Introduction

Abstract

As one night of riots followed another in Paris suburbs and elsewhere in France in late 2005, the enormity of the problem they reflected soon became evident. The impoverishment and marginalization of immigrant communities has reached a crisis point. This is, of course, not a specifically French problem. As Timothy Garton Ash argues, it is an all-European problem: ‘Unrest in Germany, bombings in London, and assassinations in The Netherlands are all signs of the façade of European multiculturalism cracking under the pressures of its underlying realities.’¹ To some extent there is recognition that most member states of the European Union (EU) have large, dissatisfied communities of immigrant dissent. The 2004 Hague Programme, which is nothing short of a project in the area of ‘internal’ security comparable to that of the Single Market, calls for a European framework for the integration of immigrants to be drawn up. Were this to lead to greater cooperation in this area, it would be highly unlikely that we would see identical responses to the problem. Different forms of nationalism within member states would determine the precise way in which governments react to and transpose such a framework, just as the French government responded in a particularly ‘French way’ to the crisis, informed by its egalitarian form of nationalism.