The JDNews. Tensions between France and Algeria reached a peak last week with the refusal of the Algerian authorities to recover an Algerian “influencer” who called for attacking an opponent of the Algerian regime… Is the Algerian government in the process of to use its diaspora as a weapon against France?
Alain Bauer. Since we rediscovered the natural hybridity of war, during the manipulation of opinion during Brexit or the elections in various democratic countries, we feign surprise at the use of non-military or unconventional methods. to weaken the adversary or enemy. However, reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu is recommended in all good military academies. The historic rise in tensions between France and what would become Algeria, after more or less tense cycles, could not ignore the mobilization capacities of the relays of the FLN regime in France.
Does France, as a democratic state, play on equal terms with an Algerian police state, which has numerous networks of influence on our territory?
Not really. Remember the Macron candidate of 2017 for whom “Colonization was a crime against humanity.” By expressing his colonial remorse so strongly, he weakened France. This one-way message, declaimed without compensation, is part of the belief, even the cult of the dry moral excuse, without reciprocity, which weakens the messenger by the force of the message, and with the idea that there could be a material response to the use of memorial flagellation.
Moreover, the French relays are singularly diminished by the constraints of France's foreign policy towards Morocco and by the Algerian national romance on the conditions in which the country was born, on the origin of its name or on the construction of its borders in 1962.
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Paris seems to hesitate to enter into a more muscular balance of power… What is France afraid of?
France still has a lot to lose in terms of interests, investments, intelligence sharing or the fight against terrorism. The subject is less about having a communication policy than about resuming unofficial channels of dialogue, particularly with the only truly powerful pillar of the regime: the army.
Several voices, including that of former ambassador Xavier Driencourt, are calling for the 1968 agreements to be denounced. Do you believe that this text favors a fully-fledged immigration sector?
I wouldn't say that. The origins of Algerian immigration are ancient and its status as a former French department, like the conditions of independence, weighed more than the agreements, often corrective, which followed those of Évian in 1962 (intended to facilitate the illusion of free movement of pieds-noirs who would have remained in Algeria…).
“Skin color is the unthought of European integration policies”
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The 1968 agreement is highly symbolic and therefore highly sensitive. For the rest, gas, cereals and other financial agreements will undoubtedly weigh in the balance. But the central subject remains reciprocity in temporality. France has failed in this understanding, even though it is at the heart of any stable diplomatic relationship.
In your book, you return to the establishment of family immigration “called to exercise the happiest influence on the success of the introduction of labor”. Was it accompanied, at the time, by effective integration policies?
The goal was, in 1918 as after, the reconstitution of the labor force of a country rendered bloodless by the succession of two world wars. The demography of weapons and the challenges of reconstruction constituted the first reasons for repeated calls for immigration from the Empire as well as from neighboring countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, etc.).
Integration was natural, the system then offered a welcome for populations who mechanically fit into the national mold, which did not doubt itself.
You quote the sociologist Patrick Simon, who notes that “European integration policies were designed in a context of European and white immigration”. Is this what explains today why certain populations, particularly of Algerian origin, are tempted by the community model?
The exact quote is worth repeating: for the sociodemographer, skin color is in fact the unthought of European integration policies. “ They were designed in contexts of European and white immigration. The second or third generation of Italian, Polish, Spanish and later Portuguese immigration is no longer identifiable. In their case, social and cultural invisibility reproduces physical banality: it is impossible to differentiate between descendants of Italians and descendants of French people from the beginning of the 20th century. However, this is not the case for more recent minorities such as sub-Saharan Africans or North Africans: thirty or even fifty years after the arrival of their parents or grandparents on French soil, they remain visible minorities. » Everything is said.
You recall the speech of a young MP before the Assembly in 1958, a certain Jean-Marie Le Pen, who said: “France needs Algeria, perhaps more than Algeria needs France. » This sentence is surprising today…
This is why I restore in my book all the stages of the national story which we will have to begin to reconcile with the national novel, which remains a political and social fiction, affirmed by a Third Republic which sought to recharge its batteries, between nostalgia for 1789, break with the ultramontane clergy and roots in “our ancestors the Gauls”. MP Le Pen's speech remains an integrationist model which will undoubtedly surprise readers. But that he never denied my knowledge.
The Conquest of the West. The truth about migration Alain Bauer, Fayard, 496 pages.
