Tokenism a la francaise....
Appointment of Arab prefect fans French angst over affirmative action
Elaine Sciolino/NYT
Thursday, January 15, 2004
PARIS Has Aissa Dermouche been given the job of prefect of the Jura region near the Swiss border because of affirmative action or because he is the best candidate for the job?
The appointment Wednesday of the 57-year-old Algerian-born business school director makes him the only prefect who is foreign-born or Muslim in all of France. But it was announced without fanfare along with others at the weekly Council of Ministers meeting.
After all, affirmative action or "positive discrimination" as it is called here is not supposed to exist in a country that does not identify people by national origin in the national census and is not supposed to gather data according to race, religion or ethnicity. Affirmative action has traditionally been seen as an ill-conceived American invention that celebrates differences and encourages divisions.
But in a television debate last November, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, broke a political taboo and touched off a fierce public debate by arguing in favor of the practice to help raise Muslims out of suburban ghettos and give them a place in French society.
Since then, the French government has found itself caught between the impulse to respond to the needs of its large ethnic Arab and Muslim population while at the same time rejecting any practice that threatens the French republican ideal of equality.
"There are parts of France and categories of French citizen who have loaded on their heads so many handicaps that if we do not help them more than we help others, they will never escape," Sarkozy, who is said to harbor presidential ambitions, said in a debate at the Political Studies Institute in Paris earlier this month.
During a meeting with high school students in Tunisia last December, President Jacques Chirac said that discrimination is not positive and that it was not "acceptable" to "appoint people based on their origins."
Then last Friday, during a reception for the press in Paris, Chirac said that he had told his ministers last July that they had to come up with a candidate as prefect from "immigrant origins."
Otherwise, he would not approve any new appointments, he said.
And the Elysée Palace announced last week that someone of "immigrant origin" was to be named a prefect.
On Wednesday, however, in a statement released from his office, Chirac said that the nomination was based on "a basic republican principle - that top civil service appointments are based on the recognition of merit, whatever the origins of the persons involved." Sensitive to the fact that the expression "positive discrimination" is a loaded one, French officials are struggling to come up with alternatives. Sarkozy on Wednesday proposed that it be replaced with the words "republican voluntarism." He did not define the phrase, which conceivably could be interpreted to mean the granting of jobs and educational opportunities to further the cause of the French republic.
In an interview with Europe 1 radio last November, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said he preferred the term "positive mobilization," adding, "The idea that there are good forms of discrimination on the one hand and bad ones on the other might be seen as a confused notion."
Despite the center-right government's official position against affirmative action, there are exceptions.
In his debate earlier this month, Sarkozy made that point, saying, "When we create quotas for the disabled, when we pass a law so that half the people on party lists at elections are women, when we set up economic and educational priority zones, what is that if not positive discrimination?"
A constitutional law passed in June 2000 requires political parties to support 50 percent of candidates from each sex in several types of elections, including elections in cities of more than 3,500 inhabitants, some senatorial elections and regional and European Parliament elections.
Although the first Muslim prefect was appointed in 1942, few Muslims have been appointed prefect or sub-prefect despite France's growing Arab and Muslim population. (Although there are no official figures, there are an estimated 5 million Muslims in France, about 8 percent of the population.) Dermouche, a chevalier of the Legion of Honor and of the National Order of Merit, came to France when he was 18. He has headed the Audencia school of management, one of the selective "grandes écoles" where France trains its elite, since 1989.
In a telephone interview from Nantes, Dermouche called his appointment "a great honor" and a "great pleasure to serve the state," but declined to speculate on why he was chosen. "I wouldn't attempt to analyze the decisions that have motivated my nomination," he said. He also declined to say whether he favored affirmative action, saying, "I can't cast judgment, which would be a political judgment, on positive discrimination." The New York Times
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