Honestly, Europe doesn't know what to make of this. Most of France, with the exception of Alsace and Lorraine, have basically been French since the Vikings got tired of invading and Jeanne d'Arc kicked the English back across la Manche. Even relatively young countries like Germany and Italy have been that way for quite a while now. Unlike the US which has been a melting pot for most of our history, the Europeans really don't know how to handle immigrants from place they don't like and even immigrants from places they do like. As a friend of mine who taught at universities in Scandinavia once said:
Jeff, they are a very nice people. They're polite and they don't mine a Czech
like me living down the street, working hard, and keeping to myself. But
everything changes if I start trying to marry their daughter...
And that is the long and short of it. At some point France will come up with an answer for how to be France when you aren't even French. I expect to see lots of social tension in Europe for a generation or so just like it happened over here. [emphasis added]
4 comments:
John, As long as they don't succumb to mandatory conversion to Islam you may be right.
That's true, and I don't see it happening. Eurabia is the more likely future.
And I'll go one step further and credit Mexican culture, which itself has a mixing of Spaniards, native peoples, and Germans (plus a few French and Yanks here and there) in their history.
And of course, our Southwest was once part of Mexico in what really is the recent past (i.e. less than 200 years ago) and still retains many elements of Mexican culture in some place.
Heck, when I was a kid, half the houses in that neighborhood stocked the pantry with groceries from Mexico, watched a great deal of Mexican television, and frequently hosted newly immigrated relatives (legal and illegal alike) until those immigrants got on their own two feet.
And yet those Mexican-American families, while retaining a strong sense of Mexican pride, also embraced their anglo neighbors as neighbors. The "gringos" got invited to Cinco De Mayo and we all had allot of fun.
It was a really nice place to grow up even though it could be a tough place at times.
But the generation before me saw much more tension between hispanics and anglos- and the situation in my neighborhood is not the case all across the spectrum. To this day, I know far too many people who still refer to Mexicans as "the help" or even more degrading terms.
And America is not all that far removed from our own race riots. Remember April 2001 in Cincinatti? Or how about L.A. on April 26, 1992?
So I'm not so sure that we can claim any edge over the French with this kind of thing. We've been at it longer, but we've also seen far worse than the streets of Paris have had to offer lately.
I agree with your last paragraph jonh w. I am not sure how far removed either Canada or the US (both of which are nations built by immigration) are from this sort of xenophobia. It just might play itself out differently
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