar critique was made concerning the supposed “debate on national identity” promoted by the UMP for what were widely understood to be less than honest reasons. Nonetheless, if it is an electoral ploy, it seems to be working. Anecdotal evidence from friends in Paris is that there is support for such a ban across a wide political spectrum of French voters, on the grounds, very coarsely, that ‘this is not what is done in France’. The “this” I suppose refers to wearing a full veil, withdrawing from public life, and acquiescing to a misogynistic framework of gender relations – it is of course debatable whether “this” has a necessary correlation with wearing a full length veil. The current campaign may also ignore the myriad of reasons that western Muslims don the veil. It is often reported that it is a political response to racism and xenophobia encountered in European countries. I do not know to what extent this is true. It is also debatable if when looked at in context the ban on the full veil would have the desired liberalising-emancipatory affect, or whether it would only serve to further entrench and polarize the debate. Again it may be important to point out here that it seems that such a ban on the full veil would apply to less than 2000 women in France. [added on February 7th 2010, revised slightly on March 29th 2010]

Here is a link to the French Parliamentary Committee report

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